{"id":4388,"date":"2024-12-31T20:18:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-01T01:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=4388"},"modified":"2025-01-09T17:11:30","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T22:11:30","slug":"december-2024-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2024\/12\/december-2024-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"December 2024 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>James and the Giant Peach<\/em> &#8211; Roald Dahl, 1961. Comfort re-read.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Big U<\/em> &#8211; Neal Stephenson, 1984. For a long time this was one of my favorite books, and I even wrote Stephenson a fan letter about it (picked up from the remainders at Harvard Bookstore not too long after it was published). I still enjoyed it very much, but I do see its flaws more now.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>White Noise<\/em> &#8211; Don DeLillo, 1985. Great Books selections, quotes TBD. I double-dipped with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.massbook.org\/readingchallenge\">Massachusetts Center for the Book<\/a> December challenge: &#8220;A well-reviewed book in your least favorite genre.&#8221; Literary fiction fits the bill! I wrote: &#8220;Very funny, challenging, weird novel of ideas and people who all talk in the same particular way &#8211; but it works.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Bear<\/em> &#8211; Andrew Krivak, 2020. I get Tim Ferris&#8217; email newsletter and read it sometimes; he highly recommended this. I loved the indirect reference and homage to Randall Jarrell&#8217;s <em>The Animal Family<\/em>, one of my great books of all time, but this didn&#8217;t reach those heights &#8211; pretty good, not great.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us<\/em> &#8211; Diane Ackerman, 2014. Nature Environment selection I regretted! Quotes pulled, TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Mouse and His Child<\/em> &#8211; Russell Hoban, 1967. I can&#8217;t count the number of times I&#8217;ve read this. It&#8217;s got everything: the hero&#8217;s quest, found family, the joys of philosophy and performing, the Droste effect, news headlines vs reality&#8230; still a perfect novel to me after first reading it in the early &#8217;70s.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Extra(Ordinary) People<\/em> &#8211; Joanna Russ, 1984. I&#8217;ve mentioned my love for &#8220;Souls,&#8221; and immediately ordered this when I belatedly found out about this collection just a few weeks ago. But to me, the other four stories don&#8217;t come anywhere near it.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>A Skeleton in the Family<\/em> &#8211; Leigh Perry, 2013. Jonathan was a classmate of the author&#8217;s husband &#8211; a super roundabout path to get to this quite nice cozy mystery featuring a talking skeleton. Luckily that was the only paranormal aspect and it&#8217;s not exactly explained, which I appreciated &#8211; he&#8217;s just another wisecracking character.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Short stories<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Amherst Book Club started reading the <em>Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story<\/em> to keep as a palate cleanser between books (we started <em>The Magic Mountain<\/em> this month), and these two were the first session. A great idea and very enjoyable to discuss!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;The Lesson&#8221; &#8211; Toni Cade Bambara, 1972<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;The Fix&#8221; &#8211; Percival Everett, 1999<\/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\">Per <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/user\/year_in_books\/2024\/1472686\">Goodreads<\/a>, 111 books and 29,240 pages (lower than the past few years, but I&#8217;ve been much busier!). Shortest <em>Otto: El Oso de Libro<\/em>, and longest <em>Moby-Dick<\/em>; most &#8220;shelved&#8221; (e.g. &#8220;read,&#8221; but I guess they&#8217;re leaving room for other meanings) <em>The Fellowship of the Ring<\/em> (not a suprise!) and least the Tintin classic <em>Le Temple du Soleil<\/em> (only four, but maybe there aren&#8217;t many Francophones on Goodreads?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the blog, I kept up with the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/category\/monthly-lists\/\">monthly lists<\/a> and I&#8217;m treading water on transcribing quotes. I&#8217;m up to 384 published posts and 213 drafts. Next year will be busy as well, so I&#8217;ll be happy if I can keep this up, and if I get back to finishing the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/category\/quote-dump\/\">quote dumps<\/a> at some point in the future, that will be nice. Since basically nobody reads this blog, it&#8217;s just for my own satisfaction anyway!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Short stories The Amherst Book Club started reading the Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story to keep as a palate cleanser between books (we started The Magic Mountain this month), and these two were the first session. A great idea and very enjoyable to discuss! Year in Review Per Goodreads, 111 books and [&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-4388","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\/4388","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=4388"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4436,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4388\/revisions\/4436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}