July 2020

Not a good month for getting out the house because it was too hot to spend much time and energy outside and we are still not ready for indoor places. Weather was so humid that we really enjoyed the few meals we were able to eat on the outside porch.  But I found some excellent reading!

Breaks from quarantine:

7/15 produce shopping at JC Farms; Mozzicata (ice cream); Veterans Park (to eat ice cream)

7/21 to firehouse to vote (drive-up)

7/23 Shopping at Rogers Orchards
6/30 Pick up library hold (curbside)

Other diversions:

The WNBA is back! So I spent the end of July watching lots of  basketball games (six in one weekend). They are living and playing in a bubble with no on site fans but they play as hard and well as ever.
(I've watched so little television in the past five months that I forgot how to work the remote.)

Reading - Fiction (the notes are not intended as reviews, they are just to help me remember the books!):

 
The House of Deep Water  by Jeni McFarland - 4+ stars
Interview with the author at Debutiful. 

The Vanishing Half  by Brit Bennett - 4 stars
 Twins. One is black, the other passes as white.

All Adults Here by Emma Straub - 4 stars

The Restoration of Otto Laird by Nigel Packer - 4 stars
 Aging Austrian/British architect reflects on his life & work

My Part of Her by Javad Djavahery; translated from the French by Emma Ramadan - 5 stars
 Iranian Revolution

The Bear by Andrew Krivak - 4 stars
 Last person on Earth fantasy

62: A Model Kit by Julio Cortázar; translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa - 5 stars
 The "City"

Queenie Malone's Paradise Hotel by Ruth Horgon - 4 stars

Elizabeth's Field by Barbara Lockhart, Barbara - 4 stars

Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty - 4 stars

Reading - Nonfiction:

Creating Connecticut: Critical Moments That Shaped a Great State by Walter W. Woodward
 Interesting history bits. Mostly stuff I didn't know about my adopted state.
Days on the Road: Crossing the Plains in 1865  by Sarah Raymond Herndon
 Gutenberg find.  Things that side tracked me:
  "The Icarian Community" (Diary entry of May 12) The Icarians established communities in  Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and California. The one Sarah writes about was in Corning, Iowa.
   Icarians - Wikipedia

Reading - Online:

A 13th-Century Persian poet’s lessons for today
 by Joobin Bekhrad

Who Did What in Every Agatha Christie Murder Novel
 Colorful graphs by Dorothy Gambrell plotting the plots.

Bostock and Originalism
 by Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, discusses Bostock v. Clayton County. 

Forgotten Best Sellers a Project of Lapham's Quarterly.
 I haven't yet read the selection that goes with this essay, but it seems like an interesting project.