I might be breaking this post into two, because I seem to have read quite a bit this summer. I'll see how much energy I have and how much Alfie lets me type while he snuggles into my armpit.
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| Found on our bookshelves. I'm guessing one of us (ie Michael) bought this copy for the cover. |
John Wyndham, Trouble With Lichen, (1960). I remember reading and enjoying a lot of Wyndham in my late teens, and for no particular reason I decided to read this, 40 plus years later. It wasn't terrible, but it also didn't age well. Wyndham was one of those mid-century male sci-fi writers who were trying to write sympathetic women characters but their ultimate lack of curiosity about what women are actually like got in the way. Heinlein always struck me as the same way, all Look At Me Writing About Modern Women, when in fact if you scratch at the women characters you quickly get to some flat and conventional stereotypes.
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| Also found on our bookshelves. A less interesting cover, than Trouble With Lichen, sadly, because it is a much better book and deserves more. |
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, (1927). How can this possibly be from 1927 when it feels so modern and fresh?! How can a story grounded in landscape about the friendship between two Catholic priests who ride around nineteenth-century New Mexico on their bonded burros be so gripping? Now all I want to do is a) go back to Santa Fe and b) read all the Willa Cather.
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| Broome County Public Library |
Zadie Smith, On Beauty, 2005. This book came up several times in discussions during my summer writing class, and since I'd just enjoyed Smith's The Fraud so much, I gave it a try, and it was well written and everything, but there were a couple of plot elements that just made me want to sigh and ask why. I feel like other people loved this a lot more than I did.
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| This is my brother-in-law's copy that he bought while we were in Santa Barbara that he let me keep because he knew he wasn't going to finish it. |
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War, (2019). Sorry to get repetitive here, but this book was not a favorite either, despite the clever writing. My BIL gave up on it because he didn't care, and I totally understand. There are two main characters, one called Blue and one called Red and even by the end of the book I could not tell them apart. Then there was one of those complicated twisty endings that rely on under-explained technological wizardry plus time twists, and I lost track of things.
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| Michael subscribes to some version of the New York Review of Books fiction reprint series (none of the lists on the website seem to quite match the books we have). It's a beautiful series and we have several shelves of them in our house. |
Tove Jansson, The Summer Book, (1972). I was fairly sure I'd read this before but wanted to remember it anyway. Because it is Tove Jansson, it is about weird people living on an island. Sometimes they are angry, sometimes they want to be alone, sometimes they like each other, sometimes there is a cat, usually there are storms. Jansson is stunning and I love her.
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| The Book Den, Santa Barbara (used). |
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, (1995). This started off so impressively, then it got weird, but in an intriguing way, and then it got bogged down in slow-moving detail, and I had trouble caring about the end. It is based on the real life of a late-eighteenth century German philosopher and poet. It's another book that other people liked it more than I did, and I'm always curious about that phenomenon. Does it mean I'm too low-brow? Or a snob? Could go either way. Or both. A low-brow snob!
I'm only half-way through the summer list, but I'll pick up the rest next week. Today is our 22nd wedding anniversary and I have to wash my hair before we go out for an early dinner.
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| Standing up in front of friends and family to declare your love and commitment to each other is an odd thing for two introverts to volunteer to do, but it seemed to have had the desired effect, because we're still happy together. |
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