What I'm reading this week (7/8/19)

Last week I finished:

I had kind of a rough readcation last week. I didn't feel well for much of it, plus there was a lot of family drama going on, which sapped my energy and joy. I didn't get to a couple of organizing projects I was hoping to begin. Still, I did finish three books, so I guess I did accomplish something.

There is almost nothing I love more than sitting down with a Flavia de Luce mystery. I only have two more to go until I'm caught up, and I'm not exactly looking forward to the day that I do. But, at that point, you can be assured that I'll just begin the series again. Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd is the eighth in the series. In this installment, 12-year-old Flavia has just returned to Buckshaw from her short-lived stay at a girls school in Canada to find that her father is in the hospital with pneumonia. Never at a loss for things to do or ways to comfort herself, she agrees to deliver a letter to the local woodworker for the vicar's wife, when she happens upon his lifeless body strung up on the back of his bedroom door. Thus begins a journey to discover what happened and who done it. The murder in this one and the meandering search for clues isn't my favorite of the Flavia plotlines, but the actual murder cases have almost become secondary to me at this point. I think I like each book in the series more than the last. Flavia is always the same, but I grow to love her more with each book. This one ends with a bang, which I anticipated but which shook me up nonetheless. I can't wait to read the next book to find out what happens next. I recommend this series with all my heart. Just don't ever tell me if you don't love it, too. I would feel too bad. My rating: 5 stars.

To be honest, I bought Gretchen Rubin's Outer Order, Inner Calm because I buy all of Rubin's books, but I had low expectations. I have not enjoyed her last couple of books, and I find her overbearing approach more and more annoying. Still, I will read any decluttering book you put in front of me. And frankly, if my home can look as beautiful as Rubin's, I'll put up with a little annoyance by way of delivery. Well, I have to say, this ended up becoming one of my favorite of her books. It's a somewhat new approach to the genre. Instead of insisting the person overrun by clutter and disorganization follow a prescribed A to Z method of handling and clearing it, she knows folks aren't the same, and a one-size-fits-all approach won't work. Instead, she gives dozens and dozens of practical ideas from which you can take what works for you and your particular clutter issues. Each idea has its own page, and the book practically reads itself. It may be coincidence, but while reading this book I was finally able to jettison a stack of boxes and large items that had been taking up an entire corner of our basement for over a year (a project begun with Decluttering at the Speed of Life). I found the entire book helpful, and I didn't have the usual negative reaction to her bossiness that I have with her more recent work. I found this one very useful, and I can see myself returning to it. My rating: 4 stars.  

Years and years ago, before I got so disgusted with contemporary fiction that I decided to stop reading fiction forever, the last book I read that impressed me was Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and little did I know it was my introduction to what would become a favorite author upon my return to fiction decades later. I remembered next to nothing about the story when I picked it up last month, so I essentially got to read it again for the first time and decide if my fondness for it was deserved. This is the story of charming Irish-Catholic Billy Lynch who has just died. The action of the story takes place all in one day--the day of Billy's funeral. There is a lot of looking back, of course, to the days when Billy wasn't yet an alcoholic, before he married his wife of 30 years, Maeve, and when he was working to save money to bring his Irish girlfriend back to America to marry him. As all of McDermott's stories, this one is quiet. The characters are folks you could have known all your life (especially if you lived in a New York City borough in the 1950s and were Irish-Catholic). Her plots never seem to wander very far from Irish characters in New York City in the 1900s (of course, I haven't read them all...). I love that about her work. I liked this book, but I did find it a little slow and draggy in parts. Her books seldom have much by way of plot, excelling instead in characterization. This one just felt a little long to me. But I still think my younger self was on to something, and stopping her search for good fiction after this one wasn't a bad move, although I'm very glad to have found her The Ninth Hour and Someone upon my return to fiction. My rating: 3.5 stars.

 

This week I'll be reading:

I've really gotten into this one.

My evening reads:

 

I'm enjoying all of these, but progress feels a little slow.

My current audiobook:

 

Not quite what I was hoping for. I'll post a review next week.

