September 2018 books read

  • A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul, 1979 – quotes pulled, review tdb
  • Strides: Running Through History with an Unlikely Athlete – Benjamin Cheever, 2007. Didn’t love it, but my dad did and I got him a copy! It gets my hackles up when people claim “anyone” can run an 8-minute mile if they just try hard enough.
  • Emily Fox-Seton – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1901 – Re-read for the umpteenth time, thanks to myself for digitizing it! I actually found a few more typos but didn’t mark them… I will next time. Trivia: I swear I read somewhere that this (or maybe just the first of the two novels that were combined here, ie The Making of a Marchioness) was one of Princess Di’s favorite books, but I can’t find it now.
  • I just skimmed it because I had to miss the Nature and Enviro meeting: The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey D. Sachs (2015). It’s too bad it turned out to be such a textbook, but I learned some things I’m glad to know about: the five concerns about distribution of wellbeing (extreme poverty, inequality, social mobility, discrimination, social cohesion), the chart of nine planetary boundaries, countries where Human Development Index and gross domestic product run in different directions (high HDI/low GDP in 2013: UK, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Korea; high GDP/low HDI: Qatar, Kuwait, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon), Kondratiev waves, stunting (short, from long-term poor diet, infections, etc.) vs wasting (thin, from acute undernutrition), etc. I never took any econ classes so the fundamental ideas, wrongly applied as they may be, were interesting. “[S]ustainable development is inherently an exercise in problem solving. It is about being creative and creating new models to combine economic, social, and environment concerns.”
  • 1984 – George Orwell, 1949 – quotes pulled, review tdb
  • How the Irish Saved Civilization – Thomas Cahill, 1995 – quotes pulled, review tdb
  • Little Women – Louisa May Alcott, 1868
  • The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
  • The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin, 1963 – quotes pulled, review tdb
  • The Beachcomber’s Book – Bernice Kohn, 1970 – Borrowed from the library based on nostalgic memories, especially of the clambake recipes. The illustrations by Arabelle Wheatley are classic. Still enjoyable.