{"id":3238,"date":"2023-04-30T20:15:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-01T00:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=3238"},"modified":"2023-06-08T17:38:50","modified_gmt":"2023-06-08T21:38:50","slug":"april-2023-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2023\/04\/april-2023-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"April 2023 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Re-read <em>City of Illusions<\/em> (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1967) again just a few weeks later, in order to better <a href=\"https:\/\/calmgrove.wordpress.com\/2023\/04\/28\/lovehain-the-left-hand-of-darkness\/#comment-58861\">participate<\/a> in Calmgrove&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/calmgrove.wordpress.com\/tag\/lovehain\/\">#LoveHain<\/a>. Unlike the first two of her Hain novels, I want to do a separate post on this one&#8230; TBD!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/gutenberg.org\/ebooks\/68061\">Lud-in-the-Mist<\/a><\/em> &#8211; Hope Mirlees, 1926. A friend sent me this <a href=\"https:\/\/hedgehogreview.com\/web-features\/thr\/posts\/a-novelists-reflections-on-useful-fictions\">fascinating article<\/a>. I recently found out about Mirlees because of her surrealist poem, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paris:_A_Poem\"><em>Paris<\/em><\/a>, which my mother quotes in a forthcoming book of essays I&#8217;m helping her copy-edit. But I had never heard of this remarkable fantasy, which I enjoyed  quite a bit. My favorite aspect was the delightful names, up there with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2005\/12\/mrs-piggle-wiggle-books-by-betty-macdonald\/\">Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle<\/a> but not intended to be funny: \n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Ranulph and Prunella Chanticleer<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Polydore and Dreamsweet Vigil<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Florian Baldbreeches<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ambrose Fliperade<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Moonlove Pyepowders<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Peregrine Laquer<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Goceline Flack<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Endymion Leer<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ebeneezor Spike<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Lettice Prim<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Captain Mumchance<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Clementina Gibberty<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Primrose Crabapple<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Diggory Carp<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Hyacinth Quirkscuttle<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Christopher Pugwalker<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Ivy Peppercorn<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Farmer Jellygreen<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Sebastian Thug<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>and some exclamations<\/em>: &#8220;Toasted cheese!&#8221; Busty Bridget!&#8221; &#8220;By my Great-Aunt&#8217;s Rump!&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Cecily G. and the 9 Monkeys<\/em> &#8211; H.A. Rey. This came up when we were looking up what kind of monkey Curious George is &#8211; this is his origin story. It&#8217;s very weird, especially the monkeys each having a pair of skis in their belongings, and making stilts for the giraffe (then she &#8220;doesn&#8217;t fit on the page&#8221;).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Spring<\/em> &#8211; Ali Smith, 2019. Read for 2nd Mondays, post TBD<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Fathoms: The World in the Whale<\/em> &#8211; Rebecca Giggs, 2020. Read for Nature Enviro, post TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a Year<\/em> &#8211; Spring Warren, 2011. An impulse checkout from the garden display at Forbes. Right up my younger self&#8217;s alley, but now it&#8217;s just vicarious interest &#8211; and a bit of jealousy that in California the author can grow artichokes, citrus, figs, and olives in her back yard. Yummy-looking recipes! <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Innocents Abroad<\/em> &#8211; Mark Twain, 1869. Read for Great Books, post TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em> &#8211; Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969. Read for Calmgrove&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/calmgrove.wordpress.com\/tag\/lovehain\/\">#LoveHain<\/a>  &#8211; another one I <a href=\"https:\/\/calmgrove.wordpress.com\/2023\/04\/28\/lovehain-the-left-hand-of-darkness\/#comment-58861\">commented on<\/a> but want to turn into a full post at some point.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Residues<\/em> &#8211; R. S. Thomas, 2002. Read for the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.massbook.org\/readingchallenge\">Massachusetts Center for the Book<\/a>&nbsp;April challenge, a poetry collection. My one-sentence response: &#8220;Brief, evocative, melancholy poems on themes like religion, WWII, and marriage, assembled after the poet&#8217;s death.&#8221; &#8220;Dreaming&#8221; is the only poem I actually liked: <blockquote>I lean over the fire; a smell <br \/>as of frost comes, sparks embroidering <br \/>the soot. It is a tapestry <br \/>of the past. How many men <br \/>have leaned, spat, dreamed <br \/>by a fire, remembering love, <br \/>youth, victory, happier <br \/>times, and the uselessness of remembering? <br \/><br \/> There is a flower of bright flame <br \/>asleep in a log, one, many <br \/>of them. It is a garden <br \/>to sit by, for thought to wander <br \/>in seeking for the lost innocence <br \/>at the centre, where the tree <br \/>was planted for the naked <br \/>conscience to conceal itself under <br \/>from the voice calling.<\/blockquote><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Articles, short stories, etc.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>In the <em>New Yorker<\/em> story &#8220;Alisa&#8221; by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, a &#8220;hefty candy&#8221; is called &#8220;Russian Bears in the Pine Forest.&#8221; Presumably it&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/russiapedia.rt.com\/of-russian-origin\/mishka-kosolapiy\/index.html\">this &#8220;Clumsy Bear<\/a>,&#8221; which sounds delicious &#8211; I will look out for it.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I skimmed <em>Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self<\/em> (Jay L. Garfield, 2022) &#8211; the author teaches at Smith and they tweeted about a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iWCRQxmp-fU\">podcast interview<\/a> with him. Very interesting ideas, but the philosophy was a little too dense for me.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Articles, short stories, etc.<\/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-3238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3238","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=3238"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3366,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3238\/revisions\/3366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}