evelyn_b

Or, it's not Wednesday yet, but I'm going to be AFK all day when it is.

Last week, I found a very nice new Little Free Library that was suffering from lack of books - it was only half full and most of the contents were self-published inspirational memoirs, self-published self-help, and Consumer Reports - so I resolved to come back with a few good books once I'd finished them. The other day, I came back with Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer, Les Mis, and Bring Out the Dog, a solid collection of contemporary war stories by Will Mackin - only to find the old selections gone and the library stuffed to the gills with appealing popular fiction (and two boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese Dinner). There was only room for the smallest of my books, and then only after I took two books out of the box. So now I'm up a book, but I'm glad to see that the LFL is well looked after.

Normal Wednesdays to return next week, probaly.

What I’ve Finished Reading

I didn’t have enormously high hopes when I bought Bobs: A Girl Detective at a used bookstore back in the day, but it still managed to disappoint them a little, as Bobs does hardly any detecting. It also exceeded them – this was a silly story, but it’s also lively and earnest and moves reasonably well under its own power, which you can't always say for the non-classic girls' books of yore. I enjoyed it much better than Nancy Drew, for example, in spite of Nancy's more focused and rigorous detective content. ( Cut for Bobs )

I enjoyed Transcendent Kingdom a lot. The story is sad – Gifty, the young neuroscientist narrator, is so busy taking care of her mentally ill mother and trying to make sense of her older brother’s death by opioid overdose that she hardly has time to be mad at her dad for walking out on them – but the writing is light-footed rather than heavy. The observations, from a narrator who isn’t sure what she believes anymore, of churchy Alabama pettiness are especially good. I wished some of the characters had a little more heft to them, especially Gifty’s academic friends and partners who mostly seem to exist as foils to and pinball-flippers for her inner struggles. To be fair, this is a first-person book and Gifty has a lot on her mind, and sometimes other people just bounce off the invisible cyclone through no fault of their own.

The real problem with (my copy of) this book is not Yaa Gyasi’s fault at all: whoever made it, in addition to the slightly-too-thick pages and their ostentatiously purposeful raggedyness (some pages were almost half an inch narrower than the page next to them), sewed it up way too tight, so that it was impossible to open all the way. Was this also on purpose, or was it a bad batch at the factory? I’d have to go into a bookstore to check. Whatever the reason, it was distracting to read a book that was constantly daring me to crack the spine.

World's Least Mechanically Gifted People Attach One Thing to Another

As noted last week, I bought the least DIY version of the Little Free Library kit available: a whole pre-assembled cupboard with working door, a post to affix it to, and a ground screw to jam the post securely into the ground. It was still a little too much spatial reasoning for the likes of me. ( Cut for hardware )

Anyway, it all came out all right in the end. The library is up and running, and one of the books has already been taken! There was going to be a picture here, but my work laptop collapsed on Friday and this backup machine has many flaws, so pictures will have to wait.

What I’m Reading Now

A ton of magazines and whatnot that got piled up and now I’m trying to put down. Some boring, some good, some a mix. At some point last year I caved to the pressure of low prices and bought a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine, and when it finally arrived they send me three issues at once. Smithsonian has some extremely specific ad targeting (flip phones that double as emergency alert systems and also have Facebook prominently pre-installed, BUY GOLD, commemorative model kits) and is a pretty good, very fast, very easy read: lots of brief stories on Things You Might Not Know About History, lots of attractive pictures of objects held by the Smithsonian. I'm not quite well-versed enough in Tumblr to know if it would be accurate to call it Granddad Tumblr.

The most recent issue of The Southern Review has a short story about Laika, one of the dogs shot into space by the Soviet space program (“You Would Set Your Jaws Upon My Throat” by Steve Trumpeter) and I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was good or not; it was about a good dog in a world that can't be trusted so I just cried the whole time.

What I Plan to Read Next

The question now is: is Wolf Hall going to jump the queue by virtue of being a Christmas gift, or is it going to wait its turn like everyone else? If it does wait its turn, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte are next up. If it doesn’t, then I guess it’s Cromwell Time.

I forgot to vote for the next book in my sci-fi book club, then woke up a week later to find we'll be reading the sequel to The Three-Body Problem, a sequel I have no interest in whatsoever. A valuable lesson in book club civic duty.