Hilary's Book Blog

• Of Wolves and Men – Barry Lopez, 1978. Nature and Enviro selection; quotes tbd.
• Wine of the Dreamers – John D. Macdonald, 1951. Continuing my revisit of old SF by non-SF writers after Ira Levin; I went through a Travis McGee phase that I probably wouldn’t go back to, but I will likely go on to Macdonald’s other 2 SF titles (Ballroom of the Skies and The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything). This doesn’t hold up very well but I still enjoyed it without remembering it at all.
• Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma – Claire Dederer, 2023. Wow, I LOVED this combination of criticism, moral philosophy, and memoir. Compelling and surprising.
• The Quiet American – Graham Greene, 1955. Great Books selection, which I had just read in April for the Second Monday group. I mostly hated it then, but found it much more interesting this time around. More quotes tbd.
• Panther – Brecht Evens, 2016. The Atlantic led me to this; beautiful, weird, very creepy, but not as mind-blowing as I was promised. The artwork is amazing.
• You Like It Darker – Stephen King, 2024. I keep reading King but sometimes I’m not sure why… many of these stories are second-rate. One is a sequel to Cujo which I’ve been thinking of re-reading one of these days. But I always think of Algis Budrys’ comment that the Pinto model in the book didn’t have the issue that the plot relies on. That sloppiness can be overlooked if the writing is good enough. But often something just feels amiss and the waking dream is broken – epitomized here in “Finn,” set in Ireland, where a grandma is quoted as saying “knee-high to a grasshoppper.” That sounds totally American, and research confirms. Did rather spoil the joke for me, I’m afraid.
• Otto: A Palindrama – Jon Agee, 2021. I love Agee’s palindrome collections (Go Hang a Salami! I’m a Lasagna Hog!, So Many Dynamos!, and Sit on a Potato Pan, Otis!), but this is a step beyond and yet it really works.
• O Genteel Lady! – Esther Forbes, 1926. A last-minute choice for the Mass Center for the Book challenge, which pulled from a much smaller set than usual for September: “A debut book by a Massachusetts author.” I wrote, “I still have never read Forbes’ most famous book, Johnny Tremain, so it was interesting to start with this one. A surprisingly feminist novel that gets off to a good start, but with a somewhat disappointing ending.” I enjoyed the local references – the protagonist is from Amherst – but mostly it’s set in Boston.

• Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created Nancy – Bill Griffith, 2023. Zippy the Pinhead first turned me on to Nancy, and I adored the deep dive How to Read Nancy, so I requested this from the library the minute I heard about it. Good and enjoyable but not out-of-this-world.
• Q’s Legacy: A Delightful Account of a Lifelong Love Affair with Books – Helene Hanff, 1985. I’ve loved 84 Charing Cross Road since I first read it as a child in my grandmother’s collection, and belatedly realized I wasn’t sure I’d read this sequel.
• 84, Charing Cross Road – Helene Hanff, 1970. It still holds up, and Q’s Legacy shines an interesting light on what was happening outside of the letters and in the gaps.
• The Fan – Bob Randall, 1977. The extreme New York-y nostalgia of the Hanff books led me to revisit this epistolary thriller about a Broadway star, her entourage, and her stalker. I’ve read this a number of times and almost swore I’d never pick it up again because it’s objectively kind of trashy, but I first encountered it as a teenager and it’s burned into my synapses as comfort entertainment, right up there with the 1980 Flash Gordon movie and “Tommy, Judy and Me.”
• If I Survive You – Jonathan Escoffery, 2022. Second Monday choice. I didn’t love it and don’t have enough quotes for a full post. I did look up the wet JAMAICA T-shirt poster he references and found it has an interesting backstory; I liked “no unaltered plan of [his] will ever work out” about a hapless friend, and “The woman staggers backward, her decorum ablating like microwaved Styrofoam.”
• The Devil’s Element: Phosphorous and a World Out of Balance – Dan Egan, 2023. Nature & Enviro. Really good! Quotes TBD. This also fit the Center for the Book reading challenge, “A book whose title starts with the same letter as your birthday month.” I wrote: “A fascinating story, compelling, well-written, and very educational. Dan Egan’s journalism skills make his science books tops in the field.”
• New Kid – Jerry Craft, 2019. I put this on a list of graphic novels to check out; I’d heard a lot about it. Very good, very charming.
• The Only Child – Guojing, 2015. Picked up from the graphic novel shelf because of the adorable art. A good example of the wordless book, but veering a teeny bit into the saccharine at times.
• The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales – Béla Balázs (tr. Jack D. Zipes), 1974. The Zipes introduction was a big chunk of the book, the stories (originally written in 1921) are slight and repetitive, and the Mariette Lydis illustrations that inspired them strike me as hideous. But both Balázs and Lydis are fascinating people, so I’m glad Zipes brought this book out of obscurity.
• Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis, 1922. Great Books; quotes TBD.
• This Perfect Day – Ira Levin, 1970. I read this decades ago and remembered enjoying it; Levin’s way with a page-turner is hard to beat. I’m more discriminating now, but as example of the things-are-not-as-they-seem genre (see also The White Mountains, Brave New World, The Giver, Beneath the Root, etc.) it’s quite good. Not super-plausible, and salted with some icky misogyny, but a decent plot twist or two and overall a fun read.

