August 2024 books read

  • 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.