Fall Reading Update: 4 more

I’ve finished another four books and I seem to write more intelligently about what I’ve read if I do it in closer proximity to the reading.  I also chose not to finish another book.

The unfinished first.  Someone left a copy of Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus in my little free library, so I figured I would see what the fuss was about.  I made it about sixty pages before I was so demoralized that I couldn’t take any more.  Pornography is one thing, but ill-natured pornography is something else entirely.  Apparently I don’t like joyless sex.  Someone else was interested, however, because it has disappeared from the free library again.

Let me digress a moment:  I used to finish books compulsively.  Now I value my time more than that.  If I book is not teaching me something or giving me pleasure or both, I don’t need to waste my time, because there are a lot of books in the world.  Whenever I quit a book partway through, I later wonder why I persisted as long as I did in the first place.  The Great Gradebook In The Sky is not watching and does not care.  On to the books that were worth finishing.

In line with my goals/obsessions, I finished reading The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll.  I bought it because it includes Sylvie and Bruno and the sequel as well as a bunch of poems and some samples from his logic and math writing.  The famous bits are more famous than the rest for a reason, but I am glad to have read the lesser known bits as well even if I don’t need to repeat the experience.  What I found interesting is that his work is most profound when it is silliest.  Something about the way he writes nonsense gets to the heart of things more directly than when he stays serious.  It is possible that this is more about how I personally find humor everywhere, but I don’t think so—he seems to grasp and convey the essential joy in the world.

c/o Postmaster by Corporal Thomas R. St. George is a wartime series of letters from the corporal sent to the San Francisco Chronicle and collected into a book.  It was light and amusing, a morale-builder for those waiting for the soldiers in the Pacific to come home.  I enjoyed it but did not need to keep it.

Michael A. Gomez’s book Exchanging Our Country Marks discusses the way that slavery, in its systematic attempts to break down the culture of the various ethnic groups of Africans ripped from their countries and transported here ended up forging a more race-based African American culture.  It is never easy to read about slavery and the inhuman actions of those in the slave industry, which was pretty much everyone since all American economies benefitted from the importation and exploitation of African labor, but I found myself oddly heartened by the resilience and determination of the dispossessed.  The strength of religion and culture and family and love rose above the absolute horrors inflicted on humans by other humans.  Also:  white Americans owe so much to African Americans—we should be truly ashamed of the actions of our forebears and eager to make things right (yes, I know we also owe debts to the Native Americans, the Latinx people, and the Asian Americans).  I am thankful that historians are working to reclaim the willfully erased history of enslaved peoples.

Needing to recover from the difficult yet fascinating reading of that book, I read Lisa Rowe Fraustina’s book The Hole in the Wall.  It is a kid book—the protagonist is a sixth-grader—and won an award, but it left me strangely empty.  The writing was lovely.  The characters, on the whole, were drawn with well-chosen details.  The story itself, however, didn’t work.  The plot hinged on a magic/technology that seemed to work in contradictory ways that were never properly explained.  I have a sense that there was a lot of backstory that didn’t make it into the actual book; it might have made sense of the actions of the not-quite-villain.  It gave me a lot to think about in terms of what makes a story truly moving.

Current totals:  12 books since September, 51 for the year.