Okay, well, this book stack is a little embarrassing. That's 12 books in one month--all but one a re-(re-re-re-)read. Let me tell you how it happened:

Fiction
When I got home from my week-long writing retreat on September 1, I started reading Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first Amelia Peabody mystery by Elizabeth Peters. This was supposed to be a research read. During the retreat, I'd decided to go forward with writing a historical mystery novel that I'd begun toying several years ago and which I'd set aside due to the pandemic shutdown making research a challenge. My book will take place in a similar time period to Crocodile (although in a very different place), and I thought, since I'm so very familiar with the story, I could concentrate on the mechanics, reverse-engineering the novel. Haha, joke's on me. Instead of deconstructing the book, I delved in, as delighted with every twist and turn as if I'd never read it (several times) before. And when I closed the last page, I couldn't stop, and picked up the next book and the next and the next. I won't list them here, but I read the first 11 books, from Crocodile through Guardian of the Horizon. And, as you might have guessed, I've kept going this month. Why fight it? Perhaps, on a subliminal level, I'm learning a thing or two about plotting and character and dialogue and all the other elements of putting together a book. But most of all, I'm having a grand time.

As for how and when do I read so much: Normally I only read fiction at bedtime, but I've made an exception and read these books while I'm eating lunch and breakfast, as well as during any lull I might experience at the end of the day, either before I embark on making dinner or after I've made it and am waiting for C to get home from work. I also probably stay up reading a teensy bit later than I usually do, especially if my current read is less exciting. (Something about knowing how a book will end makes me want to get to that end even faster than when I'm trying to figure out what will happen.) One good thing is that reading has largely taken the time previously occupied by doomscrolling, which means I'm in a happier frame of mind.

Nonficiton
I did manage to squeeze one nonfiction book in among the tombs and pyramids: We Are Animals, by Jennifer Case, a collection of essays about pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood in modern America. Case is unflinchingly honest about her feelings about her second pregnancy (i.e., not happy), and her personal experiences are fleshed out with thorough research about our country's incredibly horrid, misogynistic, and racist birth industry. It's a timely book, when women are losing their access to choice around conception and birth, and it's engagingly written. 

Is this really all I read in August? I feel sure there should be more, but I don't know what and I don't know where they are! I think I started a lot of books that were on the slow side, or not what I was really in the mood for, and set them aside. As a result, this will be quick!

Nonfiction
I'm a big fan of Lia Purpura's pregnancy/birth/early motherhood memoir Increase. I reread it this month as part of a project I'm working on, along with two of her more recent essay collections, On Looking and Rough Likenesses. I found both of these a lot more challenging. Purpura is also a poet, and her poetic sensibilities are strong in these lyric essays, and they leave me craving a lot more detail and explanation. 

Fiction
I pick up Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness books whenever I see them at used bookstores, and as a result I'm reading them wildly out of order, but it's not too hard to orient oneself in the stories, and they're always great fun, including this one, Crowned and Dangerous. Also fun was this debut mystery novel by Harini Nagendra, The Bangalore Detectives Club. I loved reading about India in the 1920s and all of the cultural turmoil and political intrigue. Turns out Nagendra's first two books were about trees and nature, and so I find in her a kindred spirit of nature writer/crime writer.

Next month's pile is going to be much taller. I've read some more books for research and I've delved back into a series that is my teddy bear/macaroni and cheese--i.e., my comfort read--and I'm already on the fifth one! I'm actually a little embarrassed about it and might not even mention it in this month's post...

