 I just wrote an entire book post and it got swallowed by the internet, which is something that used to happen all the time in my early blogging days but hasn't in a while. So I'm giving myself a free pass this month and, instead of trying to recreate the post, just listing the titles, authors, and a three-word description/review.
Fiction Street of the Five Moons by Elizabeth Peters: Madcap Rome caper. Once there Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy: Scotland, wolves, redemption. A Sinister Revenge by Deanna Raybourn: Victorian lady naturalist!!! The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King: Holmes mentors teenager. Nonfiction An Immense World by Ed Yong: Animals perceive much! The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay: Live-changing joy.
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 Almost every time I look at one of my book stacks, I think, "This collection of books makes no sense." April's stack might be the weirdest one yet. Then again, there might be a common thread that I can't see, other than "Andrea's omnivorous reading taste." What do you think?
Fiction Borrower of the Night by Elizabeth Peters. I've written enough about Elizabeth P. in this and my previous blog that I probably don't need to say much. This is the first Vicky Bliss novel. It was published the year I was born! There are, for that reason, some corny and out of date ways that people talk and act, but it has overall aged well, and I love the ending. Chef's kiss! Bind Me Tighter Still by Lara Ehrlich. I listened to Lara's podcast, Writer-Mother-Monster, back in the day, so I was intrigued to hear her talk about her first novel on the Literary Mama podcast (This Mama is Lit), and I picked up a copy right away. It's a mother-daughter story, of a daughter coming of age, and what a mother will sacrifice to protect her child, but with the unusual twist of the mother having been a siren who gave up her tail to go onto land as a human. It's a bit of a retelling of The Little Mermaid (much darker than the Disney version), set in a carnival atmosphere. I found it very raw and compelling. The Plague by Albert Camus. There was a review of a collection of Camus's notebooks recently in The New York Review of Books, which I found very interesting, and while I'd like to read that book some day, I also wanted to read more of Camus's fiction (having reread The Stranger not long ago). So I picked up The Plague, which is about a town in Algeria that is beset by rats and literal (as in bubonic) plague and is subsequently cut off from the rest of civilization. The story follows the doctor, as well as a small, ragtag group of his compatriots, as they struggle through the difficult days of trying to slow the spread of disease and watching people die. The parallels to our own recent pandemic--especially people's reactions to limitations imposed to protect others--were stark. I can's say I enjoyed the book, exactly, it was after all about plague, but I found it engaging and insightful about human nature. Nonfiction The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. Whenever I'm in a used bookstore, I look for this book to pass on to other people who I think need a little more delight in their days. I also usually keep a couple of copies lying around the house that I can pick up and read excerpts from whenever I'm in similar need. This paperback copy, which looks like a dog took a bite out of the front cover, is one of these used bookstore finds, and it happened to be the copy I picked up when I decided last month to re-(re-)read the whole thing, cover to cover, and it is now the only one I have in my possession, because I realized last week when I was casting about for things to give my three children for their three May birthdays three days apart that I had three hard-cover copies of the book (my original, purchased new, plus two used, bought at $3 and $5 apiece, such is the state of inflation these days). On the cover of each, I pasted sticky note that said "This book will change your life. (Heart) Mama." It's true--it changed my life, and it will change yours as well. The Book of (More) Delights, which I'm rereading now, will change your life more, but you need to read the OG first, and I haven't discovered any of The Book of (More) Delights in the used bookstores yet. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris. Fulfilling a similar need--the need for laughter, for joy--in an altogether different way (less earnest, more sardonic; fewer dandelions, more seedy hotel rooms). I'm not sure if it was a reread or only that I'd heard some of the essays on This American Life or at a live show in the past. At any rate, I always enjoy Sedaris's darkly funny telling of family stories, and this one didn't disappoint. Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery. I grew up with Gorey, from the illustrations in John Bellairs novels to the title illustrations of Masterpiece Mystery to the occasional book, like The Gashlycrumb Tinies, that got misfiled in the children's section of the bookmobile. I adore his intensely crosshatched drawing style, and his weirdly nonsensical stories, but I didn't know much about the man behind the art. At the beginning this biography, Dery writes, "After he died, struck down by a heart attack in 2000, a joke made the rounds among his fans: During his lifetime, most people assumed [Gorey] was British, Victorian, and dead. Finally, at least one of the above was true." I'm sorry to admit that I fell among the "most people" (well, if I didn't actually think he was Victorian, I assumed he was from a much olden-days-ier time than the mid-to-late 20th century). I was delighted to be set straight by this book, and even more delighted to learn about Gorey's weird fascinations and compulsions, the way all his varied interests fed into his creative process, and the ways that he just did the work he wanted to do without worrying about markets (or, heaven forfend, "platform") and it all worked out rather well for him. Graphic Memoirs I don't often read comics or graphic novels, but both of these books kind of jumped off the shelves at two different bookstores I was browsing around with no real intent (reason #972 to have bricks-n-mortar book stores and libraries that carry actual, physical books). And I loved both and inspired by the idea of--and two very different approaches to--visual storytelling. Belonging by Nora Krug tells the story of the author's journey of returning to her native Germany from the US and hunting down old records to figure out what role her grandparents had played in the Nazi regime and WWII, to figure out how much blood they had on their hands. It's a beautifully illustrated, deeply compelling story of what it means to collaborate or resist a totalitarian regime, that feels intensely important in our day and age. Can't We Talk about Something Pleasant? by Roz Chast relates the cartoonist's experience of caring for--to the extent she could and the extent they would allow her to--her elderly parents through their last years and final demise. It's a brutally honest, heartfelt book about one of the most challenging and least talked about parts of life.  This is one of the shorter books stacks I've had in a while. I blame the Victorian novelist up there, plus a couple other longish books that I started in March and am still working on. Let's start with the Victorian.
Fiction A friend of mine and I had both *wanted* to read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins for a while, but neither of us had gotten around to it, and we decided the only way to make it happen was to read it together. It turned out to be not nearly the Dickensian slog I was expecting. It was in fact very engaging and humorous, and though it seems like there's not much to the mystery (it's hailed as the first detective story), the reader doesn't know *really* what happened until right up until the end, and there were several good twists. Plus the characters, who alternate POVs, are hilarious. Big recommend from me, and I'll be checking out some other Wilkie Collins works. Nonfiction I've been slowly working my way through Maggie Smith's Dear Writer, in which she references her memoir about her divorce. Intrigued, I picked up You Could Make this Place Beautiful and ended up reading it almost all in one (very late) night. It's written in very short sections, which read like mini essays or prose poems. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking book. Finally, I reread Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders for about the third time (you can read my review from of the book from a few years ago here). I still love Nezhukumutathil's exuberant, colorful style and the way she somehow combines a gob-smacked sense of wonder about the natural world, near and far, with a steely eyed awareness of humanity's darker side. I'd loved the book so much, I bought her second book of essays, Bite by Bite, as soon as it came out a couple years ago, but I had trouble getting through it. It's a collection of essays about different foods--mostly fruits but also some spices and a few dishes like waffles and halo halo. Maybe I couldn't get into it because I'd already read several of the essays when they first came out in Orion, or maybe we're all saturated with food writing because every time we look up a recipe online we have to read about the author's grandmother's aunt's sister's neighbor who first assembled the ingredients. Whatever it was, I seem to have gotten over it, because this time when I picked it up and started it again from the beginning, I enjoyed it much more, while gaining an appreciation for foods I eat regularly and learning about a few unfamiliar ones foods I'd like to try.  My February book stack, despite falling mostly in the crime genre, covers a pretty wide range of styles and time periods. I'll keep this intro short, because the blurbs will be long. They'll also contain some spoilers, so be forewarned.
