February 2025 books read

  • Just Like You – Nick Hornby, 2020.
  • Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet – Ben Goldfarb, 2023. Nature and Enviro selection, quotes TBD.
  • Gifts (2004) and Voices (2006) – Ursula Le Guin, Annals of the Western Shore #1 and #2. I was recommending more recent Le Guin to my mother-in-law, raved about these, and went to pick them up again. I’m saving the third for when I have time to appreciate it. Le Guin at the absolute top of her form!
  • The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard, 1980. Great Books selection, quotes TBD.
  • After London; or, Wild England – Robert Jeffries, 1885. Read for the Mass Center for the Book February challenge: “A novel with the name of a city in its title. I wrote “Although there’s a bit of how the English countryside would change after some unspecified disaster that wiped out the population, it’s mostly the adventures of a young man in a society much like the Middle Ages. I’m glad I finally read it, but I found it somewhat disappointing.”

Novellas

  • “The Man Who Would Be King,” Rudyard Kipling, 1888 – Read (if I’d read this before, I don’t remember it) because when we discussed Black Narcissus at a Far Out Film meeting, the movies was mentioned as a comparison. I love lots of Kipling, but I often find him confusing, and this was very elliptical. (I think my dad had mentioned this work because it references James Brooke, whom family lore identifies as an ancestor. None of my genealogical research finds a connection though.)
  • “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy, 1886. I read the Pevear/Volokonsky translation, and re-read the Garnett, to participate in the wonderful Story Club. I got so much more out of this classic with Saunders’ guidance.

Just Like You – Nick Hornby, 2020

Second Monday selection. I always enjoy Hornby but didn’t find this as good or as believable as his usual standard. Just one word I learned, mandem, and a few short quotes:

  • “Cooking kept the evening away from the afternoon—it was a punctuation mark, stopping the long sentence of the day from tripping over itself and becoming garbled.”
  • On an unpromising blind date, “you could provide uninformed and unasked-for opinion, and you could be as nosy as you wanted.”
  • “He was very interested in feathering caps, and he didn’t mind which bird the feathers had fallen off.”
  • “He’d cross that bridge if the bridge ever got built. There wasn’t even anything for the bridge to go over yet.”
  • What the protagonist learns about the lute watching the movie Heartstrings – “who knew … that, if you listened to the lugubrious sound of the lute for nearly two hours, you wanted to gather up every lute in the country and burn them on a gigantic bonfire?”
  • “maybe there was no future in it, but there was a present, and that’s what life consists of”