Your August harvest of books (2021)

[scrubb]

I have read a couple books in August, and need a thread to post them in, so here it is!

[scrubb]

58) Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Started this months ago but set it down again. The author is a philosopher and I was really only interested in the biology/neuroloy. However, I picked it up again a few days ago and found it really was very good. Here's a part of the blurb on goodreads:


...how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.

I'm pretty fascinated by octopuses and cuttlefish and so I learned a lot about them. And instead of the kind of philosophical waxing I was worried about, he is talking about the development of 'mind'. About development of intelligence, and ability to learn. And the role of language, too. I really appreciated his ability NOT to anthropomorphise, but to make it clear how amazing some of the things cephalopods can do really is.

So anyway, recommended for those with interest in the subject (Liiiiisa). A worthwhile bookbub special.

59) Squirrels in the Wall by Henry Hitz. This was a bookbub special too, and while I had the impression it was supposed to be humourous, that was a mistaken impression. It's a weird book - several chapters, particularly in the first half, are told from the point of view of animals, from mice to dogs to bees to toads. They're all associated with a little boy named Barney.

The animal perspective stories aren't particularly well done. They try to build on how those animals perceive the world, but at the same time they are extremely anthropomorphized and generally kind of silly.

But more and more of the chapters start to focus on Barney and the other humans in his life and it ends up being his story, in the end. It kept me reading, and I did enjoy it, but I'm not convinced that it was a truly successful experiment, either.

[Liiisa]

Ha scrubb, yes, I will look for that, thank you! And thanks for the thread.

I'm about halfway through the rather tense new book by Rachel Cusk - yes, I just started it yesterday, but it's short.

Edited to add that I guess I was more than halfway through, because I finished it.

24) Rachel Cusk, Second Place

I am going to have to read this again. It's a very interior novel - dwelling in the protagonist's thoughts and perceptions quite a bit. In some ways I recognized things I've thought in the things she talks about. The plot is that a woman invites an irascible painter to come live in her guesthouse out in the country, by a marsh, and time passes, there are conflicts, and it's very interesting. Kind of like an Eric Rohmer film only on paper.

[Webs]

"The Midnight Library" - Matt Haig - Skip it.

"Because of You" - Dawn French - Do NOT skip it. In fact, if you really want a great experience, listen to the audio book. And have tissues at the end.

[ozziegiraffe]

Thank you Scrubb. I agree, for a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith was remarkably scientific.
And thanks for the recommendation, Webs. I like Dawn French.
Bookmarking, as I have several books I’m currently reading or listening too, including Barack Obama, which I didn’t quite finish on my road trip.

[lillielangtry]

Thanks Scrubb!

(46) Zeina by Nawal El Saadawi (translated by Amira Nowaira)
Ah, I read this in July but I forgot to add it. It was also our book club pick. El Saadawi was a prominent Egyptian feminist who recently died, which is what prompted us to pick up the book.
The description of the book was a bit misleading. It's less about the character called Zeina and more about an unhappy marriage/dysfunctional family in Egypt and there's a lot about hypocrisy (outwardly religious people doing bad things) and the gap between rich and poor. Some group members were very put off by the descriptions of child abuse. There was no indication of that theme on the blurb or on the publisher's website, so no way we could give a content warning.

(47) I, Rigoberta Menchú by Rigoberta Menchú (edited by Elisabeth Burgos, translated by Ann Wright)
My book from Guatemala. I've been aware of this book for a long time and also aware of the controversy surrounding it - some years after it was published, another book claimed that many of the factual details are incorrect and this blew up into a huge issue among Latin Americanists.
Anyway, it's Nobel Peace Prize winner Menchú describing her own, extremely difficult, childhood and life in the mountains of Guatemala, the oppression of her people by landowners, and her own journey to activism.
I listened to this as an audiobook which sadly I would NOT recommend. The actor seems to be Canadian, when I checked, and she puts on a weird accent throughout (why do you need to use a foreign accent when speaking the translated words of a person in English?) but the few words in Spanish are not pronounced very well. So that was irritating.

[Liiisa]

I remember reading "I, Rigoberta Menchú" when it came out, and the subsequent controversy. I don't remember it in detail but always had the sense that even if the details were a little fabricated, the general idea of what the people have gone through in Guatemala is true.

