November 2023 Reading

I did not meet my JaNoReadMo goal of ten books, but I did read seven.  Four were nonfiction and three were fiction.

Last year when we went to Pismo Beach to see the butterfly migration, I bought Pismo Monarch Butterflies:  Magic, Myths, and Mysteries by Cheryl Powers et al.  It was informative and fun to read.  Among other things, I learned about the link between monarch migration and Day of the Dead in Mexico; butterflies may be the souls of our dearly departed visiting us.  The book points out that the Pismo butterfly grove is located on land appropriated from the Chumash people.  Of course, there is also a bunch of information about the butterfly migrations themselves and the butterfly lifecycle.  Reading the book is not nearly as cool as going to visit the grove, but it is pretty cool.

 

One of these days I’m going to get back to biking and one of the things I want to do is to bike the American River Parkway.  So when I came across a helpful book called Biking and Hiking The American River Parkway by Robin Donnelly, it was a no-brainer to buy it.  What I particularly like about this book is that it gives information about the history and natural history of the places along the trail.  I learned all kinds of good stuff.  The book takes the trail in small increments, so the information is truly extremely local.

 

Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte is more of a reference book than a book to read straight through.  I skimmed and will keep it handy when it is time to plan next year’s garden.  What I read was informative and clear.  I might have read the whole thing if I happened to be ready to cross the line from enthusiastic but unwilling to do hard work gardening to gardener seeking expert knowledge and advice.  What I did take away was that some pairings can repel pests, which is super double awesome.

 

What I learned from Yelizaveta Orlova’s Chess for Beginners is that what I need to do now is to play a bunch of chess if I want to get better at it.  Given a puzzle, I can usually figure out the correct next move, but confronted with a new game and all the choices, I freak out.  Again, I have not made the decision to develop past dabbler, but I know that options exist if I ever do.  Frankly, I preferred the book I got on chess for kids (I wrote about it whenever it was that I read it), but that might just be because I am basically a child.

 

The first volume of Amadis of Gaul translated by Edwin Place and Herbert Behm covers the first two books of the epic work.  I’ll get to the second volume (books three and four) eventually.  I chose to read it because it is the foundational text of Don Quijote’s madness.  Of all the knights, he esteems Amadis the most.  I’m kind of surprised, except that Amadis was in Spanish.  I liked the story, but it is not as deeply engaging as the Arthurian cycles nor as fanciful as Orlando Furioso.  There is a lot of fighting in lieu of conversation, which gets boring.  Possibly my favorite part was when Amadis and Galaor come to a crossroads and discover a dead knight laid out in state and Amadis, who wants to hurry back to his lady, basically says, “Crap.  Another adventure that’s going to delay me.”  (That’s the gist, but he says it in elevated and knightly language.)

 

Finally, I read the next two books in Cornelia Funke’s Reckless series, Living Shadows and The Golden Yarn.  I enjoyed both of them very much, but I need to get the fourth book.

 

November total:  7

Fall to date:  20

Year to date:  75