I think I was deeply imprinted by childhood summers that involved weekly treks up the block every Friday morning to the Bookmobile to load up on as many books as I could carry back down the street. (I was lucky to live, until age 13, on a street where the roving library--which was a big red bus with the Roadrunner painted on the side, and which these days would probably be subjected to a copyright infringement lawsuit by Warner Brothers--stopped once a week). To this day, summer is reading season for me--on the beach or in the hammock or at the campsite or in bed late at night, anywhere is a good place to devour a book--as July's reading stack can attest. Beginning from the bottom:

Nonfiction
My friend Amanda K. Jaros released her memoir of hiking the Appalachian Trail, In My Boots earlier this year, and I finally sat down and read it last month. The book is really wonderful, and I'm not just saying that because she's my friend. There are two kinds of outdoor adventure books. First, there's the kind that purely relay the physical experience of a hike (or canoe trip or other expedition): I did this and I did this and I did this. These can be great, if the adventure is interesting enough and the storyteller good enough, but they can also be boring as hell in the wrong hands. Second, there's the kind in which the traveler takes an emotional journey alongside the physical one, which almost always makes for a better more interesting book--and this is what kind of book In My Boots is: the journey of a young woman growing from a self-doubting, timid, emotionally abused child into a hiking powerhouse who is not afraid to go after what she wants.

 Poetry
I finished the third in James Crews's trilogy of poetry anthologies, The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal, which I read a poem or two every few days for the last couple of months. As with the first two books in the series, the poems in this book express just the kinds of sense of goodness in the world--at least among poets--that I have needed to hear about  in this troubled, troubled times.

Fiction
Another book I picked up during my trip to Colorado in May was Sabrina and Corina, a collection of short stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. These wonderful and wide-ranging stories featuring Latina characters showed me a whole different cultural milieu that exists in Denver and Southwestern Colorado, parallel to and overlapping with but still wildly different from what I grew up with. Short stories are tough, and sometimes they leave me with a feeling of incompleteness or confusion, but all the stories in this book landed and were beautifully rendered and deeply emotional.

The Last Caretaker is a thriller about a woman who goes to work as a caretaker at a nature preserve and finds herself caught up in an underground network that spirits domestic abuse survivors out of town and into new identities. I'd heard about it on a podcast months ago, was intrigued, and then promptly forgot the title and author. But the premise stuck with me, and finally last month I dug around among the many (as my kids used to call them) "boring literary podcasts" that I listen to, found it, and ordered it. I was not disappointed. A really great story.

I think Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza was another podcast discovery, and I actually preordered it, which I am almost never organized enough to do (I usually read books about 20-40 years post-publication). It's also a thriller, about a journalist who attends an influencer convention and finds herself in the middle of an instagram tradwife's disappearance after her husband's brutal murder and has to figure out who the real killer is. So much fun! (And so weird--even though I was on instagram for a long time, and involved in the blogging world for even longer before that, I had no idea how extensive and insidious the influencer world is!)

The last three on the pile are used bookstore/library book sale finds:

• The Downeast Murders by J.S. Borthwick. Borthwick was a Maine mystery author, about whom I've found very little info (is she even still around?), but whose traditional whodunits are always a delightful read.
• Murder Your Darlings by J.J. Murphy is a cute whodunit starting Dorothy Parker as the amateur sleuth. It was a fun, cute read.
• Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. I have no idea how I missed reading this when it first came out--probably because I was busy with a baby and/or I thought it sounded frivolous. It *is* frivolous, but so what? It was a super fun and funny read, with shades of Bridge Jones, and I enjoyed it thoroughly (oh what a delightful escape from our current reality! There aren't even cell phones, let alone rampant fascism!).

Well, here we are, possibly at the bitter end of the American experiment, still reading books made out of paper, but for how much longer? Hopefully we'll manage to smuggle books into Musk's forced labor camps. On that cheerful note, here's what I read last month:

Fiction
​Mattaponi Queen by Belle Boggs. I'm writing about Boggs's nonfiction book, The Art of Waiting, (which, now that I think about it should also be on this stack, because I reread it last month as well), and wanted to get a taste of her fiction. I really enjoyed the stories that make up Mattaponi Queen--which is a series of linked stories whose characters overlap in various ways in this small, rural community in the southeast (I'm gonna say Virginia?). The characters were interesting and charming, and the stories were satisfying in a way that short stories often aren't.

