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