Fall Reading: Five more books

I admit I don’t have a lot of good things to say about extremely hot and smoky weather.  Here is one of the few:  I have at least been reading.  Five more books to write about this time.

 

I devoured Louise Penny’s newest book, All The Devils Are Here.  I just want to hang out with her characters.  I don’t even much care what they do.  In this case, the Gamaches are in Paris along with their grown children, grandchildren, and impending grandchild.  There is a murder, a complicated plot with many twists, and a satisfying conclusion, but it is the little stuff that makes me love this and Penny’s other books so much.  My only complaint is that the rest of the gang back in Three Pines makes such a brief appearance, but that is just a quibble.  In a world where so many books are full of truly disagreeable people, it is a gift to spend some pages with charming, smart, good people who like to eat and swear and love.  Now I’m back to waiting for the next one.  Sigh.

 

I finished two (two!!!) more of the nonfiction books from the 2020 to-read list.  Freedom’s Frontier by Stacey L. Smith was an important and terrible read.  I went to fourth grade here in California and thought I had a sense of California history.  My knowledge needed some updating and it was not a pleasant process.  The book examined how California history was shaped by the ideas of white settler colonialism, systematically working to keep out or exterminate the native peoples who were here first, the Mexicans who were here before California became part of the United States, the other Latin Americans who came for the Gold Rush, the enslaved and freed Black people, and the Chinese, other Asians, and Pacific Islanders.  Grim reading and truly shameful.  I recommend the book, even if it is hard.

 

The other nonfiction book was Educated by Initiative by Daniel A. Smith and Caroline J. Tolbert.  The authors studied in great statistical detail that I cheerfully ignored the effect of initiatives not on the creation of laws per se, but on the cultivation of an educated and engaged citizenry.  The arguments were clearly written in readable, approachable prose.  It is not the fault of the authors that the subject bored the heck out of me.  Here is the one-sentence summary:  initiatives increase voter participation, particularly in non-Presidential election years, and thus are a useful tool for the promotion of democracy even if initiatives are also used by special interest groups and political parties.

 

Then I continued to revisit the world of Anne Shirley.  I read Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery.  I am still enjoying Anne’s adventures, but I also feel some frustration with the way her relationship with Gilbert works.  It feels fake that Anne doesn’t realize how she feels about him and that he hangs around waiting for her.  Fake isn’t quite the right word.  Scripted?  Our romantic heroine can’t have an untroubled path to true love because that would not be thrilling enough.  Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon or something.  It’s not that I don’t want them to be together; it’s that I want them to be real with each other.  I’m halfway through the books now; I’ll see what happens next with them.

 

Fall total:  6 books.  Year to date:  75.