Oh My July

 

July was such a good reading month. I feel as if I got my reading mojo back. It never stays gone, but when it's gone, it feels permanently gone. But it's here, making itself at home and putting its feet up on the coffee table. Whew.

I caught COVID during the 4th of July weekend, which was unpleasant at first, but as I improved, paid off in reading dividends. I was able to plow through my half-read stack while half-sitting up in bed, as Waverly remained close by and basked in the heat of my elevated temperature.

1. Born To Run -Bruce Springsteen. Memoir. Audiobook. Much more rumination than I was expecting from The Boss. He's thoughtful. Thought-Full. Enjoyed his narration of the memoir.

2. James - Percival Everett. Novel. Smart, sly, funny, and subversive. Since I have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it was interesting to see where the two narratives meet and diverge. I am sure that Mark Twain would heartily recommend this novel. Read this one for the new, no-name book group.

3. Spent - Alison Bechdel. "Comic Novel". A fictional version of Bechdel and her partner live "off the grid" near an idyllic small town in Vermont where their lives intertwine with characters from Dykes To Watch Out For. Now I want to go back and read the whole DTWOF series and get better acquainted with everyone.

4. The Matriarch - Susan Page. Nonfiction. A serviceable biography of Barbara Bush. It's written in a sort of a gossipy style. Good interviews with Barbara Bush and her immediate family and her many friends. My main irritation with the book concerns the biographer: Somehow, Susan Page could not keep herself out of it! I'm of the school that biographers should be like the proverbial fly on the wall. This would involve some use of the passive voice, but so what? It's not all bad, and exists for situations like this one. Read this one for the 3 R's book group. The theme for the month was to pick a first lady and read a book about her.

5. Honey, Baby, Mine - Laura Dern and Diane Ladd. Memoir. Audiobook. A few years ago, Diane Ladd was unwittingly exposed to dangerous pesticides that jeopardized her lung capacity. Doctors told Diane and her daughter, Laura Dern, that Diane didn't have much time, but one doctor said that if Laura could get Diane up and walking, that would improve her breathing, so the two began a series of walks which also became conversations about their lives. Dern recorded the conversations, but listening to the audiobook, I wasn't sure if these were the actual original conversations, or re-creations, because at times, Dern in particular, sounds especially neat and pat. Not to mention that they are both accomplished actors. I'm happy that Dern got her mother walking and talking, and I'm pleased that Ladd got well. I enjoyed all the theatre and Hollywood name-dropping and gossip, but the whole package feels so contrived. I'm thinking in particular of an argument they have towards the end of the book. In addition, I could have lived without the introduction by Reese Witherspoon.

6. Who is Willie Nelson? - David Stabler. Nonfiction. A damn good entry in the Who Was...? series. I enjoyed reading about Willie's early life and his lengthy struggle for success. Also, the author doesn't shy away from Willie's marijuana use, his battles with the IRS, and an extramarital affair that produced a daughter. My only (minor) gripe is that I would have liked to have seen a brief discussion of how Willie developed his distinctive singing style.

7. A Marriage at Sea - Sophie Elmhirst. Nonfiction. In 1973, an English couple, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were sailing to New Zealand when their boat was smashed by an injured whale. The Baileys had sold their house and built this boat to follow their dreams of adventure. After the encounter with the whale, the boat sank quickly, and the Baileys were soon adrift in a rubber raft with a dinghy attached and a meager supply of food. Their ordeal went on for 118 days, until they were spotted and rescued by a Korean fishing vessel. A year later, they published their account, 117 Days Adrift. (It was actually 118 days, but early reports got the amount of time wrong.) Journalist Sophie Elmhirst, writing in beautiful and restrained prose, covers their ordeal in A Marriage at Sea, but also goes back to the couple's beginnings, when shy, introverted Maurice met outgoing, extroverted Maralyn, and they somehow clicked. Elmhirst also discusses the couple's sudden celebrity after their rescue, their return to sailing. The book comes full circle, and again, it is beautifully composed, and breathtaking in its empathy and insights. It's wonderful and my favorite read for July. 

8. Who is Caitlin Clark? -Meri-Jo Borzilleri. Nonfiction. This is one of the 50-pagers in the Who Was...? series, and admittedly, there's not much to say about WNBA star Caitlin Clark, since she's still at the beginning of her career. Reading her origin story was time well spent, and now I won't be so jaw-droppingly ignorant when I see her name in sports news.

In book-related news, I followed the story about Dan Pelzer with great interest. Columbus, Ohio native Pelzer died recently at the age of 92, and left behind a reading log that began back in 1962, and it looks like it went on at least until 2023. .Also, nearly every book Dan logged was checked out from the Ohio Public Library system. His daughter, Marci, posted the100+-page list at what-dan-read.com One of the branches in the Columbus library system has a display of books from Dan's list. In his obituary, it says something to the effect of "in lieu of flowers, go out and read a real page-turner." The more I read about Dan, the more I wish I could have met him.

Do you log your reading? If so, how long have you done so? I've been at it regularly since 1993. (I have a list from 1990, and an incomplete list from 1991.) I love looking back at what I've read, and what others have read. If you haven't started a reading log, please consider doing so. They literally are the stories of our lives.

October's Tiny List

The list is tiny, but two of these three were chunky tomes.

 1. What is the Story of Smokey the Bear? -Steve Korte-  Nonfiction. A laborious look at a long-lived American icon.

2. Time and Chance -Sharon Kay Penman- Novel. The second installment in the Plantagenet series covers the early days of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine's marriage as well as his bromance then fractured relationship with Thomas Becket as Becket moved from being Lord Chancellor to, at Henry's urging, Archbishop of Canterbury. The job switch backfired on Henry because instead of having a yes man in the church, Becket had a conversion and began to take his religious role seriously. Again, impeccable research combined with spellbinding storytelling. It's a huge cast of characters and Penman brings them all to life. Next up: The Devil's Brood, which covers the lives of Henry and Eleanor's children as well as Eleanor and Henry's growing disillusionment with one another.

3. Leave Her to Heaven -Ben Ames Williams- Novel. A bloated and overlong soapy novel from 1944 about a writer who marries a woman with severe issues concerning boundaries. Hollywood improved on the material a couple of years later with a movie of the same name. Watch that instead. It's a noir in Technicolor!  Gene Tierney is beautiful and icy and merciless, stealing the whole film from the rest of the cast until Vincent Price enters and steals it from Tierney, picking splinters of the scenery he's chewed from his teeth as he strides away.

In other news:

Still loving my book group. At the last meeting, we reported on historical fiction we had read. I talked up Sharon Kay Penman's Plantagenet series. Other books mentioned were Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips, Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker, and Sipsworth by Simon van Booy. I promptly put all of them on my TBR. For the next meeting, November 15, we will be discussing nonfiction we have been reading, and thinking up new names for the book group for a fresh reset after declaring independence from the original library program.

I'm really glad that the topic is nonfiction, because I'm doing a Nonfiction November. Here's what's on my nonfiction stack:

1. A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960. Jeanine Basinger.

2. The Noble Hustle. Colson Whitehead.

3. The Farm. Richard Rhodes.

4. Supercomminicators. Charles Duhigg.

5. Fire Lover. Joseph Wambaugh.

And finally...

