Category: Monthly lists

• The Panic Fables: Mystic Teachings and Initiatory Tales – Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2017. This is a collection of Jodorowsky’s weekly full-page color comics that ran in a Mexican newspaper from 1967 to 1973. We watched El Topo for Far Out Film and have referenced him since (was he interviewed in some other film?), so I grabbed this from the featured new books. It’s… very interesting. If I didn’t find Jodorowsky’s style ugly, I would have enjoyed it more. He’s very creative with speech bubble shapes and parable creatures; what was not so successful was over-analyzing other cartoons and stories, and single-panel guru statements (although the repetition of “what an uncomfortable position!” by the disciple Jodorowsky stand-in is funny). I liked the arguments between cubes and marbles, microbes, and simple head-and-legs creatures of different sizes. His created mythology, including “gragrofes” (useless objects that are craved and then consume others) and the holy idiot Ben-Sara, stick in my mind.
  • “Life without death is immobility”
  • Persian proverb: “Be a tiger – if you are prepared to solve a tiger’s problems.” I really like this but can’t find it documented.
  • Panel where Jodorowsky says “I read this fable in a book by Baba Ram Dass and felt that it was I who had written it” – “anywhere I stood, the chicken saw me”
• Into Every Generation a Slayer Is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts – Evan Ross Katz, 2022. I don’t remember how I stumbled on this – maybe Overdrive suggested it? – but I’d been thinking of rewatching Buffy and this was a good complement. Coincidentally, one of the people interviewed is Claire Saffitz, who I had just heard of the week before I read this book (I found Gourmet Makes down some rabbit hole and enjoyed them very much) – love those little intersections. It’s all over the map and a little too much about the author, but I found the interviews with cast members very interesting and the analysis of the show’s legacy (complicated by Joss Whedon’s trajectory) thought-provoking.
• Paddle for Water: Canoeing across America with a Message and a Man I Never Intended to Marry – Nancy DeWitte Condon, 2022. I bought this to support the writer, a member of the Nature/Environment book group, and I was delighted at how good it is! A compelling and fascinating story, well-written, and a new classic in the vicarious-enjoyment-of-experiences-I wouldn’t-want-to-do-myself genre ( e.g. Wild, Driftwood Valley, etc.).
• The Language of Butterflies: How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists, and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect – Wendy Williams, 2020. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• Paradise City – Archer Mayor, 2012. Read for the Massachusetts Center for the Book February challenge, “A book set in your home town/city or state” (mostly set in Northampton). My brief response: “I enjoyed the setting of this otherwise-middling police procedural. Mayor did his research – I was especially pleased to see the Amherst College/Five Colleges bunker on Military Road in Amherst featured.” I know the bunker because it’s the Five Colleges library repository, which I’ve gotten to tour (as well as do IT troubleshooting!). There was also a scene set at the Summit House before it was re-opened to the public – I didn’t realize it was boarded up so recently.
• The Goblin Emperor – Katherine Addison, 2014. Recommended by several Ask a Manager commentators, and they were right – a wonderful fantasy.
• Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo, 2019. A Second Monday selection but not enough quotes for a separate post. I liked the novel better after the excellent group discussion, but still dislike the writing – it was like reading stage directions.
  • “if she can’t get a proper boyfriend at nineteen what hope is there for when she’s older?”
  • “Dominique can never quite believe that her friend still smokes, that anyone over twenty does”
• Maia – Richard Adams, 1984. Umpteenth re-read, but I actually marked some quotes this time, so may make a post out it.
• The Golden Bowl – Henry James, 1904. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• Planet of Exile – Ursula K. LeGuin, 1966.  Read for Calmgrove’s #LoveHain.