 

 

 

 

July 2019 reading list

It's been difficult putting together monthly reading lists lately. Not only have I been fickle in my choices, but there's been a high demand for audiobooks because it's summertime. I think a couple of these books were on my June reading list, but since my holds didn't come in, they were pushed to July. So we'll see which of these books I'm able to read (and listen to) this month. I'm taking some time off early in the month, so I'll be starting off the month reading the eighth Flavia de Luce book.

Fiction

 

Memoirs & Biographies

 

 

Nonfiction

Poetry (both re-reads)

 

 

 

 

June 2019 wrap-up

June was a frustrating month reading-wise. I had trouble settling on books, had trouble with library holds, had trouble with finding many of my reads rather "meh". I re-read three books this month, and I tackled some things that have been on my TBR for awhile. I did score six books 4-star or above, but I still end the month feeling like I'm not loving much of what I'm reading. Hopefully July will be a bit of a revamp. As always, one-word reviews are linked to full reviews.

whiney

3 stars

forgettable

3 stars

desperate

3 stars

fun

3.5 stars

interesting

4.5 stars

hateful

2 stars

beautiful

4 stars

outstanding

5 stars

exceptional

4 stars

wonderful

5 stars

fascinating

3.5 stars

excellent

4.5 stars

charming

3 stars

"cool"

2.5 stars

good

4 stars

quiet

What I'm reading this week (7/1/19)

Last week I finished:

I held out on the popular Maybe You Should Talk to Someone for as long as I could. I wasn't particularly interested in learning about therapy, but numerous glowing reviews broke me down, and I sat down to read the book. I'm so glad I did. It really is a wonderful book about being a therapist, being in therapy, and how people can change their lives. This is Lori Gottlieb's memoir of being a therapist in/near Los Angeles, if I remember correctly. We meet several of her patients and listen in on their sessions. It is also the story of Gottlieb's therapy--yes, at the same time that she's giving therapy--while she tries to get over a very sudden breakup. This is a book about humanity and how people react to change as well as exact change in their lives. It takes you behind the scenes of therapy sessions, from both the therapist's and patient's perspectives, and it also gives a lot of information about the ways to dissect any given problem. It reinforces that people can change their lives, that reactions are more important than the precipitating act, and that happiness is always up to the individual. The patients Gottlieb gives us a peek at are quite interesting. There's the narcissist television producer, a young woman facing terminal cancer, an elderly woman who has numerous regrets about her past, and a young disengaged woman who can't stop making bad choices. And then there's Gottlieb herself who heads to therapy (she gets a referral "for a friend" from another therapist friend to avoid a conflict of interest) to come to terms with her recent breakup, but finds the problem is something much deeper. This is a well-written book about the human condition. It was engaging and never slow or boring. I enjoyed every page. My rating: 5 stars.

Camino Island is my third John Grisham book, and it's one of my favorites. I ended up trying it on audio because my last read by the author was a little disappointing (read my review of Calico Joe here), and I kind of wish I would have read this one in paper. The audio was great, but I would have enjoyed the unfolding over a longer period of time than the audio took. The story is this: a gang of thieves steals the original handwritten manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books, including The Great Gatsby, from the library archive vaults of Princeton University. We follow the books underground to the rare books black market, where frustrated author Mercer goes to stay on Camino Island in Florida to work on her novel which was due to her publisher three years ago. There she meets rare books buyer/seller Bruce Cable and is asked to be a part of sting operation to find the books and return them to Princeton. This is the perfect summer read, light, suspenseful--plus it's a book about books. Working in a university library, I was especially interested in the heist and recovery aspects of the book, and I sometimes felt that all the time spent describing Mercer's summer on Camino Island was a very slow buildup to the resolution. Still, it was an enjoyable book, and I liked it a great deal. My rating: 4 stars.