Dreaming in Literature: The Weird Philip Roth Dream: 

Philip Roth came back to life and wrote a new novel. My first reaction was anxiety, because in dream-logic, I was compelled to read his book, like it or not. After picking it up and paging through, I felt better because the protagonist was female and the book was stream-of-consciousness like Ducks, Newburyport, and the main character constantly had earworms. At that point, I honestly wanted to read Roth's novel and remember feeling very tender and indulgent towards him.

September, 2024: In The Books!

 

Ten books in September! I can hardly believe it. I may make my goal of 63 books this year after all.

1. Dear Miss Kopp - Amy Stewart. Novel. This wasn't my favorite of the Kopp Sisters series, but I was glad to see unsung-but-just-as-intrepid sister Norma solving a case in World War I France. Pleased with myself for finally finishing the series. I introduced Constance, Norma and Fleurette to my new book group, and they seemed intrigued.

2. Dear Hanna - Zoje Stage. Novel. Darkly hilarious thriller. The follow-up to Stage's debut, Baby Teeth. So satisfying. I couldn't wait to read it. Now I wish I'd saved it to savor as an October read.

3. Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation - Emily Van Duyne. Nonfiction. Plath scholar Van Duyne uses the latest information from letters Sylvia Plath wrote to her psychiatrist in the last months of her life, in which she confides that she had been the victim of domestic violence. Van Duyne convincingly builds the case that Ted Hughes destroyed Sylvia Plath in all ways, then, as the executor of her literary estate, set out to make her over in the image that suited him best, (which was a creepy sad-girl mythology that was meant to take the focus off of his own horribleness) while also destroying or losing her two unpublished novels and the last volume of her journals. The woman he left Plath for, Assia Wevill, also killed herself and her 4 year old daughter by Hughes, and he silenced her story, burying their ashes in an unmarked grave and forbidding anyone in his circle as well as Plath biographers from talking about her. He mythologizes Wevill as well as the dark temptress who took him from his happy home. "Hating Ted Hughes" would have been an apt title for this book as well. I know I did.

4. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - Oscar Hijuelos. Novel. Audiobook. I enjoyed the pulsating, jazzy rhythms of the prose, but for a book chock-full of sex, it wasn't that sexy. I watched the movie version as well. It looked great, the music was hot and so was Antonio Banderas, but it just didn't add up.

5. Who Is Billie Jean King? - Sarah Fabiny, Nonfiction. Billie Jean King was the first athlete I remember admiring. I enjoyed reading this for nostalgic reasons.

6. Who Is Lin-Manuel Miranda? - Elijah Rey-David Matos. Nonfiction. Many of the new books in the Who Was...? series seem to be getting more and more workmanlike, stolid and plodding. Lin-Manuel Miranda gave the world Hamilton. He deserves a better biography, and so do the readers.

7. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath - Carl Rollyson. Nonfiction. In the late 1950s, Sylvia Plath had a dream that she met Marilyn Monroe and Monroe became a confidant of sorts, offering advice and giving Sylvia a great manicure. While recounting Plath's life, Rollyson uses the dream as a springboard to constantly compare the two women, and by extension, their husbands, Ted Hughes and Arthur Miller. Rollyson has a fluid, efficient style that I enjoyed reading, but the Monroe comparisons jarred the narrative.

8. Sociopath: A Memoir - Patric Gagne, Ph.D. Nonfiction. I really didn't like this book at all. The nuanced conversations about sociopathy were too many and too long. In other places, the book was irritatingly vague. The writing style was thin, unsubstantial and belabored. It often felt like it was padded to make the book a conventional volume length. Maybe it's unreasonable, but I had expectations that a memoir called "Sociopath" would be somewhat more piercing.

9. Who Is Travis Kelce? -Ellen Labrecque. Nonfiction. What's not to like? He's a Kansas City Chief. He's Taylor's boyfriend. I may try the podcast that he does with his brother Jason.

10. Lady Oracle - Margaret Atwood. Novel. Audiobook. 1970s Atwood, pre-dystopian. Sharply comic.

BOOK GROUP UPDATE:

I love my new group. This is the format I have been craving. We had such a great time talking about historical fiction in September, that we're going to continue talking about it at the October meeting. I got lots of inspiration for my infinite TBR.

...And August, 2024

 Here's what I read in August:

1. Miss Kopp Investigates (novel) -Amy Stewart. The Great War is over, and the sisters are back home. The Miss Kopp in this book is Fleurette. She is recovering from a lengthy illness, and can't go back onstage. She finds work posing as "the other woman" in divorce cases. (Back then, there was no such thing as no-fault divorce. Someone had to accuse somebody of something, usually adultery or mental cruelty.) During such a case, Fleurette happens onto a fraud scheme and proves every bit as capable of detective work as her older sisters. Great ending to the Kopp Sisters series, if  it is indeed the end. I never stop hoping that Amy Stewart just hit pause.

2. Random Family (nonfiction) -Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. This book has been on my radar for years, and recently came to my attention again when The New York Times put it on their 100 Best Books this century. It's an ethnography. LeBlanc followed two young Puerto Rican women, Jessica and Coco, as well as their extended family, including their partners, George and Cesar, who are in prison for drugs and murder. I admire LeBlanc's ability to portray her subjects without judgement, and the scrupulous way she completely wrote herself out of the narrative. This is often hard to read, but it's worth it. A good choice by NYT.

3. Mornings on Horseback (biography) -David McCullough. Teddy Roosevelt is an iconic figure and a colorful personality that is recognizable to this day. But what and who made Theodore Roosevelt into that person? David McCullough explores Roosevelt and his siblings' early lives as well as providing fully realized portraits of his mother and father. One of the best biographies I've ever read. Highly recommended.

4. Kopp Sisters on the March (novel) -Amy Stewart. In the early  days of WWI, Constance, Norma and Fleurette are at an army camp for women. At first, the camp is a weak and tepid excuse for preparing women to participate in the war effort. Constance's background as a "lady deputy" stands her in good stead when she has to step in and serve as matron of the camp. Meanwhile, Norma is trying to get her carrier pigeon program off the ground, so to speak, and Fleurette is arranging for entertainment to keep up everyone's morale. They are also all puzzling over one of their bunkmates, "Roxy", who isn't exactly what she seems to be. Her story is told in alternate chapters, based on an actual person and case.

5. Bibliophile (nonfiction) -Jane Mount. Everything your little bookworm heart could desire is in this exquisite book: Book lists, thoughtfully divided up by genre and sometimes subgenre, lists of beautiful bookstores and stunning libraries, fun facts about authors, and it's all illustrated in gorgeous color! I must have a copy of Bibliophile for my home library. A lot of hard work and heart went into the making of this book and it shows. And glows.

Book Group News:

My new book group, The Three R's, broke off from the library program and are now meeting independently, although still at the library. A quick explanation: When the group was part of the library program, they were required to meet in the Storytime room, which ironically, has terrible acoustics. The members asked if they could move to the conference room. The program director said they couldn't, but that if they declared independence, they could reserve the conference room for meetings. So that's what happened. 

I couldn't make the last meeting, in which the topic was to read a book in which a character goes to a foreign country to live. For this month's meeting on September 20, the topic is to read an example of historical fiction. I'm going to introduce the members to the Kopp Sisters.

I wanted to tell you about my strange Philip Roth dream, but I'm going to quit while I'm ahead. I've already lost this post once, and AI has offered twice to show me how to write properly. No doubt that you can imagine what I said in reply.

July's Reading Adventure

I was almost done with this post, and I lost it. The UNDO button was unsympathetic to my plight the third time my post disappeared. I guess it's because I kept ignoring AI's offers to "help [me] write".