Short stories

I loved Edgar Allan Poe as a kid (never the poetry though); I don’t remember how it started, but I was given the doorstop Complete Tales and Poems paperback and read it multiple times. J and I were discussing classic detectives and turned to Poe’s Dupin (easily confusable with Lupin as well as Dupont/d). “The Gold-Bug” (1843) was one of my very favorite stories, but I probably hadn’t read it in three or four decades. I can’t recapture exactly what I loved so much about it; I guess it was the first figure-out-the-cryptic-treasure-map I was exposed to? And “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) similarly prologues the Sherlock Holmes–style detective who figures things out, but it doesn’t super hold up. I’m really enjoying the Standard Ebooks editions of public domain classics, which is what I downloaded, so maybe I’ll try re-awakening some other memories.

• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath – graphic novel by I. N. J. Culbard based on the H. P. Lovecraft novella, 2020; plus the original novella, posthumously published in 1943. I liked the Moebius-like illustrations, and realized I never had read the book – there’s so much Lovecraft! Interestingly weird but long.
• The Invisible Hour – Alice Hoffman, 2023. A friend mentioned that it was set in Western Massachusetts, and I’d enjoyed the other Hoffmans I read a long time ago. This was good-not-great, but did prompt me to suggest The Scarlet Letter for a future Great Books choice.
• Summer – Ali Smith, 2020. The last of her season quartet, for the Second Monday book group. Quotes TBD.
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body – Neil Shubin, 2009. Nature/Enviro. Quotes TBD.
• The Leopard – Giuseppe Lampedusa, 1958. For Great Books – quotes pulled, TBD – and also for the Mass Center for the Book July challenge, “A book by an author born outside of the United States.” My one-sentence submission, which doesn’t do it justice, was: “A wonderfully vivid and thought-provoking novel of the Risorgimento in Sicily.”
• Moby-Dick; or, The Whale – Herman Melville, 1851. Re-read for the Amherst slow read group, and therefore I enjoyed a book that I love so, so much more! Quotes pulled and merged with the ones from Great Books in 2018, TBD.
• In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife – Sebastian Junger, 2024. I listened to his interview on Sean Illing’s podcast (The Gray Area) and gulped it down as soon as my turn came on Overdrive. I don’t buy the afterlife speculations, personally, but it’s an incredibly compelling story, and I’ve always enjoyed Junger’s writing.
• Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words – John W. Pilley with Hilary Hinzmann, 2013. Jonathan brought this home from his volunteer gig sorting donated books for the League of Women Voters, correctly assuming that I would love it. I already knew the basics of Chaser’s story – that she knew a thousand toys by name and could infer that a new word would refer to the one she hadn’t seen before – but the details were wonderful.
• The Woodrow Wilson Dime – Jack Finney, 1968. Not his greatest, belaboring the “getting tired of spouse, looking for novelty” subplot he often uses, but the alternate timeline is fun.
• The Bear Who Wasn’t – Frank Tashlin, 1946. New York Review Children’s Collection reprint, and they have great taste. A bear emerges from hibernation into the factory that was built over his cave, and nobody believes he’s a bear. The illustrations are much more interesting than the text – most of them are embedded here, but my favorites are missing.
• The Book That Made Me – ed. Judith Ridge, 2016. I’m a sucker for anything in this genre (collections of essays about books). Not a particularly well-done version, as a number of the contributors didn’t stick to the brief, but fascinating because it’s Australian and many of the books recommended are unfamiliar to me. Lots more for the infinite TBR pile!

