Category: Monthly lists

• Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler, 1988 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• Flight Behavior – Barbara Kingsolver, 2012 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• Native Son – Richard Wright, 1940 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• The Chemist – Stephenie Meyer, 2016 – Similar insubstantial can’t-stop-reading as The Host but not as good.

The Irish Writers group read two plays this month:

• A Skull in Connemara – Martin McDonagh, 1997 – Super-stereotypically black humor Oirish comedy (like Waking Ned Devine) which feels kind of exploitative/easy but is still very funny. One of my favorite lines: Mairtin asks what the guards were doing at the disco anyway, and Mick replies “Routing out the yobbos who started the bottle fight that the two week girls got taken the night to hospital from.” A reference to Dana singing “All Kinds of Everything” led me to the video.
• Translations – Brian Friel, 1981 – Excellent. I only pulled one quote: when Manus accuses Owen of not accurately translating what Captain Lancey has been saying, Owen responds “‘Uncertainty in meaning is incipient poetry’ – who said that?” I love that and tried to track it down. George Steiner says it in After Babel (1975), and Wikipedia indicates that’s the origin, but the play is set in 1833. Interesting…

• The Enchanted April – Elizabeth von Arnim, 1922 – Re-read, always a favorite. Jonathan originally brought me this from a book give-away in around 1990, a copy where the title page simply attributed it to “by the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden,” which I’d never heard of either. I didn’t expect much of it but fell in love with it, and when the movie came out just a year later I was chuffed that I wasn’t the only one.
• At the Mountains of Madness (1936) and “The Color Out of Space” (1927) – HP Lovecraft, re-read after seeing the new original musical Moonlight on the Miskatonic at Smith, which was pretty great!
• Le Domaine des Dieux – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, 1971 – #17 in the Astérix books and one of my favorites. Re-read of course!
• A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson, 2003
• Dubliners: An Illustrated Edition with Annotations – James Joyce, ed. John Wyse Jackson, 1995.
• A Good Man is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor, 1953 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• The Door Into Summer – Robert Heinlein, 1957 – a favorite Heinlein re-read. Lots of comfort reading this month.

I’ve decided to add the occasional memorable article, especially if there’s a quote I want to remember.

• • The Atlantic, November 2018 –  Alexa, How Will You Change Us? by Judith Shulevitz: “If I have learned anything in my years of therapy, it is that the human psyche defaults to shallowness. We cling to our denials. It’s easier to pretend that deeper feelings don’t exist, because, of course, a lot of them are painful. What better way to avoid all that unpleasantness than to keep company with emotive entities unencumbered by actual emotions? But feelings don’t just go away like that. They have a way of making themselves known.”

• A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul, 1979 – I thought I had pulled quotes, but I can’t find them. Read for Second Monday. I recall liking it.
  
• Strides: Running Through History with an Unlikely Athlete – Benjamin Cheever, 2007. Didn’t love it, but my dad did and I got him a copy! It gets my hackles up when people claim “anyone” can run an 8-minute mile if they just try hard enough.
• Emily Fox-Seton – Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1901 – Re-read for the umpteenth time, thanks to myself for digitizing it! I actually found a few more typos but didn’t mark them… I will next time. Trivia: I swear I read somewhere that this (or maybe just the first of the two novels that were combined here, ie The Making of a Marchioness) was one of Princess Di’s favorite books, but I can’t find it now.
• I just skimmed it because I had to miss the Nature and Enviro meeting: The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey D. Sachs (2015). It’s too bad it turned out to be such a textbook, but I learned some things I’m glad to know about: the five concerns about distribution of wellbeing (extreme poverty, inequality, social mobility, discrimination, social cohesion), the chart of nine planetary boundaries, countries where Human Development Index and gross domestic product run in different directions (high HDI/low GDP in 2013: UK, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Korea; high GDP/low HDI: Qatar, Kuwait, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon), Kondratiev waves, stunting (short, from long-term poor diet, infections, etc.) vs wasting (thin, from acute undernutrition), etc. I never took any econ classes so the fundamental ideas, wrongly applied as they may be, were interesting. “[S]ustainable development is inherently an exercise in problem solving. It is about being creative and creating new models to combine economic, social, and environment concerns.”
• 1984 – George Orwell, 1949 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• How the Irish Saved Civilization – Thomas Cahill, 1995 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• Little Women – Louisa May Alcott, 1868
• The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
• The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin, 1963 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• The Beachcomber’s Book – Bernice Kohn, 1970 – Borrowed from the library based on nostalgic memories, especially of the clambake recipes. The illustrations by Arabelle Wheatley are classic. Still enjoyable.

• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves – Karen Joy Fowler, 2013  – Smith College 2018 Smith Reads
• Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. – Danielle Allen, 2017 – Amherst College 2018 Demott Summer Reading
• Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel – Carl Safina, 2015 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John LeCarré, 1974
• Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust, 1908 (Lydia Davis translation, 2003) – quotes pulled, review tdb

 

• Hobberdy Dick – Katherine Briggs, 1955 – re-read of a childhood favorite that holds up. It was made into an obscure anime also! I watched a little bit on Youtube but it didn’t have English subtitles.
• Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year – Carlo Levi (translated by Frances Frenaye), 1945
• When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century – Fred Pearce, 2006
• Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence through Simple Living – Elizabeth Willard Thames, 2018 – I love the blog and this was a good companion piece/mostly memoir.
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath, 1963 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think – Laura Vanderkam, 2010 – Not bad, not great, but it is good to think about how I want to focus my time.
• Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler, 1993 – Hampshire College Common Read. For how much I’ve been looking forward to reading it, I was a little disappointed; it’s flatter than I expected, and the Earthseed ideas aren’t exciting enough to make up for how depressing it is. So prescient and relevant, though–its 2025 is completely believable.
• The Host – Stephenie Meyer, 2008. Re-read because despite how not-good the writing is, the story is compelling and the viewpoint original.
• The Book of Unknown Americans – Cristina Henriquez, 2014 – Mount Holyoke College Common Read. Page-turning, heartbreaking, but a good novel, not a fantastic one.

