{"id":1795,"date":"2021-09-30T20:27:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-01T00:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=1795"},"modified":"2023-10-21T10:12:44","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T14:12:44","slug":"september-2021-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2021\/09\/september-2021-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"September 2021 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li><em>The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race<\/em> &#8211; ed. Jesamyn Ward, 2016. A great assortment of essays. Read for Mount Holyoke&#8217;s Examining Privilege group. <\/li><li><em>This is How You Lose the Time War<\/em> &#8211; Amal El-Mohtar, 2019. Picked up because of a rave review. Innovative and interesting SF,  but not my kind of thing &#8211; overwritten and too vague\/abstract to appeal to my old-school self.<\/li><li><em>The Blessing<\/em> &#8211; Nancy Mitford, 1951. Umpteenth re-read &#8211; the humor never stales.<\/li><li><em>Devil&#8217;s Den to Lickingwater: The Mill River Through Landscape and History<\/em> &#8211; John Sinton, 2018 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li><em>L&#8217;\u00c9cume des Jours<\/em> &#8211; Boris Vian, 1947. An old favorite, re-read because the Far Out Film group watched the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mood_Indigo_(film)\">Gondry adaptation<\/a>. The movie wasn&#8217;t bad at all but couldn&#8217;t quite capture the surreal and beautiful melancholy of the book.<\/li><li><em>Strange Flowers<\/em> &#8211; Donal Ryan, 2020 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li><li>Ten of <em>The Canterbury Tales<\/em> &#8211; Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400 &#8211; quotes marked but lost in a Nook accident (had two editions with the same title, BAD)<\/li><li><em>The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby<\/em> &#8211; Charles Kingsley, 1863. I&#8217;ve read this a few times since I was a kid, but not as many times as my very favorites. It&#8217;s so so weird, often with an arch tone that feels like Kingsley talking to other adults &#8211; or just to himself &#8211; over the reader&#8217;s head (on top of the to-be-expected reactionary and racist attitudes), but there&#8217;s nothing else like it.<\/li><li><em>The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside <\/em>The Room<em>, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made<\/em> &#8211; Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell, 2013. I read this when it came out, remember loving it, and checked it out again when I got the chance to see a screening of <em>The Room<\/em> followed by a Q&amp;A with Sestero. He&#8217;s really charming and a natural story-teller, the opposite of Tommy Wiseau, and once again I couldn&#8217;t put it down.<\/li><li>All the extra content from <em>The Books of Earthsea: the Complete Illustrated Edition<\/em> (2018, illustrated by Charles Vess), followed by re-reads of <em>A Wizard of Earthsea<\/em> (1968), <em>The Tombs of Atuan<\/em> (1970), <em>The Farthest Shore<\/em> (1972), and <em>Tehanu<\/em> (1990) &#8211; Ursula K. Le Guin. The collection is a giant doorstop (seriously, so many reviews mention that it&#8217;s too big and heavy to hold, and they are not exaggerating) and the illustrations are nice. I read everything that was new &#8211; the highlights were Le Guin&#8217;s introductions to each of the novels &#8211; and then returned the monolith to the library and started on my umpteenth re-read of the series, which is one of my favorite works of art ever.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I also started re-reading <em>Middlemarch<\/em> since I led a Second Monday book discussion on it, but after the first dozen or so chapters I fell back on the quotes I pulled last time &#8211; which I still haven&#8217;t posted, but I have all the draft posts to search and refer to in the WordPress back end. One of the big reasons I plug away at this blog even if no one reads it but me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race &#8211; ed. Jesamyn Ward, 2016. A great assortment of essays. Read for Mount Holyoke&#8217;s Examining Privilege group. This is How You Lose the Time War &#8211; Amal El-Mohtar, 2019. Picked up because of a rave review. Innovative and interesting SF, but not my kind of [&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-1795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795","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=1795"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2024,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1795\/revisions\/2024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}