The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth – Zoe Schlanger, 2024. Nature/Enviro selection, quotes TBD – but in case I never get there, it’s great!
Western Lane – Chetna Maroo, 2023. Second Monday selection; did not love. One quote: “As soon as [our aunt] stopped in our kitchen, we saw how much it lacked. There was no hot food, no tins or Tupperware on the side, no sign of activity or warmth. It wasn’t just that we weren’t ready for visitors. It was everything.” The protagonists play squash, which I would have loved to learn more about, but the novel didn’t succeed at illuminating it or drawing me in.
Le conte de Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas, 1844. The Great Books group was willing to tackle the unabridged version! Quotes TBD.
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens, 1843. A multiple re-read, this time for George Saunder’s wonderful Story Club, which was recommended by a friend. They were doing a slow read, one stave per week, and that sold me. I’m loving the whole experience; I know the book so well that I didn’t get much if anything new from my own reading, but some of the comments were very interesting.
Man and his Symbols – ed. Carl G. Jung, 1964. The Massachusetts Center for the Book January challenge was “A book published or about the year you were born.” I looked through the Goodreads list for 1964 and since I wanted something I hadn’t read before, I picked this. It’s been on my TBR list forever and I’ve owned at least one copy (probably still do, in storage, and now I can get rid of it when I find it!!!). I am a sucker for anything like this, especially with the wide-ranging illustrations, but I was SUPER disappointed. My submission: “If you’ve been paying attention in the past 60 years, you’ve already been exposed to all these ideas, but ideally with most of the gender and culture essentialism stripped out. Only one of these essays is by Jung, and his acolytes are even less discerning in their application of plausible ideas with too broad and assertive a brush. The images are interesting but random.” I did flag some passages, so I’ll probably find a number of things to look up and do a quote dump at some point.