Your description of the audiobook reinforces my general disinclination to read audiobooks. (It's not a snobby thing, just that I prefer to listen to music when I'm driving and don't like people reading aloud to me.)

[lillielangtry]

I love audiobooks! I find it easier to concentrate on non-fiction, but fiction can also be good on audio and a well-read book can really have that something extra. However, a poorly read book is annoying and sadly it's very common that names, place names etc are mangled, and that's just judging from the few languages that I speak. (I had to break off a book about Colombia because the reader said Bog-OH-ta instead of Bogot-AH!)

Anyway!

#48 Annie Ernaux, Die Jahre (Les Années/The Years)
(Semi?)Autobiographical account of Ernaux's life amid the background of social change in France between 1940 and the early 2000s. Very nice.

#49 Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline (translated from the Italian by Tim Parks)
A very short novel from Switzerland about a girl in a boarding school in, I would say, the late 1940s/early 1950s - it's not quite clear but in any case post-war. It's a little quaint and then it turns a bit creepy. I really enjoyed it.

[lillielangtry]

(My numbering always goes wrong somewhere. According to Goodreads I've read 50 books this year so far...)

[tzarine]

this is weird
found jane austen vintage mini

which is excerpts from persuasion, pride & prejudice, northanger abbey on the theme of marriage

an odd read, especially if you've read the real book
next? dickens excerpts on law?

[Oweena]

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss

By the author of Salt, Sugar, Fat (which I haven't read).

I found the first half super dry and only really got interested in the last 2 chapters. I found it long on details about how the food on our grocery shelves works hard to manipulate us via placement, packaging, euphemisms for chemicals, and labeling. But I pretty much knew that already.
Some of the lab stuff was interesting on what happens when we eat artificial sweeteners, sugar, salt, etc. but I think I was already pretty well aware of this too.
There was a section on the Weight Watchers, Slim Fasts of the dieting world--only mildly interesting.

Bottom line so you don't have to read it: Big Food is bad, they are out to trick us anyway they can, shop only the outer walls of your grocery store, don't eat processed food, fresh food is best.

[Liiisa]

25) Andrew H. Knoll, A Brief History of Earth

I really loved this! Knoll is a paleontologist at Harvard and wrote this lovely history of geology, evolution of life, and how the one affected the other on Earth. Some of it was a review for me, but some, especially the very early stuff, was new. What I particularly enjoyed about it was his humble attitude - he said things like "my idea of what happened is x, but other people are studying it with a different hypothesis in mind," he gave credit to grad students, he was just a lovely person to have around while I was reading it.

So yeah, if you're even remotely interested in this stuff, I'd say read this book, or give it to an interested young person as a present.

[Liiisa]

26) Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Pretty much read this entire 300-page novel this afternoon, so obviously I enjoyed it. It has a complex interwoven plot about an actor and his various wives and other people in his life, but also a deadly pandemic and the post-pandemic economic/industrial collapse future (which is presented as challenging, but not disgusting and bleak like The Road).

[ozziegiraffe]

50. Kerry Greenwood, Trick or Treat. A very different Halloween story, involving Wicca, and the legacy of World War II on both Greek and Jewish communities.
Delightful characters, living and working mostly in a block of units in inner city Melbourne, and lots of great food. Corinna Chapman is very different to Phryne Fisher, but no less fun.

[lillielangtry]

I have been wanting to read that one for ages, Liisa.

[Liiisa]

Aug 15, 2021 4:30:30 GMT -5 lillielangtry said:

I have been wanting to read that one for ages, Liisa.

I had it on my to-read list for ages too and actually had a copy without realizing it! I was going through some random pile of books and was like wait, where did this come from.

If you've read "The Glass Hotel" you'll find some commonalities in one character - kind of reminded me of David Mitchell, how he reuses characters.

[lillielangtry]

I haven't, but I love David Mitchell, so that definitely adds to the recommendation for me

[sophie]

I wanted a chick-lit book so I just finished The Last Letter From Your Lover by JoJo Moyes. It’s satisfyingly chick lit. Enough said!

