{"id":5016,"date":"2026-04-30T20:25:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T00:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=5016"},"modified":"2026-05-19T17:05:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T21:05:12","slug":"april-2026-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2026\/04\/april-2026-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"April 2026 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year<\/em> &#8211; Margaret Renkl, 2023. Nature Enviro selection; quotes TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?<\/em> &#8211; Lizzi Damilola Blackburn, 2022. Second Monday selection. I didn&#8217;t pull quotes exactly, but I did mark Nigerian foods to look up, so I&#8217;ll probably do a post.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger Longer<\/em> &#8211; Margaret Webb, 2014. I&#8217;m <a href=\"https:\/\/fundraisers.nyrr.org\/hilary-caws-elwitt-1\">running the NY Marathon<\/a> again this fall and checking out more running books. This one was music to my ears since I am old and have always been slow. I enjoyed Webb&#8217;s adventures and interviews, and it was a bit inspiring, but I didn&#8217;t learn anything much new.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Exhalation: Stories<\/em> &#8211; Ted Chiang, 2019. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.massbook.org\/readingchallenge\">Massachusetts Center for the Book<\/a> April challenge, &#8220;A short story or essay collection.&#8221; I wrote: &#8220;Nine great, thought-provoking stories, all loosely science fiction but very different in style, subject, and length. Chiang is a master of the form.&#8221; I loved most of these, but the one that sticks with me the most is &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang\/\">The Great Silence<\/a>,&#8221; which was originally written for a <a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/195588827\">video installation<\/a>. It&#8217;s just as strong on its own.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion<\/em> &#8211; Brendan Leonard, 2021. Another browse selection from the Forbes running shelves. Eh, I like the idea of his graphics, but it&#8217;s better on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/semi_rad\/\">Instagram<\/a>, and even on Instagram I enjoy <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/DXW84rvABIP\/?img_index=1\">this kind of thing<\/a> more.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>My Dog&#8217;s the World&#8217;s Best Dog<\/em> &#8211; Suzy Becker, 1995. Dollar book from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ravenusedbooks.com\/\">Raven<\/a>, a cute 10-minute read and I love the sentiment, but nothing special. Back out it goes!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Portrait of a Lady<\/em> &#8211; Henry James, 1881. Great Books selection, quotes TBD. I know I read it once before but didn&#8217;t remember a thing. Fantastic, even though in general I don&#8217;t love James.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Mote in God&#8217;s Eye<\/em> &#8211; Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 1974. Re-read again, for similar reasons to why I turned to it in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2022\/12\/december-2022-books-read\/\">2022<\/a>, but this time not just climate change&#8230;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Twenty-One Balloons<\/em> &#8211; William P\u00e8ne du Bois, 1947. Children&#8217;s splinter group selection; quotes pulled, TBD.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Short story<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;The First Full Thought of Her Life&#8221; &#8211; Deb Olin Unferth (published in her collection <em>Wait Till you See Me Dance<\/em>, 2017). A great <a href=\"https:\/\/georgesaunders.substack.com\/p\/the-first-full-thought-of-her-life\">Story Club<\/a> selection that sparked an equally wonderful discussion in the comments.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Article<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/philpapers.org\/go.pl?id=CAWSMQ&amp;proxyId=&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FCAWSMQ.pdf\">Scientific Method<\/a>,&#8221; Peter Caws, entry in <em>The Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/em> (ed. Paul Edwards, 1967) &#8211; one of my dad&#8217;s papers I&#8217;ve been digitizing and uploading. \n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;&#8216;Scientific method,&#8217; if it has any univocal meaning, means the right mixture of observation and experiment on the one side, and theory construction on the other. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the proportions should be equal. &#8230; this should give pause to contemporary practitioners of sciences in which the data are piling up without any sign of fundamental theoretical clarification.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li> &#8220;[Bacon said] the true scientist is like the bee, which goes to nature for its raw material but works it into a new product, rather than like the empiricist ant, which merely collects, or the rationalist spider, which merely spins out its own substance\u2014but in his own work antlike qualities predominated.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Short story Article<\/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-5016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5016","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=5016"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5076,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5016\/revisions\/5076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}