Entries tagged with books: fiction

Since my last reading post:

Nobody Cares, by H. J. Breedlove. This one is good, but dark: it's dedicated this to Black Lives Matter, and fairly early on I got to the first mention of Missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. It's also book 3 in the Talkeetna series, with further developments in the friendship-turning-romance of Dace and Paul.

The Disappearing Spoon, by Dan Kean: a history of the periodic table, with a bit about each of the currently-known elements and the people, or groups of people who discovered them. Someone recommended this after I mentioned liking Consider the Fork, but the two books have almost nothing in common.

The Electricity of Every Living Thing, by Katherine May: a memoir, about walking and what happens after the writer hears a radio program about Asperger's and thinks "but that's me." (I don't remember where I saw this recommended

Return to Gone-Away, by Elizabeth Enright: read-aloud, and a reread of a book I read years ago. Sweet, a family's low-key adventures in an obscure corner of upstate New York. As the title implies, this is a sequel; read Gone-Away Lake first.

Beautiful Yetta, the Yiddish Chicken, by Daniel Pinkwater, a short picture book that we read aloud after Adrian and I realized Cattitude hadn't read it before. Conversation in three languages, with translations (and transliterations) for the Yiddish and Spanish. Not Pinkwater's best, but fun.

Thimble Summer, by Elizabeth Enright, because I enjoyed rereading the Gone-Away Lake books. Several months of a girl's life with her family on a farm. The plot and adventures are relatively low-key. I liked it, and am glad I got it from the library.

Also, it looks as though I didn't post about the summer reading thing here. It started June 1, and the bingo card has a mix of kinds of books, like books in translation, published this year, or with an indigenous author; some squares with things like "read outside" and "recommend a book"; and some that go further afield, like "learn a word in a new language" and "try a new recipe." Plus the ever-popular "book with a green cover." (OK, last year it was "book with a red cover.") I do a lot of my reading on a black-and-white kindle, so I don't know what color the covers might be. Therefore, I walked into a library yesterday, looked at their summer reading suggestions, and grabbed a book with a green cover.

Two books this time, of which the Pinkwater is the less-weird:

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, by Daniel Pinkwater: This is a cheerfully surreal Pinkwater YA novel about a teenage boy whose parents don't understand that "just walk up and introduce yourself" won't get his classmates to be his friends. Things get more interesting, and weirder, when another new kid, Alan Mendelsohn, moves to the neighborhood and befriends the narrator; Alan doesn't fit in any better, but he's not interested in being liked by the classmates who pick on him. Things get weird when Alan tells everyone that he's not really from the Bronx, he's from Mars, and this somehow leads to everyone fighting over whether he's really a Martian. Then the two boys go into town and spend their book budget on a set of lessons that claim to teach telepathy.... This isn't exactly connected to Pinkwater's other books, except in the sense that it has another not-quite-Chicago as the nearby big city, Hogboro. I grabbed the kindle edition on a whim because Pinkwater tweeted that it was on sale for $1.99, and I hadn't already read it.

Discovering Scarfolk: for tourists and other trespassers, by Richard Littler. Here, the weirdness extends to the form of the book: it's part guidebook; part collection of drug ads, public service posters, newspaper articles, and other imaginary documents; and part narrative about a man who is trying to find out what happened to his twin sons. The whole presents an imaginary town in England, where the town council (if it exists) is xenophobic, casually homicidal, and hyperactive in pursuit of order, while the local pharmaceutical company specializes in psychoactive drugs with a sideline in poisons. There are dozens of footnotes by the frame-story compiler of the book, who suggests that while the explanation just given might be true, it's also possible that the incident involved, say, extraterrestrial visitors. The whole thing is funny, some of it in ways that would be horrific if the affect was less flat. Content warning for violence to children.

There's a connected blog, which I haven't looked at yet: I read

alanro's copy of the book while on vacation in the Olympic National Park, in a hotel without wifi or cell phone signals.

semi-recent reading

Reading Wednesday