[ozziegiraffe]

51. Barack Obama’s A Promised Land. Audiobook started on my recent epic road journey. It reinforced my impression of his amazing intellect, and the orange menace’s complete unsuitability for the office of president.

[scrubb]

Back from holidays with lots of reading time!

60. Cities of the Plain, by Cormac McCarthy - his sparse expository style works well with a tragic story of a young man who falls in love with a 15 year old Mexican girl who has been brutalized and forced into prostitution. It was very good.

61. Changes, by Jim Butcher - another of the Dresden Files, the wizard detective. Good for what it is - it had a little less of the graphic violence that was bothering me in some of the earlier ones.

62. Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan - excellent story of a young slave boy who becomes assistant to an abolitionist inventor. Deserving of the Booker nomination it won.

63. In the Darkroom, by Susan Faludi - this was a bookbub special I bought a few years ago and didn't remember anything about before starting it. It turned out to be a journalist's personal effort to understand her father who had a sex change at age 73. They'd been estranged since her parents divorced while she was a teenager, and she knew him as volatile and sometimes violent. It was about more than just gender, though, as he was also a Hungarian Jew who survived the war, and saved his parents too, then emigrated to Brazil, and then the US, but returned to Hungary eventually. The daughter tried to probe into his war experiences and his relationship with his family (he was mostly estranged from all of them, too) and in the end manages to show all the different things that shaped her father into the confusing, annoying, closed woman who she got to know in the last 10 years of her life. It was worthwhile.

[scrubb]

64. Interference, by Michelle Berry - another Bookbub special, by a Canadian author. Quite good, tells the stories of people in a neighbourhood in some Ontario city. Several of the women play hockey together, their kids are frenemies, etc. Nothing earthshaking, but well done.

65. Youngblood Hawke, by Herman Wouk - he wrote a lot of sweeping epics (The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Caine Mutiny) that were very good so I tried another one. It was very of its time. The story of a young writer from Kentucky who emerges onto the scene with a massive long book that has great promise. In theory it was based on Thomas Wolfe but I suspect there was some autobiography in there, too. He goes astray, having an affair with an older married woman who isn't good for him; he tries to avoid taxes with various investment schemes; and he pushes himself to write and write. It was well enough done to be worth reading, but it wasn't subtle or great

66. The Samurai's Garden, by Gail Tsukiyami - Yet another bookbub special. A teenage Chinese boy goes to his family's beach house in Japan to recover from Tuberculosis in 1938. He's cared for by the house's caretaker, who has always worked for the family. He develops relationships with the caretaker and a woman with leprosy who lives in a small village of lepers up in the mountains, against the background of Japanese aggression in China.
The author is half Chinese and half Japanese, and the book reflects an effort to reconcile divided loyalties and understanding of individuals versus nations. It was good, definitely worth reading, but not fantastic, either.

67. D (A Tale of Two Worlds), by Michel Faber - a bookbub special that turned out to be a kids' book. IT was pretty good - shades of Wizard of Oz, and The Phantom Tollbooth, with a good main character (an orphan girl from Somaliland who has been adopted by English people). A few fairly obvious allegories, and it touches on xenophobia, but isn't too heavy handed. Enjoyable.

[mei]

Aug 4, 2021 10:45:21 GMT -5 mei said:

not abandoned completely yet, but definitely put to the side for a long while: The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I love his books, but this one... ugh. I've been trying to read it for weeks, it's a very interesting premise for a story (well, 'interesting' is probably not the right word for a very very near future climate change dystopic story) but it's too political & sciency with too little story and for the moment I need something much more relaxing/entertaining!

So I picked this one back up less than a week after posting the above in the abandoned book thread. Liiisa was right, and it does become hopeful, and the political and economic and all the other science stuff that interrupted the story so much became much less as well.

In the book, the Ministry of the Future is the UN institution which is tasked (as per the Paris 2015 Climate Agreement) with protecting the interests of future generations when it comes to acting on climate change. The main character is Mary, the minister. Interesting premise, and a lot of the things that happen are not hard to imagine after last week's IPCC scenario's & report.

Overall I'm happy I read it, but it's a difficult read and I like his other books much better.

