October 2011 Reads

Don’t mind me—I’m just going to sneakily slip this in here. For posterity’s sake, as usual. Above is what I managed to read this October. Not in the picture is Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, which, for some reason, refuses to be found. It’s been a strange month for reading material, as usual. My shelves must be feeling quite hokey lately.

Regular programming will resume. Someday. Soon-ish.

September 2011 Reads

That was a random picture of random books from my hard drive. Ahem. For posterity’s sake—what follows is the list of books I read this month.

• Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs.
• Moondogs, by Alexander Yates.
• The Long Weekend, by Adam David.
• How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, by Christopher Boucher.
• Everything Beautiful Began After, by Simon Van Booy.
• The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer.
• The Suicide Shop, by Jean Teulé.
• A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, by Roland Barthes.
• How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren.
• The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton, by Miranda Neville.
• The Perils of Pleasure, by Julie Anne Long.

What’s more striking about it is after the first four books, generally a different kind of experience for me, I snuggled up to the Van Booy—another recent release, yes—hoping for something more conventional [after all, the first four are nothing but], but, ultimately, the book and I just didn’t jive. “I hate it,” I told Nash, who’d finished reading it four days ahead of me. And Nash said, “I don’t. Just half of it.”

But Simon Mawer’s novel? It’s restored my faith in humanity, haha. At the very least, it’s reaffirmed the fact that there will always be books that are, for me, worth staying up into the wee hours of the morning for. Books so expansive and generous and just so goddamned gorgeous, books that remind you that this, this is why you like reading books: the morning-after, waking in your suddenly too-big bed, looking at the novel snug beside you, and smiling. I think that it all went steadily uphill from that book.

And to think that this time last month, I was thinking of shelving the whole shoddy enterprise that is my musty ol’ book blog.

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Currently reading: Still spending time with Herr Voss and Laura and the wastelands of 19th-century Australia. Also, Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. Currently considering: I have been feeling the urge to make friends with [conquer?] Moby-Dick. Also, The House of Mirth. Currently trying to strangle: A post on Simon Mawer, a post on an atlas of depression, a post on the extreme solitude of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Currently dreading: The coming workweek.

August 2011 Reads

I really need to figure out what to do with this blog. Mostly about the fact that I tend to disappear for long stretches of time, armed with books or otherwise. Gah. Anyway. Sasha, for posterity’s sake, here’s what you read this month. Oh, wait, annoyingly enough, the books I am yet to write about are the books that so wowed and moved me. Lots of catching up to do, me:

• Love, Etc., by Julian Barnes.
• Sunflower, by Gyula Krúdy.
• Sunset Park, by Paul Auster.
• Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by John McWhorter.
• Eros the Bittersweet, by Anne Carson.
• State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett.
• The Lake, by Banana Yoshimoto.
• Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, by John Cleland.
• Enough About Love, by Hervé Le Tellier.
• If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, by Robin Black.
• Victorine, by Maude Hutchins.
• Undercurrents, by Martha Manning.
• Ten Things I Love About You, by Julia Quinn.
• The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon.
• Just Like Heaven, by Julia Quinn.
• Not Quite a Lady, by Loretta Chase.

Finally: Goodbye, July!

Tags

Books About Books, Connie Brockway, Eloisa James, Julia Quinn, Laura Kinsale, Loretta Chase, Mary Balogh, Maryanne Wolf, Romance Novel, Science, Stanislas Dehaene

I.

Well, that month was particularly ghastly—mostly because Real Life came a-calling. And when it does that, things go very silent around here. But not just in the blog, mind you—but my reading life as a whole.

No, that wasn’t a reading slump—that was Real Life wresting this little joy away from my cold, hard hands. It’s been a crazy month at my job; many times, running like a headless chicken was the only source of respite. And, ugh, there were some two weeks that I read next to nothing—just limply picked up a book here and there, even as I did so, getting that sinking feeling that I’ll abandon it—not really because it sucked, dammit, but because my schedule [read: life] sucked. Gone were the days I’d stay up all night to finish a book—ooh, defiance, dork-style! The past couple of weeks have been so exhausting that all I could do was [a] stare off into space before sleeping, [b] giving a grunt then sleeping, [c] crashing into bed and sleeping.

