books_finished_2024 epitome of incomprehensibility I felt like putting this up on blather, partly to give myself a kick in the ass to get book-reviewing. Now, these won't be lengthy reviews, or else the blathe will go super long. Instead, short descriptions are the name of the flame of the dame. Three notes to start off: -I aimed to reread books 2-8 of the Anne of Green Gables series before tackling The_Blythes_Are_Quoted, the episodic-style 9th book published posthumously. I only got to book 5. -Jane Austen books were also something to reread, though I didn't really plan that ahead of time. It was only Persuasion I'd never read before. I think it's my favourite now? Or second-favourite, if I'm staying a basic_bitch with a bias for Pride_and_Prejudice. -About the first couple of months... I wouldn't necessarily *avoid* reading memoirs by Auschwitz survivors, but I wouldn't normally read a bunch of them in a row. It was for a course on Holocaust literature. See, in the winter/spring I was finishing up a 2nd undergrad degree (major in Linguistics, minor in German Studies) and my classy_choice to steer clear of Advanced Phonology set off a chain reaction of changing course(s). Anyway! Here we go! Starting with January. 1) Growing Pains by Graham Gammell (poetry) Two poems in here involve sex. One's called "Pollinators," the other "Chickadees." The birds and the bees, huh? I see what you did there. A pun in the poem "Cuento Viejo" serves not as humour but as a pivot point: "picked" meaning played a guitar with a pick, but also chosen. An older female relative, I think, is playing guitar. Songs - Spanish - the past. Nature throughout. Ordinary topics are woven together in surprising ways. 2) Anne of Avonlea - L.M. Montgomery (children's/YA novel) Anne's a teenager now, so cue two younger children getting adopted by the same woman (Marilla) who adopted Anne. The imagined readers might be Anne's age or younger; they might have siblings, cousins, etc. like 6-year-old Davy and Dora. Mischievous Davy gets more page time than his sister. He's funnier, yes, but I was left wondering what quiet Dora was thinking. Maybe the reason she seems boring is that we just get her external actions and none of her thoughts. Maybe she has as rich an inner life as Anne. This isn't the whole book, though; Anne also has adventures teaching elementary school (even though she's only 16-17!) and befriending grumpy neighbours, etc. Avonlea is the name of the imagined town. 3) Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levy, translated by Stuart Woolf (memoir) The English title doesn't give a good sense of Levi's style. He wasn't just a survivor; he also had a blend of artistic and scientific interests that made for a wide-ranging writing career. Anyway, the original Italian title is more like "If This Is a Man," which is in Levi's poem at the beginning. The point isn't so much to ask "Are people *really* bad if they act badly in desperate circumstances?" but more to show that forcing people to act selfishly was a deliberate strategy of dehumanization on the Nazis' part. A tense episode is when Levi takes a chemistry test to get a role in a specialized labour detail, all the while knowing this could mean the difference between living and dying. Talk about exam pressure! And a quieter, more reflective moment is when two prisoners recite bits of Dante together - a brief reprieve from misery. (February next!) 250107 ... Jus I absolutely adore Anne of Green Gables ♥ Does anyone else immediately forget all the books they read? I should start my Goodreads up again. That being said, I'm a new mom and in school, so I've been reading mostly parenting books and Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus is the freshest in my mind because I've been putting off my assignment on it. It's gratuitous in its use of violence, has real Game of Thrones vibes. I'm craving Lord of the Rings but don't have time until summer. 250107 ... raze some of these were mentioned on what_are_you_reading, but a few fell through the cracks. fábio moon and gabriel bá: "daytripper" alessandro baricco: "silk" amy cipolla barnes: "child craft" lucia_berlin: "a manual for cleaning women" david berman: "actual air" raymond_carver: "what_we_talk_about_when_we_talk_about_love" kathy fish: "wild life (collected works)" jaime fountaine: "manhunt" ross gay: "catalog of unabashed gratitude" jack gilbert: "the great fires" n. griffin: "the whole stupid way we are" robert h. hahn: "none_of_the_roads_were_paved" christine hamm: "gorilla" leah hampton: "f*ckface (and other stories)" bobbie_louise_hawkins: "my own alphabet"; "fifteen poems" elizabeth hoover: "the archive is all in present tense" sophie klahr: "two open doors in a field" david_milch: "life's work" marilyn_monroe: "fragments: poems, intimate notes, letters" nicole stellon o'donnell: "everything never comes your way" dawn raffel: "in the year of long division" victoria redel: "where the road bottoms out" yelizaveta p. renfro: "xylotheque" margaret renkl: "late migrations: a natural history of love and loss" emma rhodes: "razor burn" juan rulfo: "pedro paramo" patricia m. scarry: "goodnight, little bear" david sedaris: "squirrel seeks chipmunk" maggie siebert: "bonding" ken sparling: "dad_says_he_saw_you_at_the_mall" doug stanhope: "digging up mother: a love story" erin taylor: "you look tired"; "bimboland" e.b. white: "charlotte's_web" there wasn't anything in there that i hated, but about a third of those books towered over the rest in terms of the emotional impact they had on me. 250108 ... raze (and goodreads has been a total lifesaver for me. it's made it so much easier to keep track of what i've read and what i want to read.) 250108 ... e_o_i Yay! It's cool to see people adding things. What I remember from Titus Andronicus are the two lines that TV_Tropes cites as an early "your mom" joke, but the characters' names escape me. And I like lurking on Goodreads to see what others say about books, though I haven't written in it (prefer to write things down on paper, post here, and in the future maybe write longer pieces in a dedicated blog). February 2024 4) Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery (children's/YA novel) This one seems to have a stronger frame than the second book: Anne's four years in university. Notably, it was a rare thing back then for women, small-town women more so, to do a B.A. Has homesickness, new friendships, but also the death of a friend. A more adult-oriented book - Young Adult, literally. In the end, the way a romance arc is resolved is maybe overdramatic...but it's overdramatized WELL, dammit. 5) Less by Andrew Sean Greer (novel) Also wrote about in what_are_you_reading, but yes! Less is more - more than I expected from a blind date. See, Dorval Library does this Valentine's Day thing where it wraps books in brown paper and only specifies language/genre. I didn't win the draw at the end (a restaurant gift certificate), I never do, but reading this was enough of a gift. My god, the writing! Greer could've been light and flighty about awkward writers and their travel and romantic mishaps, but this was elegantly literary without being pretentious. Does a cool thing with point_of_view. Highly recommend. 250108 ... e_o_i March 2024 Maus by Art Spiegelman (graphic memoir; he's both author and illustrator) Third time reading this comic_memoir. I think I describe it more on that blathe. The literature prof pointed out bits of visual storytelling I hadn't noticed before: for instance, one frame shows an extended family through a window, the bars between the panes showing how they fall into separate groups. The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks (children's novel) Another children's author with three names, a trend I remarked upon in dream_names. Do I only notice this because I'm looking for it? ...Anyway, this book was a childhood favourite, or at least the idea of toys coming to life gripped my imagination. It's not like Toy Story, where the toys are sentient and move around when people don't watch them. Instead, with the turn of a key in a magic cupboard, figurines turn into actual people pulled from the past. Its influence on me: I remember trying to convince my younger brother that his Lego people came to life and talked to me. I was gullible for believing he believed that. He didn't, even at six. But about the book, I'd remembered that the main character was named Omri, after an obscure biblical king, but I'd forgotten it was set in England. Anyway, Banks balances the tension between realism and fantasy well. No, you might not say "Indian" that way these days - it wasn't logical in the first place - but the ideas and imaginative spark aren't negated by issues of words_and_shame. None of Us Will Return by Charlotte Delbo (memoir) Originally in French, but I didn't write down the name of the translator. This is the first of three memoirs that takes parts of this author's life and scatters impressions from them in crystal-sharp gems of short chapters. Reminds me a little of the poetic prose of Ander Monson's Other Electricities and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Madeleine is Sleeping. Unexpected and vivid. But also nightmarish because it takes place in Auschwitz. "None of us" was too pessimistic a prediction, but that's what she expected. Even from a transport where people knew each other through resistance ties, shared a language, and actively helped each other, only a quarter survived. But the solidarity was heartwarming, especially in a system deliberately designed to break such bonds (see the Primo Levi book from January). There's a part where another woman hides her so she can cry without being beaten. The next memoir covers recovery, the aftermath; I think there's something about her protesting the French war in Algeria...but I only had time to skim it. I should borrow the three-volume edition again and read the other two. Delbo is definitely underrated. Very much recommend. 