Spring Book Report: 32 Books

T.’s semester is over, so my spring semester of reading is also officially done.  I read 32 books.  Ten of them were for blog posts, so I won’t rehash them here.

Of the remaining books, four of them were designed for kids or young adults.  Phillip Pullman continues to impress with his storytelling in The Book of Dust.  I like Lyra’s Oxford and was happy to return there.  Ransom Riggs came up with an interesting premise, using found photographs as a basis for the story in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.  (I have not seen the movie, so I have no idea how it compares.)  I very much enjoyed it and kept it on the shelf, although it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.  Kate diCamillo’s book The Magician’s Elephant, however, is a book I would happily give to pretty much any kid or person who likes kid books.  She has a gift for getting to the essential in her stories.  I always finish feeling enriched and deepened by her tales.  Ursula LeGuin’s books, to me, are not easily categorizable into kid or adult fiction.  I bought Voices when I saw it in the YA section at a bookstore, so I’m going with the management’s assessment.  As usual, her work asks big questions and does not shirk from seeking real answers.  Even better, her writing can bear up under those large conditions.

Since most of the books I read for my blog are nonfiction, I don’t feel the need to over-represent it in my other reading.  I read four books in this category.  Fantasies of the Library by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin is a cross between a book, a research project, and a work of art.  In it, photographs of the process of digitizing books share space with essays on what libraries are and do from a variety of perspectives.  It was weird and cool and when I finished, I passed it on to the librarian closest to me.  When I got my Little Free Library, it came with a selection of books.  While I realize that the point of the library was not to get me a whole bunch more books to read, I do get, essentially, first dibs on what comes in.  I would not otherwise have selected The Tarball Chronicles by David Gessner, but it turned out to be both fascinating and well-written.  It's an account of the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill, full of interesting characters and far-reaching implications.  (I think it’s still in the Little Free Library, so if you’re interested, stop by!)  One of my clients gave me Hilary Clinton’s book What Happened.  It was not a book I would have sought out myself for a lot of reasons, but I really enjoyed it. In the past, I have not followed politics at all closely, so I have no sense of whether her analysis of what happened is accurate or not.  No matter what, I think we need to learn how to ensure a better future.  Fred Turner’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture gave a scholarly analysis of the interrelationships between the movements of the 1960s and the current tech world.  There are a lot of them and Turner has a knack for articulating the way that both the counterculture and cyberculture have been the province of people who are primarily male and white and privileged.  Apparently the theme of my nonfiction reading was pretty much about getting mad, except for libraries, which are always useful.

The rest was fiction.  Nine of the remaining books were written by Kerry Greenwood.  I finished off the Phryne Fisher books and read most of the Corinna Chapmans.  (Titles, for those who want me to be thorough:  Dead Man’s Chest, Unnatural Habits, Murder and Mendelssohn, A Question of Death, Earthly Delights, Heavenly Pleasures, Devil’s Food, Trick or Treat, and Forbidden Fruit.)  Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg hit on a hilarious premise for The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules:  a group of seniors stuck in a nursing home in Stockholm turn to crime because they figure that the conditions in prison must be better than their current circumstances.  “Chaos ensues” is one of my favorite plot summaries and it applies to what happens here.  Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen was similarly hilarious, being the adventures of an eco-terrorist and a dog.  Some very bad people end up having bad things happen to them, but the overall message is that most of that karma stuff comes from what we choose to do.  I really did laugh out loud more than once.  I will always buy the next Elizabeth George book, in this case The Punishment She Deserves.  This particular one focuses more on a character I don’t particularly like, but thankfully, there is always Havers to restore my good humor.  I think that this particular series is in need of something fresh and I hope George finds it.  I got a hardbound copy of the novels of Dashiell Hammett at the library from the booksale shelves for a buck or so.  (Contents, counted as one book for my purposes:  Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man.)  Times have changed.  Some of the stories are almost unreadable and contain slurs towards many groups and individuals.  The writing style works for me when there are enough characters I like, as in The Thin Man, or when the plot works particularly well, but really I nearly stopped reading after Red Harvest.  Similarly, I acquired (and then sent to the Little Free Library) a nice-looking Tales from the Decameron by Boccacio.  I had read it before, but not for a long time and did not keep the book because it wasn’t all 100 tales, even though it was prettier than my paperback.  I don’t know what tales were excluded, but given the ones in the book, they weren’t left out due to excessive sex or intolerance of otherness.  I like a dirty joke or two or hundred from time to time, so I enjoyed the read, but I have to say that Chaucer did pretty much steal the best of the stories for his work.

On to summer reading!