★★★★☆ | Travel and Nature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A wonderful introduction to the wildlife and history of Southern Arizona from the state’s most famous poet. This book helped me pass through some awful periods of grief as I healed on our patio underneath the very same desert sun that Shelton loved so much.
…★★★☆☆ | Mystery-Suspense | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A ghost story with two sets of twins and a few surprising twists that I didn’t see coming (but should have). Niffenegger lost points with her depiction of Valentina’s parents (including Elspeth!) with their lack of grieving and too-easily-accepted death of their daughter. Obviously she’s never dealt personally with the loss of a child.
Julia had never thought of death as something that would happen to her, or to people she knew. All those people in the cemetery were just stones, names, dates. Loving Mother. Devoted Husband. Elspeth was a parlour trick; she had never been really real to Julia. Valentina is in that box. It couldn’t be true.
★★★☆☆ | Psychology | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Susan worked with Prince as sound engineer — how cool is that? Probably the most insightful thing I learned from the book wasn’t about music, but art. She described how and why the surreal art movement came to exist: as photography was invented, artists were suddenly disrupted. A photograph would always be more realistic than a painting. Surreal art allows the perceiver to fill in the meaning of the art from their own subconscious, a whole different part of the brain.
Reading the book made me want to dive back into listening to albums again.
★★★★★ | Essays | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Fantastic collection of essays spanning two hundred years of American letters.
★★★★☆ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I read William Manchester’s massive biography of Winston Churchill in the evenings over many months. I think of this an a pleasure read because the writing is so lyrical and evocative of another time and place. So many leadership and life lessons to be gleaned from studying Churchill.
I am patiently waiting to reach the end of the Story of Civilization before resuming this amazing biography of Churchill with the second volume.
★★★☆☆ | Mystery-Suspense | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
★★★★☆ | Reading and Books | Audio | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A delightful, hilarious memoir of running a used bookstore in a small town in Scotland.
★★★★★ | Literature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A beautiful, wise book touching so many themes: true love, societal pressures, women’s rights, nobility excesses, religious zealotry, jealousy, the fruitless search for the meaning of life, angst over landowner privilege, thinking vs. feeling/living, capitalism vs. communism. Reading Tolstoy is the study of life.
…★★★☆☆ | Philosophy | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An interesting collection of stories and anecdotes about how ego can be a destructive force in a person’s life.
…★★★★☆ | Philosophy | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Friendship is one of life’s greatest blessings, but are seldom accounted for as such.
True friendship is selfless and must be predicated on virtue with no expectation of gain.
Riches and success tend to change a person. If he forsakes his friends for possessions, he’ll one day wonder who he bought all this stuff for, and will have no one to enjoy them with him.
In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend’s strength is his; and in his friend’s life he enjoys a second life after his own is finished. This last is perhaps the most difficult to conceive. But such is the effect of the respect, the loving remembrance, and the regret of friends which follow us to the grave. While they take the sting out of death, they add a glory to the life of the survivors.
