August 2024 Reads

This month's towering book stack takes me back to those endless summers of childhood, when I had nothing but time, and I'd lug armfuls of books home from the bookmobile to read away those lazy August days. Let's start from the bottom of this pile.

L.M. Montgomery. C and I went to Prince Edward Island to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. In preparation, I reread Anne of Green Gables, and the only copy I could find was this enormous annotated edition. Some of the annotations were helpful (when they noted, for example, what real-life towns Montgomery's made-up towns were based on), while others were kind of obvious. The volume also includes a biography of Montgomery, which I found fascinating and good preparation for visiting the Green Gables Homesite. While in PEI I purchased a partial set (the first four books) of the Anne series, in nice hardcover editions, and read the second two (Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island), plus half (so far) of the fourth. I'd never before read beyond Avonlea, because I always found that Anne lost too much of her spunk after the first book and became too much of a goody-goody. Rereading Avonlea and Island, I still find that to be true. (But at least I know now why--she married a Presbyterian minister after writing Anne.) Another book I picked up at one of the historic sites on PEI is The Alpine Path, which starts out as an autobiography of Montgomery's writing career, but ends up a travelog of a honeymoon trip to Scotland. I enjoyed her impressions of her travels, but I was disappointed that she didn't continue to write about writing--I would have been interested to know how marriage and motherhood affected her writing.

Shirley Jackson. I took myself on a little pre-birthday shopping trip a couple weekends ago and popped into a bookshop, where I happened to run across The Letters of Shirley Jackson. I'm a huge Jackson fan, and this collection of her correspondence was a fascinating read. After the initial bunch (love letters to Stanley written during school breaks from college, which are a little cringe-worth, and I can't imagine her wanting to have them published), they are mostly to her parents, her agents, and a few friends. Her letter writing possesses all the characteristics of her nonfiction writing about raising children (collected in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons)--witty, clever, and charming. Only a handful of (likely unsent) letters delve into the darkness of her fiction world, letters in which she alludes to poor treatment from her parents and her husband. These and the references to drinking, prescription pills, diets, and a spell of agoraphobia and subsequent therapy hint at the unhappiness and instability behind her incredible writing productivity and the likely causes of her untimely death. Reading Jackson's letters made me want to revisit her fiction, so I picked up a short story collection called Dark Tales, which includes many of the Jackson's delightfully creepy stories. I need to go back and reread many of them to learn how she's able to instill that pit of dread in the reader's stomach from the first word.

Nature Writing. I picked up a copy of Janisse Ray's essay collection Wild Spectacle. I follow Ray's Substack (Trackless Wild and Journey in Place), and I really enjoy her outlook on life and her approach to appreciating and preserving wild places and communities in all their guises. This book includes many tales of travel and adventure and learning from the natural world and the people who inhabit it in different locals around the world.

Poetry. Since about April, I'd been reading about a poem a day from You Are Here, the anthology of nature poetry collected by US Poet Laureate Ada Limon. I had a routine of walking our trail, sitting on the bench overlooking the river, making a sketch or some observations, writing a short poem of my own, and reading one from the book. Around mid-June, when bugs and poison ivy came out and the trail became overgrown, I fell out of my habit, and had to work at remembering to read a poem here and there, but finally this moth finished reading them all. There's a wonderful range of poetry styles, subjects, and approaches to writing about the natural world among this collection, and I expect I'll return to it again and again.

Mystery. From the $2 shelf at the used bookstore, I picked up Garden of Malice by Susan Kenny, an author I'd never heard of, although it appears she is (was?) local (having taught at Colby College). This book was a little reminiscent of a Barbara Michael's-style modern Gothic, with the heroine traveling from the US to England and finding herself ensconced in a big, brooding house with a bunch of kooks. Although the story itself was a little far-fetched (why did no one call the police with people dropping dead all over the place), I enjoyed it. 

Audiobooks. A friend recommended the audiobooks of The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch (narrated by Kobna Hodbrook-Smith). They're police procedurals with wizards, magic, river spirits, and all kinds of mayhem and hilarity (despite the murders). Think Harry Potter meets Inspector Morse meets Monty Python. C and I started the first one (Midnight Riot) during a drive to Vermont in July and finished it and most of the second one (Moon Over Soho) during our drive to and from Canada this moth. We finished Soho and most of the third book (Whispers Underground) by listening to a chapter or two after we go to bed at night. Either the third book is a lot more confusing than the first two, or one or the other of us keeps dozing off while we listen, because we're both kind of lost as to what's going on. I think I'm generally not great at aural processing, because even when I was a captive audience in the car, I was often lost as to what's happening. So when I saw a copy of Midnight Riot at the used bookstore, I snagged it and read it (which didn't help with my confusion over Whispers, because I was reading it concurrently with listening to that one), and I felt a lot clearer about the complicated story. I really love Hodbrook-Smith's narration (he does an amazing job with all the voices), so I want to stick with listening to the rest of these books, but I think I'm going to have to read them as well to clear up any confusion.

Finally, I had a lot of household projects going on this month--painting and cleaning and sorting and rearranging (including going through every single one of our books, getting rid of about six bags full, dusting the remainders, and organizing them neatly back of their shelves. To make these tasks a little less tedious, I re-listened to The Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet that Missed, and The Last Devil to Die). I've made a habit of listening to these every fall when a new book in the series comes out, but since there won't be one this year (Osman has a book from another series coming out instead), I was happy to have an excuse to listen to them again. They never get old.

​Phew! That's a lot of books. What have you been reading this month?