Sunday Salon: Latest stack from the library

The bulk of these, fortunately, comes from the university library which means I have more time to get them read before their due dates.

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye. A.S. Byatt. Eva's review prompted this check-out.

Was This Man a Genius? Julie Hecht. I think I might read this during Dewey's Readathon later this month. I'm a little obsessed with Julie Hecht at the moment.

Split Estate. Charlotte Bacon. Recommended by Katharine Weber.

Thirteen-Gun Salute. Patrick O'Brian. Time for another adventure with Stephen and Jack!

The Other. David Guterson. I read a terrible review of this last weekend, so bad, in fact, that I intended to cancel my library hold on it. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was already on the shelf waiting for me. I'll read a chapter or two before deciding now if it's right for me.

The Plague of Doves. Louise Erdrich. It's been several years since I've read anything by Erdrich. . . I miss her.

The Comedies of Machiavelli. Niccolo Machiavelli. For Imani's ILL Challenge.

Shelter. Susan Palwick. Artificial intelligence and climate change. It's huge, but the customer reviews at Amazon make it sound as if it'll read fast.

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. Charlotte Mosley. I probably ought to wait until the paperback version comes out in the fall and buy a copy instead of attempting a library book this big.

Collected Stories. Ellen Gilchrist. Already in progress. . .

My mother is a fish.

Seriously.

Trends

Have your book-tastes changed over the years? More fiction? Less? Books that are darker and more serious? Lighter and more frivolous? Challenging? Easy? How-to books over novels? Mysteries over Romance?

My first impulse was to say yes, my tastes have changed considerably over the years, but then my eyes fell on a book that I checked out from the public library over the weekend--Charlotte Bacon's Split Estate, which has a gorgeous photo of a grey horse on the front cover--and now I'm not so sure if I'm anything more than a grown-up version of the child-reader I once was.

I lived and breathed horse books throughout my childhood, preferred the Trixie Beldens to the Nancy Drews because the characters were much more fully developed and enjoyable all the while knowing I didn't really care one way or the other about the actual solving of mysteries, and, although I wasn't exposed to more than a handful of classics before I was a teenager, took to the type of book studied in English class like a duck to water. I took an intro to fiction class my freshman year of college that focused on contemporary literary fiction (the Anne Tyler and Margaret Drabble I read there still count as all-time favorites) and contemporary literary fiction has remained my default setting ever since.

Ways I've changed: I read a lot of Zane Grey, Alistair MacLean, Emilie Loring and Grace Livingstone Hill when I was an early adolescent because that was what the relatives foisted onto me; other than an interest in reading the Zane Grey that's set in Torey, Utah, at some point, I can't see ever returning to these authors. I read a lot of science fiction when I was right out of college; I have no interest in returning to the planet of Pern although I did give dragons a try a couple years back with Naomi Novik and I read far more Animorphs books with S. than I ought to admit to, so I haven't completely turned my back on that type of thing. I was slow to warm to Jane Austen--I thought those characters lived awfully tedious little lives the first few times I tried them--and now I like her quite a bit.

Booking Through Thursday

Poor Claudie. He has a uti.

Poor us. He let us know he wasn't feeling well by peeing all. over. the. sofa.

Mourning dove

This little fella was practically underfoot yesterday afternoon while I hung out laundry (our heat pump died on Saturday, and I'll not be running the dryer until we have air conditioning once again) and he helped L. water the plants in the front yard in the evening.

Today he was m.i.a. and I worried about him, especially after I saw the hawk scoping out the back yard on one of his fly-overs--he's reduced many an adult dove to a dusting of feathers who should have had more of a sense of caution about him than this little one has had a chance to develop.

Finally, well after supper, I spotted him doing that little head bob that he does back in the woods.

Whew.

Now, if Ellie would just be a better sport about having to stay inside. . .

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

The problem is I don't ever learn anything from learning experiences. In fact, I make a special effort not to learn whatever it is the learning experience is supposed to teach me, because I can't think of anything drearier than being somebody whose character is formed by learning experiences.

~~~

People always think that if they can prove they're right, you'll change your mind.

~~

The main problem was I don't like people in general and people my age in particular, and people my age are the ones who go to college. I would consider going to college if it were a college of older people. I'm not a sociopath or a freak (although I don't suppose people who are sociopaths or freaks self-identify as such); I just don't enjoy being with people. People, at least in my experience, rarely say anything interesting to each other. They always talk about their lives and they don't have very interesting lives. So I get impatient. For some reason I think you should only say something if it's interesting or absolutely has to be said. I had never really been aware of how difficult these feelings made things for me until an experience I had this spring.

A horrible experience.

--Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You

What fun: Truth to Power.

I used to wish everyone in Congress would read The Grapes of Wrath. I'll ponder what the individual presidential candidates should read on my trip to the library to pick up holds.

What books would you recommend?