Month: August 2025

• Sandwich – Catherine Newman, 2024 – Second Monday selection, but I didn’t mark any quotes. I enjoyed it quite a bit but it’s not rib-sticking; cute, funny, slight.
• The Deluge – Stephen Markley, 2023. Nature & Environment selection. The opposite: very dark. Quotes TBD.
• The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton, 1967. Read for the Massachusetts Center for the Book August challenge: “A book with a protagonist who is a teenager or senior citizen.” I wrote “I’ve been meaning to read this classic for decades. Now that I’m 60 I’ve finally gotten around to it. Teenage me would have enjoyed it more, but the emotional drama and relatable characters were appealing.”
• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed – Jon Ronson, 2015. Well-written, interesting.
• The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850. Great Books selection (re-read), quotes TBD.
• Spent: A Comic Novel – Alison Bechdel, 2025. I enjoyed this because the character explorations felt like a continuation of Dykes to Watch Out For, and the art is great (especially the goats!), but I liked The Secret to Superhuman Strength more. (Hey, that’s not in my Goodreads list! Thank goodness for the CWMars reading history. Oh OK, it’s in the August list – would have just been left out of the year in review…)
• Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier – Kevin Kelly, 2023. Loved it, will read again. On this go-round I just marked one quote that hit me: “What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.” I have found that to be very true.
• Carnival (Firefly #6) – Una McCormack, 2021. Loved it! Firefly is one of my favorite TV shows ever and I so wish there were more episodes. This novel provided an equivalent way more successfully than I could have imagined – I’m very impressed. I will read the others in the series, and look for more McCormack.

Short stories

• “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835. Read for Story Club, and it was a great companion piece to The Scarlet Letter. I’m sure I’d read it before, but not given it close attention; what a weird and unsettling piece. Having seen his diamond graffiti at The Old Manse, visited the House of the Seven Gables, and hiked Monument Mountain, I feel surrounded by Hawthorne traces!

A very busy month so not a lot of books!

• The Voyages of Dr Dolittle – Hugh Lofting, 1922. I only read this one a few times as a kid because I didn’t own it, but I remembered it as one of the best Dolittles. The great naturalist Long Arrow and the beetle with the message on its leg stuck with me, and I remembered the giant sea snail from the movie – which I may have seen when it came out, so might have been my gateway to the books. Beginning of a binge, but spaced out because I have so much else to read (Amherst Book Group is reading Ulysses!)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce, 2015. Re-read – for the Amherst College Book Group as a prelude to Ulysses. Quotes TBD.
• We Loved It All – Lydia Millett, 2024. Nature and Enviro, quotes TBD.
• Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone – James Baldwin, 1968 – Second Monday, quotes TBD.
• Here Comes the Fun: A Year of Making Merry – Ben Aitken, 2023. Read for the Massachusetts Center for the Book Reading Challenge – “A book you were drawn to by its cover.” Jonathan saw it on the dollar shelf at Broadside and thought of me, because I am a fun-lover, and the cover did I wrote “A light-hearted account of Aitken’s attempts at dozens of activities from cold water bathing to improv. Not as funny as he wants it to be, but enjoyable.” Two things-I-learned and three good quotes (not quite enough for a stand-alone post):
  • An Idiot Abroad
  • Coasteering – wow, sounds like my kind of fun except for the jumping
  • “We are the sum of what we pay attention to and what we paid attention to. The more we look, the more we see, the more we see again. It’s the again I like. It’s the chance recurrence. It’s things reapparing and their being richer for having a precedent.”
  • “[The butterfly’s] wings are transparent — as mesh. I can see the green of the leaf through them. The wings’ colour is the colour of what is beyond. The wings’ colour is the colour of what they encounter.”
  • “I love the aimless wandering. I love the clueless ambulation. I love losing myself amid the thick and limitless variety of life.”
• The Sea, the Sea – Iris Murdoch, 1978 – Re-read for Great Books. I marked quotes so it will be interesting to compare to my previous post, once I get there.