Nonfiction The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Every single person I mentioned this book to looked at me like I was deranged. A history of notebooks? What could be more boring? Au contraire! What could be more fascinating? Turns out, those little bound stacks of paper played a role in society's progress in the areas of economics and finance; exploration, navigation, and shipping; art and engineering; literature; and much more. Each aspect of notebook history is told through stories of individuals and their notebooks (famous notebook-keepers, like Leonardo DaVinci and Charles Darwin, and lots of people you've never heard of). The only thing that could have made this book better is a timeline of the history of the notebook mapping out the many overlapping threads and stories told within the book. Fiction Almost Midnight by Paul Doiron. This is the last of a stack of books from the Mike Bowditch, renegade game warden series I started in January. As I mentioned in my post last month, they're fast-paced page-turners and a great distraction from doomscrolling. The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dion by Ron Curry. I'm going to say more about this book than I usually do, because I've been thinking a lot about it since I read it, and this is one of the blurbs where I might edge into spoiler territory. This book had an intriguing, if somewhat absurd, premise: what if there was a female organized crime kingpin in...Waterville, Maine? And what if that kingpin gets on the wrong side of an even bigger kingpin based in...Quebec? So that's fun, and the story for the most part delivers on the premise. It's structured a bit like a Netflix series, with very fast-paced, high-action (and I'm not gonna lie, violent) scenes, alternating among different characters' points of view. (Do not mistake me for implying that it's badly written, because it's extremely well done. And hey, if Ron Curry can get a Netflix deal out of it, more power to him.) The book also includes some interesting history about the French Canadian populations in Maine, with a revenge fantasy element related to that history, which very satisfying, until, like all revenge stories, it leads to bad places. It's also a lot more violent that what I normally read, and while the violence was offset, or defused, by some humor, there was at least one outright hilarious, comical scene that felt out of place considering the stakes. Finally, one last complaint: there are two major characters whose names are Bruce and Bates (not to mention Babs). Writers do this all the time (myself included), and it can be so confusing, such as in this case, when one of these characters takes the decisive action that shifts the whole trajectory of the narrative and seals the fates for most of the other characters, but I thought it was the other character, because their names are too similar, and I couldn't figure out why he did what he did. Heartwood by Amity Gage. (Again, spoiler alert.) This is the story of a woman disappears while hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine, and of the people trying to find her. I was super engaged the whole time I was reading it. I loved the missing woman's diary entires, her close, careful attention to the natural world and how that world shrank to tiny forests of moss as she grew weaker and weaker. I adored the voice of her hiking buddy, an atypical AT hiker who had to leave the trail early, as told through interviews with a game warden. And I enjoyed the point of view of the game warden in charge of the search (although I kept thinking, what would Mike Bowditch do in this situation?). But after I finished I felt a lingering dissatisfaction and have been poking at that to figure out the source. First on my list of irritations: the cause of the woman's getting lost--a sort-of kidnapping--felt both unlikely and underdeveloped, like a thriller plot was trying to be shoehorned into an entirely different kind of novel. Second, the elderly woman at a retirement home in Connecticut who discovers the final clue for finding the woman also felt hard to believe and also a little grafted onto the overall story. But these are minor complaints compared to my biggest issue. The book is endorsed by Jenna-effing-Bush, and I was trying to figure it out: why would a book that glorifies the natural world and eloquently demonstrates the challenges women face in historically male spaces (the outdoor world, law enforcement, and science), as well as the challenges a large man of color (the hiking partner) endured on the AT be promoted by a Republican? Then it hit me: the characters who try to move outside their socially accepted roles fail spectacularly: the woman hiker nearly dies; the Black hiker has to return home for family reasons; the woman scientist loses her daughter through being to focused on her science. And the one who succeeds, the woman game warden who runs the operation that eventually rescues the hiker, gives up her career and her chance for love with another woman in order to take on a caretaker role with her dying mother and young nieces, as she resigns, moves away, and becomes a camp counselor of all degradations. The more I think about it, the more nauseated I become at the book's retrograde politics. It seems weird to me that the author, a professor at Yale, might have intentionally made this the point of the book--and she might not have done it intentionally--but these days any horrible thing is possible. Great Cases of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. How about a little palette cleanser after all that? While I've seen a million dramatizations of the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, unbelievably I've never read any of the stories. I picked this collection up at the used book store recently, and tore right through them. I thought they might get boring and repetitive, especially since there's so little personal about Watson and Holmes, but I found them thoroughly engaging, and the puzzles at the center of each were intriguing and fun to try to solve along the way. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Continuing on the classic crime fiction path, I fully expected to find Chandler's hardboiled detective voice cheesy, having seen it parodied so often in films and cartoons, but I found it delightful, except of course his thoroughly retrograde views on women and any non-WASP characters. I'll be poring over his pages next time I'm stuck for a clever metaphor. Lady Susan by Jane Austen. I like to revisit a Jane Austen novel every winter, but this year I picked up a new-to-me volume (it's nice when 250-year-old writers can still put new work in front of you). Lady Susan is an epistolatory novel about a society widow who is notorious in her circles for stealing other women's men. The letters it's told through are delightfully catty, and it was fun to figure out whether Lady Susan is the charming, demure lady she portrays herself to be or the conniving seductress her acquaintances believe her to be. (It doesn't take long to figure it out, Lady Susan shows her true nature in her letters to a close friend.) It's also a short book, perfect for reading in a winter afternoon's bubble bath. I bought this beautiful cloth-bound hardcover at the local indie bookstore, and now I want a whole collection of Jane Austen's works in these covers.  Am I still doing book posts in 2026? It looks like I am. It's a habit at this point, and I suppose my version of a book journal, which is something I've never been able to keep (on paper, in an actual journal) for more than a day or so, despite being an inveterate documentarian of every other aspect of my life.
