{"id":1349,"date":"2020-12-31T22:07:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T22:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2022-12-24T16:03:18","modified_gmt":"2022-12-24T16:03:18","slug":"december-2020-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2020\/12\/december-2020-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"December 2020 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>Straight<\/em> &#8211; Dick Francis, 1989. Francis used to be one of my favorite authors, but I&#8217;ve cooled on him with age. This one didn&#8217;t sound familiar, but I do think I read it once long ago (many I&#8217;ve read multiple times). I did enjoy the protagonist inheriting his brother&#8217;s jewelry business and figuring out how to keep it going; Francis&#8217; expansion into milieus unrelated to horses kept my interest in his books going, plus I&#8217;m a sucker for getting-good-at-work plots.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants<\/em> &#8211; Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013. Quotes pulled, TBD, but just in case I don&#8217;t get there: I have to say this is one of the best books I&#8217;ve read in the past few years &#8211; maybe the past decade &#8211; and I can&#8217;t recommend it highly enough. I&#8217;m re-reading it for a different book group now and bought my own copy because I love it that much. It has changed multiple aspects of the way I see and think about the world.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Lost Horizon<\/em> &#8211; James Hilton, 1933. I&#8217;ve read this several times before and enjoyed it again despite the racism and misogyny. I probably first encountered it through watching the movie on TV with my family, and then I went on a James Hilton deep dive in the 80&#8217;s or 90&#8217;s. LH reminds me of other &#8220;secret advanced community&#8221; stories that I knew first, like Heinlein&#8217;s &#8220;Lost Legacy.&#8221; <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Forgotten Door<\/em> &#8211; Alexander Key, 1965. Slight but cool children&#8217;s book by the author of <em>Escape to Witch Mountain<\/em>, with a very similar storyline.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Overdue Life of Amy Byler<\/em> &#8211; Kelly Harms, 2019. Ehhh&#8230;. it featured a librarian so I wanted to like it. I don&#8217;t read a lot of contemporary light fiction but I think it was well-done for that genre? It was just trying so hard to be funny and &#8220;relatable&#8221; that it ended up exhausting. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Dead Souls<\/em> &#8211; Nikolai Gogol, 1842 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>How the Irish Became White &#8211; Noel Ignatiev, 1995 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>All 7 in the Harry Potter series &#8211; J.K. Rowling, 1997 &#8211; 2007. I had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/?p=543\">surgery in December<\/a> and, as planned, I re-read the HP books during my recovery. I was last seriously incapacitated (by flu) in the early oughts and re-read all the ones that had been published by then; it&#8217;s a very fond memory and I looked forward to the revisit. Rowling&#8217;s TERFishness now taints her, but my purchases are in the distant past and I still love the work. Recovery led to lots more re-reads!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Kavik, the Wolfdog<\/em> &#8211; Walt Morey, 1968. A favorite from childhood that still holds up, despite being a straight lift from the original:<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Lassie Come-Home<\/em> &#8211; Eric Knight, 1940. Holds up even better! I love the characters we meet in passing, especially Rowlie the traveling potter. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Postman<\/em> &#8211; David Brin, 1985.  A favorite post-apocalyptic novel that led me back to others. The P-A traveling theater troupe is such a trope (hah) that I wonder where it came from. It&#8217;s also in <em>Folk of the Fringe<\/em>,  <em>Station Eleven<\/em>, and the play <em>Mr. Burns<\/em> &#8211; those come to mind but I&#8217;m sure there are others.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>A Christmas Carol<\/em> &#8211; Charles Dickens, 1843. For the umpteenth time, after watching <em>A Muppet Christmas Carol<\/em> (delightfully ridiculous).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Anna Karenina<\/em> &#8211; Leo Tolstoy (tr. Pevear &amp; Volokhonsky), 1878 (2000). I just read the Garnett translation for a different book club in April; this was a slow read with an Amherst College group, 50 pages a week starting in August. I haven&#8217;t even gotten to the previous quotes but I marked new ones &#8211; it will be interesting to see how much they overlap. I&#8217;ll probably do just one post for both but haven&#8217;t decided yet.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Deadly Isles<\/em> &#8211; Jack Vance, 1969. Vance is one of my favorite SF\/fantasy writers, and I mostly enjoy his mysteries. I hadn&#8217;t read this one before; not his best but it&#8217;s interesting how the flavor of the characters is consistent. I felt the lack of his brilliant imagination of alternate cultures and environments&#8230; <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Trullion: Alastor 2262<\/em> &#8211; Jack Vance, 1973 &#8230;so I jumped to this set of three (each title is taken from a planet in the Alastor star cluster), among my favorites of his SF\/fantasy works. The first is set on a watery world and introduces the game of hussade, which apparently was imported into the <a href=\"https:\/\/stexpanded.fandom.com\/wiki\/Hussade\">Star Trek expanded universe<\/a>???<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Marune: Alastor 933<\/em> &#8211; Jack Vance, 1975. This one has stuck in my mind since I first read it decades ago. On this planet the profusion of moons means there&#8217;s seldom darkness, and the Rhune culture has developed rituals around the type of light each combination sheds. They find the act of eating in public shameful &#8211; one character says of the typical non-Rhune: &#8220;Without shame he displays his victual, salivates, wads it into his orifice, grinds it with his teeth, massages it with his tongue, impels the pulp along his intestinal tract.&#8221; The plot of each of these novels is a not-terrible whodunit, but it&#8217;s the atmosphere I love. Jonathan says he remembers public eating as taboo from Isaac Asimov&#8217;s <em>The Naked Sun<\/em> (1957) &#8211; if I didn&#8217;t hate Asimov so much I would read it to confirm. It&#8217;s also in Bunuel&#8217;s <em><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Phantom_of_Liberty\">Phantom of Liberty<\/a><\/em> (1974), which I haven&#8217;t seen, but it made such an impression on my parents that they mentioned it several times.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/user\/year_in_books\/2020\/1472686\">Year in review<\/a>: 39,688 pages over 115 books, a few more books but many more pages than last year because there were a bunch of doorstoppers. Most popular: <em>Harry Potter and the Sorcerer&#8217;s Stone<\/em>, over 9 million other readers (!); least, &#8220;Un Autre Monde&#8221; (J.-H. Rosny a\u00een\u00e9), 4 other people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Year in review: 39,688 pages over 115 books, a few more books but many more pages than last year because there were a bunch of doorstoppers. Most popular: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer&#8217;s Stone, over 9 million other readers (!); least, &#8220;Un Autre Monde&#8221; (J.-H. Rosny a\u00een\u00e9), 4 other people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists","category-year-in-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2837,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/2837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}