books
Finished reading: Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan 📚
This was Claire’s second collection of short stories, following Antarctica. Seven stories in all (in this edition that I read, some say there can be eight). I liked five of them and loved two. Worth buying the book just for the two alone.
📚 Great British Bake Off - Of Books
Wry Writer wrote on her blog about the Great British Bake Off Book Challenge. Here is mine.
Finished reading: Passing of the Dragon by Ken Liu 📚
A wonderful short story about a woman who fears she’s failing as a painter and as an artist seeks inspiration from one of her favorite poets, finding something even more wondrous, but also more impossible to capture in her art.
Finished reading: A World Appears by Michael Pollan 📚
What can I say, any book by Michael Pollan is sure to be gold, and this one does not disappoint. If you have any interest at all, or even if you don’t, you’ll understand what all this hubbub about consciousness is […]
Want to read: Everything Is Photograph by Patricia Albers 📚
Want to read: Everything Is Photograph by Patricia Albers 📚 I don’t usually post about books in the queue, but I just found this one, and wanted any other photographers interested to see it. Kertész took over 100,000 photographs, exhibited worldwide, and was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica.
Finished reading: So Late in the Day Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan 📚
Finished reading: So Late in the Day Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan 📚
Beautiful short stories. These stories leave a lot to your imagination. They are certainly different than her other work. I liked them, but of all her books, it was my least favorite.
Not a lot to say on this one. If you’ve never read Claire Keegan, you are missing out. Get reading.
I would say start out with Foster and Small Things Like These, first, then move on to her other work.
Finished reading: Go Computer Now! by Ben Zotto 📚
Finished reading: Go Computer Now! by Ben Zotto 📚 Delightful book about the start of the personal computer, and Sphere Corporation […]
Currently reading: Go Computer Now! by Ben Zotto 📚
About halfway through, what a great book. Tons of history that I knew nothing about.
Finished reading: Traversal by Maria Popova 📚
How do you get from Captain Cook’s 1769 voyage to document the transit of Venus to Mary Shelley’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and their books Vindication and An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice; to Margaret Fuller in America; to frog legs; to Aaron Burr as a destitute boarder; to the world’s first chemical equation–“grape must = carbonic acid + alcohol”; to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; to Jane Marcet; to Michael Faraday; Ralph Wedgwood, the inventor of the noctograph; to the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora and its devastating global weather effects; to a doctor who wrote the first vampire-themed book, then later took his own life after being unable to convince the public of his true authorship; to phrenology; to Walt Whitman and his lost true love; to Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Frederick Douglass? Maria Popova, that’s how.
Finished Reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Finished reading: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 📚
Another powerful, beautifully written book by Claire Keegan.
Do yourself a favor: pour yourself a cup/mug/pint/glass of something, sit down with this book, and read it from start to finish in one sitting.
Powerful, sobering, thought-provoking prose that seeps into you and will stay in your thoughts for days to come.
We have a lot to answer for, us humans.
Finished Reading: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab 📚
Finished reading: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab 📚
Do you like vampires?
Do you like good writing and a great story?
You’ll like this.
Not for everyone, but if you’re a fan of V.E. Schwab, this fits in nicely. She’s a great storyteller and brings the characters alive. I do have quibbles with the ending, though. Decide for yourself.
Finished reading: The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard 📚
Another deep dive into complex characters, questioning life, love, and family bonds, all with a strange celestial morning star in the heavens.
New Book Alert 🚨 Maria Popova - Traversal 📚
Maria Popova has a new book out today Traversal. 
Synopsis from Kobo:
“From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life. What is life? What is death? What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive—our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems—through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads—the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue—to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. By turns epic and intimate—as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one other—Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.”
I have it in the queue now and look forward to reading it.
I LOVED her first book Figuring.
Paused: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson 📚
Did Not Finish: Paused: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson 📚
Paused for now. Will have to come back later and try again. 115 pages or so into the story, and I don’t have a connection to the characters or the story. There is such high praise for this book, it surprises me. But, it may just take more time…
Gotta always remember:
Words of Wisdom from Doris Lessing:
” There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you."
Finished Reading: Foster by Claire Keegan 📚
This was the first book I’d ever finished, and I immediately started over. Claire Keegan is a master with words and story.
Finished reading: Breakneck by Dan Wang 📚
This fast-paced book offers a compelling exploration of the stark contrasts between China and the United States, highlighting issues related to governance, infrastructure, and societal challenges.
📚 Finished Reading: The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard
A beautifully crafted and haunting novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard immerses readers in the lives of ordinary characters while exploring deep existential questions about life and relationships.
NYT George Saunders Interview
NYT George Saunders Interview: The interviewer, with a deep appreciation for writers and their skill in articulating complex problems, highlights the transformative power of storytelling.
Finished Reading: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes 📚
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes 📚
Powerful book, makes you think a lot about the human condition, how we treat each other, and the assumptions we make. Intelligence or the lack of it, and how differently we treat people with the whatever level we think they have.
Good story, powerful character building.
But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”