My January reads (meaning books I completed in January--there are several floating around that I've been reading but didn't finish or have been dabbling in now and then and might never finish) are all fiction, which is a kind of rare occurrence for me, and the stack seems a little smaller than usual. We were in Puerto Rico for the first nine days of the month, and while I normally put a fair amount of time into researching and selecting books to complement a trip, with the holidays coming right before our trip and all that entails, I didn't have the time. So two days before we left, I searched "books that take place in Puerto Rico" online and, armed with two or three of the lists that popped up, headed to the nearby big box bookstore and combed the shelves for the authors listed. I found these three, making this is less of a definitive selection of books to read while on vacation in PR, than a "what the Augusta Maine Barnes & Noble happened to have in stock" selection. Nevertheless, I was pretty happy with the results. First up, I read Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzales, picking it first, I'm not gonna lie, because of the colorful cover. This is a contemporary book (taking place around the time of Hurricane Maria), and in fact only a small portion of it takes place in Puerto Rico--most of the action is in Brooklyn--but it gives a really interesting portrayal of the Puerto Rican diaspora, gentrification in New York, and some of the modern politics and recent history around the question of statehood, US exploitation of the island, etc. It made me realize that our guidebook glossed over these issues to a pretty significant extent. It's also a really intriguing story of family dynamics, political intrigue, and finding one's purpose in life. And also a sweet love story. I really enjoyed it. Going much further back in the past, The Taste of Sugar by Marisel Vera begins around the time of the Spanish-American War, right after Puerto Rico gained liberation from Spain and just as it was taken over by the US, going from one cruel and exploitative/extractive master to another. The story centers around Valentina, a young woman from Ponce who marries a coffee farmer and moves to the hills. The economic system forced on the small-time coffee planters makes their life a marginal one, and then a hurricane destroys what little they have left. Valentina and her husband and children decide to travel to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations, amid promises of prosperity which of course are a pack of lies. It's a devastating narrative and indictment of horrific, racist, classist, violent US policies that way predate our current time. Also, it's an inspiring story of Valentina growing from a spoiled city girl to a resourceful farmer's wife and mother to a bit of a revolutionary. Finally, The Storyteller's Death by Ann Davila Cardinal is a coming of age story of a girl from New Jersey who spends the summers in Puerto Rico with her mother's family, feeling like she doesn't fit in in either place. The book follows her from childhood through her teenage years, at which point, after her grandmother's death, she begins to witness, and experience, some of the stories she used to hear as a young child, only they play out in a much more disturbing fashion than what she was told. Over time, she begins to unravel a tragic story that affected her beloved great aunt's happiness and her great-grandfather's life. The book takes place in the 1970s and 80s and also touches on 20th century Puerto Rican political and social issues, including the question of statehood or independence and intra-island racism and classism. After our return, I picked up a handful of Paul Doiron's Mike Bowditch, renegade game warden, mysteries (Knife Creek, Stay Hidden, and one more that I didn't finish until this month) and plowed through them, enjoying the escapism from the horrors of January 2026 in the USofA. There's nothing like a page-turner to keep you from picking up your phone every five minutes to check and see if a certain someone has popped his clogs yet.  