A monthly post about what I've been reading, with aspirations but no real hope of reading down a very tall stack of books. Previous posts from this year:
We've got a tall stack for August. I've always considered summer prime reading season, going all the way back to my bookmobile days and continuing now in my hammock days.
Nonfiction.
I started the month reading Paddling My Own Canoe by Audrey Sutherland (which you can barely see way up there at the top of the pile) while C and I were camping on the coast. In it, Sutherland relates several trips by water to a remote part of a Hawaiian Island, the first of which she made by swimming around the island and towing her gear in a weather balloon wrapped in a shower curtain. Over subsequent trips she improved on her gear--replacing the bundle with a styrofoam box and eventually using an inflatable canoe. On these trips, she gets dashed against rocks, has run-ins with wild boars (though not sharks), and other near-death experiences. I mean, the crazy adventures are enough to make this book enjoyable, but her narration style is so utterly guileless and charming, I was with her all the way on these madcap adventures.
The boys all went away for a weekend early in the month and I binge-watched Maid while they were gone, then had to go out and pick up the book by Stephanie Land on which it was based. (I have no problem watching move before reading book.) I think both the show and the book show really well what an impossible position we place poor people in this country, with no way to climb out.
For my book coach training, I read Wired for Story by Lisa Cron, and it SO good. I really wish I'd read it early in my writing journey, when I was actively trying to figure out (and write) fiction. Sadly, I've put writing fiction on pause (for now), but this book makes so clear so many aspects of what a story requires, and why. I underlined a LOT, and I rarely deface books.
Fiction.
After finishing Wired for Story, I decided to read a book I'm very familiar with, so I could sit back as a detached observer and take note of the various story elements and see them in action, so I picked up the first of the Amelia Peabody series, Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters. This is a series I read all the way through in 2017, and again over the course of 2017-2018, aloud to my kids, on top of having read most of the books (that had been published at that time) once or twice in my 20s and again when M was a baby and as they came out over the years and probably another time or two in between. Meaning, I've read this book at minimum five or six times--probably more than that. I knew exactly what would happen, who the bad guy(s) would be, what they would try to do and why, and who would end up betrothed to whom at the end. It should have been easy to take a clinical approach to dissecting how it was put together. But of course I got sucked into the story, and, like a chain smoker, as soon as I turned the last page, I picked up the next in the series and the next. In total, I read the first nine in the series (not pictured: The Lion in the Valley, because E is reading it, having also read the first three. I'm trying to not get too excited, but that kid hasn't voluntarily picked up a book since he was about 12, so I kind of want to jump up and down squealing). And of course the binge has continued into this month (despite my determination to focus on my writing projects and eschew distraction). At least all this reading has cut down on my TV watching time.
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