- Finished The Chronicles of Narnia
- A Long Way Down – Nick Hornby, 2005 – quotes pulled, TBD
- Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer – Jeff VanderMeer, 2007. Not your typical writing book at all. It’s a little outdated in some respects, but covers so many aspects of publication and career that it’s still full of valuable and interesting information.
- Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming – Paul Hawken (ed.), 2017 – quotes pulled, TBD
- The Black Envelope (Mr. Pinkerton Again!) – David Frome, 1937 – Jonathan loves silly/cozy mysteries and recommended this one as a good representative of the Mr. Pinkerton series. Not bad, not great.
- A Death in the Family – James Agee, 1956 – quotes pulled, TBD
- The Secret Commonwealth – Philip Pullman, 2019. I enjoyed it very much but read it quickly. I’ll re-read the whole Book of Dust trilogy after the 3rd one comes out (Wikipedia says Pullman hasn’t even started it, yikes) and have a better sense then of the whole.
- Death From a Top Hat – Clayton Rawson, 1938 – quotes pulled, TBD
- Measure for Murder – Clifford Witting, 1941. Another mystery Jonathan was trying out, and because it was set in the theater world and was in a series called Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900-1950 (I love best-of lists!) it was my 3rd for the month—super-unusual for me, and I’m probably off the mystery train for a while. I just picked up two interesting terms: “compactum,” a dresser (still in use in South Africa), and “Tansad” used to mean a working stool (the company name was Tan-Sad but this article says it comes from “tansad,” a French word meaning pillion seat).
Notable quote from a magazine article, “The Sanctuary” by Elif Batuman (New Yorker, Dec 19-26, 2011):
I thought about the power of the sacred: originating, if the archeologists are to be believed, in the most material expediencies of the body—how and what to eat—it overtakes the soul, making Neolithic man build Göbekli Tepe and making him bury it, sweeping through the millennia, generating monuments, strivings, vast inner landscapes. I thought about history, and the riddle of the Sphinx: what goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening? Some people say that history is progress: isn’t this just a reflection of how we’re born, tiny, weak, and speechless, and then go on to build cathedrals and fly to the moon? When others say that history is a decline from a golden age, isn’t this because youth is so brief and we regret it for so long?
Year in review
I got almost all the books I read into Goodreads this year (might have missed a few), which helpfully counts them and tells me I read 33,705 pages (!) across 104 books. The “most popular” book was Huckleberry Finn, supposedly read by 1.2 million people this year, but only 5 also read The Black Envelope (still more than I would have expected!)
However, I am tremendously underwater with my retrospective posts of quotes pulled from book group books. I have made progress with the actual pulling—backlog under 10 I think—but draft posts etc. has got to be closer to 75. It’s OK if I never finish the actual posts as long as I grab the quotes, since this blog is really just for me anyway…