One of the most fraught decision to make when traveling (other than where to go and how to get there and where to stay and what to do when you're there and, of course, how to pay for it all) is what to bring for journaling supplies. (I wrote about this some in my Quebec City Travel Journal post.) For our trip to Puerto Rico earlier this month, I opted to go with a Sillman & Birn Zeta Series 5.5 x 8.5 landscape journal. The paper was the perfect balance of heavy enough to take a little water but not so thick and toothy that I didn't want to write on it. At 26 sheets (52 pages), it was the perfect length for a 10-day trip (~5 pages/day plus a couple bonus pages).  I'd been inspired by this series of sketches (above) that I saw at the Farnsworth Museum in the fall, and I wanted to try something similar in my travel journal. Unfortunately, I neglected to take a picture of the interpretive sign, so I don't know who the artist is (it was part of the "Joan Jonas: An Island Departure with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson" exhibition, so probably--maybe--Joan Jonas?) or what the medium was. It looks like a combination of colored pencil (or possibly pastel) and watercolor, possibly even watercolor pencil. I played around with watercolor pencils (which I already owned), and was able to create a similar effect, but the colors weren't as vibrant as I wanted, so I bought myself a set of Derwent Inktense Pencils and brought those, along with a water brush, a pencil, a few pens, a pencil sharpener (used once or twice but you'd miss it if you didn't have it), and my Ivy photo sticker printer, plus a few other items I never used (ruler, watercolor set, washi tape). The pencils take up a lot more space than a tiny watercolor kit, but are so much more manageable and dry much faster. Before we left on the trip, I put a map of our destination on the first page of the journal, as I always do, but this time did it in the style of (possibly?) Joan Jonas. I love this loose, scribbly way of drawing. It's so freeing, and I employed it on later pages, as you will see. On our return, I added a photo sticker of myself in front of a mural at one of our guest houses and some pressed flowers, including a big, beautiful bunch of bougainvillea.  I'm working on striking a better balance between text and images. Of course my journals lean more heavily toward words, because I'm a writer, but I'm pretty happy with where I've landed ratio-wise with this one. An interesting thing I've discovered, however, is that at the same time that I've tried to make my travel journals more visually appealing, what I write in them becomes less personal, because, I suppose, I envision wanting to share my sketches with others. Not that I imagine anyone would sit down and try to decipher my handwriting (or even care what I wrote about being irritated with one of my family members, as a totally random example). Most of this journaling took place in the evenings, after we returned to our apartment or guest house post-dinner. The boys would play cards and I would draw and write, which worked out perfectly, because only four can play cribbage, and by the end of the day I was tired of human interaction. I found it hard to draw on-site from life, because we were so often on the move, walking or hiking or snorkeling, so as a consequence, most of my drawings are from photographs. But I did manage a couple en plein air sketches:   In conclusion: I loved the Stillman & Birn sketchbook and will use these again. I loved using the Inktense pencils, sometimes in combination with pen, sometimes alone, and especially with this loose, scribbly style of drawing. I want to draw more from real life when I travel (I might need to go on a sketching holiday to make that happen). And I want to write more interestingly, if I don't feel I can write more personally.
 December's reading list is all over the map--with no coherent theme or throughline (is there ever in my reading lists? No, but this one seems extra weird to me. How about you?
