20 Books of Summer Wrapup

By -

 Woohoo, I did it!  I combated my reading slump and reached my goal, and I had a lot of fun doing it.  


 I went off the rails a bit from my list, but that's what lists are for; so you can turn into a pirate and flout them if you want.  A couple I decided not to read; I've color-coded a few for if I'm partly into them or just haven't gotten to them yet.

  • Going to the Wars, by John Verney
  • Walking the Bones of Britain, by Christopher Somerville
  • Castle Dor, by Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier 
  • The Curse of the Montrolfes, by Ronan O'Grady
  •  Germany Jekyll and Hyde, by Sebastian Haffner  (whoa, seriously heavy-duty, save for later)
  • The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst
  •  Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • Knock Three Times! by Marion St. John Webb
  • The Otterbury Incident, by C.Day Lewis 
  • The Millicent Quibb School....by Kate McKinnon  (got 5 pages in, not for me)
  • Kraken, by China Mieville
  • When They Severed Earth From Sky, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber 
  • On Power and the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel
  • On Lying and Politics, by Hannah Arendt
  • Bushman Lives! by Daniel Pinkwater
  • Early Riser, by Jasper Fforde
  • The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis
  • Wordhoard (Anglo-Saxon works), ed. by Jill Paton Walsh 
  • Walking the Bowl, by Chris Lockhart
  • Sunken Lands, by Gareth Rees
  • Beau Geste, by P C Wren
  • Parables of Kierkegaard

    • I'm pretty happy!  I wound up reading 22 books, most of my list, and some extras.  I really enjoyed all the reading time and feel like I did well in rebuilding my reading habits, which as I've said elsewhere, I lost a lot of in the stress of the last couple of years.

    So many thanks to AnnaBookBel for hosting, because I always really have fun with this challenge!

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

    Popular posts from this blog

    Summerbook #9: The Deorhord

    By -
    Image
    The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary, by Hana Videen This followup to The Wordhord was a lovely read.  Videen uses her wordhord format to write a bestiary, explaining how medieval people loved to used animals as examples of Christian ideas.   Plus I always enjoy learning about Old English words, because they are often cognate with both modern English and with Danish.  Deor (animal), which in English evolved into deer , is also related to Danish dyr  (animal). Videen has sections of everyday animals, 'wonder' animals (such as elephants), creatures that especially symbolized good and evil, and just plain mysteries.  The good animals are the lion, deer, phoenix, and panther, and the evil ones are the whale, snake, dragon, and wolf.  The mysteries are usually taken from Alexander the Great's writings about his conquest of India; one sounds kind of like a crocodile, except that it has a head like the moon and also crocodiles were well-known.  Another...
    Read more

    Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

    By -
    Image
    I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
    Read more

    The White Goddess

    By -
    Image
    My 14yo asked me to hide the cover The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth , by Robert Graves Oh, wow.  I could talk about this fabulously nutty book all day!  I had no idea when I picked it up what I was getting into. The short version: Graves was looking for evidence of a European-wide goddess-worshiping  Ur-religion that he believed existed before all that male god patriarchy stuff came along.  He found his material in myth and poetry, and claimed that bards and poets disguised their lore by deliberately mixing it up.  All true poetry is based on the Triple White Goddess as Muse, and no monotheist can be a true poet.  Graves, being a true poet, realized all this through poetic intuition. Now the long version: This is 500 extremely dense pages of speculation about myth, poetry, and ancient tribal movements, presented as plain fact deduced by intuition and research.  It's from the same school of...scholarship...as The Golden B...
    Read more