June 2011 Reads

June was busy. Like May. But the stark difference is my sense of accomplishment: I managed to post my thoughts on the books I neglected to talk about last month, in addition to the handful of books I read this month. Happy dance. Happier dance because of the books pictured below, I liked a lot of them, feel an overwhelming love for a select few, and hated nothing! And, again, the blog wasn’t completely comatose this month. YAY. Sasha is a happy goat.

So. Here they are, with the links leading to my thoughts.

1. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss.
2. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard.
3. The Bride Stripped Bare, by Nikki Gemmell.
4. The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa.
5. Love Virtually, by Daniel Glattauer.
6. It Happened One Season, novellas by Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, Jacqui D’Alessandro, and Candice Hern.
7. Mrs. Beeton’s Household Book, edited by Kay Fairfax.
8. Fair Play, by Tove Jansson.
9. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin A. Abbott.
10. The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault.
11. My Reckless Surrender, by Anna Campbell.
12. Tomorrow Pamplona, by Jan van Mersbergen.
13. Monsieur Monde Vanishes, by Georges Simenon.

I am so excited for July. I mean, I know I’m going to be busy with real life [gahdamn you, real life!], but I’m psyched to show you all what I’ve been trying to read, haha. I guess, yes, I’m also psyched to start working on this clean-ish slate. I’ll start trying to spam your blogs with my chatter very soon, like them good ol’ days. Baby steps for now, though. [Thanks for sticking with me, you guys.]

May 2011 Reads

May feels like those creaking weeks after some Mysterious Illness, where you instinctively know that thy must not Exert thyself. Which accounts for cautious reading, which accounts for a mound of books set aside and, also, a mound of books you simply have to bear, since you’re too blargh to exert the energy to look for another book. Then again, even though there’s an appallingly high number of Meh books read on May, once or twice I felt the terrifying glee of plunging headfirst into a book that you find you really do love.

Yes, I think it’s been a great reading month. Though, yes, it’s also been a crappy month for blogging—it began with laziness, and then I got drowned in too much work to even make way for laziness. And, well, ya know—I’d much rather read than chain myself to the laptop.

Sorry if the photo’s jaundiced, haha. Those are what I read this May; most of them were lump-discussed in a single post.

1. You Do Understand, by Andrej Blatnik.
2. Where the God of Love Hangs Out, by Amy Bloom.
3. The Summer Without Men, by Siri Hustvedt.
4. Persuasion, by Jane Austen.
5. When Beauty Tamed the Beast, by Eloisa James.
6. Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn, by Harvey Swados.
7. The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht.
8. Other Stories and Other Stories, by Ali Smith.
9. Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, anthology of three erotic novellas from Sherrilyn Kenyon, Melanie George, and Jaid Black.
10. Playing Easy to Get, by Sherrilyn Kenyon, Jaid Black, and Kresley Cole.
11. Double the Heat, four romance novellas from Lori Foster, Deirdre Martin, Elizabeth Bevarly, and Christie Ridgway.
12. Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin.
13. The Pilgrim Hawk, by Glenway Wescott.
14. Treasure of the Sun, by Christina Dodd.
15. The Science of Kissing, by Sheril Kirshenbaum.
16. Memoirs of a Master Forger, by Seamus Heaney.
17. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.
18. The Gilded Web, by Mary Balogh.
19. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle.
20. Untouched, by Anna Campbell.
21. Tempt the Devil, by Anna Campbell.
22. An Object of Beauty, by Steve Martin.
23. An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green.
24. Obsession, by Gloria Vanderbilt.
25. Stitches, by David Small.
26. Ms. Hempel Chronicles, by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum.

 #09, #10, #11 and #14 discussed in “General mutterings on prose, boredom, and credible love, or: Reuniting with my romance novels, v.02.”  #17 and #19 to #26 all quite flakily talked about in “Stuff I’ve been reading while I disappeared from the glittery world of the intarwebz.”

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Yes, in real life, it is nearing the end of June. But the persnickety in me naturally wants this kind of order. So, well, here it is. I’ve got a couple more days before June ends—before I then get buried by my backlog for that month. But, blah. We’ll see how it goes. I am shoveling myself out of the heaps of stationery and memoranda as we speak.