First of the Spring 2020 Reading

One of my goals for my recent vacation was to do a bunch of reading.  I packed ten books and read eight and a half of them while I was away and finished the ninth today.  Which means it is time to do another book report.

I bought Silent World by Jacques Yves Cousteau for a quarter many years ago because I thought one of the kids would be interested in it.  I was wrong about that.  I figured it was time to check it out myself and either keep it or send it along its merry way.  I did not have high hopes, frankly, for a book written in the 1950s about diving in the ocean.  Wrong again.  It was fascinating to read about the development of the aqualung in occupied France during World War II, with challenges ranging from the technical to the physiological to the caloric—with food rationing in place, the divers had to do the math to decide whether spearfishing was worth the calories it cost (generally, no).  I am keeping it.

My mom gave me Lucille Stott’s book, Saving Thoreau’s Birthplace.  She and my dad got a call from the author as she was writing it because she wanted permission to print my grandfather’s photo in the book.  Why?  Well, he was kind of a Thoreau nut and set up a foundation to promote things Thoreauvian.  For a variety of reasons, my grandfather’s dream was not realized in the context of this particular project, but his foundation did provide some much-needed funds.  The book as a whole is an interesting portrait of the kind of grassroots organizing that can, eventually, do remarkable things.  A bonus for me was that not only did I get to see my grandfather’s picture, there was also a photo of my Grandma Marian.  (My grandfather had a debilitating heart attack when I was three and was not himself from then until he died when I was eight, but Grandma Marian lived to be 91 and T. has memories of blowing bubbles with her when he was small.  I miss her.)  (None of which is about the book, but I am being honest about why I had it and read it.)

The quest for all things Alice led me to read Go Ask Alice again.  I first read it when I was an extremely gullible twelve-year-old and I believed that it was a Real Diary.  Now I find it to be a very odd book, even for anti-drug propaganda.  The author could not actually find much bad to say about the drugs themselves; all the bad things that happen to poor Alice are caused by bad people.  The most memorable line remains:  Another day, another blow job.

Also on that same quest, I read In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by Karoline Leach.  It is sort of a biography of Charles Dodgson and very much a dissection of the myth of Lewis Carroll and how it was created and perpetuated.  The author contends that the evidence suggests not that Dodgson was a child-molester, but rather that he was too interested in women, that the love of little girls was emphasized to whitewash his reputation because, in his society at his cultural moment, little girl worship was emblematic of purity and upstanding nature.  It is her assertion that the passage of time has made that fabrication into something worse.  It is an interesting argument and she marshals a good amount of evidence for her case.  I will keep reading, because I have also seen the four extant photographs of naked young girls and they are disturbing.

I got Terry Pratchett’s Thud for Christmas and could not wait to read it.  It was awesome and I loved it.  I have to wait patiently for my birthday for the next book.  It will be hard.

The year we spent six weeks in Sydney between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, I bought The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern for Brent.  He never read it, so recently I stole it back from him fair and square.  I’m keeping it.  What a beautiful book!  (He would not enjoy it.)  I loved all of it, the characters, the setting, the language.  Two thumbs up.

I have had my thumbs in my ears and have been humming, “Lalalalalala I can’t hear you” since Game of Thrones on television got past the point where the books left off in the (probably vain) hope that George R.R. Martin will eventually get around to finishing the series.  In the meantime, I read his Fire and Blood.  It’s a different kind of writing for him, a mock-scholarly chronicle, but I enjoyed it in all of its pretended controversies and scandals.  Fans will enjoy it; everyone else can probably skip it.

I really wanted to like The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson.  I did like it, but not as much as I expected.  The “mystery” was thin and the central scavenger hunt did not satisfy.  That said, I enjoyed the characters and many of the relationships.  I just wanted it to be better than it was.

Jasper Fforde is weird and hilarious and charming.  His book Early Riser exhibits all of those characteristics and slyly approaches climate change from the other direction—in the world of the book, the world has gotten much, much colder and almost all humans hibernate to survive the winter.  Bonus points for an excellent trans character treated with appropriate respect.

Total for the year so far:  nine books.