Skimmed

• Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell – Deborah Solomon, 1997. I only intended to dip into this briefly (I needed to look up a citation for my mother’s essays), but it was so interesting I checked it out and kept it around for months. I read at least half; it’s a very good biography and a fascinating analysis of the ways Cornell became a key part of the New York arts scene.
• World as Lover, World as Self – Joanna Macy, 1991. I liked a couple of the quotes, which I’ve found collected online, as well as the breathing through exercise, the Great Ball of Merit, and the idea of being “in league” with “the stones and the beasts of the field, and the sun that rises and the stars revolving in the sky” (adapted from Job 5:23). I learned about the Sarvodaya movement and was reminded of The Council of All Beings – I probably heard about that through a Whole Earth publication, and I would love to participate in one someday.

Short story

• Sally Rooney’s “Opening Theory” in The New Yorker‘s Fiction issue really grabbed me – it works on so many levels! – a bit to my surprise, since I kinda hated Ordinary People.

• The Cool Impossible: The Coach from “Born to Run” Shows How to Get the Most from Your Miles—and from Yourself – Eric Orton, 2013. I haven’t yet read Born to Run, but this book was recommended for improving foot strength. Reviewers warned that you have to slog through a second-person story of a week “you” spend with Orton in Jackson Hole, and they were right… which means that most of the pages are kind of tedious, but the fundamental program seems awesome. I have already started doing slow runs only breathing through my nose, I bought a slant board, and I intend to work on the heart rate training, sugar detox, and other exercises.
• Captains Courageous – Rudyard Kipling, 1897. Re-read because our current Amherst College slow-read book is Moby Dick, and the long sea voyage reminded me of this all-time favorite.
• Ruined By Reading: A Life in Books – Lynne Sharon Schwartz, 1996. I think this was pushed at me when I was looking for the amazing The Child That Books Built. I enjoyed it, especially because Schwartz’s favorite book as a kid was The Secret Princess, which I also love, but the book overall didn’t really stick with me.
• My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir – Meir Shalev (tr. Evan Fallenberg), 2009. Second Monday choice; quote dump TBD.
• Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law – Mary Roach, 2021. Nature/Environment selection; quote dump TBD.
• Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov, 1957. Re-read with the friend group that started with Proust. Quote dump TBD.
• Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev (tr. Constance Garnett), 1862. Great Books; quote dump TBD.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger – Charles Munger, 2023 (3rd abridged edition). Comments got long so I’m working on a full post for this one.
• The Princess Bride – William Goldman, 1973. Center for the Book reading challenge: “A book that inspired a film or television series.” I actually didn’t love this; I liked it OK, same as the movie, and they’re pretty-good-not-great in different ways. My submission: “Interesting to finally read the source for the classic movie, especially Goldman’s additional framing of trying to a source a copy for his kid and editing what we supposedly are reading. The movie is a very faithful adaptation, but some aspects of character development are better as a novel.”

