January 2021

Another month of quarantine but maybe there's a little light coming--I got my first (of two) jab of the Pfizer  Covid vaccine. So here is the total of my outside contacts. Not impressive. 

Errands  etc.

1/2 Library to pick up holds.

1/8 Library returns; Lyman Orchards for produce & bread. 

1/12 ditto of 1/8

1/21 cvs

1/21-??? phone problem

1/25 covid vaccine dose 1

1/26 land phone repair (a stranger had to enter our house!)

Most of the  reading this month was good. A mixed bunch. Five from my shelves (first group), two Advance review copies (second group), and eleven from public libraries (third group plus the nonfiction). Of the fiction, Polar Vortex was the only one I didn't like at all. The Smiley, Moore, and Osman books were fun light reading. I needed that!

 

In nonfiction, The Dan Rather book was the weakest. I just didn't learn anything from it at all, certainly not what the title suggests.

 

Finally, I spent a lot more of my online time reading stuff other than the news. Still, it was such a pleasure to see competence that I became addicted to White House Press Briefings on CSPN.

 

Fiction
The Regal Lemon Tree by Saer, Juan José
That We May Live by Si'an, Chen and others, various translators (Short Chinese speculative fiction.)
Joseph Walser's Machine by Tavares, Gonçalo M.
Harmada by Noll, João Gilberto
Life Went On Anyway: Stories by Sentsov, Oleg

 

Here Lies a Father by Cassidy, Mckenzie (ARC via LibraryThing. Coming of age--surprised I liked it.)

Polar Vortex by Mootoo, Shani (ARC via LibraryThing. I didn't like it at all.)

Perestroika in Paris by Smiley, Jane
Facing the Bridge by Tawada, Yōko
Igifu by Mukasonga, Scholastique
Missing Person by Modiano, Patrick
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng
Hamnet by O'Farrell, Maggie
Shakespeare for Squirrels by Moore, Christopher
The Thursday Murder Club by Osman, Richard

Nonfiction

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Townsend, Camilla
City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World edited by Marron, Catie
What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism by Rather, Dan
      

Online

Gamey Meat: Here’s the Deal by Hank Shaw

Shaw's blog -- Hunter-Angler-Gardner-Cook -- is always a good read even if one isn't into game meat, foraging, etc. 

 

The History of Esculent Fish By Roger North. 

Includes descriptions of several edible fish and an essay on the breeding of fish and construction of fishponds. There are notes on what the fish eat, where to find them and how to catch them, but nothing about preparation and cooking. The plates, drawn and engraved by Eleazar Albin are what made me want to keep going back to this. Here is his Haddock:

The Smoky Valley  by Birger Sandzén

 I found this on Gutenberg and it was a nice introduction to an artist I'd never heard of. However the works are all in black and white so it was nice to find a resource that has them in color.

Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery 

November (fourth week) 2017 Reads

This week was a mixed bag of short stories, non-fiction, a mystery, and not much time for making notes on the books and uploading cover images. I'm really surprised that I've been pretty faithful with the Deal Me In challenge.
A lot of my reading this week had to do with places I've been.

Deal Me In

Story: The Boar-Pig (in  Beasts and Super-Beasts by Saki)
A short piece involving party crashers, a mischievous girl, and a ferocious beast. This is a gentle story, not one of Saki's macabre pieces.






Card: Ten of Diamonds.
This card from Roy at Deviant Art has nothing to do with the story. I just thought it was a fun design.








from the library....
The Lying Game by Ruth Ware (Kindle edition)


from my shelves...
Conversations on Art and Aesthetics by Hans Maes
One of my better wins. This is a keeper. 
free finished copy from publisher through Goodreads

Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky by Bryan Karetnyk (Editor/Translator)
Super anthology. 

Old Rendering Plant  by Wolfgang Hilbig: translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole
Not crazy about this one.

Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology by Eric H Cline, Glynnis Fawkes (Illustrator) (Kindle ed)
Kind of a refresher course for me. Read it mostly to get updated on recent stuff.

  

The Lawrence Durrell Travel Reader by Lawrence Durrell, Clint Willis (Editor) (Kindle ed)
And this was a bit of a trip down memory lane.

San Francisco Noir by Peter Maravelis (Editor) (Kindle ed)
I've read a bunch of these anthologies in the Akashic Noir series and this is my least favorite. I really didn't much like any of the stories.
Stories by  Domenic Stansberry, Barry Gifford, Eddie Muller, Robert Mailer Anderson, Michelle Tea, Peter Plate, Kate Braverman , David Corbet , Alejandro Murguía, Sin Soracco , Alvin Lu, Jon Longhi, Will Christopher Baer, Jim Nesbit, David Henry Sterry.

Ccaspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai (Kindle ed)
A tragic story of a Jewish family in Tehran immediately preceding the 1979 Revolution. I really liked this. 

Return to Dust (Rick Van Lam Mystery #2) by Andrew Lanh 
Set in Farmington, Connecticut with a Vietnamese-American private investigator. An ok read with nice local color.

May (second week) 2017 Reads

This week's story:    The Ice Palace (in Flappers and Philosophers, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

"The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were entrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.

Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nineteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark Darrow's ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot—being partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved—and Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps. There was a heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle."

And that, Folks, was as much as I could take. Well, I did skim enough to find that it seems to be that Sally is rumored to be engaged to a Yankee, but I just couldn't bring myself to read this story. "...her ninteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year old sill..." ????




This week's card: Eight of Diamonds. "Biba" Playing Card 

OK, so in the spirit of the story I didn't read, here is a girl resting her twenty-something-year-old-tush on a two-day-old stool.





from my "owned-but-unread" shelf...
 
Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan; Reilly Costigan-Humes (Translation), Isaac Wheeler (Translation)
In trying to save his brother's business (a gas station) Herman encounters thugs, gypsies, refugees, smugglers, ghosts, and various kinds of fanatics.Life is not easy in post-USSR Ukraine.

From my subscription to Deep Vellum Publishing





from the library...



 The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink, Bradley Schmidt (Translation)
The story starts in Germany with a painting, three obsessed men, and a woman (the model for the painting). The model's husband owns the painting, the artist steals the wife, and the third man is a lawyer representing the artist. The painting is stolen and they all--the painting, the woman, the three men--end up in Australia where the majority of the story takes place.

It's a strange "love" story, maybe more about self love, than romantic love since no one here is really able to relate to the other.



 Gutenberg find...


With a Camera in Majorca by Margaret D'Este (With Illustrations from Photographs by Mrs. R. M. King) Putnam, 1907
Not just pictures, there is a lot of prose description. It was fun to read and view this 1907 book about a place I frequently visited in the 1980s.
Also includes Ibiza and Minorca. The prose is typical of travel writing of the time and I probably would have skimmed more if I weren't so familiar with the terrain and curious about how they saw it.




online...


I finished  the MOOC   Antarctica: From Geology to Human History
This was really interesting and well organized. It's a place I'm curious about but not interested in visiting.

February 2015 Reads (week 2)

Skylight by José Saramago. translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Library book. An amazing first novel.

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko, Nina Shevchuk-Murray (Translator)
This is a huge, sweeping novel told in  straight narrative, dreams, and flashbacks. It is long (750 pages) and intense. It took me three month to read it. The amazing thing was that although it is complicated and covers a vast swath of Ukrainian history and contemporary politics, I never got lost in the many times I put it aside. Every time I picked it up I knew exactly where I had left off, even when I had set it aside for more than a week and read 4 or 5 other books in the interim. 

An amazing, rewarding, and essential read.

  
Frog by Mo Yan, Howard Goldblatt (Translation)
Free ARC from publisher through Goodreads First Reads program.
I liked this novel about a Chinese midwife who is caught up in China's population control policies. Gugu not only delivers babies, she must provide birth control information, insert IUDs, and perform abortions. The major part of the novel is told by her grand-nephew in a series of long letters. The final portion is a play based on Gugu's life. I found the play section tedious and really a slog to read.

Although the subject matter is serious and the characters struggle with difficult moral choices and tragedies, there is a warmth, humor, and sympathy in the narration. Definitely worth reading.

Online
The Wolf of Bordeaux  by Richard Lange a short story set in a French prison in 1899. Published online in The Summerset Review and included in his Sweet Nothing: Stories published this week by
Mulholland Books. Lange has links to two more of the stories on his website.

February 2015 Reads (week 1)

Bed Rest. Four days bed rest. I hate to admit it but I seem to be getting too old to shovel snow. So, gee, what do you do if you have to spend four days in bed, resting and getting waited on?

Reading, you say, Reading! you shout.

I did read, but it was sort of restless reading. I made some progress with The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko--I'm now at 89 percent and, according to Kindle I have about an hour left. I also read a few more stories in Years of Red Dust, and a couple more in Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean (a Christmas gift from my housemate/daughter).

Speaking of housemate/daughter, she did a library run between snowstorms. She was returning books for us both and getting books for herself. I didn't have any requests but, as frequently happens when she is browsing, something caught her eye that she thought I would like: Skylight by Saramago. It will have to go to the top of the pile because it's a 7-day, no renewal loan.

She also made several trips to the mailbox but that's another whole stack of books. In one of my sprier moments I went to the back door and there was a UPS package leaning against the stoop. "Stoop" was not in my orthopedic abilities, so I had to call for assistance. She rescued the package (an ARC) and sent me back to bed. So much for spry.
Light this week on the web surfing, it's a bit difficult with the sore back.


Finished this week:

A Paris Apartment by Michelle Gable
Read for French Bingo My Review

Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar
ARC from publisher via Goodreads First Reads program.
Where to begin? I loved this book, but why? 

 
The Love Book by Nina Solomon, Kaylie Jones (Editor)
ARC from publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers program
Just what I needed for this week of restless reading: High quality chick women's lit.
 
Bed rest is working. I can now stand from a seated position without the aid of a cane, I can stoop an pick up a book that has fallen to the floor,  and I can make my own lunch. I am in bed but because I want to be, not because I have to be.

Reading Saramago. Putting off reviews for another day or so because it's still uncomfortable to spend a lot of time with laptop.