September 2024 Reading

It’s time to wake up Billie Joe Armstrong, otherwise known as when September ends.  So here’s what I read this month:  seven books.

Audio first.  I continue to enjoy listening to Louise Penny’s books via Hoopla and the public library.  What is not to like about free?  This month, I heard All the Devils Are Here and The Madness of Crowds.  The former is unusual among Penny’s books in that it is set in Paris.  True to form, however, there is fabulous food and a victory for love and kindness in the end.  The latter book is one of the few I’ve read that deals with the aftermath of the pandemic on our collective psyches.  I never much care who did it in her books.  I read for the characters and the general decision to focus on the good things in life.

 

Both of the nonfiction books I read this month are religious/spiritual.  Walk in Love by Scott Gunn and Melody Wilson Shobe is a handbook of sorts for the Episcopal Church.  I was not born an Episcopalian, so it was interesting to see the what and why of how things are done.  Not exactly a page-turner, although both authors seem like kindly, knowledgeable, approachable humans.

 

I happen to know Callie E. Swanlund in person from her days as a seminarian.  I was very excited to buy her book From Weary to Wholehearted:  A Restorative Resource for Overcoming Clergy Burnout.  OK, newsflash:  I am not a clergyperson (thanks be to God!).  As a lay person, however, I found the stories, techniques, and skills Callie describes to be useful anyway.  I think a large proportion of the people I know are dealing with some kind of burnout and anyone who does not find a religious perspective an automatic trigger or contraindication could find good stuff here.  Callie is smart, funny, and real as well as wise.

 

Heading into fiction, I will stay with religion for one more book, C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which I read in church book group.  It describes a journey by flying bus from hell to heaven, sort of a field trip for the damned.  Our narrator (the un-Dante?) learns about how things work in both heaven and hell.  He meets various inhabitants of both places.  It was not my favorite book ever.  Some of that is down to the fact that Lewis was a man of his time.  His attitude toward the young, the nonconformists, and women are all… challenging.  He does not and cannot see how some of his characters were shaped by their cultural demands and he is more than a little uncharitable.  I also don’t agree with his ultimate conclusion, but I am not foolish enough to presume to know how the universe turns out.  The discussion, however, in the book club meetings, was excellent, so at the very least Lewis gets points for being a spark.

 

In a totally different vein, I very much enjoyed T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call.  What is one supposed to do when one’s mother is an evil sorceress preying on good people?  This book pits a damaged but resourceful young woman against a difficult problem.  There are twists.  It was a heck of a ride.  Highly recommend.

 

As I continue to wend my way through the collected works of Ursula K. Le Guin, I read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else.  I don’t remember precisely where the line is between novella and novel, but if this book qualifies as a novel, it’s a very short one.  It’s a coming of age story with the usual sorts of conflicts that entails, which would perhaps be a little stale if not for Le Guin’s gifted prose and attention to detail.  Not my favorite of her books, but entirely worth reading.

 

September total:  7

Fall total to date:  7

YTD:  88

August 2024 Reading

Another month over!  I read or listened to eight books in August.

Audio first.  I continue to work my way through Louise Penny’s books in audio format.  (Side note:  Hoopla through the public library is an awesome way to listen to audio books without paying a bunch of money.  Or any!)  I listened to Kingdom of the Blind and A Better Man.  As always, the books made me want to move to Three Pines and eat fabulous food with quirky neighbors while someone figures out murders.  As I have mentioned before, I find murder mysteries soothing, as long as they’re not too gory or scary.  Penny manages to maintain the stakes for her characters while also giving me confidence that it’s all going to be more or less all right in the end.

 

Gail Carriger is an amazing writer and also an amazing human whom I know in person.  She met my previously unknown need for spicy gay werewolf romance perfectly with The Omega Objection.  Her characters are compelling and I root for them all the way through, even when they do dumb stuff and get in messes for a while before it all turns out in the end.  Highly recommend.

 

I finished the last two books in the Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms and The Kingdom of Gods.  What I love about her work is how creative her world-building is.  Strong characters and interesting plotting keep me interested in a world that is very different from my own.  She also does not shy away from the difficult bits.

 

I continue to work my way through the works of Ursula K. Le Guin.  This month I read Powers and The Eye of the Heron.  Both were engrossing in different ways.  Powers is a story of tragedy eventually overcome.  The Eye of the Heron is, I think, more of a thought experiment about how we make our lives, about class, and about how cultures define us.  They both contain the elegant and beautiful prose that keeps me coming back.

 

Finally, I bought and read the brand-spanking-new Ann Cleeves book The Dark Wives.  It’s a Vera novel and exactly right in all the usual Vera ways.  Go get it now.

 

August total:  8

Summer total:  29

Year to date total:  81