{"id":1678,"date":"2021-07-31T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-31T21:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=1678"},"modified":"2023-10-21T10:12:28","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T14:12:28","slug":"july-2021-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2021\/07\/july-2021-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"July 2021 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><em>Harding&#8217;s Luck<\/em> and <em>The House of Arden<\/em> &#8211; E. Nesbit, 1909 and 1908.  I was looking for comfort reading on my e-ink reader and realized I didn&#8217;t remember <em>Harding&#8217;s Luck<\/em>. I had actually never read it! Finding a new-to-me E. Nesbit, and realizing it was good &#8211; wow, that was a thrill. It&#8217;s actually a sequel to <em>The House of Arden<\/em> so I read them out of order, but they are self-contained stories. I had heard the word &#8220;Mouldiwarp&#8221; but didn&#8217;t realize it was from these. It&#8217;s a magical white mole, a typically-Nesbit cranky and cryptic mentor, but in <em>Harding&#8217;s Luck<\/em> we also get the Mouldierwarp and the Mouldiestwarp! Not quite as great as <em>Five Children and It<\/em> or <em>The Phoenix and the Carpet<\/em>, but wonderful. I look forward to re-reading these.<\/li><li><em>Home Made: A Story of Grief, Groceries, Showing Up&#8212;and What We Make When We Make Dinner<\/em> &#8211; Liz Hauck, 2021. I loved this sort-of memoir of cooking and eating dinner weekly with the residents of a communal foster care home. Touching and compelling.<\/li><li><em>Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc<\/em> &#8211; Hugh Aldersey-Williams, 2011 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>The Periodic Table<\/em> &#8211; Primo Levi, 1975- quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>The Country Girls<\/em> &#8211; Edna O&#8217;Brien, 1960 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>The Adventures of Pinocchio<\/em> &#8211; Carlo Collodi, 1880. I re-read this because the Far Out Film group watched <em>A.I.<\/em> and then <em>Mind Game<\/em>, both of which have Pinocchio references, and I remembered it as being super-weird and dark, like the Mary Poppins books (as opposed to the movies).<\/li><li><em>In the Wet<\/em> &#8211; Nevil Shute, 1953. Oh my. I remembered this was a strange Shute (one of my favorite good-but-bad or bad-but-good novelists). It&#8217;s centered around a future England where the Queen takes refuge in the colonies, and I&#8217;ve been watching <em>The Crown<\/em> and was reminded of it. The novel also continually raises and doesn&#8217;t answer the question &#8220;but WHY should this ordinary woman be assigned this arbitrarily powerful role?&#8221; But it&#8217;s full of crazy-bad stuff I had forgotten, like the mixed-race protagonist willingly adopting the N-word as his nickname (!?!??!!), and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plural_voting\">plural voting<\/a> justified because &#8220;the people&#8221; were voting wrong.<\/li><li><em>Souls<\/em> &#8211; Joanna Russ, 1982. Since I&#8217;ve been more-or-less keeping up with these lists, I see I&#8217;ve re-read this novella annually for at least the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2019\/02\/february-2019-books-read\/\">past<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2020\/03\/march-2020-books-read\/\">three<\/a> years. It captures something about the human condition in a way no other artwork does for me.<\/li><li><em>Anne of Green Gables<\/em> &#8211; Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1908. I watched the first few episodes of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anne_with_an_E\"><em>Anne With an E<\/em><\/a> with my dad and stepmom a few years ago. I have access to Netflix now so finished the first season, but its darkness (combined with that of <em>Souls<\/em>!) sent me back to the original, one of my ultimate comfort re-reads.<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harding&#8217;s Luck and The House of Arden &#8211; E. Nesbit, 1909 and 1908. I was looking for comfort reading on my e-ink reader and realized I didn&#8217;t remember Harding&#8217;s Luck. I had actually never read it! Finding a new-to-me E. Nesbit, and realizing it was good &#8211; wow, that was a thrill. It&#8217;s actually a [&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-1678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678","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=1678"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2407,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions\/2407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}