May 2022 Reading

Another month, another batch of books, ten to be precise.  May was mostly a month for fiction, with eight of the ten books of that sort.  I read one book of poetry and one nonfiction book.

 

Nonfiction first.  Henry Beston’s book, The Outermost House, is, apparently, a classic of nature writing.  I expected Thoreau, given the fairly similar premise of a year more or less alone in a cabin in a place.  What I got was something else.  Beston is lyrical and sociable.  He is not withdrawing from society so much as choosing to be in a closer relationship with nature on the beach at Cape Cod.  He hangs out with the Coasties often.  I liked the book, but did not love it.

 

Next, poetry.  I do not know how I heard of Ellen Bass, but I am so glad I did.  Her book Like a Beggar is one that makes me delight in language.  I am going to copy the bulk of it into my commonplace book because it is that beautiful.

 

Two of the remaining books I finished this month are from a book group I joined.  The group read some of the stories in The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor and my completionist-self needed to read the rest.  It is entirely possible to think that someone is a good writer and not at all enjoy their work.  This is the case for me with O’Connor.  Nearly all of her characters are disagreeable.  The epiphanies that come to them are too late, too little, or too ironic.  Now I don’t have to read the stories again.

 

By contrast, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce is delightful in spite of some difficult events and subjects.  As you would expect from the title, there is a journey involved and the physical journey has spiritual implications.  Harold and the people around him are all flawed, hurting humans, but they discover various kinds of grace in the course of the story.

 

I finished my birthday allotment of Terry Pratchett by reading Men at Arms.  As always, I find Pratchett wise and funny.  I enjoy spending time with his characters no matter what they are doing.  Christmas can come soon, as far as I am concerned, so that Syd and Sam can give me the next books.

 

I read N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky).  All three books won Hugo and/or Nebula awards and I am not surprised because they are beautifully written.  The world-building is impressive and unique.  The story, as it unfolds over the three volumes, is harsh, but also redemptive.  There are plenty of costly decisions to make in a world dealing with generational trauma on a geologic scale and immediate trauma on a potentially apocalyptic scale.  The characters are compelling and understandable, if not always sympathetic.  Highly recommend.

 

The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge is also a book about redemption, but on a much smaller scale.  Goudge’s work is old-fashioned, but I like it.  She writes about ordinary people facing the existential issues of everyday life in post-WW2 England.  Her prose is lovely, her characters finely drawn, and the plot, such as it is, satisfies.

 

Finally, in this year of Don Quijote in Spanish, I finished reading it in English this month as part of the class I’m taking with Stanford’s continuing education program.  The translation is by Edith Grossman, who seems to have a feel for Cervantes’s language.  Translations are always tricky, especially in a book where there is so much word-play, but Grossman manages with only occasional recourse to footnotes.  I love the book.  It has pretty much everything in it.  It’s tragic and funny and deep.  It engages with political issues that still resonate (classism, racism, abuse of power), philosophical issues (What is reality anyway? What does it mean to be sane/insane?), and spiritual questions (how do we live a good life?) while exploding genre expectations.  I am not, of course, going to abandon my Spanish quest, but for those who want to have the Quixote experience without the language thing, I would recommend this translation.  (Note:  the Spanish spelling of the don’s name is Quijote, but it came into English as Quixote, a spelling Grossman uses because we have the word “quixotic” in relatively common use nowadays.)

 

May total:  10

Spring total:  51

YTD:  51

 

On to Summer Reading.