{"id":4168,"date":"2024-08-31T17:04:59","date_gmt":"2024-08-31T21:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=4168"},"modified":"2024-10-18T17:10:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-18T21:10:28","slug":"august-2024-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2024\/08\/august-2024-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"August 2024 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, the Man Who Created <\/em>Nancy &#8211; Bill Griffith, 2023. Zippy the Pinhead first turned me on to Nancy, and I adored the deep dive <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2018\/01\/how-to-read-nancy-the-elements-of-comics-in-three-easy-panels-paul-karasik-mark-newgarden-2017\/\"><em>How to Read Nancy<\/em><\/a>, so I requested this from the library the minute I heard about it. Good and enjoyable but not out-of-this-world.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Q&#8217;s Legacy: A Delightful Account of a Lifelong Love Affair with Books<\/em> &#8211; Helene Hanff, 1985. I&#8217;ve loved <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2011\/03\/84-charing-cross-road-and-the-duchess-of-bloomsbury-street-helene-hanff-1970-and-1973\/\">84 Charing Cross Road<\/a><\/em> since I first read it as a child in my grandmother&#8217;s collection, and belatedly realized I wasn&#8217;t sure I&#8217;d read this sequel.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>84, Charing Cross Road<\/em> &#8211; Helene Hanff, 1970. It still holds up, and <em>Q&#8217;s Legacy<\/em> shines an interesting light on what was happening outside of the letters and in the gaps.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Fan<\/em> &#8211; Bob Randall, 1977. The extreme New York-y nostalgia of the Hanff books led me to revisit this epistolary thriller about a Broadway star, her entourage, and her stalker. I&#8217;ve read this a number of times and almost swore I&#8217;d never pick it up again because it&#8217;s objectively kind of trashy, but I first encountered it as a teenager and it&#8217;s burned into my synapses as comfort entertainment, right up there with the 1980 <em>Flash Gordon<\/em> movie and &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=x5wsNPcycow\">Tommy, Judy and Me<\/a>.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>If I Survive You<\/em> &#8211; Jonathan Escoffery, 2022. Second Monday choice. I didn&#8217;t love it and don&#8217;t have enough quotes for a full post. I did look up the wet JAMAICA T-shirt poster he references and found it has an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.islandoutpost.com\/outpostings\/2016\/04\/18\/incredible-story-behind-jamaicas-famous-poster\/\">interesting backstory<\/a>; I liked &#8220;no unaltered plan of [his] will ever work out&#8221; about a hapless friend, and &#8220;The woman staggers backward, her decorum ablating like microwaved Styrofoam.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Devil\u2019s Element: Phosphorous and a World Out of Balance<\/em> &#8211; Dan Egan, 2023. Nature &amp; Enviro. Really good! Quotes TBD. This also fit the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.massbook.org\/readingchallenge\">Center for the Book reading challenge<\/a>, &#8220;A book whose title starts with the same letter as your birthday month.&#8221; I wrote: &#8220;A fascinating story, compelling, well-written, and very educational. Dan Egan&#8217;s journalism skills make his science books tops in the field.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>New Kid<\/em> &#8211; Jerry Craft, 2019. I put this on a list of graphic novels to check out; I&#8217;d heard a lot about it. Very good, very charming.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Only Child<\/em> &#8211; Guojing, 2015. Picked up from the graphic novel shelf because of the adorable art. A good example of the wordless book, but veering a teeny bit into the saccharine at times.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales<\/em> &#8211; B\u00e9la Bal\u00e1zs (tr. Jack D. Zipes), 1974. The Zipes introduction was a big chunk of the book, the stories (originally written in 1921) are slight and repetitive, and the Mariette Lydis illustrations that inspired them strike me as hideous. But both <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/B%C3%A9la_Bal%C3%A1zs\">Bal\u00e1zs<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mariette_Lydis\">Lydis<\/a> are fascinating people, so I&#8217;m glad Zipes brought this book out of obscurity.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Babbitt<\/em> &#8211; Sinclair Lewis, 1922. Great Books; quotes TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>This Perfect Day<\/em> &#8211; Ira Levin, 1970. I read this decades ago and remembered enjoying it; Levin&#8217;s way with a page-turner is hard to beat. I&#8217;m more discriminating now, but as example of the things-are-not-as-they-seem genre (see also <em>The White Mountains, Brave New World, The Giver, Beneath the Root<\/em>, etc.) it&#8217;s quite good. Not super-plausible, and salted with some icky misogyny, but a decent plot twist or two and overall a fun read.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Short stories<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I loved Edgar Allan Poe as a kid (never the poetry though); I don&#8217;t remember how it started, but I was given the doorstop <em>Complete Tales and Poems<\/em> paperback and read it multiple times. J and I were discussing classic detectives and turned to Poe&#8217;s Dupin (easily confusable with <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ars%C3%A8ne_Lupin\">Lupin<\/a> as well as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thomson_and_Thompson\">Dupont\/d<\/a>). &#8220;The Gold-Bug&#8221; (1843) was one of my very favorite stories, but I probably hadn&#8217;t read it in three or four decades. I can&#8217;t recapture exactly what I loved so much about it; I guess it was the first figure-out-the-cryptic-treasure-map I was exposed to? And &#8220;The Murders in the Rue Morgue&#8221; (1841) similarly prologues the Sherlock Holmes\u2013style detective who figures things out, but it doesn&#8217;t super hold up. I&#8217;m really enjoying the <a href=\"https:\/\/standardebooks.org\/\">Standard Ebooks<\/a> editions of public domain classics, which is what I downloaded, so maybe I&#8217;ll try re-awakening some other memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Short stories I loved Edgar Allan Poe as a kid (never the poetry though); I don&#8217;t remember how it started, but I was given the doorstop Complete Tales and Poems paperback and read it multiple times. J and I were discussing classic detectives and turned to Poe&#8217;s Dupin (easily confusable with Lupin as well as [&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-4168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168","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=4168"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4299,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168\/revisions\/4299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}