Articles & short stories

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, one of my all-time favorites, in the New York Times:
  • “Humility that brings that sort of joy and belonging as opposed to submission”
  • “I’ve often had this fantasy that we should have Fox News, by which I mean news about foxes.”
• New York Times article on the Studio Ghibli theme park:
  • He has long told parents that children should not watch his films more than once a year. (“Whatever experiences we provide them,” Miyazaki has said, “are in a sense stealing time from them that otherwise might be spent in a world where they go out and make their own discoveries or have their own personal experiences.”)
  • “Totoro drops acorns everywhere as a kind of calling card. To love Totoro is to love not just a single creature but a whole habitat.”
• Short story, “The Third Law of Magic,” by Ben Okri (The Atlantic, March 2023) and interview about it:
  • “Value ought to be related to being and consciousness. In real terms, the sight of one’s child in a moment of unique happiness ought to be greater in value than a fur coat. The joy one feels in the presence of the one we love ought to be greater in value than a new car.”
  • “I have always felt that if we have a proper grasp of what reality is, we will better know what to do with this tremendous gift of life, this infinite energy compressed into a mortal frame. I think all literature at its best tries to do that.
  • “Reality is all we have to work with, but we don’t really know what it is. The truth about reality is that its subdividable aspects can yield results which can be faithfully replicated while we remain completely in the dark about its other aspects or the whole itself. This is odd, for it gives us the illusion of control, when in fact what we have is merely the control of contingent conditions. Therefore, much of our confidence is provisional. One can be wrong and yet some things we do seem to work. One can be right and yet some things that we do appear not to work. Often it is a matter of perspective, of time, of truths concealed from us.”
• Amazing essay “In the Beforetime” by Yiyun Li (The New Yorker, July 4, 2022) “So rarely do we look at the present, innocent of fresh disaster, as a rosy beforetime: we live in the aftertime of events, some more catastrophic than others.”
• A short story in the same issue, “A King Alone” by Rachel Kushner: “The magic of a thing you’d normally see only from a distance disappears when you see it up close. But a new magic takes its place.”
• I digitized two of my father’s articles: “The Decline of Conceptual Thinking” and “The Humanities in a Technological Age.”

• Milkman – Anna Burns, 2018. Re-read.
• What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses – Daniel Chamovitz, 2012; updated 2017.
• Tar Baby – Toni Morrison, 1981. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• Rocannon’s World – Ursula K. Le Guin, 1966. Read for Calmgrove’s #LoveHain.
• The Traveler’s Gift: Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success – Andy Andrews, 2002. This came up in Your Best Year Ever where someone’s job title was listed as “brand manager for Andy Andrews” and I wondered “what’s that?” I’m surprised I didn’t encounter him back in the Susquehanna County Library days, as the simplistic Christian-ish inspiration genre was big there. It’s decently written but the conceit (despairing guy is sent back in time to visit seven famous people and get a very 1950s resolution from each of them) is laughable and the historical liberties are breath-taking. I marked this passage:
  • “If I touch a thistle with caution, it will prick me, but if I grasp it boldly, its spines crumble to dust.” I think he means a nettle. Boldly grasping a thistle will end badly, I’m pretty sure – even goats lick them to soften the spines before they eat them, don’t they? Maybe not – I’m not finding any evidence – but in any case, thistle spines are no joke.
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë, 1847. Many times re-read, this time for Great Books. Quotes marked, TBD.
• Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do – Jennifer L. Eberhardt, 2019. I’d heard a lot about this book, but what prompted me to finally read it was a book group on Post. I deleted my Twitter account last year and Post is the closest replacement so far. But I should have realized that the format isn’t what I’m looking for in terms of reflecting on a book, so I probably won’t do it again. I didn’t learn much new, if anything, from the book, but it’s well-written and well put-together.
• The Hidden Power of F*cking Up – The Try Guys, 2019. Like many people I had never heard of the Try Guys before the Fall 2022 Ned Fulmer scandal. I was mildly interested, and this very colorful book caught my eye in the new arrivals at the library. It’s OK. If you don’t care about these people there’s too much of their personal journeys, but there are also plenty of attractive photos and slightly funny anecdotes. C-grade self-help in an A graphic package.
• Lady Into Fox – David Garnett, 1922 – Read for the Massachusetts Center for the Book January 2023 challenge, “A book less than 100 pages in length.” The one sentence response I sent in: “Strange and touching fantasy about the irrational power of love.” It had been kicking around on my e-reader because I knew of the title as a fantasy classic and the author as a Bloomsbury group member.
• A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband ‘Master’ – Rachel Held Evans, 2012. I used to follow Evans’ blog, as part of my general curiosity about religions – her voice was sensible and interesting, and I always appreciated her perspective on feminist and LGBTQ issues. Her critiques of Mark Driscoll/Mars Hill were particularly pointed, and I was remembering how much I missed her (she sadly died at only 37) when listening to the fascinating The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast. I enjoyed this book, although the humor was a little forced.
• The Hollow – Agatha Christie, 1946. I picked it up because of this thread on Ask A Manager, which compared the character Henrietta to Sayers’ Harriet Vane. I don’t really see it, but the book was OK though tainted with anti-semitism and racism (par for the course for Christie).
• Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff – Dana K. White, 2018. Forbes Library is offering virtual author talks and this is the first one that caught my fancy. It was really delightful so I followed up with the book, which is basically the same content. The two main points I picked up from both are a) how to declutter without making a mess even if you’re interrupted (basically, use a donatable “to donate” box and put things where you would look for them as you go) and b) to treat containers as limits. White is very funny and relatable.