In the interest of getting this done ahead of the sword of Damocles that all of a sudden lurks in this computer, I'm going to just hit the high notes.

New book group: Loved it. Love the format. This is my tribe. They seem to be in some sort of transition, though. Stay tuned.

Books read this month: 3. A meager number. I'm going to have to keep a daily reading diary to see what I'm actually doing.

1. Such a Fun Age -Kiley Reid. Novel. Audiobook.

2. Who Is Michael Phelps? - Micah Hecht. Nonfiction.

3. The Overstory - Richard Powers. Novel. Audiobook.

OK. I'm going to hit Publish now, so we've at least covered this much.

I Can't Help Myself: The Book Group Chronicles

Yeah, yeah. I know what I said. Words like "no more book group". Words like "free to read what I like into eternity". 

Mmmm, words. So delicious. I'm eating them now.

Because: Guess what? I found another book group and I'm going to give it a whirl.

This time, it could work, it could really, really work. (Why do I suddenly feel like Elizabeth Taylor embarking on another marriage?)

Here's how the book group is set up: First, someone (I don't know who! The Powers That Be? The Book Gods? Nancy Pearl?) chooses an author or a genre. Then, the gentle reader/scruffy bookworm goes in search of a book that fits the parameters. Finally, a month later, GR/SB shows up to book group, and each individual presents the book they chose.

Example: This month is "Edith Wharton (Again)". (Presumably, someone in this group has a hell of a girl crush on Edith Wharton, if it's "again".  Can't wait to find out who.) But anyway! Edith Wharton! I'm a fan. Which book should I choose? Should I just go with something I've already read or strike out and read something fresh, something new to me? I can't go wrong; Wharton is always satisfactory. A little depressing, yes, but nobody does it better, to quote Carly Simon.

As you can see, I'm already in love with this book group format. No more turning pages with one hand and holding my nose with the other. Even better: Since the group meets around lunchtime, we can bring our lunches! In my previous book group, NO FOOD OR DRINK ALLOWED. I always thought it was a shame; I'm not one of those wispy, ethereal bookworms. Sometimes in books, characters eat, and when they eat, I get damned hungry. So yeah: Lunch!

This all takes place July 19. Stay tuned.

*

In other news, the bookgroupless me read 7 books in June:

 1. It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Breakups in History -Jennifer Wright- Nonfiction. If you're suffering from a bad breakup, or you know someone who has just had one, or if you've ever had one, you need to read this book. Jennifer Wright, covering ground from Nero to Norman Mailer will put it all in perspective for you. Your rotten ex-partner couldn't possibly be worse than Henry VIII (killing two wives) or Norman Mailer (attempted murder, laughed off). There is also a great rebound story: Effie Gray's husband, John Ruskin, was horrified by her naked and completely normal form and refused to have sex with her. She rebounded years later with a painter friend of Ruskin's and the happy couple went on to have several children. Edith Wharton's in here, too. After an unhappy and mostly unintimate marriage, she finally found a journalist who made her toes curl. Unfortunately, he was a jerk. Speaking of jerks, Lord Byron was of that variety, but his lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, stalked him unmercifully and even sent a bloody tuft of pubic hair in one of her many, many, many letters. And there was poor Oscar Wilde, going to jail because of his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, only to have Alfred abandon him, then write self-serving crap about everything. Read it, and you'll either say, yeah, I don't have it so bad, or you'll have someone historical to compare your scummy ex-lover to, and your friends will be impressed.

2. Come and Get It - Kiley Reid - Novel. Audiobook. Agatha, a well-known author of nonfiction books signs on for a year as an author-in-residence at the University of Arkansas. Millie is a senior and a Resident Advisor at one of the dorms. Agatha starts out interviewing students about how they feel about weddings for her new book, but suddenly her focus shifts to how these same young women talk about money. After accidentally overhearing a conversation, Agatha compromises Millie's position as an RA  and her own as writer-in-residence by paying Millie to let her sit in Millie's room and eavesdrop with a tape recorder running. This novel is long on character, seemingly short on plot, but rich in awkward situations. I liked Come and Get It well enough to seek out Reid's debut novel Such A Fun Age. Nicole Lewis narrates both audiobooks and her gift for voices and accents is superb.

3. Rx -Rachel Lindsay- Graphic Memoir. Rachel was diagnosed as bipolar as a young adult, and she must stay on medication to stabilize her condition. That means that her jobs must include health insurance. She gets a good job in advertising, but finds herself developing ads for an antidepressant drug. As she becomes both the target audience and the targeter, she starts to destabilize and soon requires hospitalization. As soon as she's "better", she's expected to hop right back into this twisted cycle again, and that's when she takes a step back and scrutinizes the situation. Read this, it's good.

.IV. The Road to Oz - Kathleen Krull - Biography, picture book. L. Frank Baum was an imaginative, daydreaming child who retained those same qualities as an adult. He failed at business repeatedly, but never ran out of ideas for his next creative endeavor. Author Kathleen Krull follows Baum through his checkered careers, showing the various inspirations for what finally catapulted him into literary legend. She did a great job of bringing Baum's quirky personality to life on the page, but she would also insert these parenthetical asides that seemed to be the equivalent of eye-rolling, and that was so jarring and annoying.

V. When Christ and His Saints Slept - Sharon Kay Penman - Novel. Book 1 of 5 in Penman's Plantagenant saga. In this volume, Stephen and Maude battle for England's throne. Stephen seems to be a weak king, but the English aren't about to accept a woman ruler. Historical fiction that feels so fresh and alive. I'm working on the second book in the series now, which follows the fortunes of Maude's son Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. 

6. Lost Boy -Jane Yolen- Biography, picture book. This biography of J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan was exquisite. Jane Yolen related anecdotes about Barrie's life and tied in quotes from his work.

7. Who Gets the Drumstick? -Helen Beardsley - Memoir. This memoir has an alternate title, Yours, Mine, and Ours. Two movies under that name were based on Beardsley's experience of suddenly becoming a widow with eight children and almost as suddenly, meeting and falling in love with a widower with ten children, marrying him, then having two more children. It's a charming little book with a quirky story sincerely told, but the first part gave me weird vibes. Beardsley's first husband, a Navy pilot was killed when the plane he was flying crashed. At the time, she was six months pregnant with their eighth child. After the child is born, a well-meaning nurse and her own sister seem hell-bent on pushing Helen to forget her former life and make a new one with the children, and her sister pushes her into moving from Washington to California, then immediately into dating. One of these dates leads to the father of ten, Frank Beardsley, also a Navy man. He and Helen get married fairly quickly. Here's the timeline: The first husband dies in July of 1960. Frank and Helen get married in September of 1961. There are light and humorous anecdotes throughout the book and no one could deny the strong human-interest appeal, but it feels as if there is more conceal than reveal. Everything's a little too good to be true. In spite of my reservations, I did enjoy this book.

May, 2024: Quit Book Group. Don't Care.

o

Bookworms work in mysterious ways, and one day last month, I woke up and decided that I didn't want to be in book group anymore. I didn't like that itchy feeling of having to read a book that I really didn't want to read. A book in which I didn't even want to crack the cover, not even the teeniest bit, and I damn well didn't want to sit and talk about it, nor did I want to answer inane questions about (cardboard) character motivation.

Regrets? Sadness? None so far. Instead, I have a feeling of buoyancy. I can read anything I want FOREVER.

