I’m not usually a big fan of new year’s resolutions, but this year I have one that I am really going to stick to. I’ve decided that I need my brain to focus on one thing for long periods of time, and so I am committing to reading 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction books in 2023. That’s about a book a week and I am very excited to delve into the ever growing pile on my nightstand. This week I finished Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, a dystopian vision of a possible near-future USA. This book was chosen for one of the two book clubs I’ve joined to help keep me on track with my reading.
Winter Reading: The Marriage Portrait
So it’s been a while since I’ve posted any of my reading recommendations, and it’s not because I have stopped reading. It’s because all of my previous book posts featured my old hound dog, Daisy, who died last year. I simply could not bring my self to take a photo of a book without her. Now I have a nice big stuffed animal Basset Hound and I’ve decided to let it be a very poor substitute for Daisy, but to honor her memory. This month I devoured Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait for one of my two book clubs. It was a lusciously-written page-turner, and although I guessed the ending halfway through the book, it was still a satisfyingly fun read.
Winter Reading: The Plague by Albert Camus
Last week, I found myself overwhelmed by the possibility that we could be looking at another year or two of pestilence. To ward off the despondence (because misery does love company) I hunkered down with a blanket and a copy of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel, The Plague. I devoured it cover-to-cover for the first time in over thirty years. I previously read it back in 1986 when fears of a world-ending nuclear war between the United States and the USSR far outweighed any considerations of a rampaging virus.
Back in March and April 2020, when the first pandemic reading lists appeared online, I resisted the bandwagoning trend to read [or reread] books like The Decameron or the The Plague. It seemed hysterical and a bit premature and so hard to imagine that we could still be living this exasperating reality almost two years later. But Camus’s novel exudes true brilliance, and even those who consumed it back in early 2020 will find it all the more poignant now. One of my favorite quotes:
In this respect [the citizens of Oran] had adapted themselves to the very condition of the plague, all the more potent for its mediocrity. None of us was capable any longer of an exalted emotion; all had trite, monotonous feelings. “It’s high time it stopped,” people would say, because in times of calamity the obvious thing is to desire its end, and in fact they wanted it to end. But when making such remarks, we felt none of the passionate yearning or fierce resentment of the early phase; we merely voiced one of the few clear ideas that lingered in the twilight of our minds. The furious revolt of the first weeks had given place to a vast despondency, not to be taken for resignation, though it was nonetheless a sort of passive and provisional acquiescence.
Our fellow citizens had fallen into line, had adapted themselves, as people say, to the situation, because there was no way of doing otherwise. Naturally they retained the attitudes of sadness and suffering, but they had ceased to feel their sting. Indeed, to some, Dr. Rieux among them, this precisely was the most disheartening thing: that the habit of despair is worse than despair itself (page 180-181).
Winter reading: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful book about a book and the power of words spanning generations. It’s about all of the stories that link us together and the beauty of writing. It’s a 600-page novel with three different sets of protagonists in different time frames whose stories all somehow converge at the end. The first 150-pages of exposition can be a little confusing and hard to follow, but it is definitely worth it. One of the best novels I have read in a very long time, and I just re-read The Plague by Camus.
One of my favorite quotes: “That’s what the gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.” page 439
Winter Reading: Cafe Europa Resisted
“…in all former communist countries in eastern Europe, it is difficult to mention the merits of communism, a system that, in a short time, brought modernization and changed an agrarian society into an urbanized, industrial one. It meant general education as well as the emancipation of women; this has to be recognized, even though such changes were accomplished by a totalitarian regime.”
Cheerful holiday reading
Nothing like a little Fourier and Kropotkin to get the holiday season off to the right start.
Winter reading: Woman on the Edge of Time
So, I actually didn’t like this novel all that much, especially the ending, but I did enjoy the utopian world building.
Part III: Arc of a Scythe Trilogy - The Toll by Neal Shusterman
Okay, no more YA fiction for me. I stayed up until 2:00am finishing this book last night and now I am utterly exhausted! But what a fun ride.
Part II of the Arc of a Scythe Trilogy: Thunderhead
So fun to read a book with a plot!
Loving Scythe by Neal Shusterman
So I don’t read novels all that often, and I almost never read YA, but my daughter has been on me for years to read this book and I loved it. The AI in this world is benevolent and it is such a nice change from all of the YA dystopias out there. I am really pleased that she kept pestering me about this.
Winter Reading: Momo by Michael Ende
The men in grey are stealing time… A beautiful critique of modernity by the German author of The Never Ending Story.
Winter Reading - The Way to Paradise
This is basically a fictionalized double biography of the Utopian Socialist, Flora Tristan, and her grandson, the painter Paul Gaugin by Llosa. I read mostly for the background on Tristan, which he lifted directly from her own diaries and writings.
Reading Bogdanov's Red Star
The grades are all in and the reviews done, so I finally have a little time for reading. I finished this amazing book last night. So prescient!
My Guilty Pleasure
Well the grades are finally in, so I have had the pleasure of diving into one of my favorite genres of reading: the graphic novel. I binge-read all 39 issues of The Wicked and the Divine, reread some old favorites (Watchmen and Maus), and am now diving into Y the Last Man. Because I read a lot for my work, it is hard to find the time to read for pleasure. So the best thing about reading graphic novels is that I never have to have a highlighter or a pencil to mark any quotes or passages that I might use later in my own writing. I just get to lose myself in the stories!
