Here are the first lines of some of the books I read during
August (yes, I know it's the end of September - I'm just trying to get caught up).
With the library “Bookshelf
Bingo” program to spur me on, I read ten books, which makes it sound like I was
lolling around doing nothing but reading.
Looking back, it’s clear that some of this material was pretty bleak,
but thankfully three of them were children’s books.
Book #1 (for the
bingo square “Novel with a two word title that doesn’t begin with “The”, “An”,
or “A”)
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a
grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery
Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood,
shipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated
iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries,
and laboratories and flophouses.
Book #2 (“A best
novel of the 20th century,
chosen by Modern Library”)
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much
true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot
that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew
really did threaten to have his
personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on.
I’ve changed all the names.
Book #3
Zoe Chambers eased the Monongahela County EMS ambulance to a
stop next to a heap of dirty snow.
Book #4
Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved
into the house.
Book #5
After the death of Joshua, the Israelites inquired of the
Lord, “Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against
them?” The Lord said, ‘Judah shall go
up. I hereby give the land into his
hand.”
Book #6
In a smallish London suburb where nothing much ever
happened, my family gradually became the talk of the town. Throughout my teens, wherever I went, I would
always hear the same question, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
* * * * * * * *
Here are the titles and authors.
Book #1
Cannery Row, by
John Steinbeck. We read this for book
club. I love this book! Steinbeck gets it just right – presenting his
characters with humor, but without mocking them. And there are frogs! My husband is big on the book club snacks
pertaining to the book. We wanted to get
chocolate frogs, but they were too expensive.
But since we had book club on my birthday, we had birthday cake. It was a perfectly lovely way to spend my
birthday.
Book #2
Slaughterhouse-Five, or,
The children's Crusade : A Duty-dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut. Difficult topic. Great writing. The story is not told sequentially, which
normally drives me nuts, but it works in this case, and seems appropriate. It is good I did not read this earlier in
life, because it would have disturbed me so much that it would have prevented
the main points from getting through. It
was a struggle to read this right after Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, because of the frequency, arbitrariness,
and distressing occurrences of death. And
so it goes.
Book #3
Circle of Influence
by Annette Dashofy. This is a murder mystery that takes place in
Pennsylvania. It was a bit too
nerve-wracking for me (other people might call it a good page-turner), but I
liked the main character.
Book #4
Coraline, by Neil
Gaiman
For a children’s book, this one was awfully creepy. Excellent writing. This was recommended by Younger Daughter.
Book #5
Judges (The
Bible). This book contains several
gruesome stories which should not be read by children. Kids, go read Coraline for a good scare. The
main point of Judges seems to be that
the people just can’t resist doing evil.
And evil, nasty things happen.
When I was a child I was fascinated with the story of
Samson, which I read in a sanitized version in a picture storybook. That version left out the part where Samson
visits a prostitute. Samson is kind of
like The Incredible Hulk of Bible times, crashing around, tearing down
buildings and slaying thousands with the jawbone of an ass. The biblical text passes no judgment on him
for any of that stuff, but, boy, does he get in trouble for hanging around with
Delilah.
Book #6
Thinking in Numbers:
On Life, Love, Meaning, and Math, by Daniel Tammet.
“Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand
our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial
point of view. Numbers, properly considered, make us better people.” I found this book fascinating, since it sits
at the junction of philosophy and math.
Includes one of my favorite math concepts, Riemann sums, as applied to
history.