 If I were to return to book groupdom, I would want to be in one of those new silent book clubs in which people sit around reading to themselves, then at the end of the meeting, they go around and share brief details and impressions of what they've been reading. If I liked the look of their book, I could quickly borrow it and make a note of the title, author, and some keywords that led to my attraction. So yes, I've had some pleasantly hazy reveries about this sort of book grouping, but I can't figure out why I am picturing all of us in semi-formal clothing!

...

In other news, I decided that I wanted to belong to all the libraries in the area, so I started patronizing the university library ten miles down the road. Wandering around in the stacks which seem to stretch for miles is both relaxing and exhilarating. Even better, it's free! I don't have to pay a fee to check out materials. Contrast this with an earlier attempt to join a community college library in a nearby town: 

1. No, you can't join. You don't live in our preferred counties.

2. No, you can't pay a fee to join. We just don't want your other-county ass.

3. Even if you were eligible, you still couldn't have access to all the available materials, because you aren't a student.

I know, of course, that this library has its reasons, rules, and regulations, but this Fuck You gift-wrapped in a Fuck Off stung a bit. I felt ashamed and unwashed. I felt like a bumpkin; how dare I inquire, how dare I try to walk my stinky feet through its shining portal? I slunk away, but regained my equanimity within a day: I'm not the bumpkin! They're the bumpkins! 

Everything is fine now. I joined the university library, and it's free and they sent me an email welcoming me, and you know what else? They could fit all of Bumpkin Library on one of their many floors! So there.

...

Finally, I'm going to talk about my May reading:

1. What Were the Shark Attacks of 1916? -Nico Medina. Nonfiction. These attacks are what the bestseller Jaws was based on. It seems so strange that just barely a century ago, people and even scientists knew so little about sharks.

2. What Was  the Great Molasses Flood of 1919? -Kirsten Anderson. Nonfiction. My jaw dropped so many times reading about this preventable disaster. I know that companies can be inept and unscrupulous, but this was really blatant.

3. Emma -Jane Austen. Novel. Back last century, when I took that Jane Austen class and read six novels in six weeks, I had the sense in my bruised brain at the end that Emma was my favorite of the novels. I've been going back and rereading, and so far, I'm not wrong. There's only Mansfield Park left, and that was the one I ranked at the bottom. I'm not in a tearing hurry to read it. But Emma! What a treat! Audiobook.

IV. (for some reason, the numeral four isn't working on this keyboard) The Sunne In Splendour -Sharon Kay Penman. Novel. Rich and rewarding historical fiction about Richard III and The Wars of the Roses. I've got a stack of Penman novels that should take me to the end of the year.

V. (hmm, this is interesting.) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -Ken Kesey. Novel. While I appreciated the novel, this is one of those cases in which the movie was better. McMurphy as a Christ-figure was too heavy-handed. Audiobook.

6. Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -Philip Gefter. This book seemed like one of those long New Yorker articles padded into book-length. Although it was repetitive, I enjoyed the backstage drama involved with the making of the movie, and at the end, Gefter's look at other movies about marriage that were influenced in one way or another by Who's Afraid...? I followed up this read with my own viewing of the 1966 movie, and relished it more armed with the insider knowledge and trivia Gefter's book provided.

...

Other stuff.

What I'm working on now: 

It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Breakups in History - Jennifer Wright. Nonfiction.

When Christ and His Saints Slept (Book 1 of the Plantagenet Saga) -Sharon Kay Penman. Novel.

Come and Get It -Kiley Reid. Novel. Audiobook.

Wishlist: The Alienist -Caleb Carr. Novel.

And That Was April, Twenty Twenty Four

Only three books read in April:

1. Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan. Novel. Audiobook. So much satire and so much fun. Alamak!

2. Who is Taylor Swift? -Kirsten Anderson. Nonfiction. OK...so this book goes from Taylor's birth in 1989 and alllll the way through 2023 and mentions almost all of her hit songs and her boyfriends. Somehow, Travis Kelce doesn't show up at all. Not even a shadowy drawing of a football player wearing a red jersey with 87 on the back. Interesting!

3. Knife -Salman Rushdie. Memoir. Rushdie writes about the 2022 knife attack in which he was stabbed 15 times and lost an eye. The book follows his recovery and reactions to the attack, including a long, imaginary dialogue with his 24-year-old assailant, who seems to have gotten the half-baked idea from watching a few YouTube videos. A year after the assault, Rushdie defiantly returns to the venue and does the reading he had prepared when calamity struck. This gives the book a nice shape, but I'm sure he is still getting over this horrific event. I admire his toughness and resolve.

 

My completed reading seems scant, but behind the scenes, I've been working on two books:

The Sunne in Splendour - Sharon Kay Penman. 1982 historical fiction about The Wars ofu the Roses, and particularly about Richard III. It's very long and just as compelling. I wonder if George R.R. Martin read it before he started the Game of Thrones series. I'm often reminded of GoT as I'm reading. After finishing The Sunne in Splendour, I plan to tackle Penman's five-book series about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II and their sons.

Emma - Jane Austen. Novel. I read this back in college, but I didn't really "get" Austen until many years later. I'm familiar with the "mystery" in the novel, so it's fun to search out the clues Jane Austen sprinkles in. Emma is my favorite of all her books. I still have Mansfield Park left to read, but don't know if I'm feeling that brave yet.

March Madness

Yes, it's true. I could not come up with a more clever title. There were no basketballs, polished gym floors, hoops, or three-point shots involved in the making of this post. 

Six books for the third month in a row. A respectable number.

 So much for my thinking that I could go a whole year reading nothing but nonfiction. It's just not so. I need novels. Novels need me?

 1. Lilac Girls - Martha Hall Kelly. Historical novel. Audiobook. I was almost halfway through this novel before I realized that several of these characters were actual people. Up to that point, I was quite engaged in the book, but that revelation had me sitting straight up for the rest. Caroline Ferriday is a rich New York socialite who devotes endless days to helping French refugees at the dawn of WWII. During the war, she raises funds for care packages for French orphanages. After the war, she spearheads a campaign to help women who were in German concentration camps get surgery to repair injuries inflicted on them by Nazi doctors at the camp who were bent on ghoulish experimentation. Kasia is a young Polish political prisoner. Herta is one of the Nazi doctors. Eventually, their stories intertwine. I'm really mad at myself for sidestepping this book for at least three years. It was so well done. The audiobook is incredible. Three different actors portray these women, and the one who narrated Kasia's part had me teary-eyed more than once. I admired Caroline, and despised Herta with the heat of a thousand suns. 

 2. Akin - Emma Donoghue. Novel. There are two stories here, and one gets completely overshadowed by the other. Not my favorite Donoghue novel, although when she seems to falter, she's still really good. I read this for book group.

 3. Class - Stephanie Land. Memoir. Land starts Class where her previous memoir, Maid left off, and concentrates on Land's senior year at the University of Montana, where she is pursuing a BA in Creative Writing, and is hoping to be accepted to the MFA program there. She's also still working cleaning houses and raising her kindergarten-age daughter as a single mother living below the poverty level. As graduation draws near, her life is further complicated by an unplanned pregnancy. She gets more than her share of raised eyebrows and well-meaning  but judgmental advice from classmates and faculty. And, as always, she does ongoing battle with a social services system that borders on Kafkaesque. Stephanie Land's writing is intense. One of her professors said "relentless", and I agree, but only in the best sense. What I like best about both her memoirs is that she's not afraid to portray herself as complex and contradictory. Looking forward to a third memoir.

