★★★★☆ | Fantasy | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I understand why this book is so often described as a cozy read. It’s filled with nice, helpful characters who work together to make nice things – like a coffee shop with delicious baked goods. Yes, there are bad guys, but of course kindness prevails in the end.
★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My 75th book of 2023, which is a new personal record for the most books I’ve read in a single year. Many of the stories in this collection touch on the hard to articulate grief of losing a child, which hit home for me.
…★★★★☆ | Horror | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My 14th Stephen King book in 2023 and his most recent. The setting was some unnamed city in the Northeast, close to Philly maybe, during the second year of COVID-19. A big theme here was the idiocy of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters. While I agree with King on these three groups, it felt very preachy in a horror novel. But, the story itself was good enough to look past this. In this one, there was no supernatural element at all, just the pure evil of two elderly professors preying on young “livestock” to prolong their own lives.
★★★★★ | Reading and Books | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Reid Byers Website | Readwise
Two Quotes:
…Book-wrapt — that beneficient feeling of being wholly imbooked, beshelved, inlibriated, circumvolumed, peribibliated … it implies the traditional library wrapped in shelves of books, and the condition of rapt attention to a particular volume, and the rapture of of being transported to the wood beyond the world.
★★★★☆ | Writing | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A slow read over the course of a few months, one chapter/writing tool per sitting. Lots of great tips and advice to improve your writing.
…★★★☆☆ | Philosophy | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Eastern philosophy with a Westerner’s no nonsense practicality. Watts cites the Hindu Upanishads as the source of his philosophy that there is no self, we are all one with the cosmos, and it’s only because of our social customs and teachings that we believe we are independent and apart from others and the world. We do not leave this earth when we die, just as we didn’t come into the world at birth. We have always been here.
…★★★★☆ | Travel and Nature | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A slow, year-long read of 365 daily meditations on the meaning of travel.
★★★★☆ | Horror | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Continuing my quest to read the Stephen King books I missed along the way. This book flew by on my Kindle. Lots of supernatural fun mixed in with nostalgia for my late 1970s youth. I’m tempted now to watch the movie, which I somehow also missed.
…★★★☆☆ | Horror | Audio | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I listened to this Richard Bachman book on audio. The story was OK. By the end, you felt sorry for Blaze, the thug who kidnaps a baby for money. Blaze led a hard life and physical abuse from his drunken father caused permanent brain damage, so he was “slow”, but kind hearted (unless you crossed one of his friends). He leads of life of small crime as an adult and hooks up with George, a fellow thief which is clearly a tip of the cap to Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck.
…★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I finished this fourth installment of Will Durant’s Story of Civilization after three months of slow, careful reading. The Age of Faith begins with the fall of Rome and carries through the end of the Middle Ages. The writing is clear, colorful, engaging, often horrifying, and occasionally laugh-out-loud hilarious. Along the way, I encountered kings and popes, treachery and atrocities, saints and philosophers, economic systems, the building of cathedrals and castles, and primers on the great works of literature and philosophy across a thousand years of recorded time.
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