• Trustee from the Toolroom – Nevil Shute, 1960. One of my very very favorites by Shute, which is saying a lot. I went back to it because of reading about my friend John’s amazing puzzles – the engineering reminded me of Keith Stewart, the protagonist.
• Time Shelter – Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel), 2020. Second Monday pick; quotes marked, TBD. V. interesting and meta.
• Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis – Annie Proulx, 2022. Nature/Enviro pick; quotes marked, TBD. Did not love.
• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit – Sloan Wilson, 1954. Great Books pick; quotes marked, TBD. Extremely readable – not a great book, but compelling.
• The Broad Highway – Jeffrey Farnol, 1910. I’m not sure where I saw this recommended, but it was supposedly the best-selling book in the US in 1911. Confirmed in the excellent Making the List (Michael Korda, 1992) but not even rating a mention in the text. I was interested to read that Farnol is credited with initiating the Regency romance along with Georgette Heyer. This was delightful! A will conditional on a marriage, identical cousins, mistaken identities galore, colorful rural characters as far as the eye can see… nothing surprising, but fun to read.
• March: Book 1 – John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell, 2013. The May Center for the Book challenge was “a graphic novel.” I made myself a list of ones that sounded intriguing, but most of them were checked out. This is a series I’d been meaning to read… and it’s OK, but I didn’t feel inclined to go on. My favorite bit is that Lewis loved chickens as a boy – there was a delightful amount of detail around that. “An interesting window into civil rights history” – sorry, I’m kind of phoning it in there!
• Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions – Steve Martin and Harry Bliss, 2022. I tried this one as well, but it’s so slight that it wasn’t worth reviewing for the challenge. I do enjoy Bliss’ drawings, especially those of his poodle Penny, and I learned that Paul McCartney sang Martin’s song “Best Love.” but that’s about it.

• Birnam Wood – Eleanor Catton, 2023. I picked this up again, less than a year after I first read it, because I enjoyed the NYT Book Review podcast interview. It’s so good, and knowing the shocking ending helped make more sense of it this time. The thriller plot combined with psychological acuity is remarkable, and I find the New Zealand setting fascinating.
• The Quiet American – Graham Greene, 1955. Second Monday choice – I missed the discussion but read it anyway. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• Thirty-Eight: The Hurricane That Transformed New England – Stephen Long, 2016. Nature and Environment; quotes pulled, TBD. This also counted for the Massachusetts Center for the Book challenge, “A book about nature, the environment, or climate change.” I wrote “A wide-ranging investigation about the effect of the hurricane on forests and timber, with effects lasting to the present day.”
• Citizen of the Galaxy – Robert Heinlein, 1957. I re-read this for the umpteenth time, prompted by something but I don’t remember what. The more I love a book, the more random incidents or thoughts will remind me of it and make me want to go back. My ability to re-read brings me a lot of pleasure!
• Nine Things I’ve Learned about Life – Harold Kushner, 2015. We visited my mother-in-law for the eclipse and during our ample downtime on 4/8 I read the whole thing. I’ve enjoyed the other Kushners I’ve read as well. He’s the exemplar of why I find Judaism attractive despite being an atheist.
• The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading – Francis Spufford, 2002. One of the best books-about-books I’ve ever read. I need to buy myself a copy and read it again. I added Land under England by Joseph O’Neill (Spufford credits it with part of the plot of Lewis’ The Silver Chair), Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, and The Perilous Descent by Bruce Carter to my TBR-someday list.
• Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866. Great Books group finally got me to read this! Kinda hated it. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• Elevation – Stephen King, 2018. I like King’s short books and it features running, hurray! But it’s sloppy, like a lot of his work. For example, people look at the protagonist and say “you’re doing a 5K?” You really can’t tell by looking who’s a speed demon and who’s back of the pack like me; a 5K is not a big deal; so many folks run that it wouldn’t be that notable; and that was just one of the false notes. Did not love.
• The Girl with All the Gifts – M.R. Carey, 2018. A wonderful exemplar of SF where you’re in the head of the protagonist and slowly realize things-are-not-as-they-seem (see Under the Root, Never Let Me Go). I very much enjoyed it and see there’s a sequel, The Boy on the Bridge. TBR!
• Les sept boules de cristal and Le temple du soleil – Hergé, 1948. I’ve read these multiple times – Seven Crystal Balls a few, Temple of the Sun many times – and they still hold up because the art is so striking. The eclipse prompted me to revisit TotS but 7 Balls is the prequel.

