Weird_O Bill's 2023, Part Three (3)

     

Geez. Dunno what happened. I was just sailing through me library, getting to The Big Seventy-Five in record (for me) time. Then everything went black.

You ever have this experience?

Maybe it's the weather. Or the beginning of mass extinction.

First Quarter's Reads

January 2023
1. Regeneration, Pat Barker. Finished 1/6/23. 
2. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Kate Beaton. Finished 1/6/23. 
3. Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus. Finished 1/11/23. 
4. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum. Finished 1/13/23. January 2023 AAC. 
5. Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein. Finished 1/15/23. January 2023 AAC. 
6. Freddy Goes to Florida, Walter R. Brooks. Finished 1/15/23. January 2023 AAC. 
7. Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Giles Milton. Finished 1/19/23. 
8. The Far Side Gallery 2, Gary Larson. Finished 1/19/23.
9. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Finished 1/20/23. 
10. What Is Left the Daughter, Howard Norman. Finished 1/23/23. 
11. How to Be Safe, Tom McAllister. Finished 1/26/23. 
12. God's Man: A Novel in Woodcuts, Lynd Ward. Finished 1/26/23. 
13. The Odyssey, Seymour Chwast. Finished 1/27/23. 

February 2023
14. What It's Like to Be a Dog, Gregory Berns. Finished 2/1/23. 
15. How to Fake a Moon Landing, Darryl Cunningham. Finished 2/1/13. 
16. The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams. Finished 2/4/23. 
17. Bewilderment, Richard Powers. Finished 2/7/23. February 2023 AAC. 
18. The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman. Finished 2/9/23. 
19. A Master of Djinn, P. Djeli Clark. Finished 2/24/23. 
20. Help I Am Being Held Prisoner, Donald E. Westlake. Finished 2/28/23. 

March 2023
21. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, Norman Ohler, Finished 3/5/23. 
22. Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World, Mark Miodownik. Finished 3/9/23. 
23. When We Cease to Understand the World, Bernard Labatut. Finished 3-11-23. 
24. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, T. S. Eliot. Illus. Edward Gorey. Finished 3/11/23. March 2023 AAC. 
25. Intercourse, Robert Olen Butler. Finished 3/18/23. 
26. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. Finished 3/27/23. 
27. American Cult, Robyn Chapman, ed. Finished 3/30/23. 
28. Severance: Stories, Robert Olen Butler. Finished 3/30/23. 

Second Quarter's Reads

April 2023
29. The Case of the Baited Hook, Erle Stanley Gardner. Finished 4/4/23. 
30. He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter's Quest to Know Him, Mimi Baird. Finished 4/8/23. 
31. Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Dr. Carl L. Hart. Finished 4/11/23. 
32. Because of Winn-Dixie, Kate DiCamillo. Finished 4/11/23. 
33. Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas, Jim Ottaviani; illus. Maris Wicks. Finished 4/15/23. 
34. Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America, Ursula Hegi. Finished 4/19/23. 
35. The Woman Who Died a Lot, Jasper Fforde. Finished 4/21/23. 
36. All Systems Red, Martha Wells. Finished 4/26/23. 
37. Six Easy Pieces, Walter Mosley. Finished 4/29/23. 

May 2023
38. An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison. Finished 5/4/2023. 
39. Sapiens: A Graphic History Vol. 2: The Pillars of Civilization, Yuval Noah Harari, illustrations by David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave. Finished 5/7/23. 
40. Plum Pie, P. G. Wodehouse. Finished 5/15/23. 
41. Number One Is Walking, Steve Martin and Harry Bliss. Finished 5/21/23. 
42. Robert Capa: Photographs, Robert Capa. Finished 5/22/23. 
43. A History of the World in Six Glasses, Tom Standage. Finished 5/29/23. 

June 2023
44. The Eye in the Door, Pat Barker. Finished 6/5/23. 
45. Shopgirl, Steve Martin. Finished 6/6/23. 
46. A Puzzle for Fools, Patrick Quentin. Finished 6/8/23. 
47. Bangkok Tattoo, John Burdett. Finished 6/10/23. 
48. The Unsuspected, Charlotte Armstrong. Finished 6/12/23. 
49. The Chinese Orange Mystery, Ellery Queen. Finished 6/14/23. 
50. Rocket to the Morgue, Anthony Boucher. Finished 6/19/23. 
51. The Bigger They Come, A. A. Fair (a.k.a. Erle Stanley Gardner). Finished 6/20/23. 
52. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ, Giulia Enders. Finished 6/26/23. 
53. Voices from Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich. Finished 6/28/23. 
54. Joe Gould's Teeth, Jill Lepore. Finished 6/29/23. 
55. Mort, Terry Pratchett. Finished 6/30/23. 

