{"id":1614,"date":"2021-05-31T20:57:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T00:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=1614"},"modified":"2023-10-21T10:12:10","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T14:12:10","slug":"may-2021-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2021\/05\/may-2021-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"May 2021 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><em>Math with Bad Drawings<\/em> &#8211; Ben Olin, 2018. Loved it and want to re-read! Re-learning and going further in math (straight As in Calc I, II, and III in my 50s after failing I in college) has been one of my great joys of the past decade, and this is a wonderful, approachable overview no matter what level you&#8217;re at.<\/li><li><em>Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds<\/em>\u00a0&#8211; Bernd Heinrich, 1994\/1999 [2nd edition] &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>The Mormon Murders: A True Story of Greed, Forgery, Deceit, and Death<\/em> &#8211; Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, 1988. I first read this soon after it came out. I&#8217;m fascinated by LDS stuff anyway (part of a general interest in religions and cults), and the overlap with the rare book trade and forgery made it irresistible. I very much enjoyed it then but didn&#8217;t expect to learn a life lesson about toxic positivity (the first victim&#8217;s company was failing but he thought if everyone just had faith and worked harder it would succeed). It stuck with me over the years, and after watching <a href=\"https:\/\/www.netflix.com\/title\/81226889\"><em>Murder Among the Mormons<\/em><\/a> I went back to it for more background &#8211; it&#8217;s amazing that the documentary interviews all the major players. What a crazy story.<\/li><li><em>Autumn<\/em> &#8211; Ali Smith, 2016 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>Beyond This Horizon<\/em> &#8211; Robert Heinlein, 1948. I thought I had read every Heinlein, but somehow this one slipped into my &#8220;yeah, I remember that one&#8221; list when actually it was new to me. But it&#8217;s quite terrible &#8211; worse-than-even-RH-usual social stuff, and also doesn&#8217;t hang together well or make much sense.<\/li><li><em>If It Bleeds<\/em> &#8211; Stephen King, 2020 &#8211; Four new stories which I enjoyed quite a bit. One of them, &#8220;Rat,&#8221; stuck out because it&#8217;s about an author (King often writes what he knows) writing a Western he thinks &#8211; and we are supposed to agree, I&#8217;m pretty sure &#8211; is going to be brilliant. But the excerpts are terrible, just one trope and cliche after another. It reminded me of how the play that is going to make Jack Torrance&#8217;s career in <em>The Shining<\/em> sounds like a piece of junk.  Fiction-within-fiction is probably not that easy to pull off&#8230; <\/li><li><em>The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie<\/em> &#8211; Muriel Spark, 1961 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing<\/em> &#8211; Eimear McBride, 2014. Too experimental for me (and others in the Irish Writers book group), but I did mark two lines: &#8220;I must turn myself to the great face of girls&#8221; (about the protagonist entering the schoolyard)  and &#8220;his voice tiny diamond cutting strips out of air.&#8221;<\/li><li><em>The Officer&#8217;s Daughter: A Memoir of Family and Forgiveness<\/em> &#8211; Elle Johnson, 2021. One of my college roommates wrote a memoir! It&#8217;s good &#8211; a touching and thought-provoking story about her cousin&#8217;s murder and its ripple effects.<\/li><li><em>One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em> &#8211; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967. Re-read; quotes pulled afresh, TBD.<\/li><li><em>The Slice Harvester: A Memoir in Pizza<\/em> &#8211; Colin Atrophy Hagendorf, 2015. I enjoyed this saga of eating a plain slice at every joint in NYC, and looked up our favorite local slice from childhood <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sliceharvester.com\/2010\/01\/don-filippo-when-youre-here-youre.html\">(Don Filippo&#8217;s<\/a>) on the actual blog. I&#8217;m a sucker for projects like this anyway, but the writing and memoir aspect were decent too.<\/li><li><em>Growing Old: Notes on Aging with Something Like Grace<\/em> &#8211; Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, 2020. A mish-mosh, alas. I want to read her books about the San because I loved this story: &#8220;If lions appeared by night at an encampment, some of the men would take burning branches from their fires and shake them at the lions while saying politely, &#8216;Old lions, we respect you, but this is our place. We ask you to leave.'&#8221;<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Math with Bad Drawings &#8211; Ben Olin, 2018. Loved it and want to re-read! Re-learning and going further in math (straight As in Calc I, II, and III in my 50s after failing I in college) has been one of my great joys of the past decade, and this is a wonderful, approachable overview no [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614","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=1614"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1724,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1614\/revisions\/1724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}