Oh, Jan

 I read six books in January. I was on the verge of the verge of finishing two more books, but then I fell asleep and the calendar page fluttered to February. They will do that, won't they?

1. The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion - Fannie Flagg. Novel. Audiobook. I read this for book group. I went in, fully prepared to dislike it, but this tribute to the WASPS and their gutsy contributions during WWII absolutely charmed me, and filled me with the deepest respect. 

2. Being Henry: The Fonz and Beyond - Henry Winkler. Memoir. Winkler's memoir is a good one to read in conjunction with Ron and Clint Howard's The Boys. Winkler is quite a bit more introspective, though.

3. Bonnie and Clyde: The Making of a Legend - Karen Blumenthal. Nonfiction. Audiobook. Written for the Young Adult set, but the author didn't write down to her audience. Every bit as good as Go Down Together, the quintessential book about the pair.

4. Who Was Salvador Dali? - Paula Manzanero. Nonfiction. I think it's really difficult to capture the full flavor of the enjoyable weirdness that was Dali, but I loved the anecdote about Dali walking an anteater in the Paris Metro.

5. The Witches of Worm - Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Novel. I do wish I'd saved this novel for October. Troubled latchkey child Jessica adopts a newborn kitten she names Worm who seemingly talks to her and tells her to act out in school and at home. Excellent dark, moody atmosphere, although Worm scared me a lot less than Jessica's feckless mother and the mother's douche boyfriend.

6. Child Star - Shirley Temple. Autobiography. So very glad to be done with this book! I've been wrestling with it since July. July 13, to be precise. Child Star covers Temple's life from birth to approximately her late twenties. Her life was fascinating, her research was impeccable, but her writing is stodgy. She wrote the book long after she had entered political life, and it definitely shows.

July, 2022: Reading. Seriously.

 Another Val story before we begin. This was one of her favorites. Every time it popped up in her Facebook memories, she'd repost it.

Val was moving yet again during her time in Korea. I was not particularly pleased because she would be moving out of my apartment building and over to a university way the hell out in the country and about 30 minutes away by train. Although I was dreading the day, I got caught up in the hustle and bustle of her packing.

About 9:30 pm, she decided that she would load some boxes into the boot of her little red Matiz automobile. Of course the boxes were terribly heavy, so she decided that we must get a trolley.

A what? I said.

A trolley.

I decided that she meant a dolly, but didn't say so. 

We looked around in the dark stairwell on the first floor for a trolley/dolly, but didn't see anything. Finally, we ran into a security guard. He didn't want to speak to us because of the language barrier, but Val neatly cornered him at the door of his guardhouse. She pulled out her phone and started typing into the translator.

She showed the guard the word on her phone and then said in Korean, "Please give me."

He looked at her like she was crazy. She nodded. I nodded, too. Finally, he sighed and got his flashlight and looked around in the hallways of our building. We followed. Then after a decent interval, he shook his head and started back to the guardhouse.

"Wait!" Val showed him her phone again. "I KNOW they have trolleys in Korea. I've seen them."

Dolly was trembling on the tip of my tongue, but I confess: Even though English is my native language, I've always had an inferiority complex about speaking American English around English English speakers. I usually throw in the linguistic towel and give Brits the win right away.

The guard sighed, mumbled something and repeated the walk, shining his flashlight up and down the corridors. Then he headed back to the guardhouse and settled in with his K-Drama. He offered up a final word in English: "Impossible."

We retreated to Val's apartment. "Maybe there's another word," she said, looking at her phone. "Oh, hold on. Uh-oh. Look." She showed me the phone. Turned out that her finger had landed on the wrong word, and we'd had the guard looking around in the gloomy stairwells for a troll.

I was really really glad then that I'd restrained myself from saying dolly.

"I'll try again tomorrow," Val decided. "If he'll even speak to me. The poor man."

***

1. What Are Castles and Knights? - Sarah Fabiny. Nonfiction.

2. The Witches - Stacy Schiff. Nonfiction. Schiff takes the reader into the world of Salem Village, 1692 to make us understand the time and place that created a toxic atmosphere where nearly everyone lost their damn minds and sent 19 innocent people to their deaths for witchcraft based on the word of a few shrieking teenagers. By the end, I felt claustrophobic and a little crazy, but mightily enjoyed counting up the many references to The Wizard of Oz that Schiff cleverly inserted.

3. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver. Novel. I shied away from this book for decades, and now I'm a little mad at myself, but not too much because I think maybe I just wasn't ready for this story of religion, culture clashes, and revolution (of all kinds) in the Congo (now Zaire) in 1959. It's a searing and illuminating book and Kingsolver's masterpiece. I am adding it to my favorite reads of 2022.

4. Who Was E.B. White? - Gail Herman. Nonfiction.

5. What Is the AIDS Crisis? - Nico Medina. Nonfiction. A careful, comprehensive look at the AIDS crisis from its very beginnings. The government's indifference was chilling, and Nico Medina pulls no punches. No bullshit. Well-executed.

6. Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela. Nonfiction. I audiobooked this one. Danny Glover's narration was interspersed with African national songs, crowd reactions in real time to events unfolding in apartheid South Africa, and speeches read in Mandela's own voice, which made for a moving listening experience. Since this was significantly abridged, I don't feel as if I got all the nuances or even the whole story, but the crux is there and it left me in a thoughtful mood, eager to learn more about Mandela and the ANC and the struggle for a more democratic South Africa.

7. Who Was Ponce de Leon? - Pam Pollack and Meg Belviso. Nonfiction. MAD RESPECT for how this book was written! It starts out like a conventional biography of Ponce de Leon, conquistador in the making, then it makes a wicked left turn that nearly had me scrambling for the Dramamine, and it essentially says: You know what?! This guy, none of these guys were heroes. None of them were admirable. They ruthlessly rode roughshod over native lands and territories and ruined millions of lives. They disrupted cultures. They enslaved and murdered people with weapons and disease! Then the authors take a tiny step back and allow that maybe Ponce de Leon couldn't help it; he was conditioned at an early age to believe that as an agent of Catholic Spain, he was on the side of right. Then they gather themselves again and they're like, nah, he's still awful. And that cute Fountain of Youth story? What a bunch of hooey cooked up to make him look deluded at worst and whimsical at best. 

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dI read 7 books in July. When I wasn't Who-Was-ing, I felt as if my reading had unexpected depth. Am I being and becoming? Is it just a stage I'm going through? Actually, two of the Who Was...? books I read went way beyond my expectations (What is the AIDS Crisis and Who Was Ponce de Leon) and handled the material in a manner that would create new levels of understanding in mature readers while introducing it to newer, younger reader1. What Are Castles and Knights? - Sarah Fabiny. Nonf

The Reads of December

 For some reason-- holiday spirit? -- I was in an amiable reading mood during December. I met my goal of 59 books, then tacked on another one. 60 isn't a big number, but its roundness pleases me.

Also: I finished Ducks, Newburyport! Still can't thank Care enough for bringing this book to my immediate attention, and then...and then...she brought it to my mailbox!

So here's what I read in December. I'll do the numbering to reflect how many books I'd read so far:

56. Ducks, Newburyport - Lucy Ellmann. Novel. This is my favorite read of 2020. It just fit the zeitgeist so well.

57. Who Was Jules Verne? - James Buckley, Jr. Nonfiction. More and more, I'm fascinated with this series, especially the editing. What gets mentioned. What doesn't get mentioned. What kinda-sorta gets mentioned. Kinda-sorta showed up in Jules Verne's story and distracted me to no end. I ran to Google without stopping. Later in his life, Verne was enjoying the fruits of his successful writing career buying homes and building boats and hosting Nellie Bly as she was recreating a trip around the world in 80 days. Suddenly, Verne's nephew shows up in the book and shoots Uncle Jules in the leg. The pain and the recovery are addressed in full, but the nephew disappears, just as abruptly as he appeared. WHY? WHY DID HE SHOOT HIS UNCLE? Google revealed more: the nephew was apparently nuts, and put in a mental asylum. Also: he shot at Uncle Jules TWICE. He missed the first time, then the second shot got Verne in the leg. I don't see why this information couldn't have been shoehorned in. In addition, there was some read-between-the-lines stuff about Jules Verne's son being a disappointment to his father.

58. Who Was Bruce Lee? - Jim Gigliotti. Nonfiction. I liked this biography of Bruce Lee so much! I hardly knew anything about the martial arts master and actor who shattered Asian stereotypes on film.

59. Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, The Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy - Leslie Brody. Nonfiction. As soon as I found out this book was out, I was one big long red scream of WANT! Luckily, the planets aligned; my birthday was also in December, and my friend was casting about for ideas for a present. So many interesting revelations in this biography! Like Gloria Vanderbilt (at roughly the same time) Louise Fitzhugh was at the center of an acrimonious child custody battle in Memphis. She found out all the details as a teenager, when she worked a summer job at a newspaper. She fled the south as soon as she could, and went to New York City. She lived openly as a lesbian, and was remarkably well-connected in artistic and literary circles. My eyes nearly popped out when I read that one of her partners was Constance Ford, who played Ada on Another World for decades. In spite of the richness of detail and the thoroughness of Leslie Brody's research, Fitzhugh comes off as elusive -- there were no diaries, so the reader doesn't quite get intimacy, immediacy with this fascinating woman. Kudos to Leslie Brody for first-rate spy work.

60. The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X/Alex Haley. Nonfiction. Based on interviews Alex Haley conducted with Malcolm X for about five years, Haley organized and edited his material into a cohesive autobiography, which he explains in an extended epilogue.  Both are fascinating: Haley's collaboration with Malcolm X, as well as the actual the story of Malcolm X, who rose from poverty in the south to being a hustler in the larger northern cities like Detroit and New York, then after he was arrested and sent to prison for ten years, turned from an embittered convict to an educated, eloquent follower of Elijah Muhammad, and upon his release from prison, a leader in the Black Muslim movement, then after being cast out, finding larger truths after a pilgrimage to Mecca, then returning to America and living as a marked man. He was constantly questioning and growing and evolving and Haley captures it all in the interviews. This book has motion. It fairly pulsates.