Third Quarter's Reads

July 2023
56. Fen, Bog & Swamp, Annie Proulx. Finished 7/6/23. 
57. In Review: Pictures I've Kept, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Finished 7/7/23. 
58. Fables of Aesop, S. A. Handford, trans. Finished 7/7/23. 
59. Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine, Martin Cruz Smith. Finished 7/10/23. 
60. The Rubber Band, Rex Stout. Finished 7/11/23. 
61. Foster, Claire Keegan. Finished 7/14/23. 
62. The Netanyahus, Joshua Cohen. Finished 7/18/23. 
63. The Witches, Roald Dahl. Finished 7/20/23. 
64. A Book of Days, Patti Smith. Finished 7/20/23. 
65. The Chickens Are Restless, Gary Larsen. Finished 7/20/23. 
66. Ascending Peculiarity, Edward Gorey. Finished 7/22/23. 
67. The Red Box, Rex Stout. Finished 7/23/23. 
68. The Widening Stain, W. Bolingbroke Johnson. Finished 7/25/23. 

August 2023
69. The Dubliners, James Joyce. Finished 8/2/23. 
70. The Haunted Lady, Mary Roberts Rinehart. Finished 8/8/23. 
71. The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell. Finished 8/11/23. 
72. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride. Finished 8/15/23. 
73. The Far Side Gallery 4, Gary Larson. Finished 8/19/23. 
74. Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman. Finished 8/20/23. 
75. The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild. Finished 8/30/23.  

September 2023
76. Good Talk, Mira Jacob. Finished 9/21/23. Most Excellent.
77. A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles. Finished 9/26/23. 
78. Ride the Pink Horse, Dorothy B. Hughes. Finished 9/28/23. 

…So, whilst blacked out, I apparently read a few pages, sometimes a chapter or two, in various books, interviewing them (so to speak) for the position "Number Seventy-Six."

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien. I wanted to read this, having made my way through O'Brien's The Third Policeman last year. But boy howdy, this'n opaque from the first paragraph. More concentration required than I could summon in my comatose state.

Our Woman in Moscow, Beatriz Williams. Both my daughter and I have copies of this. She liked it and suggested I read it. By page 90…that's where the bookmark is: NEXT!

Mathilda, Mary Shelley. Need I remind you that Mrs. Shelley wrote Frankenstein. This short novel is about incest. In hand-wrung preVictorian gush. For a different mood, one to settle over me some other day..

Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann. TransAtlantic was a great read; LGWS started well, but it was going somewhere I hadn't been thinking of for position "Number Seventy-Six." Another time; when I come to.

      

Ride the Pink Horse, Dorothy Hughes. A possibility for September's AAC: Crime novels by women. It's been resurrected by Otto Penzler, owner of NYC's Mysterious Bookstore and publisher of "American Mystery Classics." I've read a bunch of them. Hmmm. Slow start, even for someone seemingly comatose. Coming to, I found it set aside nevertheless.

Tunnel Vision, Sara Paretsky. Apparently another AAC candidate. I have three Paretskys in amongst the TBR. Apparently I picked this one to sample; stuck the jacket flap between pages 14 and 15, beginning of chapter 3. Features starving sleuth V. I. Warshawski, who seizes an opportunity to save a struggling family, whether they want to he saved or not. Left it under the Hughes book, so not rejected outright.

Fathers and Children a.k.a. (Fathers and Sons), Ivan Turgenev. Linked to position "Number Seventy-Five" by its setting in Russia. (An aside: Having read of Chernobyl earlier this year and, in position "Number Seventy-Five," a book about Stalin and his residual impact on the USSR, I rounded up all the Russia-related books I could remember owning—see the following post.) Anyway, Turgenev. I observed an ad in The New York Review of Books last fall about a new translation of Turgenev's novel. Got it for Christmas. Read only a dozen pages before recognizing the need to make a list of characters. That was enough to stall the read. Oh! The shame, the shame… But I am going back to it, damn it!

