- The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race – ed. Jesamyn Ward, 2016. A great assortment of essays. Read for Mount Holyoke’s Examining Privilege group.
- This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar, 2019. Picked up because of a rave review. Innovative and interesting SF, but not my kind of thing – overwritten and too vague/abstract to appeal to my old-school self.
- The Blessing – Nancy Mitford, 1951. Umpteenth re-read – the humor never stales.
- Devil’s Den to Lickingwater: The Mill River Through Landscape and History – John Sinton, 2018 – quotes pulled, TBD
- L’Écume des Jours – Boris Vian, 1947. An old favorite, re-read because the Far Out Film group watched the Gondry adaptation. The movie wasn’t bad at all but couldn’t quite capture the surreal and beautiful melancholy of the book.
- Strange Flowers – Donal Ryan, 2020 – quotes pulled, TBD
- Ten of The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400 – quotes marked but lost in a Nook accident (had two editions with the same title, BAD)
- The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby – Charles Kingsley, 1863. I’ve read this a few times since I was a kid, but not as many times as my very favorites. It’s so so weird, often with an arch tone that feels like Kingsley talking to other adults – or just to himself – over the reader’s head (on top of the to-be-expected reactionary and racist attitudes), but there’s nothing else like it.
- The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made – Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell, 2013. I read this when it came out, remember loving it, and checked it out again when I got the chance to see a screening of The Room followed by a Q&A with Sestero. He’s really charming and a natural story-teller, the opposite of Tommy Wiseau, and once again I couldn’t put it down.
- All the extra content from The Books of Earthsea: the Complete Illustrated Edition (2018, illustrated by Charles Vess), followed by re-reads of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), The Farthest Shore (1972), and Tehanu (1990) – Ursula K. Le Guin. The collection is a giant doorstop (seriously, so many reviews mention that it’s too big and heavy to hold, and they are not exaggerating) and the illustrations are nice. I read everything that was new – the highlights were Le Guin’s introductions to each of the novels – and then returned the monolith to the library and started on my umpteenth re-read of the series, which is one of my favorite works of art ever.
I also started re-reading Middlemarch since I led a Second Monday book discussion on it, but after the first dozen or so chapters I fell back on the quotes I pulled last time – which I still haven’t posted, but I have all the draft posts to search and refer to in the WordPress back end. One of the big reasons I plug away at this blog even if no one reads it but me!