 4. The Vaster Wilds - Lauren Groff. Historical novel. A young girl, a servant to a minister and his wife is on the run in the 1630s from the diseased and failing settlement of Jamestown. The reader is made to understand that the girl has committed some sort of crime. Her life in the wild is brutal, but through flashbacks, we see that her whole life has been difficult, and seems to have prepared her. given her the mental toughness needed for this latest hardship.

 5. The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen Age 83 1/4 - "Hendrik Groen". Novel. Audiobook. Set in The Netherlands, Hendrik and his friends, old-age pensioners in a retirement home, get tired of the tedium of the place and start the Old-But-Not-Dead Club in which each member arranges an outing per month for all of them. Hendrik also buys a motorized scooter and explores the area around the home. He is an avid reader of the news, especially when it pertains to senior citizens. His observations are concise, witty, and sometimes pretty savage. His diary follows a whole year, one of great change as he and his friends face up to their physical limitations and still have good times. Derek Jacobi as narrator was an inspired choice, although I sometimes had problems with his vocal dynamics. When Hendrik shouts, he shouts, he lets it all out, but when he was saying witty, caustic things half under his breath, I would often not catch it. When the book ended, I found myself missing these characters.

 6. The Guest - Emma Cline. Novel. After inviting her to spend the summer with him at his house in the Hamptons, Alex's much-older, rich boyfriend suddenly cuts her loose right before Labor Day, having his assistant get her a ticket back to New York City. But Alex has burned all of her bridges back in the city, and has grown accustomed to life among the rich, so she decides that no, she just won't return to NYC. Her plan is to hang around then show up at Simon's (the boyfriend) Labor Day party. By then, she hopes he will reconsider and they'll have a lovely reunion. During the five days Alex is adrift, she taps into her considerable grifting skills, then immediately embraces her genius for the bad decision. I was horrified by Alex, but enjoyed The Guest so much. Really loved the Patricia Highsmith feel of it. And OH MY GOD THAT ENDING! What happened? I went back over the last chapter a few times, looking for clues and developing theories. I'm glad I don't know for sure. I admire Emma Cline for making readers figure it out.

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.

Nonfiction November, Making a Stack to Remember

 

Five Days at Memorial - Sheri Fink. I've already started this chronicle of events at a hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. It's compelling and upsetting.

The Farm - Richard Rhodes

The Wager - David Grann. And if I can work in a reread of Grann's previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon, so much the better.

Child Star - Shirley Temple Black. After months and months, I'm finally going to finish this autobiography.

I Must Be Dreaming - Roz Chast. I'm hoping that this book will arrive during November.

Hollywood: The Oral History - Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson. This was a last-minute addition to the stack. I couldn't resist. Jeanine Basinger. Movie history. I swooned!

Alternate:

Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy - Karen Abbott.

May, 2023 Reading: Finally Finished Tess!

May was the Getting Stuff Done month, reading-wise. Instead of floating like a butterfly from book to book to book, I stayed with the ones piled up on the coffee table. However, my book buying tendencies ran amok. Amok af. I know the reason: Bookstore anxiety. I fear that if I don't buy something when I go into a bookstore, it will fail.

Seven books read this month. 6 out of the 7 were library books. 

Books bought -- I'd tell you the number, except that I don't know the number. Somewhere between amok and infinity. The corner curio cabinet in the living room had to be repurposed as a bookshelf. I like it better this way. The knickknacks that were there before never looked quite right, although the cat found them attractive. She now probably thinks that I'm tearing her playhouse down room by room.

Here are my books read for May:

1. The Farewell Tour - Stephanie Clifford. Novel. In 1980, Lillian Waters, or "Water Lil", as she is known, is a 58-year-old country music singer trying to make a last comeback after a diagnosis of polyps on her vocal chords. As she travels across the country, her life story is told in alternating chapters. There's also a mystery surrounding her early years in Washington State and an abusive but shadowy older sister. Good details about country music throughout the book. Good storytelling.

2. Madly, Deeply - Alan Rickman. Diaries. In spite of the footnotes, I didn't always know what or who Rickman was talking about, but I still enjoyed his musings. My favorite thing was his incisiveness about why a movie worked or didn't work. 

3. Abridged Classics - John Atkinson. Humor. So much fun. Classic novels distilled down to a few words. Favorite examples: 

War and Peace/Everyone is sad/It snows. 

Moby-Dick/Man vs. whale/ Whale wins. 

Robinson Crusoe/Old-timey Gilligan's Island. 

Mysteries of Udolpho/Gothic Scooby-Doo. 

The Canterbury Tales/ Medieval version of  "99 Bottles of Beer" with sex and poop jokes. 

Ethan Frome/Farmer's life can't possibly get any worse./Hey, a sled!

 Jane Eyre/Workplace romance gets fiery. 

Charlotte's Web/Clever web designer saves a pig.

4. How to Keep House While Drowning - KC Davis, LPC. Self-Help. (Funny aside: I was initially interested in this book because I thought it was a novel with one of those quirky and evocative titles.) KC Davis conceived this book a couple of years ago. She gave birth during the pandemic, and the support systems she'd set up for herself suddenly vanished. Did I mention she also had a toddler? She was in survival mode, and this book is for people who are in that mode whether it's from new parenthood, isolation, depression or they just don't know how to keep house. I appreciate her assertion that rest is important, there's no such thing as laziness, care tasks are morally neutral, and my favorite maxim of hers: "Anything that's worth doing is worth doing half-assed." The 5 things tidying method is the perfect hack for making sense out of chaotic surroundings. Another valuable tip is to try to do things for your future self. Life can get overwhelming, so I'm glad I read this one.

5. Writers & Lovers - Lily King. Novel. I read Euphoria a few years ago and absolutely loved it, so when this book came out, I was wary about reading it, fearing disappointment. I shouldn't have worried! Now I want to reread Euphoria and then go romp around in Lily King's backlist. 

6. Forget the Alamo - Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. Nonfiction. Although the seemingly flippant title might be off-putting to many, this book is thoughtful and well-researched as it examines the origins of the Alamo and how the defenders grew to nearly mythical status. What were they defending? Were they really heroes? Should the Alamo be a shrine? Is there a richer, more nuanced, and more inclusive story to tell? The authors tackle these questions and bring the reader from those first Southern men who struck out for Texas up to present-day San Antonio. And Phil Collins, too! A captivating read.

7. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy. Novel. It took YEARS, but I finally finished this book. Wondering if Hanya Yanagihara read this, studied this as she was writing A Little Life. I suspect she's a bit of a Hardy girl since the main character in A Little Life is called Jude. Anyway. I despised Alec D'Urberville. That was easy; he is a moustache-twirling villain. A slimy bastard. A stock type. But who I really hated was Angel Clare, the "nice guy" Tess falls in love with after her bad encounter with Alec. Also frustrating was Tess's streak of fatalism and her dogged insistence on suffering so that she wouldn't do anything further to inconvenience Angel Clare after her confession of being a "fallen woman" on their wedding night. But yeah, Angel is the real villain of the piece. Tess was well-rid of him and didn't know it; that's the tragedy. When all is read and done, this may turn out to be my year for reading classics, but I'm not sure. It's going to take me a while to recover from this one.

March, 2023 Reading

 March is a long month, and yet I only completed five books. When I'm having a bit of a struggle, I wonder whether to blame it on age. Being online too much is much more likely the culprit. 