The Collected Tales, Nikolai Gogol. Another Russia book, another Christmas gift. I solicited, last fall, something with a story by Gogol titled "The Nose," described as the funniest story ever. So…got the story. Read it. Didn't roll on the floor laughing my ass off. But still, I intended to read all the stories, so it was at hand. Maybe for position "Number Seventy-Six"? But I've come to…

A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles. Not least was this tome, on the TBR since 2019, with my sister's recommendation and many recommendations here on LT. So, again, I read some pages. But I collected other books. I know I did, because a stack of them on the bookcase bore witness of my—well, someone's labor.

Dark days, dark. Would someone…get…this…clod…out…of…his…stupor? Read on, read on.

Books drawn from my vast but weird TBR for consideration for the position of "Number Seventy-Six." These were deemed unworthy of sampling, but I don't know why. Right now, each one of them seems worth a taste. In no particular order then.

Red Famine, Anne Applebaum. An exhaustive account of the Soviet folly called "collectivization." Peasants were forced off their small but productive farms and onto huge farms that absorbed—collected—all the small holdings. Didn't work too well, but Stalin made do by transforming famine resulting from crop failures into a means of population reduction. Three million of the estimated five million who starved to death in the U.S.S.R. were Ukrainians.

The Chocolate Cobweb, Charlotte Armstrong. September AAC candidate, published as an "American Mystery Classic", a mystery novel published in the 1940s that lapsed out of print and has been republished in the 21st century. A switched-at-birth (or maybe not) yarn.

Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead. Whitehead's second Pulitzer-winning novel, which has been sulking amongst the TBRs for two years. "You read five of eight of my fellow Whitehead creations, chucklehead. When is it MY time?" Into the serious circle with ya, sez I. So soon, soon.

The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel, Don Marquis. I was introduced to the existence of "archy and mahitabel" in a journalism class in college, though I admit to not having read more than a few entries, then or since. The concept is that archy is a cockroach who writes missives to mehitabel, an alley cat. And does it letter by letter, by jumping onto the keys of a typewriter (no caps or punctuation—those are just extra keystrokes, thus extra jumps). I bought this paperback edition from Amazon earlier this year, but…still haven't read it. So…

The Trial, Franz Kafka. Cited by Adam Hochschild in The Unquiet Ghost, my read Number Seventy-Five. Though possessing several copies, I've never read it. It makes my current list.

Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak. My notion of this'n is that Pasternak smuggled the ms. to the U.S.—CIA involvement, I believe. Soviet authorities angered. Anger inflamed by book's publication and even more when the author is awarded the Nobel Prize. Anger mollified by author's rebuff of the award. But a spectacular film—David Lean, dir; Robert Bolt Oscar-winning script; Oscar-winning sets, costumes, cinematography, and score; Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Tom Courtenay Alec Guinness, Rod Steiger, Geraldine Chaplin, and a few other performers—sealed the book's influence. But it has never escaped my TBR. Sadly, unread. Time for action?

       

Gulag, Anne Applebaum. A 600+-page, Pulitzer-winning history of the Soviet concentration camps that terrorized its society from 1917 to 1986. Acquired a used copy in '21 and another in '22. There's a message there, ain't.

Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham. Lordy, another exhaustive history of another Soviet disaster. This time a nuclear disaster. I got a short report by reading Voices from Chernobyl, and I'm not sure I am up to an exhaustive read about THIS Soviet f*ck-up. We'll see, we'll see.

August 1914, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Russian history by exiled writer—a Nobelist—Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Focused on a Russian defeat during World War I. Is it fiction or nonfiction? Whichever, it is sweeping, detailed, comprehensive (a trade-mark of Russian writing). Actually, I have two copies, so I should read at least one of them.

The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Soviet history by exiled writer Solzhenitsyn. A doorstop at 900 some pages. After writing that first sentence, I checked WikiPedia and learned I was barely correct. I won't say more here, other than that there's a lot more to say. Especially if I read the book.

Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed. John Reed was a young American journalist who witnessed the Revolution and was transformed. American publishers were unwilling to publish his story. He died in 1920, but a British publisher issued a posthumous edition. (I'm possibly making up this publishing history; don't even know if I'm sentient just now. Bump on the head, don't you know.) Warren Beatty revived Reed's short-lived fame by portraying him and his story in a film epic, Reds. Haven't seen the flick, but the book seems worth a read.