Articles

• “Humanists All” – James Engell, Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2023.
  • “In life as in academic disciplines, the arts and humanities, rightly conceived, draw freely from the single nectars of other fields to create a honey none alone produces.”
  • “Did we lose the Vietnam war, flail in Iraq, and occupy Afghanistan for two decades before letting it revert to the Taliban in two weeks all for lack of superior science, technology, engineering, or math? For lack of computers? Weapons? For lack of trillions spent? How many would have lived had our leaders known the history, religion, language, and culture of those countries?”
• “Restored to Nature: Landscape architect Mikyoung Kim’s healing arts” – Lydialyle Gibson, Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2023.
  • “Ecologically, the Ford site collects a huge volume of stormwater (finding artful solutions for excess water turns out to be a frequent creative challenge for Kim). which in her design will be cleansed and ‘daylighted’ into pools or perhaps a ring of mist that people can walk through—something sculptural and interesting, she says, but not hidden: ‘Part of the job of a landscape is to teach, and I think it’s important for people in a city to understand that this is a system that’s constructed, to see what the parts are, and how it works.'”

• Job: A Comedy of Justice – Robert Heinlein, 1984. Multiple re-read, one that I shared with my father (both fascinated by eschatology). I keep forgetting that this is much better than most late Heinlein. It combines the angst and love of a couple trying not to be separated from The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag with the mutiple universes of The Mark of the Beast, and includes a depiction of Heaven as a colossal bureaucracy directly inspired from:
• An Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven – Mark Twain, 1909. Re-read because of Job – always delightful. “As many as sixty thousand people arrive here every single day, that want to run straight to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and hug them and weep on them.  Now mind you, sixty thousand a day is a pretty heavy contract for those old people.  If they were a mind to allow it, they wouldn’t ever have anything to do, year in and year out, but stand up and be hugged and wept on thirty-two hours in the twenty-four.  They would be tired out and as wet as muskrats all the time.”
• Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life – Bill Perkins, 2020. I have very mixed feelings about this book – on the one hand, it’s a thought-provoking look at the timeline considerations of paying for experiences (you have to be young enough to enjoy them), and it’s good for ants to get a taste of the grasshopper virtues. But it’s a terrible book for grasshoppers because he discounts the uncertainties of both investing and aging, stating that you can plot a smooth curve of how to spend and give away everything before you die.
• Career of Evil – Robert Galbraith, 2015. When I read #5 last month I though I was caught up with the series, but I subsequently realized I had missed this one, #3. It’s very dark… and quite tedious. So I went back to re-read:
• The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith, 2013. … and this one, which I remember very much enjoying the first time around, has shrunk on me significantly. It’s not because my opinion of JK Rowling as a person has plunged (which it has), since typically the author’s character doesn’t much affect my liking for their work – but I do think the thoughtful critical assessments of her work itself I’ve read have sunk in and cumulatively taken most of the shine off.
• The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables – David Bellos, 2017. A wonderful companion to Les Mis, recommended by the leader of our slow read book group. During the months we spent reading the novel, we speculated about how Hugo could have kept all the threads straight – that’s one question this book didn’t answer, but it shed light on many other challenges of writing and publication.
• Winter – Ali Smith, 2017.
• A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species – Rob Dunn, 2021.
• The Great Impersonation – E. Phillips Oppenheim, 1920. This is one of the classics referenced in Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads. It’s quite strange; I enjoyed it but kept expecting it to go in a different direction, so I didn’t predict the big twist which I easily could have seen coming. A lot of suspension of disbelief required!
• Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be: A Rock and Roll Fairy Tale – Jennifer Trynin, 2006. Our friend who reads all the rock bios recommended this, and another mutual friend has a cameo. Trynin writes well. I had never heard of her and didn’t become a fan of her music, although she’s one of the most rock-star-looking people I’ve ever seen! Her journey from unknown, to a bidding war between every big label in the early ’90s, back to unknown, was interesting, but the book didn’t grab me. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Reading this great review (which I found searching for an example rock-star-look photo) makes me want to try it again someday, but realistically my TBR list will always be too long.
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens, 1843. My annual re-read, but the Amherst College group is discussing it in December, so I might go again!
• The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann, 1924.
• The Grey King – Susan Cooper, 1975. Read for Annabookbel’s #TDiRS22.
• Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s – Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein, 2014. This is my prime teen/young adult listening and still stuff I love, so I really enjoyed this book. Lots of variation in how the artists today think about their early work! My favorite bit was the “Mixtape” sidebar in each chapter, focusing on similar songs to the chapter’s topic, like “5 More Melodramatic Songs About Heartbreak” for “Poison Arrow,” “5 More End-of-the-Seventies Songs That Pointed the Way to the Eighties” for “Being Boiled.” Some of the mixtape songs are quite obscure, so I’ll listen my way through at some point!
• Citizen of the Galaxy – Robert Heinlein, 1957. Comfort re-read of one of my very favorite Heinleins. It starts as an homage to Kipling’s Kim, continues with a character based on Margaret Mead, and culminates in a board meeting proxy fight. And it all works… for me at least.
• The Mummy Market – Nancy Brelis, 1966. One of the many books I loved and re-read at my public library as a kid, only registering where it was in the shelf layout, rather than the author or other such minor details. Luckily this title stuck with me so I was able to find a used copy as an adult. Three siblings get sick of their strict housekeeper/guardian, “The Gloom” and go looking for a parent at the market of mothers, run by volunteer children for children. I see that it’s still out of print but has garnered a lot of love on GoodReads and was eventually turned into a 1994 movie called Trading Mom. The trailer literally opens with “In a perfect world“!
• Some Christmas Stories – Charles Dickens, 1911 (Chapman and Hall edition, cobbled together from earlier publications). I thought this was going to include the other Dickens Christmas classics like The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, but it’s just a grab-bag of inferior pieces. The opener, “A Christmas Tree” (1850), is an evocative description at least.

• Fairy Tale – Stephen King, 2022. I loved loved loved the first part, a realistic modern-day story about a teen who befriends an old dog and her cantankerous owner. King is brilliant at depicting ordinary people and getting you to care about them. The rest, a fantasy quest in an alternate world, was nowhere near as compelling. But this book helped me realize that King’s sloppiness is probably part and parcel of his gift for breakneck narrative. I remember reading a review of Cujo (I think) by Algis Budrys (I think) where he complained that the car couldn’t have had the engine King described, a little detail that King could easily have researched to get right. I had similar “did rather spoil the joke for me” moments – where he describes a 1970s mall as having “a climbing wall, a trampoline area called Fliers, an escape room,” for example. Another annoyance was the heavy-handed symbolism of butterflies, all monarchs because that’s the easy/common choice. But if King were the kind of writer who finessed all the details… he wouldn’t be Stephen King and we wouldn’t have 80+ of his books. I often prefer quality over quantity, but quantity can have its pleasures too.
• Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell, 2020. Read for Second Monday, but I only marked two quotes so not worth a whole post. It was good, but the choice to make the protagonist clearly William Shakespeare but refuse to name him got a little annoying.
  • “her patience has slipped out from under her, like ice from under her feet”
  • “the body clings to life, as ivy to a wall”
• À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs #1 & #2 – Stéphane Heuet, 2000-2002. The drawing quality is worse than the first one, but it was worth reading just to have a condensed review of the original. I would continue with these if any local libraries get the sequels… not worth inter-library loan.
• Les Misérables – Victor Hugo, 1862. Almost seven months of the slow read book group, totally worth it and so much fun. Second set of quotes marked, TBD (first set from Great Books in June).
• Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses – Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2003.
• Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy, 1878.
• The Ink Black Heart – Robert Galbraith, 2022. I loved the first few in this series, before JKR turned into a transphobe (Nathan J. Robinson’s essay is brilliant on the “limits of imagination” there), and I was curious about how terrible this book would be, at 1000+ pages and stuffed with screenshots of chat channels and tweets. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, but it’s sure not good either. The plot is a transparent self-validation of a creator harassed by toxic fans, the chats/tweets don’t ring true, and it should have been edited down by at least half. Quite sad, but grist for my thoughts about flawed-yet-readable authors.
• Greenwitch – Susan Cooper, 1974. Read for Annabookbel’s #TDiRS22. Another one in the Dark Is Rising series that was new to me.
• How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion – David McRaney, 2022. Very interesting, especially the claim that our individual mental fallacies – stemming from laziness and bias – are often overcome when we think as a group.
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – Haruki Murakami, 2007. I listed to a podcast featuring three runners who loved this book, one who said it was his favorite book ever, far ahead of his second favorite. I’d been meaning to read it for years anyway, although I’ve yet to try one of Murakami’s novels. The podcast folks claimed it captured some of their thoughts and experiences of running in ways nothing else did; not me, and in fact what was most interesting to me was the connection he draws between the writing process and training for marathons.

