{"id":745,"date":"2018-12-31T23:45:27","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T23:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=745"},"modified":"2022-12-24T16:04:35","modified_gmt":"2022-12-24T16:04:35","slug":"december-2018-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2018\/12\/december-2018-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"December 2018 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><em>Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds<\/em> &#8211; Melissa Katsoulis, 2009. Introduced me to some interesting stories I didn&#8217;t know, but not great.<\/li>\n<li><em>The End of Nature<\/em> &#8211; Bill McKibben, 1989 \u2013 quotes pulled, review tdb<\/li>\n<li><em>The Beautiful and Damned<\/em> &#8211; F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922 \u2013 quotes pulled, review tdb<\/li>\n<li><em>The Testament of Mary<\/em> &#8211; Colm T\u00f3ib<span id=\"freeTextContainer17613272706451360396\">\u00ed<\/span>n, 2012 &#8211; Read for Irish Writers group, which I wasn&#8217;t able to attend. This is the 3rd T\u00f3ib<span id=\"freeTextContainer17613272706451360396\">\u00ed<\/span>n I&#8217;ve read (all for book groups) and I am just not a fan, at all. At least this was short, and the viewpoint\/topic (Mary telling the Jesus story from her point of view) interesting but not as much as I&#8217;d hoped.<\/li>\n<li><em>One Train Later: A Memoir<\/em> &#8211; Andy Summers, 2006. The Police were the first band I really, really loved and dove into deeply; my younger self would have relished this in a way I can&#8217;t quite. Writing&#8217;s not so good, but the part that covers the origin and rise of the band is compelling. A really abrupt ending: the hours before a 1983 concert in Bridgehampton are sprinkled throughout as intros to the chapters, and then the afterword is basically &#8220;so, we broke up, and I&#8217;m still not feeling closure.&#8221; Which I hope the reunion tour in 2007-2008 provided.<\/li>\n<li><em>A Christmas Carol<\/em> &#8211; Charles Dickens, 1843 &#8211; Never ever gets old in my eyes.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Wolves of Willoughby Chase<\/em> &#8211; Joan Aiken, 1962 &#8211; I saw the description of this so many times in the back of Puffin paperbacks from the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s that it&#8217;s hard to believe I never read it; I think I tried it from the library at least once but I didn&#8217;t have much of a taste for gothic as a child. What finally got me to try again was <a href=\"https:\/\/captainawkward.com\/\">Captain Awkward<\/a> mentioning it as a favorite. Enjoyed it quite a bit but didn&#8217;t love love it. &#8211; Edited to add: I pulled out a bunch of the Puffins I still have and found what may be the blurb I was thinking of, which is actually for <em>Night Birds on Nantucket<\/em> and just mentions <em>Wolves<\/em>:<br \/>\n<blockquote><p>Many years ago, late in the middle watch of a calm winter&#8217;s night, a square-rigged, three masted ship, the <em>Sarah Casket<\/em>, was making her way slowly through northern seas. And on the deck a child lay sleeping in a wooden box, so still and pale that she seemed more like a wax doll than a human being. It was Dido Twite, and she had been asleep for more than ten months. (Dido was missing, presumed dead, at the end of <em>Black Hearts in Battersea<\/em>).<br \/>\nSuddenly the lookout yelled from the crosstrees, &#8216;Whale-o! Dead ahead, not more&#8217;n a mile,&#8217; and Dido woke at last, only to find that she was aboard one of the strangest vessels that ever sailed the seas.<br \/>\nThis is Joan Aiken&#8217;s third fantasy (the first was <em>The Wolves of Willoughby Chase<\/em>) and it is as deliciously outrageous as ever. Warmly recommended for readers of ten and over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s in the back of <em>Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake<\/em>, one of my all-time favorites, so it makes sense I would have read it many times. I found it compelling but creepy enough that I didn&#8217;t particularly seek to read the book. Now I&#8217;m intrigued!<\/li>\n<li><em>A World Made by Hand<\/em> &#8211; James Howard Kunstler, 2009 &#8211; The &#8220;mantasy&#8221; aspect has been widely criticized, but I was willing to overlook that for the sake of a good entry in one of my favorite genres (has dropped through the ranks but still in the top 10), post-apocalyptic fiction. But the world outlined here makes no sense. As <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/customer-reviews\/R1LWOYF0L56CMW\/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&amp;ASIN=B008V43WTI\">an insightful reviewer<\/a> asked, &#8220;<span class=\"a-size-base review-text\" data-hook=\"review-body\">If everyone is still around, why can&#8217;t some of the electrical infrastructure be rebuilt? If almost everybody is dead, why are they making their own shoes instead of scavenging?<\/span>&#8221; Same with the power dynamics. Disappointing.<\/li>\n<li><em>Sister Age<\/em> &#8211; M.F.K. Fisher, 1985 &#8211; The beginning, about a weird portrait on leather of the unknown Ursula Van Ott that Fisher bought in a Swiss antiques store, is gripping, as are the memoir pieces. The short stories&#8230; not so much, alas, even the ones that center on food.<\/li>\n<li><em>Le Petit Prince<\/em> &#8211; Antoine de Saint-Exup<span id=\"freeTextContainer16083016268721581609\">\u00e9<\/span>ry, 1943 &#8211; Re-read of course, on New Year&#8217;s Eve while trying to stay awake until midnight, so the last book of the year!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I probably missed a few, but if my monthly posts are accurate I read 99 books this year. I have posts to write for most of the book group books, some of which are still hanging around full of post-it flags of quotes to pull. So I&#8217;ll be either back-dating a lot of posts or giving up on that part of this blog as being too ambitious. I&#8217;m happy I&#8217;ve stuck with the monthly lists though!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Literary Hoaxes: An Eye-Opening History of Famous Frauds &#8211; Melissa Katsoulis, 2009. Introduced me to some interesting stories I didn&#8217;t know, but not great. The End of Nature &#8211; Bill McKibben, 1989 \u2013 quotes pulled, review tdb The Beautiful and Damned &#8211; F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922 \u2013 quotes pulled, review tdb The Testament of Mary [&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-745","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\/745","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=745"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":773,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745\/revisions\/773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}