Yes, an argument could be made that I celebrate jólabókaflóð all year long.
Jólabókaflóð begins
Category Archives: books
A few more
May 2020 was the perfect time to first encounter Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (2019). For some reason, this treasure was only in my Kindle library, so when I recently gave the book as a gift, I grabbed a hard copy for myself. Speaking of gifts, Brightly Shining (Ingvild Rishøi; 2024) was one that arrived yesterday.
Acquisitions
Bought three; received the fourth as a gift.
Today I’m reading The Bell by Iris Murdoch (1958), my first encounter with this author. One hundred pages in, I can say that this wasn’t at all what I expected.
Winter afternoons
From lows in the teens and biting winds, we have temporarily arrived at upper forties and a breeze. Today we will walk without scarves and wash the windows.
This weekend, to prepare for an Academy of American Poets seminar, I am reading a selection of Emily Dickinson poems, including one that begins:
There’s a certain Slant of light,Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
As they say, mood.
Other books on my nightstand include The Bell (Iris Murdoch; 1958), Daytripper (Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá; 2010), and King Lear.
Acquisitions
My younger daughter and I are planning to read works by Brazilian writers (in translation). First up? The profound and wonderful Daytripper (Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá; 2010), a reread for me.
A few more books
Holiday travel and adventures will leave little time for reading, so these have been shelved.
A few more books
In which my plans and interests exceed my reading speed. Again.
New books
Yesterday I finished reading Sandra Newman’s Julia, a feminist retelling of George Orwell’s 1984, which I finished rereading just a few days before. After this evening’s Middlemarch discussion (Book VI), I plan to continue reading Evil Eye by Joyce Carol Oates.
“[A]lmost more calculating, and far more imperturbable”
Continuing yesterday’s celebration of the delightful and often serendipitous intersections of interests and pursuits, consider the frog in “Home Sweet Home” by Thomas Dial, Jr. (1990) and Mr. Rigg Featherstone of Middlemarch. From Chapter XLI:
The copy in this case bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex frog-features, accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded figure, are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers. The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no order of intelligent beings. Especially when he is suddenly brought into evidence to frustrate other people’s expectations—the very lowest aspect in which a social superfluity can present himself.
But Mr. Rigg Featherstone’s low characteristics were all of the sober, water-drinking kind. From the earliest to the latest hour of the day he was always as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled, and old Peter had secretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more calculating, and far more imperturbable, than himself.
Falling
According to the forecast, daytime temperatures will reach the low eighties tomorrow and Wednesday. That’s all right; I’ll rise early to walk, and throughout the day, I’ll remind myself that the cooler weather will return on Thursday.
In my last post, I somehow neglected to mention Monk, which opened my recent “small screen as succor” season. My older daughter suggested that I try a few episodes of the television series, one that my son adored. I came for sentimental reasons and remained for Tony Shalhoub’s performance.
Of course, I have been reading, too. Since my last annotated list I finished Henry IV, Part II, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre for my “Shakespeare in a Year” project (Pericles out of order in anticipation of seeing this); and for my Willa Cather project, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Shadows on the Rock (1931). For a seminar led by translator Stephanie McCarter, I tackled her 2022 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and for a seminar led by W.H. Auden scholar Edward Mendelson, The Shield of Achilles. I read John Leland’s Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old for a talk he was giving at the University of Chicago but missed the event. Similarly, I read SciFri Book Club’s September selection, Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America (Jane Billinghurst and Peter Wohlleben; 2022) but did not participate in the online discussion.
Revisiting some books I shared with my children has been a source of comfort and delight: Freddy Goes to Florida (Walter Brooks; 1927), Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling; 1997 and 1998).
Other fiction read during this period included Bury This (Andrea Portes; 2014), The Gate to Women’s Country (Sheri S. Tepper; 1988), The Devil and Webster (Jean Hanff Korelitz; 2017), Sipsworth (Simon Van Booy; 2024), The Sea (John Banville; 2005), and A Haunting on the Hill (Elizabeth Hand; 2023). Other non-fiction works included Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir (Lacey Crawford; 2020), The Limits of My Language: Meditations on Depression (Eva Meijer; 2019/2021), and A Wolf Called Romeo (Nick Jans; 2014).
With a small discussion group, I’m rereading George Eliot’s Middlemarch and with 100 Days of Dante, The Divine Comedy. Beside my favorite chair is George Orwell’s 1984, which I picked up to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of its publication and to mark Banned Books Week. (Yes, I’m a wee bit behind but catching up.)
Nerdishly 