{"id":3317,"date":"2023-05-31T16:36:11","date_gmt":"2023-05-31T20:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=3317"},"modified":"2023-06-16T17:29:37","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T21:29:37","slug":"may-2023-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2023\/05\/may-2023-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"May 2023 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>LIFTOFF: Couch to Barbell<\/em> &#8211; Casey Johnston, 2021. Motivating, but I haven&#8217;t embarked on the program yet. Johnston is a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.shesabeast.co\/\">delightful writer<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Light in August<\/em> &#8211; William Faulkner, 1932. Quotes marked, TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Nature&#8217;s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard<\/em> &#8211; Douglas Tallamy, 2019.  Quotes marked, TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Souls of Black Folk<\/em> &#8211; W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903. Quotes marked, TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet<\/em> &#8211; Becky Chambers, 2014. I loved this and I&#8217;m glad it&#8217;s the first in a series I can continue! It&#8217;s feel-good, character-driven SF with realistic alien species working together as an oddball found-family crew on a small ship &#8211; reminiscent of the feel of <em>Firefly<\/em> but without the Whedon violence-driven tension. But it does have some deep themes about societal guilt and responsibility.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Dragonsinger<\/em> &#8211; Anne McCaffrey, 1977. Comfort re-read, this time sparked by recommending it to some younger friends while discussing Tamora Pierce.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>A Town Like Alice<\/em> &#8211; Nevil Shute, 1950. According to my previous records I last read this in 2016, but I wonder if I missed a comfort re-read in there, because this is one of my favorites. The saga of Jean Paget leading a troop of other captive women and children on a forced march through Japanese-occupied Malaya is the part most people remember (the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Town_Like_Alice_(film)\">movie<\/a> focuses on it, not sure about the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/A_Town_Like_Alice_(miniseries)\">miniseries<\/a> &#8211; I haven&#8217;t seen either), but it&#8217;s the section where Jean starts a shoe factory, ice-cream shop(!), and grocery in rural Australia that I come back to. I love books about small businesses and wish there were more of them. Maeve Binchy often has a subplot about a dress shop or catering business; I might go back to those&#8230;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>La Fugitive<\/em> &#8211; Marcel Proust, 1925. Quotes marked, TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Word for World Is Forest<\/em> &#8211; Ursula K. Le Guin, 1972. <a href=\"https:\/\/calmgrove.wordpress.com\/2023\/05\/26\/lovehain-the-word-for-world-is-forest\/#comment-60144\">Re-read<\/a> for Calmgrove\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/calmgrove.wordpress.com\/tag\/lovehain\/\">#LoveHain<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind<\/em> &#8211; Dana K. White, 2016. I read her <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2023\/01\/january-2023-books-read\/\">decluttering book<\/a> and enjoyed this too.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Lessons in Chemistry<\/em> &#8211; Bonnie Garmus, 2022. So many people I know loved it that I finally picked it up. And yes, an enjoyable read, but on the lite side. I was trying to describe to a friend why I found it, and a number of other recent novels, &#8220;fluffy.&#8221; I had trouble putting my finger on it. They (this, along with <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2021\/08\/august-2021-books-read\/\">The Midnight Library<\/a><\/em>, <em>All the Light We Cannot See<\/em>, at least one other that&#8217;s not surfacing) have a kind of vividness that feels shallow to me; they are well-crafted and all the gears mesh seamlessly, but the narrative doesn&#8217;t seem organic and the character arcs feel predictable.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>No Highway<\/em> &#8211; Nevil Shute, 1948. Comfort re-read &#8211; my records last show <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2007\/02\/end-of-2006\/\">2006<\/a>, but I&#8217;m sure that&#8217;s wrong (and I labeled it as &#8220;closest to Shute&#8217;s real life&#8221; when I must have meant <em>Kindling<\/em>; did Shute work on metal fatigue?). It&#8217;s got great suspense, and raises interesting questions about whether to trust someone in one domain when they have bizarre ideas in others.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking&#8217;s Final Theory<\/em> &#8211; Thomas Hertog, 2023. Read for the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.massbook.org\/readingchallenge\">Massachusetts Center for the Book<\/a> May challenge, &#8220;a book on nonfiction on a subject new to you.&#8221; I wrote: &#8220;Mind-melting book about the &#8216;no boundary&#8217; big bang, quantum\/string\/M theories, imaginary time, the holographic universe, and other fascinating concepts; surprisingly accessible despite the inherent challenge of &#8216;understanding&#8217; anything in it.&#8221; Makes me want to take more advanced physics classes!<\/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>J.R. Moehringer&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/05\/15\/j-r-moehringer-ghostwriter-prince-harry-memoir-spare\">The Ghostwriter<\/a>&#8221; (New Yorker, 5\/15\/2023) reminded me of loving both his own memoir, <em>The Tender Bar<\/em>, and Andre Agassi&#8217;s <em>Open<\/em> which he ghost-wrote. Now I want to read <em>Shoe Dog<\/em> as well as <em>Spare<\/em>.<\/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-3317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3317","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=3317"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3385,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3317\/revisions\/3385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}