• 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style – Matt Madden, 2005. A delightful and ingenious reimagining of Raymond Queneau’s Excercises de style in graphic-novel form. I especially loved the homages to R. Crumb, Winsor McCay, the Bayeux Tapestry, Charles Atlas ads, and Chick comics; and Madden’s clever ringing of various conceptual changes reminds me of Sol LeWitt’s methodical approach.
• Pachinko – Min Jin Lee, 2017.
• The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter – Colin Tudge, 2006
• Daniel Deronda – George Eliot, 1876.
• The Bridge Across Forever – Richard Bach, 1982. A friend brought up Jonathan Livingston Seagull (as the epitome of a terrible best-seller, as I recall), and I mentioned this one, which led to another re-read. Bach is one of my love-them-despite-their-flaws authors; he might easily be the worst of the bunch (some others are Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dick Francis, Robert Heinlein, Stephen King, Nevil Shute, Dornford Yates), but he’s got something that draws me back. It’s such a weird combo of sappy and quirky, of wish-fulfillment and unwitting self-owns. And although I don’t believe in the kind of eternal/astral soulmates he describes, Jonathan is my forever partner and I root for stories of true intimate partnership. The real Richard Bach and Leslie Parrish broke up, but the couple in this book still has a place in my heart.
• The Dark is Rising – Susan Cooper, 1973. Read for Annabookbel’s #TDiRS22. I was surprised to realize I had never read it before, so it’s lovely to have this monthly journey to complete the series.
• Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads – ed David Morrell, Hank Wagner, 2010. I love books-about-books, and although thrillers aren’t my favorite genre, I enjoy some of them. I added a few to my to-read pile, from old (Oppenheimer’s Great Impersonation) to sort-of-old (Goldman’s Marathon Man).

