October 2024 Reads

When I was a baby, I earned the distinction of being the youngest library card holder at our local library, and I remained a continuous library card holder for nearly half a century. One time, years ago, I lost my wallet at a street fair in a nearby town, and when I picked it up at the police station (with all the cash still present--thank you kind people of Hallowell), the cop who handed it back to me said, "You sure have a lot of library cards." My wallet still held my Jessup Library card, from when I was in college in Bar Harbor, Maine, my Aurora, Colorado, card, from my year there in the AmeriCorps, my Littleton, Colorado, library card, from where my parents were living at the time, my Maine State Library card, and my Gardiner, Maine, card, from the town I lived in then. I kept my Gardiner card going, for an annual fee, for years after we moved away, because our town didn't have a library, nor did it have a relationship with another town's library. But during the pandemic, when a trip to the library meant checking out books through a window, as if they were an order of French fries, I let my Gardiner card lapse, even though I rarely wandered the aisles to check out in-house books, rather relying on interlibrary loans ordered through the Minerva system. With the pandemic came a conundrum: I couldn't order books without renewing my card, but there was no point in going to the library to renew my card when there weren't any books waiting there for me. I instead focused on trying to read down my TBR pile, while also refilling it with obsessive online purchases. For the first time in my life, I was without a library card. (Technically I still had, and still have, a Maine State Library card, but that institution, along with its neighbor the State Museum, used the pandemic as an opportunity to move out and repair the leaky building they were both housed in, and there's no sign of either of them opening up again in the near future.)

In the meantime, a scrappy group of volunteers in my town turned a pile of donated books and a drafty old grange hall into a library. I had visited early on, to donate a bunch of children's books, but hadn't been back until this September, when I was invited to give a reading. It was a delightful event, and the library is a wonderful space. At the end of my reading, I signed up for a library card, which I picked up earlier this month, when I checked out my first book.

Nonfiction
Educated, by Tara Westover. I know I'm about six years late to the party on this one, but I've been meaning to read it since it came out, and when I spied it in the library's stacks, I realized the time had come. I brought it home on a Wednesday afternoon, stayed up way too late that night reading, and finished it the next morning. It was that gripping--harrowing and shocking. I mean, I'm not surprised that there's abuse and gaslighting and family members treating each other terribly, but I'm still shocked by seeing this brutality laid out, line by line, paragraph after paragraph. I went into it expecting one of those books that's a good story but mediocre, but it was beautifully written, from the overall structure to the individual sentences.

Fiction
The Lottery and other Stories by Shirley Jackson. I kept going on my Shirley Jackson kick with a reread of The Lottery. It had been over ten years since I read it last in graduate school--the whole book, I mean, not the story "The Lottery," which I've surely read a few times over that time. I was delighted to find how much I still love these stories. They're creepy and quirky and mundane and insightful and chilling and pitch perfect.

Broken Harbor by Tana French. This is a police procedural, with a the propulsive pace of thriller. I was totally sucked in for about the first half of the book, but then I started to find the minute-by-minute narration of every second of the detective's work on the case a little tedious. Around that time there was also a moment where the narrator (first-person) zooms out, as if he's narrating from some distance in the future and comments how a certain event was the moment when something important occurred, even though the whole rest of the book, before and after, is written as if in the narrator is experiencing it all in real time. I wondered at first if this was a clever technique on the writer's part, or just a weird slip of the pen. I decided that it was a slip (or a sloppy choice) since it distracted me for the rest of the book. Finally, the events led the murderer to do what they did were just way too farfetched. So I give it a "meh." Maybe I'll try another--she's apparently a highly regarded writer--but I won't rush out to do so.

The Dark on the Other Side by Barbara Michaels. I've been trying to stop myself from going back and reading more Barbara Michaels until I get through my whole TBR pile (which just keeps growing so it's a hopeless task), but I happened to run across this one and I didn't remember anything about it, which made me think I hadn't ever read it before (I later checked my blog posts and found I last read it in 2018). What intrigued me is that there is a male main character (with occasional exchanges of POV w/ a female character), which Barbara rarely does, so of course I had to read it and see what that was like. It was a delightful read--and perfect for October, with a witch and werewolf (or is it a gaslighting husband?) theme. So fun!

Scat by Carl Hiassan. This is another of the books I found in the boys' closet and which I read because I felt sorry for it, having never been read by my kids (though M told me later that he had read it, so I needn't have fretted). It's a cute story about a couple of kids who get tangled up with a biology professor and a Hayduke kind of character who are trying to protect a swamp and the Florida panther who lives there from some oil development guys. It was a fun read, and it's too bad my other two kids missed out!

Poetry
Sparrow Envy and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves by J. Drew Lanham. I loved both of these books so much. The poems are about birds and wild things and history and social justice and human nature. They make you think and make you feel. Some are joyful, yes, while others tend toward the heart-wrenching end of the emotional scale. But all are beautiful.