Digression: Funny thing about that word, "culprit". Long ago, in a rare, dyslexic moment, it entered my brain as "curplit". I pronounced it that way in a roomful of English majors and you should have heard the sharply inhaled silence before they all burst out laughing. Embarrassing. I'm much more careful now, but at any given moment, I could still curplit. End of digression.

Then there's my harsh inner critic who tells me it's not age, it's not being online, it's that I'm an imposter. A poser bookworm. That I've never been much of a reader. Dim. Lazy. Unmotivated. Mean adjectives are her stock and trade; I told you she was harsh!

But never mind her. Instead, let's talk about something that really made my bookworm heart happy this month: While I was on Twitter one day, a guy named Ben from Australia posted pictures of excerpts from his 94-year-old grandmother's reading log. She's been keeping track since she was 14 in 1943. 80 years! Her entries start out in German and switch to English in the late 1940s. I fell into a daydream about spending my life in a clean, well-lighted room surrounded by other people's book journals that go back decades, reading and enjoying endless spooling lists of books. (How could I get people to send me their book logs, and what's an intelligent excuse for wanting them other than I would find them both comforting and thrilling?)

Okay, I think I've driven around the block enough now that I'm ready to post my five reads for March:

1. Young Man with a Horn - Dorothy Baker. Novel. A short 1938 novel about a young musician, loosely based on Bix Beiderbecke. The music itself seems like one of the characters. Baker writes so well about technique that the reader feels as if they also know about the intricacies of music. Sort of like chess and Walter Tevis and The Queen's Gambit. When Baker veered into the romance part of the story, the book seemed to lose some of its oomph, although I think the female interest is meant to be fascinating. Luckily, that was a brief sidebar. I was going to complain a little about not being able to figure out just who the narrator of the story is supposed to be, but since the book is about jazz and jazz is about improvisation, I'm just going to mellow out and not get too exacting. I really loved the atmosphere of Young Man with a Horn. As I read, I felt as if I were in a nightclub, music and smoke wafting through the air and ice tinkling in glasses. I want to read more of Baker; her 1962 novel, Cassandra At The Wedding is the one I've got my eye on now.

2. A House Divided - Pearl S. Buck. Novel. So glad to finally finish the House of Wang trilogy! Many hours of pure listening enjoyment. Audiobook was definitely the way to go. Buck writes in the cadences of ancient storytelling and as it washed over me, I was mesmerized. As far as the individual books go, The Good Earth is a solid and illuminating look into agrarian life in China, Sons has the most action, and A House Divided conveys the tension of past and present colliding.

3. Sooley - John Grisham. Novel. This was a book group read. I was engrossed in the story of the young South Sudanese basketball player/refugee, but Grisham's writing style is so bad. Yet, I couldn't stop reading! So bad it's good? Really baffled about my love for this one. I'm thinking about trying another of Grisham's sports novels like Bleachers or Playing for Pizza.

4. Who Was Alex Trebek? - Pam Pollack and Meg Belviso. Nonfiction. It's about time he got his own book! I miss seeing Alex Trebek so much on Jeopardy! Smart, witty, erudite -- the man inspired a girlish crush across generations in my family -- my grandmother, my mother, and me.

5. Who Was Maria Tallchief? - Catherine Gourley. Nonfiction. This biography of the first Native American prima ballerina is beautifully, almost lyrically written.

And now it's April. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction will be announced soon, and this year, my money is on Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. My sentimental choice, as always, is Joyce Carol Oates.

January, 2023 Reading

 Nine books this month, which is a really good number for me. I can't take total credit; some of them were books that followed me into the new year.

Before I discuss those nine, here's what I'm in the middle of reading now:

Spare - Prince Harry. Memoir.  On audiobook. Of course.

Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography - Gail Levin. Aren't all biographies intimate to some degree?

Poison - Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. Novel. It's a roman a clef with a weird Virginia Woolf vibe.

Here's what I want to read:

Ducks - Kate Beaton. Graphic Novel. It just arrived today via ILL. Squeeeee! I know it's going to zoom to the top of my reading pile, but when? Tomorrow? Tonight? As soon as I get off this computer?

Here are the nine for January:

1. Sons - Pearl S. Buck. Novel. The second in a trilogy following The Good Earth. Wang Lung's three sons are an interesting bunch, especially the youngest, Wang the Tiger, a soldier turned warlord. I'm eager to finish the trilogy.

2. The Man Who Invented Christmas - Les Standiford. Nonfiction. An examination of Charles Dickens and his most popular work, A Christmas Carol. I liked it, but it felt padded, as if it were really meant to be New Yorker article-sized rather than book-length.

3. Who Was Michelangelo? - Kirsten Anderson. Nonfiction.

4. Moloka'i - Alan Brennert. Novel. For several decades, Hawaiians exhibiting symptoms of leprosy were ordered by law to leave their families and go into an undetermined quarantine on the island of Moloka'i. This story follows the life of Rachel who is five years old when her symptoms first appear. I have mixed feelings about this book. I liked all the history of Hawaii, but felt the crashing weight of information dumps throughout. Brennert writes beautiful descriptions of the islands. The reader can really see their rugged beauty. The characters are mostly sympathetic and their rituals are presented respectfully and often movingly. My interest in learning more about Moloka'i was piqued. On the other hand, the prose style is a little clunky. The dialogue often seemed anachronistic and POV was all over the place, sometimes all at once. I wish that Brennert had just committed to doing this as straight nonfiction; I think the result would have been more satisfying.

5. Joan is Okay - Weike Wang. Novel. Joan is an attending physician who works in an ICU unit in New York City right about the time that COVID-19 is starting to make its frightening presence known. At times, the novel and the title character have a sort of flat affect, but then there's a good deal of sharp commentary. This is one of those novels I'm going to have to read again to fully absorb.

6. Opening the Road: Victor Hugo Green and His Green Book - Keila V. Dawson (author) and Alleanna Harris (illustrator) Nonfiction.

7. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver. Novel. Basically, David Copperfield set in Appalachia during the opioid crisis. I never realized that Kingsolver and Dickens had so much in common. You don't have to have read David Copperfield to "get" Demon Copperhead, but it enhanced the experience for me. I suggest pairing those two books, or pairing Demon Copperhead with the nonfiction book Dopesick by Beth Macy.

8. Who Was Shaquille O'Neal? - Ellen Labreque. Nonfiction.

9. Starring Steven Spielberg: The Making of a Young Filmmaker - Gene Barretta (author) and Craig Orback (illustrator). Nonfiction.

DNF:

A House Divided - Pearl S. Buck. Novel. The third book in the House of Wang trilogy. I got a quarter of the way in and had an audiobook malfunction. I'm hoping to get back to it after I finish listening to Spare.

IT'S NOT ME, IT'S YOU, I THINK:

I've been in my book group for a year now, and we just don't seem to meld, or click, or whatever you call it. Our group dynamic is chilly. We engage with the leader (who is the Outreach librarian) but there's no rapport among ourselves. It's painful and I'm frustrated.

I need to feel some sort of connection. As a last-ditch effort, I'm going to try the library's other book group, which meets a little earlier in the day. The leader said that this other group is 'harder to please' and 'complains a lot more', so I'm interpreting that to mean that they are lively and interesting, and that maybe discussions are a little more organic. Wish me luck???

