{"id":1923,"date":"2021-12-31T20:29:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-31T20:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=1923"},"modified":"2022-12-24T16:02:48","modified_gmt":"2022-12-24T16:02:48","slug":"december-2021-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2021\/12\/december-2021-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"December 2021 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>That Hideous Strength<\/em> &#8211; C.S. Lewis, 1945. Re-read of the third in the &#8220;Space Trilogy.&#8221; I always enjoy this one as much as the first two but in a different way. Although there are SF elements, it centers more on the psychology of Mark Studdock. He&#8217;s a fairly awful person, but Lewis manages to make me root for him &#8211; a bit by default, because he&#8217;s the protagonist, but more so by the most realistic, cringey depiction of an outsider trying to become an insider (in academia, yet) that I&#8217;ve ever read. But the sexism in this one is off the charts, even for Lewis. It does fit in with the very flawed writers I love (Burnett, King, Yates). Most of Lewis&#8217; books are much better, and to my mind often unwittingly undercut his reactionary views because he&#8217;s too good of a writer for the didacticism to work. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World<\/em> &#8211; Paul Morland, 2019 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Power of Awareness: And Other Secrets from the World&#8217;s Foremost Spies, Detectives, and Special Operators on How to Stay Safe and Save Your Life<\/em> &#8211; Dan Shilling, 2021. Checked out from the Forbes new books display. <em>The Gift of Fear<\/em> is way better.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Shoal Water<\/em> &#8211; Dornford Yates, 1940.  One of the gaps in my Yates collection that was filled late, so this might be only my second read. A mostly stand-alone thriller &#8211; instead of Chandos, we have new guy Jeremy Solon to make the love story easier, but old guy Jonathan Mansel to help him out. Not bad, but not his best.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Stuart Little<\/em> &#8211; E.B. White, 1945. I always forget quite how <em>weird<\/em> this book is &#8211; not only the peculiar transition between little-kid stuff (rescuing the ring, helming the toy boat) and angsty teen\/young adult (Margalo, substitute teaching, Harriet), but how the story just&#8230; stops. As I child I think I lost interest along the way so didn&#8217;t mind so much. The success of this book should probably be chalked up to a combination of Garth Williams&#8217; wonderful illustrations and the dearth of anything better.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Leap of Faith: Finding Love the Modern Way<\/em> &#8211; Cameron Hamilton and Lauren Speed, 2021. I got hooked by <em>Love Is Blind<\/em> on Netflix so picked this up from the new books display. A quick read &#8211; not much substance but enjoyable.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Dornford Yates: A Biography<\/em> &#8211; A.J. Smithers, 1982. My recent Yates kick led me to check this out from the UMass library &#8211; interesting, but a bit of a hagiography (quite a trick since Yates was a next-level asshole). I picked up two good words (both in the same paragraph!): armigerous (entitled to bear a coat of arms) and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fugleman\">fugelman<\/a> (leader).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Novelists Against Social Change: Conservative Popular Fiction, 1920-1960<\/em> &#8211; Kate Macdonald, 2015. A serious treatment of Yates, as well as Buchan (whom I know a little) and Thirkell (only by reputation), without buying into their views. She says &#8220;While being Leftish-leaning all my adult life I have long enjoyed reading novels of the Right: a paradox that has been many times awkward to explain.&#8221; She &#8220;offers a template for reading politicized authors against the grain.&#8221; Wish I could have talked about this with my father! I wrote her a little fan comment on her site and she actually replied, which was a thrill.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Song of Solomon<\/em> &#8211; Toni Morrison, 1977 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD, but just in case I never get there: WOW!!!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Inferno<\/em> &#8211; Dante Aligheiri, 1320 (Allen Mandelbaum translation, 1980) &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996<\/em> &#8211; Seamus Heaney, 1997 &#8211; quotes pulled, TBD<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>A Christmas Carol<\/em> &#8211; Charles Dickens, 1843. I think I&#8217;ll make this an annual re-read (last was 2018 per <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/list\/1472686-hilary-caws-elwitt\">GoodReads<\/a>) &#8211; I love it every time. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place<\/em> &#8211; Jackson Bird, 2019. A really good intro to trans issues in general, as well as a nice memoir. Wish J.K. Rowling would read and absorb this&#8230;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most<\/em> &#8211; Greg McKeown, 2021.  Eh&#8230; nothing really new? I did like that each section was summarized cumulatively, so that you re-read the summary of the first section multiple times. I was struck by &#8220;Relieve a grudge of its duties by asking, &#8216;What job have I hired this grudge to do?'&#8221; &#8211; I don&#8217;t really hold grudges but it has a more general application. I also liked &#8220;To simplify the process, don&#8217;t simplify the steps: simply remove them,&#8221; which tied into this <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/our-brain-typically-overlooks-this-brilliant-problem-solving-strategy\/\">fascinating study<\/a> I had just read about, finding that people are less likely to hit on removing features to solve a problem even when that would be advantageous (eg balance bikes vs tricycles).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Year in review<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once again I managed to get most everything recorded in GoodReads, and as a reward it generates a spiffy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/user\/year_in_books\/2021\/1472686\">Year in Books<\/a>. 37,039 pages read over 123 books; shortest was <em>Secret World of Teddy Bears<\/em> (so I have the jogging teddy bear right there!) and longest was <em>Brothers Karamazov<\/em>; most popular <em>The Midnight Library<\/em> with almost 2 million other readers, and least <em>Wife Apparent<\/em>, only 8 others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the blog itself: in the &#8220;good&#8221; column, I caught up with the monthly lists in a push over the last few weeks of December (I back-date the posts to match when the reading happened). In the &#8220;OK&#8221; column, I&#8217;ve been more-or-less keeping up with transcribing quotes from the book group books (the only ones where I make that effort, but that&#8217;s still around 40+ a year) that have to go back to a library. In the &#8220;not great&#8221; column, I&#8217;m slowly falling behind with transcribing quotes from ebooks &#8211; which is a problem because the Nook doesn&#8217;t allow them to be offloaded or backed up, and if I had to reset I would lose them. I don&#8217;t even have an inventory of which those are, which would be a helpful first step! And in the &#8220;might need to give up on this&#8221; column, I am totally underwater on turning those draft quotes piles into publishable posts. I have around 125 mess o&#8217; quotes drafts and each would take at least an hour or two&#8217;s work to organize and polish up even minimally. It&#8217;s still worth creating the drafts because I can search and reference them for my own purposes, and who reads this blog anyway aside from dear Jonathan? Answer from analytics: 2,293 pageviews last year (ie very few, if any, actual people). The most popular post is still my review of <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2004\/05\/tisha-the-story-of-a-young-teacher-in-the-alaska-wilderness-as-told-to-robert-specht-author-listed-by-lc-as-anne-hobbs-1976\/\">Tisha <\/a><\/em>from 2004, which has been true for quite a while (because it&#8217;s an obscure book that people love, and because a number of people left comments, some of which are actually helpful).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Year in review Once again I managed to get most everything recorded in GoodReads, and as a reward it generates a spiffy Year in Books. 37,039 pages read over 123 books; shortest was Secret World of Teddy Bears (so I have the jogging teddy bear right there!) and longest was Brothers Karamazov; most popular The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1923","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\/1923","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=1923"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2836,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923\/revisions\/2836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}