By the end of March, I had finished 69 books. Some books I toss off in a day or less, others take longer. One thing I am noticing is that I reading more fiction, both as a result of the booklists I am working off of and as a result of recommendations. It is probably also a result of not physically being in the library since February 7. When I graze the shelves, I lean heavily towards nonfiction.
Here are the new titles that I have read since the last book post:
60. Personal History by Katharine Graham (Graham's autobiography, which I read on the strength of seeing the movie The Post; so much of her life until her midyears was difficult that I was relieved when she took over leadership of the Washington Post and became a major force in the newspaper publishing world)
61. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (think Shirley Jackson meets a toned-down but still seriously twisted Stephen King; this novel is by the author of the short stories in #51)
62. The Other by David Guterson (by the author of Snow Falling On Cedars, think of Into The Wild written as a bromance from the viewpoint of the the friend who did not succumb to the lure of the wilderness)
63. East of the Mountains by David Guterson (the two Gutersons came from a male friend—this one he was particularly interested in my reading because the older male protagonist (a retired heart surgeon) has terminal colon cancer and sets off to stage his suicide—what did I think? I think the decision to stick with living as a result of delivering a difficult breech birth was a bit hokey, but if Anne Sexton could make that decision based on delivering dalmatian pups, who am I to quibble?)
64. Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading By Listening by Roger Nierenberg (remember the book Fish!, in which the fictional heroine changed her poorly performing department into a wildly productive team based on lessons learned from the Seattle Pike Place Fish Market? Everyone was reading it to get ideas on how to improve their workplaces. Substitute a baton and a podium for a twenty pound salmon being tossed across the store, and you get the idea)
65. The Witches by Roald Dahl (this was another stray Dahl hanging on my bookshelves: better than The Twits but nowhere near the spark and the charm and the anarchism of Matilda and Danny The Champion of the World)
66. The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory (a frothy romance featuring a white male doctor and a curvy black female attorney who keeps getting eyed by all the skinny white blonde women wondering why her? I'm not a romance reader, but I made it through this one)
67. Made For You and Me: Going West, Going Broke, Finding Home by Caitlin Shetterly (this was a reread of Shetterly's memoir of her and her husband getting ground up in the Great Recession in 2008 and their retreat to Maine to rebuild their lives)
68. The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Field and Dinner Table by Tracie McMillan (I discovered McMillan reading her essay "Who Do We Think Of As Poor?" last year in the New York Times; on revisiting that essay recently, I realized she had written a book about food and access and food and poverty and poverty and nutrition and how we view those intertwined topics in this country. I'm so glad I did.)
69. American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander (superb poetry by the same author of the stunning memoir I blogged about earlier)
Many of the books on the list of titles by women of color are fiction (#66, for example), so I have a lot of heavy reading ahead of me. I don't dislike fiction. It's just not what I turn to first. It continues to be a fascinating year and my reading horizons are getting expanded in ways I could not have anticipated when I started in January.
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