★★★★☆ | 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.
…★★★☆☆ | Travel and Nature | Digital | Borrow
Up to date guide on the requirements and steps to move to Mexico.
★★★★☆ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My third Slow Horses book. The plot of this one followed the TV series pretty closely, though there are more differences than the first two. The allure here is the continued depth of characters that grow and develop from book to book. Herron throws these well-established characters into tension and conflict and they respond predictably. It’s up to the author to put them into tighter and tighter binds to avoid becoming cliche. I’ll bet in later books, he has the characters become less predictable, otherwise this could feel a little too much like Star Trek novels. We’ll see.
…★★★★☆ | Horror | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This is a wonderful collection of short stories and novellas by our generation’s master storyteller. I enjoyed every piece, but particularly liked Rattlesnakes, a sequel of sorts to Cujo. It’s meditation on the persistent grief of losing a child masquerading as ghost story. I’ve read most of Stephen King’s shorter works. This newest one tops them all.
★★★★☆ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
The second installment of the Slow Horses series. This one departed enough from the TV series to keep me guessing. Jackson Lamb is such a terrific character. Perhaps not great literature, but engaging and fun.
…★★★☆☆ | Literary Fiction| Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoyed the setting of the fictional small town on Puget Sound. I liked the premise of the story. I loved the octopus. But, in the end, the author was too young/naive to be inside the head of a grief-stricken 70-year-old woman. It would have been better had she let us imagine what she felt by her actions and words alone. Some big themes were drawn in magic marker when they deserved an artist’s paintbrush.
★★★★★ | Philosophy | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Ah, what a treasure. Two to three page poetic essays on 52 commonplace words or themes like Curiosity, Heartbreak, and Forgiveness. I’ve been ruminating on this definition of Beauty for the past month:
Beauty is the harvest of presence.
Whyte often shared a take that surprised me, and sometimes changed my very paradigm of a long-fixed, but one-sided belief. I can see spending a year with this book, one theme per week, and digging deep, deep, deep into the purpose of life. This one is a permanent addition to my bedside table.
…★★★☆☆ | Horror | Print / Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Continuing my quest to read every Stephen King novel … The Regulators was published on the same day as Desperation. Many of the same characters bedeviled by the same evil spirit Tak, but set in a parallel universe. The book covers of the two novels make up a single scene:
…★★★☆☆ | Horror | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
This book was nothing like I expected. Frankenstein (the scientist) is arrogant, self-absorbed, and makes incredibly bad decisions. The story itself is unbelievably far-fetched. There were times I wanted to throw my Kindle on the floor at the dumb-assedness of our unreliable protagonist.
Taken more broadly, it’s a cautionary tale about mankind’s continual push for scientific advancement, which feels more relevant today than ever.
…★★★★★ | Literature | Digital + Audio | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters you meet will eventually make sense. I was distrustful at first, my head spinning with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I was wrong to be critical of the master. By the end of this story, every character, no matter how minor, was reintroduced and I understood their purpose in the story. Sure, this involved a lot of happy coincidences for our protagonist, but it brought me happiness to have these loose threads woven together.
…★★★★☆ | Reading and Books | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I read the first half of this short epistolary book as an excerpt in Stories of Books and Libraries by Jane Holloway. I bought the print edition because the library didn’t offer it and the Kindle version cost too much. I read the rest of it over the course of an hour or two. I suspected it couldn’t end on a bright note and I was right. I shed a few tears at the sudden ending. Such is the way of life. Helene, as the crazy, run-at-the-mouth American contrasts nicely with the British reserve of Mr. Frank Doel. We learn all these bizarre details about Helene’s life, but have to coax the smallest of things from Frank. The spare book without any explanatory text to accompany the letters worked perfectly.
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