Welcome to the 2022 Reading List! I read 35 books last year! I hope to beat that this year. :) I am also happy to add that my voracious reading has inspired Nick to read more, as well! This pleases me! I’ve not beaten 35, but I’m at 31 on Dec 20, and I’m happy with that!
Random additions:
Fairy Tale, Stephen King. This is an excellent story! I mean, of course, it’s King, but really, it is quite good. It’s a new realm with little to tie it to the bigger King Universe. I hope he will revisit this world again in the future! This story is about a kid who gets involved with an old dying man who has been keeping a secret world SECRET for his whole life. Good stuff!
Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich. This author is an investigative reporter with a long list of books about various subjects (that I need to read!). This book is about her experience doing bottom rung, minimum wage jobs in various cities in America and the undeniable truth that these jobs are not only mind numbingly horrible, but you cannot live on just ONE of them. A very good read and as we know from personal experience, VERY TRUE. Every rich American should read this.
Goodwill Hurl! June 2022
Cruising Attitude, Heather Poole. Picked this up for light reading – and it certainly was! LOL This is a collection of anecdotal essays about being a flight attendant. This girl is pretty dumb and overall, she doesn’t really raise the perception of flight attendants. My fave sentence went something like this: …and the motel I was in was in view of a big white building in DC. The White House? I don’t know. Wow. So, yeah, a lightweight trying-too-hard to be a tell-all, this book is strictly a palate cleanser between better reads.
The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman. This was an excellent read! Set in SW Australia, it is a lovely story set at a lighthouse far from anything. Stedman’s descriptions of the SW Australia coast is exemplary. I did get pulled out of the story occasionally by the comments of a “blistering January” or a “chilly June”. It is really odd to think of the seasons as opposites! But the characters are pretty well written and the story, while sometimes slow, is compelling. I have the movie version of this book that I’ll watch once I’ve digested the book. I like to have space between reading a story and seeing it redone in visual form. If you run across this book, it is worth the read.
The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls. I just read Half Broke Horses, and it was EXCELLENT. This is Walls’s memoir of growing up with two mentally ill parents. It’s not as chilling as The Sound of Gravel (see below), but still pretty damned harsh. Her mother was bipolar and a hoarder and her father was an alcoholic (and probably bipolar, too). They drug their children all over the place in their car and regularly did not feed them. The parents ended up homeless in NYC – and liked it that way. There was a movie done in 2017 with the same name that starred Naomi Watts, Woody Harrelson and Brie Larson as Jeannette. It was pretty good, but of course, the book is better. The movie portrayed her parents – particularly her father – very sympathetically, which I don’t think they really deserved. The book is well written with a strong voice.
Fifth Chinese Daughter, Wong. This book was actually written in 1945!! I have a 2002 edition, with an updated intro from 1989. The author died in 2006 and was known for her ceramics work. The story is written in third person, which is a Chinese tradition, but makes it read a little dry. But still an interesting look into turn of the century Chinese immigrants.
A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean. Yep, the movie was made from this. This is a short story collection with the title story being the first. Maclean has a very distinctive voice and a lovely, lyrical way of writing.
Half Price Books hurl!
ALL these are from the memoirs section. I’m on a memoir tear!
Ruined By Reading, Lynn S Schwartz. This is a short tome, which is to its benefit. It is a memoir of a life of reading and musing on various authors. The book was published in 1996, pre-internet as we know it. Which is why this quote is prescient:
“If those of us who live by language become superfluous in years to come, it will not be because of the advance of technology, but the loss of coherent discourse.” – p.24, Ruined by Reading.
OH, YES. She is right on the money. She is of the Silent Generation (b. 1939), so many references are a bit dated, but she certainly has a handle on being well read and dealing with morons who are not. Good read!
MORE BEHIND CUT!
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