• The Princess and the Goblin – George MacDonald, 1872. Comfort re-read after Phantastes, on the plane to Puerto Rico – I forgot my Nook so had to download something at the airport.
• The Princess and Curdie – George MacDonald, 1883. Continuing to the sequel with its wonderful monsters.
• This Other Eden – Paul Harding, 2023. Second Monday; quotes pulled, TBD.
• The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet – Kristin Ohlson, 2014. Nature/Enviro; quotes pulled, TBD.
• At the Back of the North Wind – George MacDonald, 1871. Of course I was pulled to re-read this one as well. The horses Diamond and Ruby must have inspired Strawberry in Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew.
• The Warden – Anthony Trollope, 1855. Great Books; quotes pulled, TBD.
• Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver, 2022. Amherst Book Group, so quotes pulled and TBD, but I also read this for the Mass Center for the Book March challenge, “a book whose protagonist has a different culture or lifestyle from you.” My one-sentence for that was “A compelling novel of Appalachia even if you haven’t read David Copperfield – but extra-fun if you have, to pick up on all the references.”
• Otto, El Oso de Libro – Katie Cleminson, 2011. I’m studying Spanish with Duolingo and particularly like the bear (Falstaff), so this picture book on a cart at the library drew me right in. I enjoyed reading it aloud to Jonathan.
• Dune – Frank Herbert, 1965. I re-read this when the first Villeneuve movie came out, and again now after seeing Dune Part 2. It’s a good adaptation but makes me want to go back to the atmosphere I imbibed as a teenager.
  • Words to add to the list of unfamiliar-yet-evocative terms: cherem, farufreluches, kanly.
  • Real words: pan and graben; he took liberties with the German spannungsbogen.
  • A Bene Gesserit saying that doesn’t show up in the lists I googled: ““The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.” – it is in the 3,084 (!!!) Frank Herbert quotes at GoodReads.
  • “It is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.”

Short story

“Neighbors” by Zach Williams (The New Yorker, March 18, 2024):

Anna had said once that it fascinated her to have the ocean so near—it was as if infinity were just outside our bedroom windows. I felt something similar in that garage, the perceptual illusion of boundlessness. I no longer needed to announce or explain myself. There was nothing to study or question. And I was too scared to think. In fact, it sometimes seems that I’ve applied conscious thought to that moment only retroactively. I took a breath and held it. A paradoxical calmness came over me. And what I felt, then, was that my life was not in me but diffused across the darkness, which was an unbroken field containing everything. Me and him. Anna, the girls. Bing. Everything. And so, no matter what happened next, there could be no consequence, because I had no identity separate from that field. No one did, nothing did. Everything just was, together, without boundaries or names. This appeared to me as a plain description of reality and not a moral or personal judgment. I had never felt anything like it, nor have I since.

• Instructions to the Cook : A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life That Matters – Bernie Glassman & Rick Fields, 2013. I was hoping for something like Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings (Edward Espe Brown, 1997), which I loved and ought to re-read, but this one eh… a little too self-congratulating. I did love this quote: “The Jewish mystics say that at the very beginning of creation, the holy flame burst into billions and billions of sparks and that these sparks have to be brought back into the holy flame.”
• The Ends of the Circle – Paul O. Williams, 1981. I picked up this paperback somewhere recently. Even though I was reading a ton of SF in the early 80s, this hadn’t come across my radar. Quite good and refreshingly interesting about gender roles.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum, 1900. The Far Out Film group watched the 1939 movie so I was drawn to read again, and then it turned out Lory was hosting #Ozathon24. I love that the book doesn’t have the deep back-story/”it was all a dream” baggage of the movie, and how weird it is, like when the Tin Man chops off the head of a cat because it’s chasing a mouse.
• A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887. I picked up the Sherlock Holmes short stories I started with, when I was 10 or 11, and segued to this to read in order and because the Utah/Mormon scenes are so vivid in my memory.
• Flights – Olga Tokarczuk, 2007.
• Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures – Merlin Sheldrake, 2020. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• The Marvelous Land of Oz – L. Frank Baum, 1904. The Gump is great, but the sexism is not.
• The Sign of the Four – Arthur Conan Doyle, 1890. The short stories are best because they are so concise, but I still love the long-form stuff as well.
• Le Temps Retrouvé – Marcel Proust, 1927. I first read all of A La Recherche in college, and started it again a number of times, but this is the first time I revisited volume 7, which blew me away as an undergrad. The highs were still as high, but there was some slog in there. Quotes pulled, TBD. Reading the whole thing with two friends, and talking about it almost every week for several years, has been a highlight of my 50s. Thank you, Anne and Fran!
• Green Doors – Ethel Cook Eliot, 1933. For the February Massachusetts Center for the Book challenge, “A book with a color in the title.” I wrote “A strange almost-romance from 1933, by an author I knew from her children’s books. A psychoanalyst falls in chaste love with a teenage patient referred to him by her sweet-seeming wicked stepmother.” I loved The Little House in the Fairy Wood so much that I digitized it for Project Gutenberg after re-discovering it, and I enjoyed The Wind Boy as well (referenced in this novel, which is a bit cringe). But the adult work doesn’t live up to that standard. This one does tie together with her most collectible book, Roses for Mexico, which is the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in that a main character is Catholic and we hear about the Little Flower. It intrigues me because Little House feels very pagan. A weird/annoying quote: “A painting by Georgia O’Keefe [which] Petra couldn’t possibly understand.” But this book did get me to finally read Phantastes! In thinking over the book I was confused about the age of the male protagonist – aha, he’s supposedly 33. Ugh, and the love interest is for sure under 20.
• The Custom of the Country – Edith Wharton, 1913. For Great Books. I first read this for Second Monday last year, and those quotes are also still TBD – I’ll be interested to see if they match up.
• When Grumpy Met Sunshine – Charlotte Stein, 2024. Charming and hot, but it takes hella long for the protagonist to twig that the Roy Kent character is not only the most ridiculously sweet fella evar, but also very into her.
• Phantastes – George MacDonald, 1858. Very strange, very interesting. Green Doors (above) points out how super-creepy the Maid of the Alder Tree is, beautiful in front but rotten and hollow behind. That’s only one of many haunting, fascinating images; the doors in the island cottage remind me a bit of the hidden library in Le Guin’s Voices. I don’t think many people read MacDonald anymore, but his influence lives on.