• Hot Money – Dick Francis, 1989. Re-read but maybe only for the second time as I think I got it towards the end of my first Francis deep dive. He’s shrinking on me as I age, but I went on to:
• Longshot – Dick Francis, 1991. This one is still a winner. The relationship between survival writer John Kendall and the family he accidentally falls into is charming, and the plot is good.
• Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters, 2021.
• Summer World: A Season of Bounty – Bernd Heinrich, 2009.
• Le côté de Guermantes – Marcel Proust, 1920-1921. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values – Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.
• Over Sea, Under Stone – Susan Cooper, 1965. Re-read for Annabookbel’s #TDiRS22
• The Stand – Stephen King, 1978. Umpteenth comfort re-read of the original edition, as I think the updated/uncut version is worse in many ways. But I notice the racism of the original sticks out more each time, and I wonder to what extent he fixed that in the 1990 edition. (I read it once, but that was more than 20 years ago – I agree with the GoodReads reviewer who calls it “probably the single greatest argument for a good editor in publishing history.”)
• Ex Libris – Matt Madden, 2021. Intriguing meta graphic novel.
• The Secret to Superhuman Strength – Alison Bechdel, 2021. Much better than Are You My Mother? – equally pretentious, but it worked for me and I very much identified with Bechdel’s love for workout gear and athletic fads.
• When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi, 2016. I heard a lot about this touching memoir when it came out and finally got around to reading it – it is very good.
• Wild Boy: My Life in Duran Duran – Andy Taylor, 2008. Unfortunately not very well-written or interesting, especially compared to In the Pleasure Groove, but that one had a co-writer (Tom Sykes). If AT had a ghost for this, they didn’t do a very good job. He doesn’t seem very self-aware or to have thought about what readers would want to know. Nonetheless I’m a big enough Duran Duran fan that I’m glad I read it. And this comparison is making me change my mind a bit – perhaps AT has more good bits scattered in there, hidden in the thicket of cliches…
• Mistress Masham’s Repose – T. H. White, 1946. Another many-times comfort re-read. I shared the especially funny bits with Jonathan so I’ve compiled them.
• The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith, 1955. I finally read this after watching Purple Noon with the Far Out Film group (I also saw the 1999 film early on) and liked it OK – not my favorite genre and so dark, but I can see why it’s a classic of its kind.

And a short story: “Cold Clews,” one of Erle Stanley Gardner‘s stories featuring Lester Leith, recommended by Jonathan. Leith is a con man who simultaneously solves thefts and gets the goods for himself by incredibly baroque con jobs, and this was the wackiest one in the collection Jonathan read. I see this format is described as “puzzle plots.”

• The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of his Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts – Hugh Lofting, 1920. The Doctor Dolittle books were a huge influence on me as a kid – they’re about love of animals, passion for learning, pacifism, anti-materialism, egalitarianism, and rejection of convention. I read and re-read many of them, especially Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake and The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. I own all of them except this one (I had the abridged picture book edition which doesn’t count), and Jonathan brought it home from the League of Women Voters book sale! And… it’s nowhere near as good as the subsequent ones, plus super-racist/colonialist. But it’s got the origin story of a bunch of the household animals.
• Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen – Mary Norris, 2015. Who the heck is the audience for this book?!? I mostly enjoyed it despite Norris’ unsuccessful attempts to simultaneously appeal to grammar newbies, New Yorker nerds (right there the Venn diagram shrinks to nothingness), and memoir lovers.
• Improvement – Joan Silber, 2017. For Second Monday but I didn’t pull any quotes, which means it left little impression. Not bad, but not at all memorable.
• Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape – Barry Lopez, 1986.
• A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens, 1859.
• When I Grow Up – Julianna Hatfield, 2008. I love Julianna’s music (Minor Alps, a collaboration with my brother, is brilliant and never got the recognition it should have IMO…) and this was candid and compelling, but a depressing and harrowing read.
• The Sculptor – Scott McCloud, 2015. I was blown away by Understanding Comics when it came out, and have admired McCloud ever since. This was both more accessible and more enthralling than I expected. The end made me cry. Graphic novels aren’t may favorite genre, but this one is great.
• The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science – Culdasa (John Yates), 2015. This is the first truly helpful meditation book I’ve read to go beyond the basics of “note your thoughts, let them go.” It explicitly lays out steps to proceed through the stages of meditation (using the breath at the nostrils) and how to handle the hindrances and pitfalls that arise. I borrowed it through the library but will buy my own copy – a step I rarely take these days, only with books I will intend to keep for the rest of my life.
• From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine Year-Old Self – Katherine Langrish, 2021. Read for #Narniathon2021.
• No Exit – Taylor Adams, 2018. Change of pace: a can’t-put-it-down thriller. I loved its plot twists even though a couple telegraphed themselves from miles away. I’d rank this with Vertical Run as a reader’s advisory “Sure Bet.”

Peter Caws papers: the last few were in Spanish so I didn’t list them, but this month I digitized and uploaded “The Paradox of Induction and the Inductive Wager.” I learned strong and weak induction in CS 250 and could barely wrap my head around that, so to really follow this argument I’d need to read it a bunch more times. I’d rather focus on digitizing more papers, but it’s out there now for anyone else who wants to dive in!

