September 2024 Reads

September was another read-ey month--still in summer hammock mode, I guess. My book selections this month were all over the map. My reading lists are usually pretty diverse, but I think this month could win a prize for weirdest combination of books. Working our way from the bottom up, we have:

Fiction
The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan. C heard a review about this book on NPR and he thought it sounded right up my alley--a coastal Maine setting, a spooky old house, ghosts, women's history, a woman seeking to reset her trajectory midlife--and ordered it for my birthday. It was okay (I don't usually like to say anything negative about books here, but since this one's a Reece's Book Club pick, I think it can handle it). There was *so much* exposition throughout--starting with a many page prologue. Whole life stories of characters and whole histories of groups of people told in pages and pages of summary and information dumping. And while those stories and histories were interesting, they did not read like a contemporary novel. It felt like the author did a lot of research and wanted to reader to know it. Or that she was on deadline and didn't have time to revise the summaries into scenes. Also, the ghost story just kinda fizzled out. 

Anne of Windy Poplars by L.M. Montgomery. This is the fourth book in the Anne of Green Gables series, and the last one that I bought in PEI. I continued to enjoy Montgomery's writing, the saga of Anne's life, and the details of that time on PEI, as I did to through the second and third book, but I also continued to miss the spunky Anne of the original. I don't think I'll go on to read the next four, although I do want to see her and Gilbert finally married.

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson. I'm still going with my Shirley Jackson kick, that was (re)set off after reading her collected letters last month. The Sundial is a strange book (no surprises there!), about a wealthy family who hole up in their big house in anticipation of the end of the world--which was foretold to one of the characters by her dead father. The entire story centers on the interactions and relationships among the characters--the remaining members of the family and a few friends and strangers who come to join their small cult--and their various ways of preparing the future that will come after everything outside of their realm is destroyed. It's wryly funny while at the same time feeling like a cutting indictment of human nature (but what is it saying about human nature, exactly?). And it's a murder mystery without a solution. I'm still pondering what I think of it two weeks after I finished reading.

Flush by Carl Hiaasen. I don't normally read YA or middle grade fiction (now that I don't have  kids around to read to, and if you don't count Anne of GG, which I guess is maybe a YA?), but I was getting a bunch of books ready to go to the library book store, and this book, along with another by the same author, appeared as if they'd never even been opened, and I felt bad about that so I decided to read them both before I sent them on. Flush is about a kid whose dad has gone to jail for sinking a boat that he suspects of dumping pollution into the bay near the characters' home in the Florida Keys. Despite the clear young reading level, the pacing, development of setting and characters, and buildup of suspense, and even the stakes make it an engaging read. What a bummer for my kids that they didn't give it a try!

Nonfiction
The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush. I've always been fascinated by Antarctica, and when I was in my 20s, I looked into going there to work at one of the US research bases, but since I had no useful skills, there wasn't anything I could reasonably apply for. I still don't have any useful skills (why didn't I become a diesel mechanic?), so I probably won't ever make it there, unless I reach a place where I could qualify for a National Science Foundation artist residency. That is how Elizabeth Rush found herself on a boat for several weeks, plying Antarctic waters to study the Thwaites Glacier. In The Quickening, Rush tells the story of this voyage and her interactions with the scientists and crew members on board the boat, while also contemplating pregnancy and parenthood, which she's put on hold for a year in order to participate in the trip, and interviewing her fellow passengers about their birth and parenting experiences. Through telling the story in this way, Rush aims to subvert the typical Polar travel story of white men setting out to discover and conquer the ice caps and replace it with a story of nurturing and care, and seeing Antarctica and its glaciers not as terra incognita, but as an animate, entity, a driver in our human story. It's a beautiful, thoughtful, and engaging read.

The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay. I loved this book every bit as much as I loved The Book of Delights. It's the same format: short essays about whatever it is that delighted the author on the particular day of writing--figs, a notebook, a visit with a friend, etc. Totally quotidian things elevated to magic through Gay's *delightful* way of seeing the world. (I almost typed "Ross's" up there, because after reading three books of essays by the guy, I feel like he's a friend.)

Craft & Current by Janisse Ray. I've been following along with Janisse Ray's Journey in Place (which she describes  as a "year-long correspondence course in place-knowing) all year, and I've read three of her books. I like her way of writing and looking at the world, and so was happy to get in on crowd funding this writing craft book. It has some useful ideas and frameworks and ways of approaching writing, which I'm already trying to put into practice, but what I found most interesting were the bits of memoir about her journey to becoming a writer.

Poetry
Indwelling by Libby Maxey. When my former co-editor at Literary Mama came out with a second book of poetry this summer, I ordered it right away, and then promptly lost it among a pile of books and papers. Amid a subsequent flurry of cleaning and reorganizing, it resurfaced and I've been savoring a poem or two a day all month. Libby's (I can use her first name because we really are friends) writes in sonnets and other traditional forms, which gives the poems a pleasing feeling of timelessness. While at the same time, it's thrilling to discover within the strict structures of these poems thoroughly modern and everyday moments, like a truck stuck in the snow, an encounter with a turtle in the grass, sheets hanging on the line in winter, cheese purchased at a farm stand, the things left behind in an abandoned house. The combination weaves together the past and the present, history and personal experience.

Audiobooks
C and I listened to the fourth Rivers of London book by Ben Aaronovich, Broken Homes. But it was a challenge, because we've been listening after we go to bed at night, and C kept falling asleep, because he's back to teaching and getting up early, and we'd have to replay half of the previous night's selection every night, and we were both confused about what was going on. A long drive to Massachusetts and back helped us through a big chunk of the book, but I think we'll have to wait until we need to drive a long ways before picking up with book #5.

Because I listened to the whole Thursday Murder Club series (over and over again), I felt compelled to get the latest Richard Osman book, We Solve Murders via audio as well. Also it was narrated by Nicola Walker, which is reason enough. The book, which is the start of a new series, is every bit as delightful as the TMC books. A bodyguard, her retired-cop father-in-law, and a world-famous thriller writer go on madcap caper from South Carolina to St. Lucia to Ireland to Dubais with assassins and cartel bosses and money launderers chasing after them, and vice-versa. Yes, the bodies do pile up, but it's all in good fun. Nothing gruesome or disturbing. Just highjinks and hilarity.