• The Book of Form and Emptiness – Ruth Ozeki, 2021. Quotes marked, TBD.
• Whalefall – Daniel Kraus, 2023. Liked but didn’t love this “The Martian inside a whale” science thriller. Cool ideas, but the writing was just way, way too purple, and the peril/damage so over the top. The premise (scuba diver trapped inside a sperm whale) would have worked on its own without daddy issues and reputational repair.
• How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing – K.C. Davis, 2022. I would have gotten a lot out of this several decades go; it was really cheering/amazing to reflect how I’ve come so far with my ADHD that this was mostly second nature already, although most credit goes to Jonathan for doing the bulk of the stuff I struggle with.
• The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career – L.M. Montgomery, 1917. Reading The Blue Castle last month got me thinking about which Montgomerys I hadn’t read yet; I started The Story Girl but am not loving it, so I turned to this memoir partly because I adore Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The One I Knew the Best of All, which I must have neglected to record because I’ve certainly read it in the past six or seven years. Anyway, this was a little interesting but not very insightful and a bit disjointed.
• Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest – Suzanne Simard, 2021.
• Tom Brown’s Schooldays – Thomas Hughes, 1857.
• The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954.

Didn’t finish

The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor – Howard Marks, 2011. This came up because I was searching for a copy of Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which doesn’t seem to be available in library systems (because out of print now, and was originally too expensive, and/or self-published and not available through distributors?) But wait, now a copy has shown up on order through CW Mars – people must have been asking since his death gave a spurt of publicity. But wait again, now an abridged version is online? Anyway, somewhere a version of this book came up in association with that one (it’s blurbed by Warren Buffett, but I thought there was more to it) and it was available through the public library. It basically emphasized to me, for the umpteenth time, that individual stock investing is a mug’s game. “The most important thing” is actually 19 different things – “they’re all important,” says Marks – most of which are outside a regular person’s control. However, I got a couple of quotes before abandoning the book:

• “Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.” (And just recently I heard a similar saying from a relative who’s a ski guide: “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.”)
• “In basketball they say, ‘You can’t coach height.'”
• Marks attributes this to Yogi Berra, but per QI it was first written by a Yale student in 1882: “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.”
• Marks calls this an adage: “Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.” Interestingly, the Internet now mostly attributes it to him!
• Marks attributes to John Maynard Keynes, but QI traces to Gary Shilling: “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

Wow, that’s a bad – but typical! – ratio on the attribution accuracy!