Poetry I've really gotten out of the habit of reading poetry lately, but I was in the local anarchist bookstore during December's art walk (yes, there really is such a shop in Gardiner, Maine, of all places, and they also sell yummy bread) and I saw the latest poetry collection by an acquaintance of mine: Samaa Abdurraqib's Towards a Retreat. I snapped it up, because while I'd interacted with Samaa in other settings (mostly naturalist-based), I hadn't yet read any of her work. I was not disappointed! It's a beautiful collection. I especially enjoyed the "Upta Camp" series. Fiction I picked up Jessica Elicott's latest in her WWII lady constable series, Murder on the Home Front, at Maine's crime writing conference back in September. I always enjoy Elicott's work, and this one was both entertaining and interesting in its peek into life in a coastal town during the war. My sister sent me The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year a while back, and I saved it for Christmas season. It's really a romcom with some crime novel elements (a locked room mystery and a stranded in a country house trope), but it was a rollicking good read, and I think it did both genres proud! Nonfiction Here's where my list starts to get kookie! In the service of reading down my TBR pile, I read Mama's Girl by Veronica Chambers, which a friend sent to me several years ago. It's a memoir of a young Black woman who grew up in New York City with a single mom and absent/angry dad. What it's really about is navigating and repairing a fraught and difficult mother-daughter relationship. I really enjoyed it, and as my friend noted, it was a quick read! Also from the tall TBR stack: All Souls by Michael Patrick Macdonald, which is the harrowing account of growing up in the projects in South Boston in the 70s and 80s, when Whitey Bulger's gangs controlled everything. You know from the beginning of the book that several of Macdonald's siblings are going to die over the course of the narrative, so it's just a matter of biting your nails as you read and asking, Why doesn't somebody do something? Still in the family stories department, but in a completely different vein, I picked up two David Sedaris books I found at a used bookstore (probably because I needed a few laughs after reading All Souls, and living in 2025 America): Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. These are both fairly old, and I'm sure I've read at least one of them before, but they're good for a giggle if you need to lighten the mood these days (who doesn't?). Finally, I read Deep Things out of Darkness: The History of Natural History by John G.T. Anderson. John was my biology professor in college (Bio I and II as well as Conservation Biology). I was expecting the book to be heavy going--not because John is dull, but because it's sold (and priced!) as a textbook. However it's every bit as charming and engaging as John's real life lectures. Even though he refers to his personal life rarely in the book (noting places he's visited or lived, for example), his personality and especially his enthusiasm shines through on every page. I love how he made it into a conversation among the various naturalists profiled--noting whether and how they knew each other (and liked each other) or might have read their predecessors' work. It's unfortunate that it wasn't marketed (and priced!) as a trade book, because I'm certain armchair naturalists and historians would find it as delightful as I did. Since 2013 I've taken a moment every December to look back over the previous year and, instead of lamenting all I did not accomplish, enumerating what I did, primarily in the writing department, but also in other areas of my life. This year I felt like I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels. Let's see how it actually shook out!  Writing In 2025, my creativity group went through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, over the course of 12 months rather than the prescribed 12 weeks. Part of this program is to write "morning pages"--three pages written long hand every morning. Although I missed a fair number of days, and occasionally did not fill three whole pages, this practice resulted in my filling up six Decomposition Books (by contrast, in 2024 I filled four of the same notebooks), plus two small travel journals. Also, in an effort to be less precious about writing tools, I stopped buying refills for my favorite jell pen and instead tried to use up some of the several million ball-point pens cluttering up the house. The good news is that I used up a lot of them. The bad news is that my husband replaced them with ones brought home from work at least once a week. Whether any of this morning "brain dump" writing did me any good is still an open question. I did not have any major epiphanies, but I do often mine my old brain dumpings for essay material, so you never know... Aside from journal pages, I wrote:
 Travel & Adventure
Trips taken in 2025:
I recently read the advice to "local like a traveler" (an inverse of the "travel as a local" philosophy), and this is something I want to intentionally put into practice, although I think I did a pretty good job making the most of local cultural opportunities and attractions, in addition to taking a few trips. I didn't set out to visit two museums (or museum-like places) a month, like I did in 2024, but I still managed to visit 21 museums, some of them more than once, which averages out to about two a month:
I also saw four plays and a ballet at local theaters. I went on a few local hikes (and did one volunteer trail maintenance day on the trail nearest me) and paddled a few nearby ponds. Arts & Crafts
Overall, some things I want to keep doing--traveling, making art, visiting museums--and some things I want to concentrate on doing a lot more of--writing, submitting (and publishing), hiking, kayaking--in 2026. NATIONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS DU QUÉBEC  I started last month by reading the last book* in Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series, The Tomb of the Golden Bird. After that delightful romp through Egyptology, I turned my attention to attacking my TBR pile, which had once again grown out of hand, starting with several books I'd begun reading over recent months but had set aside for various reasons (mainly because my attention had been diverted by rereading Peters).
