April 2024 Reading

Well, so much for April!  I read or listened to ten books this month!

Audiobooks mean re-reading, at least for me, because I’m weird about them.  I continued listening to Dorothy Sayers books with Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon.  They’re two of my favorites because they are more novel than mystery and I like the relationship between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.  Then I listened to another Dorothy, Dorothy Gilman, who wrote The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax and its sequels.  I listened to the first one and somewhat enjoyed it, but also noted how much times have changed since the mid-sixties.  Still, a novel about a resourceful older woman is always a pleasure.  It’s nice to know we’ve made some progress.

 

For my birthday, I received Lidia Brankovic’s picture book The Grand Hotel of Feelings.  It’s a beautiful and moving book that talks about the challenges of feeling one’s feelings and accepting them even when it is difficult.  So, basically, it is perfect for me.  I can say with authority that it makes a great gift.

 

I read three nonfiction books this month.  Two of them are related to my church book group.  First, I read A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans because we read a different one of her books in the group and I was intrigued.  This particular book was both interesting and frustrating.  (Hmmm… maybe for the reasons discussed in the next book on my list?)  What exactly Biblical womanhood is remains slightly unclear.  I also wanted Evans to go deeper into how she felt about what she did and what she felt was worth doing and so on.  She never fully resolves the tension between her own (justifiable) feminism and the things she chose to do for her experiment.

 

Which brings me to the current book group read.  (The group is not done with the book yet, but I got impatient, as usual, and finished it.)  It is How the Bible Actually Works: In which I explain how an ancient, ambiguous, and diverse book leads us to wisdom rather than answers—and why that’s great news by Peter Enns.  The thesis is right there in the title, actually.  Enns is writing to counter the Bible fundamentalist mindset, which is surprisingly resilient despite the facts.  I doubt he’s going to convince any fundamentalists, but those of us who follow the Christian faith in a non-fundamentalist way can use his work to explore what the Bible does give us, if not clear directions.  The short version is that the Bible, in all its complexity and multiplicity of voices, gives us an opportunity to figure things out, to question, to practice using our brains and our faith to figure out right living and the nature of God.  Plus he’s funny.  Highly recommend to those interested.

 

The third nonfiction book I read is tangentially related, sort of.  Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World by Christopher de Hamel delves into some gorgeous and important manuscripts in deep and nerdy detail.  As a person whose first priority on going to Dublin, Ireland was to visit the Book of Kells (one of the twelve!), this was right up my alley.  I adore the medieval period in all its complexity and beauty and mess, all of which is on display in this book.  Want a comparison of scribal hands?  It’s here.  Need to see some illuminations?  Also here.  Want a funny and knowledgeable guide to medieval book-making, history, and controversy?  Check.  I loved it.  Folks who did not major in English with an emphasis on the medieval period might have a different experience.

 

On to fiction.  I will buy every Ann Cleeves book when it comes out (I have some of her back catalog still to acquire, but I’m staying on top of the new ones.).  The Raging Storm is her latest Matthew Venn mystery.  Venn is perhaps the most likeable of her detectives, nerdy and awkward, scarred by his childhood.  He’s also good at his job.  I read, not so much for the mystery, but for the well-written glimpses into the imaginary lives of each character.  Cleeves creates plausible universes and I like them.

 

I continue to work my way through all of Gail Carriger’s books.  This month I read Romancing the Inventor, which is a lovely romp of a book.  It is not a plot spoiler to say that everything turns out well in the end—it’s a genre expectation, after all.  Adorable lesbian romance.  Highly recommend.

 

Finally, I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin.  I love Jemisin’s world-building.  Yeine is a strong female protagonist.  Multiple people in the book call her “little pawn,” which is accurate in terms of her experience in the political battles of the novel, but grievously understates her grit and character.  It’s the first of a series, so I’m interested in knowing what happens next!

 

April total:  10

Spring total to date:  44

2024 year to date:  44

March 2024 Reading

Travel does strange things to my reading.  Sometimes I read a bunch more, and sometimes a bunch less.  This month was on the less end.  I read or listened to eight books this month.

Listening first.  I continue to enjoy getting audiobooks from the library.  I listened to Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, which I liked.  I’ve read it many times before.  Audio is a great way to deal with airplanes.

 

Again while I was traveling, I didn’t want to schlepp a ton of books, so I got Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers from the library in e-book form.  I just don’t like reading e-books that much.  I got about halfway through while traveling and finished the book in hard copy.  I read it a long time ago, when I was about ten or eleven.  The book is funnier and also more serious to my grown-up self.  The writing is a bit uneven and the story shows its serial origins.  Every once in a while, a character would stumble across a manuscript or a person with a story to tell that had no real relation to the ongoing story, but made up a chapter.  By the end, however, I found myself attached to the characters.

 

Amadis of Gaul, Books III and IV, however, was not much fun.  I was committed to finish this second volume, but it was a slog.  (For those who don’t remember when I read the first volume, this is the novel that drove Don Quijote mad.)  I have read more medieval and courtly romance than the average person, I think.  Amadis is dead boring compared to the Arthurian cycle (in English or French) and Orlando Furioso.  It turns out that what I want in my knightly tales is one or both of the following:  an overarching purpose to the narrative, like the Grail quest, and/or a sense of humor.  Amadis is just a bunch of guys whacking each other with swords when they could sit down and sort their differences like grown-ups.  All the knights and ladies are virtually interchangeable.  Even the bad guys are boring and predictable.  I’m glad I’ve read it and now I don’t have to ever again.

 

On my travels, I acquired and read five picture books.  In a haphazard sort of way, I collect alphabet books from the places I go, so I was happy to find A to Z of Aotearoa in New Zealand.  It’s an alphabet book with a Kiwi flavor (gumboots, hangi, jandals, etc.).  It’s very cute.

 

At the Christchurch Art Gallery/Te Puna o Waiwhetū, I bought both an alphabet book and a numbers book.  A is for Art features artworks from their collection and words in both English and Maori.   (Aa is for animals; hōiho/horse, with an image from Lucy Kemp-Welch’s painting In the Orchard.)

 

123 What Will We See? similarly pairs images from the collection with numbers in both English and Maori in a lift-the-flap format.  Again, charming.

 

There are some picture books that simply have to come home with me, maybe so I don’t embarrass myself too much laughing in public.  The Book That Did Not Want to Be Read by David Sundin is one of those books.  It’s silly and beautiful and my stomach hurt from laughing.  A sure cure for a bad day.

 

Finally, at the MOTAT in Aukland, I got Sky High:  Jean Batten’s Incredible Flying Adventures by David Hill.  I love a girl-power book and Jean Batten was definitely a power in early aviation.  The illustrations are great, too.

 

March total:  8

Spring total to date:  34

Year to date:  34