I don't even know what to tell you about Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. I listened to this one, too, but I'd have to give my listening a grade of "D". I was just not interested in the story from the start. I don't think I much care for that genre of 1930s hard-boiled mysteries where the men are all barrel-chested and manly and the women are all described in terms of their shapeliness and physical assets. There's way too much cigarette-smoking, drink-making, and emotional "coolness" for me. The leading man, Same Spade, has zero emotions, but the others were often overly emotional. The audio sounded like a radio play, with the secondary characters sounding like exaggerated cartoon villains and buffoons. The plot is simple: folks are in search of a bejeweled falcon statue from Malta that has spent time in various nefarious hands over the centuries. You don't know who to trust, and lots of folks get whacked. I have both watched the movie and listened to the book now and I still can't tell you who was straight, who double-crossed who, if the statue was recovered, or who ended up with it. And frankly, I don't care about any of it. I was absolutely unable to listen to and follow the story due to lack of interest. And frankly, it didn't take me long to decide I didn't care if I listened closely to this one. We read and we learn, and I learned this genre may not be for me. I shall move on without guilt. My rating: 2.5 stars

I love Sara Pennypacker's Clementine books, and when she finished that series, she started the Waylon series (Clementine makes an appearance in each book), of which Waylon! The Most Awesome of All is the third installment (my review of book two can be found here). Waylon is a budding scientist who wants nothing more than to take his dog Dumpster Eddy home, but since his mother is allergic to dogs, he must keep him at the local police station instead and visit him every day after school. In this book, Waylon's big sister, Neon, is producing an imaginative play about the life stages. Their father has the staring role. But when Dad needs to see someone in Hollywood to (hopefully) sell his screenplay on the same night as the play AND on the same night as Waylon's Science Expo where he has a chance to meet a much-admired scientist, someone will have to sacrifice for the others. Who will it be? In a secondary plot, Mom has been seen exiting another family's car, and she's been very secretive lately. What's up with that? This was a good continuation of the story, and I liked it. Waylon is no Clementine, but that's okay. We do get a resolution to the Dumpster Eddy sadness, but I hope that doesn't mean the series is over. I recommend this series (as well as the Clementine series) to young readers. I'd say these are about the third grade level. They're wonderful books, though they do sometimes include some liberal themes that you may or may not be comfortable sharing with children so young. In this one, the female principal shows up to Neon's play with her wife. It shocked me, but maybe it won't shock your third-grader. My rating: 3 stars.

I first read Poetry 180 in 2003 or 2004, and many of the poems in it have become fast friends. In fact, on this re-reading, I was amazed to discover the source of my familiarity of dozens of my favorite poems. It's so easy to forget where you first encountered a poem, but this book brought that back for many of my faves. Billy Collins is an excellent editor here, and his mission is achieved. As his poet laureate project, he put together a set of 180 contemporary poems that would be accessible for high school students, and he encourage schools to read one each day of the schoolyear either over the public address system or at morning assembly. He encouraged schools just to read the poem, not to talk about it, dissect it, or ask for reactions. His endgame was simply to get good poetry into kids' heads. He followed this collection up with 180 More. You can find the whole project, including a link to all 180 of the poems at the Library of Congress's website. There are so many great poems in this book. It really felt like going home. I didn't, however, give the book a 5-star review on re-reading because I was too familiar with the poems. This might seem unfair, but at least 2 of my stars are always given based on how much I enjoyed a book, and I didn't always enjoy reading this one because I knew the poems so well. Perhaps that's not fair in this case because the original presentation was so good I internalized the poems for the next 15 or 16 years, but there you have it. My review: 4.5 stars.

Five years ago almost to the day, I first read George Will's A Nice Little Place on the North Side about the Chicago Cubs baseball franchise and Wrigley Field. This is a love story, a fan letter, a trove of Cubs/Wrigley trivia, and tangent after tangent of baseball lore. The book came out before the Cubs broke their 108-year quest to win the World Series in 2016. How the city must have partied that day! I encourage you to read my original review here because it is much better than anything I can write five years later. Upon re-reading it, I was impressed by how well I articulated the magic of the book. I have to say I did not love this book as much upon second reading (Is it because they finally made it to the World Series in the meantime and I felt the story was finally resolved?), but perhaps some books are just better the first time around. My rating: 3.5 stars.

This week I'll finish:

I'm enjoying this re-read. I remember next to nothing from my first reading.

This week I'll be reading:

I. Cannot. Wait.

My Kindle re-read:

Kindle reading is pretty slow these days. Sigh.

My evening reads:

I'm enjoying all of these, and I'm making good progress on each--especially considering they're all July reads!

My next audiobook:

I was happy to see that a library in our system finally bought a copy of this one. I wanted to read it, but audio might be better for this one for me.