★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital. | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A fun, palate-cleansing read.
Themes: living with your mistakes and regrets, starting over. It’s never too late to begin again on your own terms. Also: how awful family can be. How awful people in power treat their subjects. The ending was jolting, but comforting in a way.
…★★★☆☆ | Writing | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An amusing mishmash of quotes and editorializing on the benefits of showing up and sharing your work, including the messy sausage making process. I read this on a Kindle, so may have missed out on the visual aspects of Kleon’s work. But to me, it felt more like a commonplace book of inspirational (and sometimes disconnected) quotes.
…★★★☆☆ | Essays, Memoir | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I loved Lamott’s Bird by Bird memoir on the writing craft. The writing here was good, but forced. Too many similes, too many quotes from others. Great life advice: be kind to yourself & others, all we need is love, etc., but it felt repetitive to me. Her advice on sobriety and community is heartfelt and immensely quotable.
…★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I’ll read anything that Amor Towles writes. He’s one of my favorite living writers. This collection of six short stories and a novella hit the mark, though each left me wanting more, to know happens next. A master storyteller.
★★★☆☆ | Reading and Books | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
The author, Robert Dawson, spent decades driving around the country taking photographs of public libraries in the U.S. This book is the result. He keeps a blog at https://libraryroadtrip.com which he continues to update.
The book is mainly photographs, but there are some good essays sprinkled throughout. I bought the book because of an E.B. White essay, which turned out to be a paragraph-long letter to children who had written him from a library. Ha. I liked the Anne Lamott one the best — saving the Salinas public libraries that were about to close with a “read-in.”
★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I loved everything about this book. Who knew it was possible to write a novel filled with intricate chess games and make them exciting?! Consider this:
…She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer.
★★★☆☆ | Mystery-Suspense | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A strange meta-detective novel with an unreliable narrator who slowly dissolves into insanity. I followed maybe half of the literary and Biblical allusions. Not at all what I expected, but oddly satisfying. I read it for the setting — Manhattan in all its grandeur — and so I can’t complain.
★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My quest to read all eleven volumes of Durant’s Story of Civilization continues. Volume VII has returned to the shelf with hundreds of scribbles and notes and many, many exclamation marks. If you think the world is crazy now, you ought to revisit these darker times of wholesale human butchery, religious wars and inquisitions. This has been an eye-opening and hair-raising experience.
★★★★★ | Memoir | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A beautiful, poignant essay of White’s return to New York after a long absence. He celebrates the eternal qualities of New York and the people it attracts, while mourning the loss of his New York, which can never be restored for New York is always changing. That’s what makes it special.
…★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
The New York Times listed this book at the best novel of the 21st century (so far). I decided to hold off reading it until I had read David Copperfield by Charles Dickens as this book is a loose retelling of that story. That was probably a mistake.
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