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:
So...September's book stack looks a lot like August's, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise, except I kind of expected to spend a lot more time writing and a lot less time reading once all the boys went back to school full time. Then COVID-19 hit, and I spent several days sick on the couch, reading, and the previous week I'd been under the weather as well, and there's no such thing as boys at school full time (in the first seven weeks of school, there have been only two when all three of them--C, Z, and E [at least if M's not in school he's still away at school]--have had five days of school, and only one of those four short weeks was due to illness. So let's say the fall writing program has been off the a rocky start. But the reading? The stack is tall, anyway.
Fiction. I finished the ten remaining Amelia Peabody books (by Elizabeth Peters...you can read more about them in last month's post). I skipped The Painted Queen--the posthumous homage or pastiche or I'm not sure what you'd call it, because I was disappointed the first time I read it. But these ten did not disappoint. I had as much fun reading them as I did the first three or four times I read them. In fact, I kind of more like inhaled them than read them--like a chain smoker lighting up a new cigarette from the butt of the last one, I turned the last page on one book and picked up the next without missing a beat. Rereading them all was a fun and soothing experience. I can't recommend it enough.
Nonfiction. I didn't have time to read much other than Amelia Peabody, but I did read one book for my book coach training program: The Artful Edit by Susan Bell. It's intended to help writers in editing their own work, but I found a lot in it that would be useful for editing others' work as well, and I was very entertained by her use of examples of the editing relationship between F Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins while The Great Gatsby was in process. I'm intrigued enough to pick up that book, a few decades after the last time I read it.
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