Cov-ember

 This post was originally meant to be all about how I rocked Nonfiction November, and I did, but of course I must mention how, on the last day of the month, COVID-19 kicked me in the ass with its hobnailed boots. And my little (!) Spawn, too!!!  So now we're in quarantine. This is difficult to write, so I'd better move along. Brain fog is real, and my fingers are not obediently flying to the proper keys.

1. Who Was Georgia O'Keeffe? - Sarah Fabiny. Nonfiction. My favorite part was when Georgia went down to Mexico to meet up with her good friend Frida Kahlo.

2. The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck. Novel. Audiobook. Loved the narration. I can't think of his name, but he played the assistant principal on Boston Public.

3. Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz - Gail Crowther. Nonfiction. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Boston, 1958. Where's my time machine?

4. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt. Nonfiction. Audiobook. I'm mad at myself for sidestepping this brilliant book for -oh god- three decades! Novels are so jealous they cry because this book has got so many juicy characters, terrific atmosphere, a murder mystery and magic. Like so many people who have read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I have added visiting Savannah to my bucket list. Give it a go, if you haven't already. The audiobook version is superb.

Looks like only four books, but not really. I got 150 pages into Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and was absorbed, but had to turn it back into the library before finishing. There's a waiting list.

I'm slowly and enjoyably working my way through Heather Clark's excellent biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Esquire just put out a list of 50 of the best biographies of all time. Red Comet is on it, and that's damn right.

I need to stop writing now. See you for December and the year-end wrap-up.

Six In September

 Three audiobooks and three paper books! I like the symmetry:

1. Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions - Amy Stewart. Novel. Audiobook. Christina Moore's narration is simply the best. Trust me.

2. Dust Bowl Girls - Lydia Reeder. Nonfiction. Audiobook. A barnstorming women's basketball team from a small Oklahoma college were trailblazers with a forward-thinking male coach who made them into champions. Their accomplishments were astonishing. I love how their story is told in such a sweet and conventional style, mostly through their own recollections. The juxtaposition gives the story a warmth and immediacy. I enjoyed the cameos featuring Babe Didrickson, who was handed one of her few defeats by our title heroines, and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover, who frowned on women playing any kind of sports. I was reminded of the movie A League of Their Own.

3. True Biz - Sara Novic. Novel.  A groundbreaking novel about Deaf culture, and the very real threat of extinction by the well-meaning hearing community, armed with imperfect technology. Thought-provoking. The ending seems open-ended. I'm hoping for a sequel.

4. Everybody Thought We Were Crazy - Mark Rozzo. Nonfiction. Actors Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward got married after a whirlwind romance in 1961. They quickly discovered they shared a love for modern, often unconventional art. For a brief time, everyone flocked to their home from Hollywood royalty to Andy Warhol to The Velvet Underground to The Byrds. Hopper also finds that he has a talent for photography. A dizzying look at Pop Culture. A fun read.

5. Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit - Amy Stewart.  Novel. Audiobook. I can't stop listening to this series, and I am not a series person. Miss Kopp gets better and better with each novel.

6. The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven - Nathaniel Ian Miller. Novel. In the 1910s and 20s, the title character feels like a misfit in Swedish society. He goes to work as a miner, and gets seriously injured. After that, he decides to go farther north and live as a hermit, hunting and trapping. Although he's awkward and unpolished, people warm to him, and life hands him a few surprises. The novel seems a little uneven, but I enjoyed Sven and his cohort and his many adventures.

August, 2022: Pendulum Swings

 What a month for reading! I made so many happy discoveries. 

But first, a Val story:

I had a complete Little House set. Val borrowed it. One day, she came to my door looking like a thundercloud.

"I'm reading The Long Winter now," she said. "And I'm really mad at Pa." Was she seething?

"Almanzo and his brother invited Pa for pancakes, and he sat down and ate with them. THEN he went home and ate that wee bit of food Ma fixed. And he never let on about eating those pancakes! What was it? Two stacks? Really shit behaviour."

I decided to try and defend Pa. "Well, he was getting out there every day in the blizzards and such, tending to the livestock --"

"I'm sorry," said Val. "It's just shit that he did that. Never said a word."

"My mom noticed it, too," I said. "She criticized him."

"And she's right," Val said.

***

Okay, so where was I? Reading in August. July was decidedly non-fictiony, and last month, the pendulum swung back the other way. I really love how my reading sorts itself out now, without my help.

1. A View of the Harbour - Elizabeth Taylor. Novel. Many thanks to my book blogging buddy Care for sending me this novel. I've wanted to read Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress) for years, and she was definitely worth the wait. First published in 1947, A View of the Harbour takes place in a coastal village called Newby where nothing goes completely unnoticed. Taylor seems to have had a lot of fun with this book. One of the characters, Beth, is writing a novel that spans the length of this novel. Also like Taylor, she is sharp and observant, but seems oblivious that her husband and her best friend are carrying on an affair. The novel is witty, wry and so meta. Although the book is more than 70 years old, it feels very fresh. Elizabeth Taylor is one of my favorites now.

2. Lady Cop Makes Trouble - Amy Stewart. Novel. Audiobook. Many thanks to my book enabler Teri for recommending the Kopp Sisters series to me. I've been dancing around it for a long time. I saw the audiobook for this one, the second in the series and thought I'd plunge right in. What a delight! The lady cop of the title is Constance Kopp who is based on a real person -- the first female deputy sheriff in the United States. The stylish and retro book covers would dress up any bookshelf, but even better, author Amy Stewart has striven to write in a manner that convinces readers they are indeed back in the 1910s. Also, in Constance Kopp, I get a Mattie Ross (True Grit) kind of vibe.

3. My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh. Novel. Reread. I had such an urge to reread this book about a young woman who decides to sleep a year of her life away. The outrageousness of the plot and the characters (especially the shrink!) stayed with me, but this time I picked up on how it's really a novel about grief when you strip away the designer labels.

4. Bluebird, Bluebird - Attica Locke. Novel. Book group book. I liked the juxtaposition of the main character being a Texas Ranger and also being Black. These identities added some much-needed uneasy tension to a novel that creaked under the weight of constant information dumps that seemed the only way to advance the plot. I appreciated that Attica Locke didn't resort to predictable tropes. This is the first in a series, and I'm invested enough in Darren Matthews, who is very human and very flawed to come back and read another. Besides solving more crimes, he's got a hell of a lot of baggage to unpack, and I'm rooting for him.

5. Who Was Nelson Mandela? - Pam Pollack and Meg Belviso. Nonfiction. As usual, the writing team of Pollack and Belviso do not disappoint. Very well done.

6. Girl Waits With Gun - Amy Stewart. Novel. Audiobook. I doubled back and listened to the first book in the Kopp Sisters series. I cannot recommend these novels strongly enough. Cool and sturdy writing, much like Constance herself.

7. The Wicked Boy - Kate Summerscale. Nonfiction/True Crime. Book group book. In 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes stabbed his mother to death in East London, then calmly went off with his younger brother to a cricket match. Although the boys continued to live in the house with her corpse upstairs, it was not discovered until many days later, in a grisly state. Using contemporary sources, Kate Summerscale follows the tumult leading up to the trial, and explores the public's fascination and bewilderment about what could have led this "wicked boy" to commit matricide. Summerscale goes down plenty of rabbit holes in her research, but doesn't dwell there. She shares these side trips briefly, and efficiently ties them to the subject at hand. After the trial, Robert Coombes' story would seem as if it were at an end, but improbably, it's just beginning. It gets even better and more interesting. This is my favorite of all the book group books so far, and I've been after my bookwormish friends to check it out.