• Vacationland – John Hodgman, 2017 – Funny, touching, local relevance
• Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things – Amy Dickinson, 2017 – I met Dickinson at a Susquehanna County Library author’s luncheon for Mighty Queens of Freeville. She’s charming and I enjoyed this one too, but it’s a little choppy structurally.
• The Three Body Problem – Cixin Liu, 2007 – Weird but interesting.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon, 2003 – quotes pulled, review tdb
• The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer – Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2010
• Germinal – Émile Zola, 1885
• Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery, 1908 – re-read for the umpteenth time after watching episode 1 of the “Anne with an E” reboot (which is very good).
• Ask a Manager – Alison Green, 2018 – I’m a huge fan of the blog and this captures its fundamental messages–concise and useful but not as entertaining, although some AAM classic letters are excerpted.
• How to be an Adult:  A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration – David Richo, 1991
• The Best of Jack Vance – Jack Vance, 1976 – Re-read; I love Vance’s style, although he’s maybe fading a little on my palate with time. I used to think “The Moon Moth” was one of the most satisfying stories ever; still pretty darn good!
• 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works – Dan Harris, 2014 – I’d been meaning to read this for several years and finally got around to it. A little more memoirish than I expected and much more focused on meditation (I think I had it confused with Dan Gilbert type books), but it helped me finally get serious about a meditation practice myself, just in time to make it my “re-wirement challenge” for the Yale Science of Well-Being class (highly recommend!)

• The Lord of the Rings  – J.R.R. Tolkien, 1955. I couldn’t make my way through this until having seen the first Peter Jackson movie, and, for one of the biggest classics in a genre I love, I’m not that fond of it still.
• The Soul of An Octopus – Sy Montgomery, 2015.
• How To Be Both – Ali Smith, 2014.
• Play it as it Lays – Joan Didion, 1970.
• Dragonsinger – Anne McCaffrey, 1977 – Still one of my favorite re-reads!
• Why Buddhism is True – Robert Wright, 2017 – Great and prompted me to try a meditation practice again.

• The Devil’s Children – Peter Dickinson, 1970
• Scoop – Evelyn Waugh, 1937
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Harari, 2011
• Adele And Co. – Dornford Yates, 1931
• These Possible Lives – Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor (Italian 2015, English 2017) – Interesting prose poem bios (labeled “Essays”) of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. A tiny book (hand-sized, 60 pages) that New Directions has the face to charge 12.95 for.
• Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts—Becoming the Person You Want to Be – Marshall Goldsmith, 2015 – I love self-help but haven’t been reading as much of it lately (that’s a good sign). This came highly recommended by Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar, one of my favorite bloggers, in a post where he specifically referenced the technique of setting a daily goal to “do my best” on some measure and then rating yourself at the end of the day. I’ve been doing that during the month of May (“Today I will do my best to eat and drink in moderation with maximum enjoyment”) and it hasn’t been nearly as helpful for me as it was for Trent. But doing anything at all for an entire month is an achievement for me, so that’s a recommendation of some sort…
• James and the Giant Peach – Roald Dahl, 1961 – A perennial favorite.
• The Group – Mary McCarthy, 1963
• If This Goes On— – Robert Heinlein, 1940
• Methuselah’s Children – Robert Heinlein, 1958

• Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel, 2014
• Running with the Mind of Mindfulness: Lessons for Training Body and Mind – Sakyong Mipham, 2012
• Candide – Voltaire, 1759 – Wow, I thought I had marked passages in this, since I read it for the Great Books group, but no record of a draft post or anything. I’ll come back if something turns up!
• The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate; Discoveries from a Secret World – Peter Wohlleben, 2016.
• Lost Boys – Orson Scott Card, 1989 – multiple re-read
• Amphigorey (1972) and Amphigorey Too (1975) – Edward Gorey, re-reads because of the very interesting exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum. I was given the second when it came out (I would have been 11 or so) and pored over it many times, but didn’t get the first until later. I really want to visit the Gorey house on Cape Cod someday…
• The “Odessey”: The Zombies in Words and Images – Rod Argent, Colin Blunstone, Hugh Grundy, Chris White, with Scott B. Bomar and Cindy Da Silva, 2017
• Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer, 2014 – I saw the movie first and actually prefer it quite a bit.
• Cold Mountain – Han-shan, tr. Burton Watston, 1992
• Why We Run: A Natural History – Bernd Heinrich, 2002
• High Stakes – Dick Francis, 1975 – Comfort reading but I think I’m getting a little sick of DF, even the good stuff that was written by his wife. I can’t unread the hysterical take-down in Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion, a great book I have somewhere and want to re-read.