• The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (alternate subtitle: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis) – Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, 2020. For Nature & Environment. I thought I had marked quotes, but apparently not? It was as encouraging as a climate change book can be and still be realistic… sigh.
• Mary’s Neck – Booth Tarkington, 1932. A Jonathan recommendation I loved discussing with him. It’s the tale of a Midwestern family who try to join the in-crowd at a summer resort in Maine. Lots of humor that builds over the episodes, with recurring characters whose foibles create suspense as you wonder what social disaster will ensue this time. I probably wouldn’t read it again but I’m glad I checked it out.
• The Letter of the Law – Carole Berry, 1987. I love books set in workplaces, and Jonathan recommended this Bonnie Indermill series because she’s in a different environment each time. This is the first, featuring a law firm. I did finish it but it wasn’t very satisfactory – it felt like there was no there there, with not enough humor and a boring mystery.
• Scarred: The True Story of How I Escaped NXIVM, the Cult That Bound My Life – Sarah Edmondson, 2019. I picked this up after listening to part of an episode of the A Little Bit Culty episode. I’m intrigued by cults in general and had heard a bit about NXIVM but haven’t watched the documentary (The Vow, HBO). NXIVM seems to be like Scientology in combining features of religion, self-help, and MLM. I did finish it, but it left me puzzled about why the cult was able to attract and keep so many people.
• The Dutch House – Ann Patchett, 2019.
• Les Misérables – Victor Hugo, 1862 (tr. Isabel F. Hapgood, 1887). I’m reading this slowly in French with the Amherst group but finished it fast in translation for Great Books, so will end up with two sets of quotes. In case I don’t get to this ever, giant plug for the amazing Les Misérables Reading Companion podcast, which I am enjoying alongside our weekly discussions. I wish there was something similar for more books, but it’s a tremendous amount of work. Thank you, Briana Lewis, for your labor of love! (I did kick in a donation to help cover the costs because it’s so great)
• The Last Battle – C. S. Lewis, 1956. Re-read for #Narniathon21.
• Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games – Lizzie Stark, 2012. I enjoyed this, and it would make me want to try LARPing if I had all the time in the world…

• Thrush Green – Miss Read, 1959. Finally checking out an author who was really popular back in my Pennsylvania library days, with the first in one of her two most popular series (Chronicles of Fairacre is the other). A little low-key for me, but appreciated the mix of characters and the “changing of the guard” between generations.
• Justine – Lawrence Durrell, 1957.
• We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast – Jonathan Safran Foer, 2019. Quotes pulled, TBD.
• Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata, 1948.
• Firestarter – Stephen King, 1980. Multiple re-read, picked up this time because of starting to watch Stranger Things. ST is deeply indebted to this novel not only in plot and time period, but even down to the title font. I’ve never seen the Firestarter movies – they both look terrible! – but the book holds up.
• Decision at Doona – Anne McCaffrey, 1969. I hadn’t re-read this in years… wow, the sexism is off the charts (despite being written by a woman!), but I still enjoy the alien cat-people. It’s kind of fascinating how many of McCaffrey’s plots revolve around bureaucracy – typically omnipresent, powerful but dumb, with honorable intentions miscarried by tinpot dictators, always vanquished by her cunning heroes who know how to work with the system.
• Emma and the Blue Genie – Cornelia Funke, 2002. Very slight, got rid of it.
• In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way; A Graphic Novel – Stéphane Heuet, 1998-2013 (tr. Arthur Goldhammer, 2013). I’ve been reading through ISoLT with two friends, fifty pages at a time, and absolutely loving it (read the whole thing in college, almost 4 decades ago, and loved it then but barely remember it). I often enjoy graphic novels. So when I found out about this series I was elated, but actually reading it was disappointing. It does have some virtues. As Goldhammer points out in the introduction, paring the text down so severely reveals aspects of the structure that are easy to miss. Heuet’s style is classic clear line style, which I adore. And it seems like he’s done his research – the time period comes alive, and it’s helpful to see the characters visually fleshed out, wearing period-appropriate clothing. But alas, his skills aren’t up to the (huge) job. The faces in particular are poorly rendered, and because Proust is so much about character, that’s a fatal flaw. Nonetheless, I’ll read volume 2, which is as far as he’s gotten.
• The Magician’s Nephew – C. S. Lewis, 1955. Re-read for #Narniathon21.