Spring Reading Report: 41 books

T. is home for summer, which means the end of the spring reading season.  I have read 41 books since January, 13 of them for my fitness blog.  I won’t be writing about those again in this post.

Because most of the reading for my blog is nonfiction, I read only five other nonfiction books.  Walk in a Relaxed Manner by Joyce Rupp is an account of a nun’s walk on the Camino de Santiago.  I read it because one of my friends talked me into joining a Lenten book group.  It was a good book, but not life-changing, except that I no longer have a pilgrimage fantasy thanks to her accounts of the bathrooms in the refugios.

Daughter of Persia by Sattareh Farmanfarmaian was a book T. read in school.  He loved it and pressed it on me.  I found it fascinating, at least in part because I have had an extremely Eurocentric education.  It was great to learn about such a different way of life.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl, on the other hand, was a re-immersion in the culture of my childhood.  While I have decided that I no longer need a sunbonnet in order to be perfectly happy, my girlish ambition to be like Laura persists.  That ambition has, over time, been modulated by the realization of the evils of white imperialism and racism, but there is still something to be admired in the self-reliant, loving family portrayed in her work.

Jerry Apps writes about Wisconsin in particular and nature in general in his book Whispers and Shadows.  He is an engaging writer with a gift for observation and an obvious love of his land.  I bought his (very cute) book while visiting Syd and Sam in Wisconsin and he is definitely a find.

I wanted to read The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson.  It, like its subject, is not an entirely likeable book, but it was useful.  I first learned of her through the Alcott/Thoreau/Emerson connection.  I did not realize the scope of her achievements or her knowledge.  Her early death was a loss to American culture.

My lone foray into graphic novels this time was to read the first volume of John Lewis’s March.  The other two volumes are waiting on the shelf for me.  What a great telling of a great story!  Go forth and read!

I read six books geared at kids or young adults.  Syd’s friend Amelia Gurley wrote a lovely book called The 473^rd Annual Witch Trials.  It is a great story with well-developed characters.  I hope she writes more!

I found a copy of The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley while browsing a used book store (a dangerous and expensive pastime).  Had I read it while younger, I think I would have liked it better.  It is slightly too moralistic for my current taste, although appealingly weird.  The edition I bought has some fantastical illustrations.

Jonathan Stroud is awesome.  I loved The Hollow Boy, the latest installment in the Lockwood and Company series.  It’s funny, creepy, and absorbing.  I can hardly wait to see what the characters get into next.

I had read Susan Cooper’s book The Boggart and the Monster a long time ago.  I re-read it because I was looking for inspiration for a Loch Ness Monster story for Sam for Christmas (as I blogged about when I made it).  The book is not as strong as the whole Dark Is Rising series, but she tells a good story.  Also, who does not like a boggart who enjoys the occasional whiskey?

The last two kid books I read were also research-based.  I’m done with the story for T.’s Christmas book, but I have one more picture to finish before I post it.  I wanted to make him something based in Persian myth and story, so I read Persian Legends and Persian Fairy Tales.  (I am not counting the picture books on the topic I also read.  My system for classifying what I read is complicated enough already.)  There is lots to love in these stories.  Some are very embedded in their culture and others are more universal in theme, but all added to my sense of the richness of the world.

Which brings me to fiction.  When I am sick or stressed, I like mystery novels.  I continued to work my way through Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher books, putting away Death at Victoria Dock, The Green Mill Murder, Blood and Circuses, Ruddy Gore, and Urn Burial.  Julia Buckley gave me the beginnings of two new series; I polished off A Dark and Stormy Murder, Death in Dark Blue, The Big Chili, and Cheddar Off Dead.

Jostein Gaarder’s book Sophie’s World is both a novel and an introduction to philosophy.  It works on both levels.  I bought it because he wrote The Christmas Mystery, an Advent book I used to read with the kids when they were smaller.  He is a deft writer who does not shy away from big questions.

It is possible that at some point I will have read all of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books.  Then again, I think they reproduce on the shelves while I’m not looking.  The Skies of Pern is an excellent member of the clan, dealing with the shift to a post-Thread world.

Orson Scott Card’s book Treasure Box left so little impression on me that I would not remember that I read it except that I wrote it down.  It was a reject from Brent’s shelf that I thought I might read someday.  Because I made a goal to read all the stuff lingering on the to-read shelf at the beginning of the year, I did in fact read it.  De facto review:  don’t bother.

Neil Gaiman’s The Norse Myths, on the other hand, is awesome.  He is totally comfortable letting a weird story be weird.  This is a feature when it comes to retelling this batch of myths.  There are not a lot of writers whose versions of the archetypes are both plausible and trustworthy, even if I don’t always agree with his exact characterizations.  Also:  I want him to come read to me every night.

Syd and Sam are keeping me supplied with each successive volume of Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men series.  This time I read Wintersmith.  In addition to the hilarity of the Nac Mac Feegles, this book has a lot to say about the nature of story and how it controls us as we control it.  All thumbs up.

Vanishing Point by Michaela Roessner was recommended to me by someone in a Facebook thread about dream landscapes when I mentioned that the Winchester Mystery House is a recurring place in my dreams.  The book is set there in a dystopian future.  The story is a good one, dealing with sci-fi staples of space-time in innovative ways.  Also, I love the repurposing of the Century Theaters by the house as Watcher Domes.

Finally, I am making my leisurely way through the works of Ursula LeGuin.  The Lathe of Heaven rocks.  It walks through the landscape of dream and reality and illuminates both.

Not a bad five months of reading.