June, 2022: What I Read

 

 

Here's what I'm thinking about today: Val dressed up like a tomato (pronounced Toe-MAH-toe) for the Toecheon Tomato festival in South Korea. For the talent show portion, she wrote and sang a song to the tune of "Feelings" about all the delicious things one can make with tomatoes. She even worked in some Korean lyrics. Val was the hit of the show, and her tribute was not misplaced; the tomatoes from Toecheon are the best tomatoes I've ever eaten.

Sometimes, I want to turn this into a Val blog. She was (is!) a lot more interesting than all my bookworming about. But then I hear her voice asking me, as she so often did: "Are ye daft?" And the way she asked it -- always like she was sincerely wondering. My answers varied.

I know that somehow I must bring this back around to my own book Blob. 

Okay. 

Yes. 

June, 2022 reading:

1. My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business - Dick Van Dyke. Memoir. Audiobook, read by the author. Enjoyable, but a little on the bland side.

2. Who Is Jimmy Carter? -David Stabler. Nonfiction. VERY well done. Carter's life has had so many acts, there is a vigor in the portrayal of him at all junctures and well into old age.

3. Who Was Johnny Cash? -Jim Gigliotti. Nonfiction. The first part of the book is good, then it seems to lose some energy. I think it's hard to pin down the essence of Cash's mystique in a book for younger readers. The best description I've ever read of him is that he was kind of a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley.

4. Happy-Go-Lucky - David Sedaris. Humor, Essays. Most of the essays seemed familiar; I listened to A Carnival of Snackery not too long ago, but I can never get enough of Sedaris. His father's long, slow decline struck a chord.

5. Pretty Baby - Mary Kubica. Fiction. Audiobook. Suspenseful. I liked the multiple narrators and the Chicago setting.

6. Vinegar Girl - Anne Tyler. Fiction. Re-read. Book group read for July meeting. Anne Tyler is always comfort reading. This is her retelling of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I want to go back and read Tyler's older titles, starting with A Slipping-Down Life or Celestial Navigation.

7. The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough. Fiction. Re-Read. Comfort reading. This time I was entranced by the description of Australia's many micro-climates. Paddy, Fee, Frank and even Mary Carson deserve their own novels. Meggie/Father Ralph had me rolling my eyes. Luke really struck me as a real bastard this time. Still find the Justine section of the book zzzz, although I recognize that Justine is the character McCullough most identifies with -- noticed they are approximately the same age.

8. Who Is Chloe Kim? - Stefanie Loh. Nonfiction. Usually I don't like the 50-page Who Was...? books, but this one was entertaining and well-paced. I didn't know much about Chloe Kim before reading this book, but now I look forward to following her snowboarding career.

The end of June meant that half the year was over, and out of the 39 books I had read so far, four emerged as favorites:

1. Taste - Stanley Tucci. Memoir.

2. Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco - Alia Volz. Memoir/Social History

3. Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner. Memoir.

4. The Leavers - Lisa Ko. Novel.

May 2022: Slow Read, Take It Easy

I read a whopping four books in May, and maybe I gave you an earworm when you read the title of this post.  So all is good.

Just noticed that they're all library books! As the receipt at one of my libraries likes to point out, I saved a bajillion dollars. 

Did I mention Mother's Day? The Spawn gave me a gift certificate to Reader's World, the local bookstore. He also treated me to Thai food. He's definitely got game when it comes to this mother of a holiday.

Anyway, here's what I read in May:

1. Films of Endearment (memoir/film criticism) - Michael Koresky.

2. The Taking of Jemima Boone (history/nonfiction) - Matthew Pearl.

3. The Leavers (novel) Lisa Ko.

4. What is Juneteenth? (nonfiction) - Kirsti Jewel.

Films of Endearment stemmed from a project Michael Koresky undertook -- since he and his mother bonded by watching movies together throughout his growing-up years in the 1980s, he decided to revisit one film from each year of the decade. Some of the selections included: Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Terms of Endearment, Places in the Heart, Nine to Five, and Aliens. These films were chosen because they all had strong female characters. Like works of art should do, each movie spawned memories and associations for Michael, as well as fresh realizations about what a remarkable, strong, multitalented woman his mother is. At first, I thought the book was all over the place, a little messy and disjointed, but now it's had time to settle, and now I deeply appreciate how Koresky's musings made Films of Endearment a far richer book than if he'd just stuck to a strict film essay format.

The Taking of Jemima Boone follows a chain of events that began with the kidnapping of Daniel Boone's 13-year-old daughter and two of her friends by one of the Indian tribes that were unhappy with white settlers streaming into Kentucky and violating previous treaties. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary War is just beginning, and the English are eager to have the Indian leaders on their side. This book is meticulously researched, and I particularly liked Pearl's acknowledgment of all sides involved.

The Leavers turned out to be my favorite book for May. 11-year-old Deming and his mother, Polly, a Chinese undocumented worker in a nail salon, live in the Bronx, New York City with Polly's fiance, Leon, Leon's sister, Vivian, and Vivian's son, Michael. One day, Polly goes to work as usual, but never comes home. Since she has an independent nature and has talked about moving to Florida, it's assumed that she has abandoned Deming. Within a matter of months, Deming's world is turned upside down, and he finds himself fostered then adopted by a childless couple living upstate, two academics who rename him Daniel and seem intent on having him forget his Chinese identity and turning him into a replica of themselves. Although this seems cruel, they are well-intentioned, and among the main characters, there are no real villains. Ten years go by, and upon returning to NYC, Deming reconnects with Michael, and begins to unravel the mystery of what really happened to Polly, who also relates events from her point of view. The Leavers is beautifully written. Fans of Barbara Kingsolver will be interested in this smart, honest, and perceptive novel.

What is Juneteenth? is a valuable resource that sheds light on and much-needed information about our nation's newest holiday. I knew a few historical facts about its origins, but in reading this book, I learned about how Juneteenth celebrations began, how they slowly spread around the United States, as well as the types of food served and popular games that are played. Recommended reading for all ages!

March, 2022: Sideswiped

The last day of March found me as an unwilling and unwitting participant in a fender-bender. Doesn't that sound like too cute and trivial of a phrase? The impact really REALLY rattled my cage. I think it rattled all the words out of me. But up till then, March was a stellar month, especially for reading. I can't think why it decided to give me the finger on its way out. 

What I read:

And Never Let Her Go - Ann Rule. Nonfiction/True Crime.

The Lincoln Highway - Amor Towles. Novel. (audiobook)

Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco - Alia Volz. Memoir/Cultural History.

Mrs. March - Virginia Feito. Novel.

The Dressmaker - Kate Alcott. Novel.

Born With Teeth - Kate Mulgrew. Memoir.

What Were The Salem Witch Trials? - Joan Holub. Nonfiction.

Half-Empty - David Rakoff. Essays/Memoir. (audiobook)

My very favorite read for March was Home Baked. No one recommended it to me; I found it while browsing the shelves at the library. It's perfect. If I see this book in a bookstore, I will buy it. Alia Volz expertly weaves her own family history into the larger canvas of 1970s and 1980s San Francisco. Her writing is beautiful and audacious just like her mother, Meridy Volz who popularized selling marijuana brownies. She first got San Francisco stoned in the 1970s, then used the brownies to bring pain relief to AIDS patients in the 1980s.  I know that Home Baked will be one of the re-reads of my life.