Second batch of summer reading

What seems to be true in the pandemic times is that I have a lot less ability to focus and a greater need for fun reading.  Thus the following.

 

I managed to finish one more book from my accumulated nonfiction pile.  It was Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes.  The landscapes in question are the borderlands between present day Arizona and Mexico.  Their fugitive nature, according to the book’s argument, springs from shifting borders, peoples, and dreams.  Waves of humans of many different kinds have existed or arrived at this particular place and have seen it through the lenses of their goals.  Some saw raiding land, some cattle ranches, and some copper mines and railroads.  The subject was at times a little dry, but the writer has the occasional lyrical turn of phrase that made the book more interesting.  Incidentally, I am feeling the benefits of all that Mexican history reading.  I now recognize different waves of Mexican revolutionaries.

 

The next most serious reading I did was William Blake’s Selected Poems.  I enjoyed the shorter poems and have a whole bunch of stuff to copy into my commonplace book at some future time.  I even have some moments from the epics that I would like to remember, but holy cannoli, are those epics weird.  Furnaces and emanations and nets and the French Revolution and then a bunch of English place names and then winepresses full of screaming death…  Let’s just say that the epics were not my cup of cocoa and that maybe there are benefits to engraving and publishing one’s own work.

 

I loved the next three installments of Ursula Vernon’s Dragonbreath series, especially the one with the jackalopes.  I need cheering up today, so I think I will go order the rest of them when I’m done writing.  They are laugh-out-loud funny and the pictures are charming and every kid and not-so-inner-child should read them.

 

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin is a book I saw in a bookstore window that demanded to come home with me.  I am glad I listened.  It is a charming story in which cultural distrust eventually gives way to a better way of seeing.  The pictures are as important as the words, in a Hugo Cabret kind of way, but maybe more subversive as sometimes the pictures tell a different tale than the words, allowing the reader/viewer multiple perspectives at once.  I would give this book as a gift.

 

I am slowly working my way through the works of Tamora Pierce.  Slowly only because I probably shouldn’t spend all of my money on books and sometimes I have to pretend I am a grown-up and do actually useful things like laundry and making dinner.  Which means that there was a long time between reading the second Beka Cooper book and Mastiff.  That didn’t matter.  I was plunged right back into Beka’s world and happy to be there.  What I particularly appreciated about this particular book was that the ending managed to be happy, progressive, and yet practical in a way that made me tear up.  Two thumbs up.  And maybe that batch of books I’m going to order just got bigger.  Oops.

 

Summer reading total so far:  14.  Year to date:  56.