The Ghost Road, Pat Barker. Pretending to be a a completist, and having read the first and second books in Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, I plucked the third book from Box # 1. Barker won the Booker Prize for the third; I've read that many critical readers believe The Ghost Road is the weakest of the three, that the first shoulda been the Booker winner. Might have been a good fit as "Number Seventy-Six." But no. No, no. no.

LaRose, Louise Erdrich. Another opportunity for completistness. The third novel of Erdrich's Justice Trilogy has been on my TBR for several years. I've read both The Round House and The Plague of Doves, not knowing they are books 1 and 2 of a trilogy. I've the third and final in hand, so while in dreamland? La-la-land? Suspended animation land? I can consider completing the triad. Nothing ventured, as they say.

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. I acquired this doorstop of a book when it was published in 2009. Of course I have not read it—Why would I list it here as a possible read if I had already read it? I did consult the index; found the names Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, also that of Alger Hiss. Hmmm. Some flap copy: "In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States." He came away with extensive notebooks, which are the basis of the book. Upshot: Yes, the Rosenbergs and Hiss and many other Americans passed information to the KGB. I might read all about it.

Books purchased to be read right away…

Good Talk, Mira Jacob
Tabula Rasa, John McPhee

     

How did this come to happen? One was purchased at a Barnes & Noble, the other had a receipt from a bookstore on Newbury Street in Boston. When was I in these places? Sleepwalking? Zombie book buyer?

Upshot? Books read whilst I was…eh…"away":

76. Good Talk, Mira Jacob
77. A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
78. Ride the Pink Horse, Dorothy Hughes September 2023 AAC

     

Books Now Being Read:

Tabula Rasa, John McPhee
Tunnel Vision, Sara Paretsky September 2023 AAC
Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

       

I'll explain that Georgia O'Keeffe bio at another time.

       

Who is feeling lucky? The next slot is yours. It is Number Thirteen.

The Baker's Dozen is mine then, Bill.
Happy new thread.

Good to see you back!

I am going to guess that you are watching the Freida Kahlo special on PBS and that made you think of Georgia O'Keeffe. Hence, the biography of her?

For what it is worth - I liked the Pat Barker series and thought that Ghost Road was the best of the three books in the Regeneration trilogy. I am certain that you will come back around to it someday.

You must be going through a Russian phase. Lots of heavy duty reading on that heavy subject.

Happy new thread Bill!

Happy new thread and congrats on sailing past 75.

I have Our women in Moscow on my shelf for a while. Was it a good read for you ?

Happy New Thread, Bill. Love the topper. We missed you. Looking forward to your thoughts on both Good Talk & the Towles. I loved both. I am nearly finished with The Singapore Grip. You read this trilogy, right? One for the ages.

>13 PaulCranswick: Good good good, Paul. No superstitious avoidance by you. I myownself lived about 6 years at 1313 Cochran Road. In my formative years at that: 5th grade through 10th.

>14 benitastrnad: I am going to guess... Oh, I'm sorry, Benita, but that's not it. I'll explain soon.

I liked the first book in Barker's trilogy more than the second. I am heartened to read that you liked the 3rd book best of all. That inches it up other books in the stack.

I'm kind of stutter-stepping at the Russian border with my list of Russia/Soviet Union books. I am prone to jump into things, then suddenly lose interest and immediately walk away. Don't know if that will happen here. I'm thinking that I have unread writings of Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Gogol, Bulgakov, and other writers.

      

      Chekhov and Tolstoy in Yalta

Drat! I had replies to Susan and Anita written and one to Mark, then I blew it out the cables. Hovered indelicately over a Touchstone, just to get an author's name, and instead jumped to the book page. My uncompleted post thereby...uh...went away.

Happy new one, Bill!

I went through a fairly intensive Russian-novel-reading spell in my 20s. You know, back when there was all the time in the world, and it didn't matter how long it took to finish a book, the longer the better? I would love to have that feeling again. Immersive.

I read The Round House (but never reviewed it, so don't even remember the story line now) in 2017, and am currently reading The Plague of Doves. I think I'll re-read the first before going on to the third, LaRose.