When I saw a series of capers by Peter Mayle at a used book sale, I was reminded of the summer before I went to college, when my best friend's mother loaned me Mayle's A Year in Provence. Perhaps she thought it would make me more worldly, or inspire me to move to France, but it did neither, since I never cracked the cover and returned it to her unread, but much battered from riding around in my tote bag all summer. I do love a good caper, however, so I gave the first in the series, The Vintage Caper, a go. Now, the term caper refers to the way the action in these stories (which often center around a heist) resembles a goat scampering around with no apparent purpose or direction. I'd say the action in this book was a little less goat-like and more like a languorous house cat, lying in the sun and talking about wine and food and the difference between Marseilles and Paris, a lot. I started reading Strangers on the Train by Patricia Highsmith a year or so ago, after I picked up a book of hers on the craft of writing suspense. I figured I should be familiar with her writing before I take her advice. She does suspense very well. So well that I had to set the book aside for a year to calm my nerves. It was just too stressful waiting for what you inevitably know will happen (that the protagonist will be driven to commit a murder). It's a brilliantly written book (although to be honest I'm not sure I'd have handled the ending the way she did), but I don't think I want that level of anxiety from the books I read. I'm not sure why I picked up Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha from the used bookstore a couple of years ago. It's an older book---1993 Booker Prize winner--about a 10-year-old boy growing up in an Irish village in the 1960s, written from the boy's perspective in an engaging, nonlinear fashion. The cover says something about it being a comic novel, and while many of the incidents, and the way the child sees the world, are humorous, it is ultimately really sad. For Father's Day, I sent my dad The Book of Flaco by David Gessner, about the Eurasian Eagle Owl that escaped the zoo in Central Park and lived "wild" in New York City for a year, and he sent it back to me after he read it. It's an interesting meditation on freedom and wildness, versus captivity and peril, as well as human interactions with birds in general and this bird in particular, and each other. Interestingly, Gessner never saw the owl in person, but writes the whole book from the perspective of after (spoiler alert) Flaco's death, relying on interviews with the most involved humans on his beat. Laura Jackson was an editor at Literary Mama for part of the time I was there also, and she and I were in a remote nature writing critique group for a couple of years. I always enjoyed her wry humor and enthusiasm for the less-loved elements of nature (I recall an endearing essay about earwigs). So I was thrilled when her first book, Deep and Wild: On Mountains, Opossums, and Finding Your Way in West Virginia, came out earlier this year. Whether you've spent time in WV (I think I nipped through a corner of it on a road trip between Georgia and Western Pennsylvania) or you only know the state from less-than-flattering television and movie portrayals, this book will open your eyes to the land's beauty and richness and make you want to pack up the car, buy some dramamine, and hit the country roads. It will also make you laugh. And we need a lot of that these days. Finally, my sister passed on her copy of Blood, Sweat, Tears, a collection of women's writing on the outdoors (mainly hiking and trail running). There were some really lovely and moving pieces of writing here, and also several that made me worry about women today---there seems to be a drive among a lot of them to punish themselves through grueling outdoor pursuits, not just pushing personal limits and challenging oneself, but depriving one's own body of food and water while causing injury. It seems almost like another variation on diets, eating disorders, plastic surgery, and other ways women contort and harm themselves in order to conform to impossible standards and/or to take up less space. It makes my heart hurt to read about.  In October, I continued my avoidance of reality reading spree and finished *most* of the rest of the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters, except for the very last book (in chronological order; stay tuned) and the one posthumously finished and published book, which I'd found disappointing when I first read it, and real life is disappointing enough, I don't need to read a disappointing book. (They might not be in the correct chronological order in the stack, but rest assured they were read in the proper order.) Interestingly, reading books that I know so well I was even more compelled to get to the resolution of the various plot points than I would be on a cold read--knowing what was coming didn't tune me out; it made me more invested.
I also read/finished a handful of nonfiction titles: More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, edited by Jared Champion. I have an essay in this collection, along with 10 other writers. It was interesting to read about other people's approaches to and experiences on the trail. I especially enjoyed Champion's piece, "Backpacking, Ideally" and "Wild Geese" by Katie Jackson. As well as my own, "Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail," natch. Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists by Marcia Myers Bonta is a collection of mini biographies of 25 women naturalists from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which I've owned a long time but had only ready as far as the introduction. It's a fascination view into the challenges and the triumphs of women finding their way and making their mark in a field dominated by men. Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan, by Jill Sisson Quinn, is a collection of braided essays exploring her childhood landscape of Maryland, her home as an adult in Wisconsin, and what it means to belong to a place. |
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