Sunday, January 01, 2017

Fall 2016 Reading Report


I didn’t get as much reading done for my fall session as I had hoped, but it could have been worse.  Slightly more than half of what I read, I blogged about on my fitness blog.

The fitness blog books were:

Full Catastrophe Living
Scoiology of Sport
Tribe
How Not to Die
The New Better Off
Papillon
Indestructible
At the Water’s Edge
Margot Fonteyn
Emotional Intelligence
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire
This is Where You Belong

That felt like a lot of non-fiction, so I read only one other non-fiction book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John M. Gottman.  It was useful.  Enough said.

I read four kid books, by which I mean books that are targeted toward audiences up to and including young adults.  (I also read a bunch of picture books, but I didn’t count those.  Most of them were Christmas books.)  The always-impressive Rick Riordan’s The Hammer of Thor amused and delighted me.  Whenever I read his work, I wish I had written it.  Matthew Kirby writes good adventures.  I read the first two books in his latest trilogy, The Arctic Code and Island of the Sun.  I impatiently await the next book.  For Christmas, my dear son and daughter-in-law gave me the sequel to Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, which I loved.  Guess what I asked for for my birthday!  Hilarious and wonderful.

My friend Laila Ibrahim wrote a moving novel about coming to terms with faith and queerness.  Check out Living Right.  I enjoyed Louise Penny’s latest, A Great Reckoning.  She writes the kind of mysteries that soothe me.  Bad things happen, but they are made, mostly, right in the end.  Tana French also writes good mysteries and The Trespasser is no exception.  Anne Tyler has a gift for finding the loveably absurd in the every day.  I would happily hang out with the characters she creates.  A Spool of Blue Thread was a lovely book.  Brent busted me out of a bad mood by thrusting the three-book collection The Planet Pirates at me.  The collaboration between Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Moon, and Jody Lynn Nye produced some entertaining science fiction.  Mary Doria Russell was known to me for her science fiction novels The Sparrow and Children of God.  I was surprised to find that A Thread of Grace was about Italian Jews during World War II because that seemed like an entirely different direction, but I enjoyed the book a lot.



I have my pile for the next while all stacked up and ready to read.