Welcome To My Reading Week: Early July, 2021

 Okay, let's do this. I've got my Belle (Beauty and the Beast) socks on and my reading journal at my side. Here's a look at my read life from July 1-11:

What I read:

Who Is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? - James Buckley, Jr. Nonfiction. I know that I complained about the 50-page offerings in the Who Was...? series, but this one felt just right. Not rushed at all. I enjoyed reading about how Dwayne Johnson grew up with a father and grandfather who were famous wrestlers, and how Dwayne tried to become a successful pro football player before following in the family business and finding success in the WWE. Despite its brevity, the book did justice to Johnson's charm and charisma.

The Mayor of MacDougal Street - Dave Van Ronk. Memoir. Recently, I watched Inside Llewyn Davies, a Coen brothers movie that came out a few years ago, while I was living in Busan. It was one of the films featured at the Busan International Film Festival, but I couldn't get a ticket to see it. The story of a folksinger going through a rough patch in Greenwich Village in 1961, the title character is loosely based on Dave Van Ronk who seemed to know everyone and everybody across several musical genres, including a new kid from Minnesota called Bob Dylan. Van Ronk died in the middle of working on this memoir, so parts of it feel a bit disjointed, and while his musical insights are illuminating and entertaining, those sections are a bit rambly. Ditto for his political views. Still, I'm glad to have read The Mayor of MacDougal Street. (Many thanks to The Spawn for tracking down both the book and the movie for me.) Dave Van Ronk was a hilarious guy with a trenchant sense of humor, and his chapter about a cross-country trip from NYC to LA with a fellow musician and a 12-year-old kid in tow makes up for the unevenness of some of the other chapters. One big surprise: Dave Van Ronk was also heavily into science fiction fandom. What if he was at a convention I attended in San Francisco back in the early 1990s? My heart beats a little faster to imagine it. By the way: If anyone is working on a time machine, please consider sending me to Greenwich Village, 1958-1961. Thank you.

What I'm reading:

The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich. Novel. At first, I didn't like the latest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and complained about it bitterly in a couple of letters to my bookwormy friends Care and Teri. But once I got to the 170-page mark, I settled in, or Louise Erdrich settled in, and now I like it much better. 

Little Bird of Heaven - Joyce Carol Oates. Novel. I'm audiobooking this one, and I love it. Typical JCO dark and depressing and sharp with an upper New York State setting to match the bleakness of the narrative. I never thought of listening to Oates on audiobook before, but it's an inspired match. I feel a little crazy after my commute, but in a good way.

Cheeky: A Head-to-Toe Memoir - Ariella Elovic. Graphic Novel. If Elovic never does another book in her whole career, and she will, because she's only 30, she will have performed a valuable service to female humanity. This funny, frank, charming, whimsical, eye-opening memoir is her effort to change the conversation with herself about her body self-consciousness from "Imperfection!" to "I'm perfection!" I'm already halfway through Cheeky and loving every single page of it. I think it's already influencing my thinking, because I winced when a friend took a selfie of herself and her pet and asked us to excuse her unmade-up face, which is absolutely beautiful as it is. Anyway, I hope Cheeky gathers a wide audience, and I wish it could have somehow been around back in the 1970s and 1980s. There's that time machine longing again.

There, There Now

My wrist is nearly healed, so I'm back to typing with both hands. The right-side shift makes me wince a bit, but it's nothing I can't handle, she said bravely.

I've read so much these past couple of months, but blogging...it's like I'm locked up, locked in. Part of this is because of the wrist, and part of it is because Mom is working on her third week in the hospital. A double feature this time out: The usual touch of pneumonia coupled with an abscess gone way WAY wrong. The details are so horrific, I can't even type them here. Both you and Mom would never forgive me. Stephen King might...well, yeah, but he doesn't read this blog.

Even with all of this, I MUST get back to blogging. As I've done before when stuck, I'll try to do short entries until I'm comfortable again. Tonight (it's 12:40 a.m.), I'll talk about what I'm reading currently:

1. Washington: A Life - Ron Chernow. I'm glad I didn't give up on this biography. I'm 10% into the book and am starting to see and appreciate the human side of the most formidable icon in American history. He's so much more than that lifeless looking unfinished painting by Gilbert Stuart.

2. Consider the Fork - Bee Wilson. Really struggling with this book, and I can't put my finger on why. Wilson devotes each chapter to the history of a particular kitchen gadget. Sounds like it should be great fun, but the prose seems quite dense. It's not a long book, but  I've been at it for weeks now. I'm determined to finish.

3. A Touch of Stardust - Kate Alcott. This is part of my keep-an-audiobook-on-the-go-at-all-times project. What a fun, frothy gem. The setting is 1939 Hollywood, the backdrop the filming of Gone with the Wind. Carole Lombard and Clark Gable are characters. It's not all classic Hollywood, though. Talk of the war in Europe is in the air, and something is brewing with Julie Crawford's Jewish boyfriend, Andy Weinstein, who is David Selznick's right-hand-man. Julie, an aspiring screenwriter, is the main character. She is Lombard's personal assistant, and like Lombard, she is from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I'm not sure if the mash-up of Old Hollywood insider gossip and the dark story that seems to be on the horizon is really going to work, but for now, I'm thoroughly entertained. I could eat this book with a spoon, it's so delectable.

So that's my Read Life right now. For my next blog post, I'll work backwards, so I don't forget everything. On the other hand, I may leap so far forward that I pull my reading hamstring. Stay tuned.