Reading

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

/ Essays, Memoir, Reading

 ★★★★☆ | Essays, Writing, Memoir | Audio + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

I enjoy Ann Patchett’s novels, but I love her essays.  She writes with such clarity and compassion.  My first book of her essays was These Precious Days, which was written upfront as a collection of essays.  This one came together after the fact as a compilation of essays Ann had written in magazines over many years. Only later did she decide to publish them as a book. As a result, there isn’t much of an underlying theme, other than Ann herself.  I came for the essays on writing, but stayed for her views on RV life, dogs, opera, marriage, friendship, and defying all odds, the opening an independent bookstore in the post Amazon era.  Ann narrated the audiobook, which added to the personal voice of these essays.  After reading this and These Precious Days, I will basically read anything she writes.

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The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

Stegner must be my spirit author. The Big Rock Candy Mountain affected me on a deeply emotional level because of the many similiaries from my own life that that novel explores.  This one touched me as well, but for diffrent reasons. The narrator is 69, retired to his dream home in California, and deeply unhappy. He looks back on his life as pointless, a spectator.

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark.

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The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony

/ Nature, Reading

★★★★☆ | Travel and Nature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

I enjoyed these episodic adventures in the wilds of South Africa amongst elephants and the incredible struggle to preserve and cohabitate with these massive and intelligent animals. An Immense World by Ed Yong introduced me to the ways in which elephants see the world from a scientific basis. Here, the author tells the story from practical experience. 

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Rose Madder by Stephen King

/ Horror, Reading

★★★☆☆ | Horror | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads

My journey to read all of Stephen King continues.  Normally, I enjoy the supernatural aspects of King’s novels.  In this case, I think the story would have been better without any of the other-world part. Rosie is an abused woman who digs deep and finds strength to leave and ultimately confront her abusive husband with the help of her new friends.  Having to rely on the supernatural powers to ultimately defeat her beast of a husband felt like a let down.

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Spook Street by Mick Herron

/ Reading, Spy-Detective

★★★★☆ | Spy-Detective | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads

The fourth Slow Horses book was fun. These books follow a formula, yet are so well written. These aren’t the kind of books you analyze for themes or highlight many passages.  They’re just good, well-written entertainment. It will be interesting to watch Season Four on TV now that I’ve read the book. Maybe there will be more departures from the book?

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The Age of Louis XIV by Will Durant

/ ★★★★★, History, Reading

★★★★★ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads 

My straight-through reading of this mammoth 11-volume history continues. Volume VIII shares a detailed view of Europe in the 17th Century. So much war and bloodshed and atrocity, and yet brilliance too.

Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair.

Will Durant

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

/ Reading, Writing Guides

★★★☆☆ | 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.

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Somehow by Anne Lamott

/ Essays, Memoir, Reading

★★★☆☆ | 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.

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Table for Two by Amor Towles

/ Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★☆ | 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.

The Public Library by Robert Dawson

/ Books and Libraries, Reading

★★★☆☆ | 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.”

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

/ ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

★★★★★ | 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.

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City of Glass by Paul Auster

/ Mystery-Suspense, Reading

★★★☆☆ | 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.

The Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant

/ ★★★★★, History, Reading

★★★★★ | 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.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron

/ Reading, Spy-Detective

★★★★☆ | 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.

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You Like It Darker by Stephen King

/ Horror, Reading

★★★★☆ | 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.

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