While Christmas shopping, I came across this fat collection of the first three (of four) Jacqueline Kirby novels by Elizabeth Peters: The Seventh Sinner, The Murders of Richard III, and Die for Love. These are wildly entertaining murder mysteries with university librarian (turned romance novelist in later books) and amateur sleuth Jacqueline Kirby as the main character (who also happens to be one of the rare middle aged mothers of grown children who get to also be glamorous protagonists). All three books involve small, insular groups of particularly wacky characters: foreign students with art or archaeology fellowships in Rome; a society devoted to clearing Richard III of the murders of his nephews; and romance novelists and their fans. The first two have the clever device of being written from the POV of a secondary character; the third one hops around among Jacqueline's POV and that of at least two other characters in a jarring fashion. The third book also starts out with an exceptionally outrageous premise and very kooky characters, so I was prepared to not enjoy it, but it comes around over time (or one gets used to the weird cast of unbelievable people).

Nonfiction
I just happened to pick up How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell because it was shelved next to a book I was actually looking for at the bookstore. I was surprised by how little of a how-to it was, considering the title (I guess maybe we don't need to be told how to just chill, though maybe we do?). It was, in fact, a lot of philosophical musing on American culture, which I found interesting if a little slow at times. That being said, it's an excellent book for these times, considering how the way we've handed over our attention to some of the worst people on earth over the last 20 years, making them extraordinarily wealthy (through both advertising and monetizing our data) and putting them in position to destroy democracy.

Unrelated to any specific advice from the book (of which there's very little), I've done a number of things to withdraw my attention from the corporate overlords most directly responsible fore or collaborative with the current coup d'etat in Washington:

• I had deleted my Twitter account a long time ago, not long after the nazi took it over (even before he was sieg heiling on TV it was obvious who/what he was).
  
• I deleted my Meta (Facebook and Instagram) accounts. (I would delete WhatsApp too, except I'd have to download the app to do it, and I refuse to give Zuckerberg even that much of a data hit.) (Also, I deleted Twitter at least a year ago--way before it became clear that Musk was the one person most likely to bring down the USA).
• I deleted my Goodreads account. (I rarely use Amazon for anything else--maybe order off it once a year, never go to Whole Foods, never watch anything on Prime, and I have maybe six books in Kindle, which I don't care about losing. I buy books from local bookstores or off bookshop.org, and I get my audiobooks are on Libro.fm. I have a half dozen books on Kindle, which I wouldn't care about losing either. Did you know that bookshop.org now has ebooks? And of course, there's the library.)
• I'm trying to figure out how to disentangle from Google. I already avoided using Chrome, and I'd quit the search engine months ago because it had become such garbage (I've been using Duck Duck Go, but now I'm trying Ecosia). I never switched my email to gmail because I didn't want to deal with the hassle, and now I'm immensely grateful for that bit of laziness. But I have a lot of stuff on Google Drive, which I'm now downloading to my hard drive and deleting, at the rate of one folder every day or so. I'll also be looking for an alternative file sharing platform (suggestions welcome). I also have a huge archive of my old blogspot/blogger blog, which I don't want to delete, because and can't afford to turn into a book (it would cost about $1000 due to the amount of entries I have!).
• I'm trying to be intentional about minimizing time spent scrolling (having deleted those other social media accounts, I joined Substack and Bluesky, which have the same addictive qualities--especially when horrors and atrocities are being committed by the minute). Instead, I'm focusing on spending time on analog activities: reading (paper books!), walking in the woods, drawing and painting, yoga, writing letters, going to museums, getting together with friends. This, I think, is the message somewhat buried in How to Do Nothing: that for a fulfilling and meaningful life, we need to live in the real world. Attention is not only money, it is power, and what we give our attention to we give our power to; so I want to take my power back from pixels and billionaires and direct it toward things that I love.

Amanda K. Jaros, author of the forthcoming book In My Boots: A Memoir of Five Million Steps on the Appalachian Trail wrote a lovely review of Uphill Both Ways over at Mom Egg Review. She writes:

"Uphill Both Ways is more than a hiking travelogue, more than a motherhood journal, more than a natural history reader. It is one woman’s attempt to unify the pieces of her life in search of happiness. It’s also a reminder to other women out there. You don’t have to be just one thing."

You can read the whole review here.