(#13 for the year, The Ministry of the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson)

[Oweena]

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America By Clint Smith

Such a great book on so many fronts.
Each chapter Smith visits a different site in the US and Senegal that has to do with slavery. At each spot he interviews people working or visiting the site to listen to their take on the history of the place. But he also delves into the history of each location. He dispels a lot of what we were taught or believed about these places, and shows how the narrative around the founding of the US and the Civil War has twisted the truth.
So it's an interesting history book that could stand on its own just from that viewpoint.
But his writing is so perceptive and beautiful I'd read it just for that. Probably because he's a poet, his descriptions of his feelings visiting these spots, or describing those who meets along the way are what intrigued me.
Recommended for the both the writing and for what you may learn.

[Liiisa]

Wow Oweena - that goes on the list for sure.

[Oweena]

I really recommend it Liiisa.
I've never wanted to visit a plantation and after reading his chapter on the Whitney Plantation, if I ever make it back to Louisiana I'm going there. It's a plantation totally focused on life from the viewpoint of the enslaved.
Whitney Plantation

[snowwhite]

Impressed by how much some of you have been reading!

I've recently finished The Road Trip (Beth O'Leary) and Last One at the Party (Bethany Clift).

Very different - chick lit and post apocalyptic (pandemic!) respectively, although in a way they both deal with people coming to terms with mental health issues.

I have issues with the Clift one: lack of research, poorly thought-through in some respects, first person protagonist seems to undergo a personality transplant towards the end, but a good enough story I wanted to know what happened, and why some people didn't like the ending! The Road Trip? Well, if you like her other novels you'll like this one... but I feel the scenario could have been handled in a far more interesting way (better) by other novelists.

[scrubb]

Finished "Night Train to Lisbon" by Pascal Mercier. It's sort of a philosophical novel. A Swiss Classics professor meets a Portugese woman on a bridge, she attends his class then disappears, and then he goes to a bookstore and finds a memoir by a Portugese doctor who was in the resistance during Salazar's dictatorship.

So he jumps on a train to Lisbon where he looks up the doctor's family, friends, and associates. Visits all the places he went (school, university, homes).

He makes connections and thinks about his own life, and about ideas. It's all very slow and ponderous, but somehow kept me reading. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I kinda liked it.

[sophie]

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. This was the 2020 Booker prize winner. Set in the poor sections of Glasgow in the 1980’s, a young boy navigates the complex path through his mom’s alcoholism, poverty, unfaithful husbands, blended families.. and his own awareness of him being different sexually. I talked to a friend of mine (who happens to be from Scotland) yesterday about this book, snd she said it was an excellent description of life there then at that time. Not a happy book but it is so well written, it’s worth reading.

[riverhorse]

I've just gone onto my Libby app as I've run out of books and realised I haven't updated for a while.

The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba by Chanel Cleeton. Another book in a series set against various eras of Cuban history, once again featuring a great range of strong female characters. This one is set at the time of what would become the Spanish-American war at the end of the 1800s and is a fictionalised account of the life of Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelina_Cosio_y_Cisneros

It also talks about what basically was the beginning of tabloid journalism in the US, and the rivalry between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. There is also a focus in the novel on a young female journalist struggling for a break in a man's profession. An enjoyable read.

Away With the Penguins, Hazal Prior. A quick and enjoyable read. I kept trying to visualise which grande dame of British acting will be chosen to play the main role when this is inevitably turned into a film. Maggie Smith? Imelda Staunton?

I have a few more to update but will do so later.

[ozziegiraffe]

Aug 22, 2021 0:01:32 GMT -5 sophie said:

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. This was the 2020 Booker prize winner. Set in the poor sections of Glasgow in the 1980’s, a young boy navigates the complex path through his mom’s alcoholism, poverty, unfaithful husbands, blended families.. and his own awareness of him being different sexually. I talked to a friend of mine (who happens to be from Scotland) yesterday about this book, snd she said it was an excellent description of life there then at that time. Not a happy book but it is so well written, it’s worth reading.

Interesting, Sophie. My current audiobook is Jimmy Barnes’ autobiographical account of his childhood, which started in working class Glasgow. Very bleak. I don’t think I would want to read another account of something similar.