250113 ... e_o_i April 2024 This_Way_for_the_Gas_Ladies_and_Gentleman by Tadeusz_Borowski, translated by Barbara Vedder (short stories) Fascinating stories, if painful because of how immersive and matter-of-fact they can be. Based on the author's imprisonment in Auschwitz and Dachau, and afterwards. Excellent descriptions and dialogue. The Black Seasons by Michał Głowiński, translated by Marci Shore (memoir) For the same course. A Polish historian recalls and reflects on his childhood surviving the Holocaust - his family's escape from the Warsaw Ghetto and his time in hiding, including at a Catholic boarding school in the country where many Jewish children like him were hidden. Also immersive, though some of the analysis from his adult perspective seems too general at first. Heavy on abstract nouns. But sometimes I just have to be patient. A memorable scene: the time feels he's about to die because two of the non-Jewish Polish kids in the school threaten to report him, shattering the peace of a nook in the garden he'd taken to visiting. The prof talked about how this book deals with memory: Głowiński explores how retrospective interpretations of childhood events can change their meaning, and how insignificant details get remembered when others fade. The Auschwitz Photographer by Luca Crippa and Maurizio Onnis, translated by Jennifer Higgins (novel) Last book for the course, a novel based on the real-life Wilhelm Brasse. He was imprisoned for refusing to join the Nazis (his father was Austrian, his mother Polish). He had more food and freedom compared to most other prisoners, having a specialized job to do: taking photos, including intake photos of prisoners. This book wasn't as well written as the others, in my view, but there's a picture in it that made me cry and it wasn't a gruesome one. It was because the child in the picture was probably crying, based on the look of her nose and under her eyes. Krystyna Trzesniewska, registered at 13 years old as a "political prisoner" (!) Maybe her parents were partisans, maybe it was just because she was Polish. Anyway, Brasse was able to help some people, covertly, and at the last smuggle many of his photos out of the camp. (next month is way more Jane_Austen-y) 250116 ... e_o_i I just realized I forgot to count. The last six books take me up to 11. 250116 ... Soma I have to think really hard to remember what I have read. I don't feel like I've read much of substance or quantity. The feeling hangs over me – that cozy literature and fantasy romps aren't real books. I know differently though, I suppose, logically. Reading is difficult though. I don't make time. I barely make time for myself. But here it was. 「Bookshops & Bonedust」 by Travis Baldree. This book was supposed to be a sequel, but it turned out to be a prequel – and what a delightfully cozy read it was. 「Every Heart A Doorway」「Down Among the Sticks and Bones」 and 「Beneath the Sugar Sky」 by Seanan McGuire. I picked this book up randomly, at an indie bookshop in California. I wanted something similar to Baldree's cozy writing, and they seemed keen to recommend me lots of books about cute little witches, which I'm not about. Finally they handed me this one, which was darker, without being heavy, and I really liked them. I was particularly pleased that the second book turned out to largely be a vampire story, which was wholly unexpected to me. I'm quite fond of vampire stories. I like darker themes about power and control, as much as I lighter coming of age stories and cozy slices of life. 「Dragonquest」 by Anne McCaffrey. This was left at my bus stop, and I was so delighted to see a nostalgic author title that I took it home and read it in just a few brief days. I forgot how delightful it was that old fantasy books had dictionaries for unique words and appendices of maps, and indexes of character names. There was even a recap of the previous book at the front! 「A Darker Shade of Magic」 by V.E. Schwab. I swapped out my Anne McCaffery for this interesting looking color (and the word "magic") at my little library. It was okay I supposed, but not memorable enough that I can note much about what happened in it. I guess that's it. More than I gave myself credit for, I guess, but pales against my friends who spend all their spare time reading. 250116 what's it to you? who go blather from