As I mentioned in an earlier post, September was a weird reading month for me. I ended up starting and not liking more books than I finished at first. Or I started and decided that it wasn't the right book for the moment. But eventually, I got my mojo back. Here are the books I ended up reading.
There's a funny story associated with this book. I was sitting with a friend, waiting for Bill to be finished with an appointment so we could all go to breakfast at a local cafe. Friend started talking about how some books just appear in your life and turn out to be meaningful. He went into the glove box, pulled out this book, handed it to me, and said it's a really good book and I should read it. He also said he had no idea where it came from or how he happened to have it. It was just there in his house. I read the blurb on the back and it did sound good so I said I'd give it a go. I also mentioned that Bill might like it. When Bill returned, we showed him the book. It was then that the mystery was solved. Bill said, 'I read it already. I used to have it.' I had no idea it was ever in our home. I do recall him reading a book about a bird, and me saying I didn't want to read it. That was a few years back, so what must've happened was that Bill put it with the books to donate. Friend, who is also friends with a couple who used to be very involved with the Animals in Need organization, would take our things to be donated to them and they would bring them to the charity shop in Donegal town. This book never made it there, apparently.
So what's the book about? Sam Bloom and her husband, Cameron, were quite outdoorsy and liked to travel. Some of the travel was curtailed a bit when they started having kids--three sons--but they started travelling again when the kids were old enough. One one trip, Sam fell from a tower while they were sightseeing. It was a catastrophic fall that almost killed her and did leave her paralyzed. When she returned home, she was depressed and angry. She loved her family deeply but could not get past the pain and anger. And then they rescued an injured magpie and things began to change for the entire family. They named the bird Penguin. They knew he needed to be free if he recovered so they did create space for that, but Penguin seems to have a sense of where his home is. The book tells this story through words and photos and contains an afterword by Sam. She is a straight talker--no platitudes or feel good emotions from her--she's brutally honest about the fact that she's still very angry about what happened and she has not come to terms with it. She has improved and can better handle her situation, but she will always be angry at what she lost. She wants others in similar situations to know that this is OK and she provides advice and information for people. It is a good book that was apparently made into a movie a few years ago.
On the first day of the year, the author decides that she will go in search of all the butterfly species that can be found in Denmark. She doesn't really know why she has this sudden need to find these butterflies, but there it is. She never paid much attention to them before. It becomes something of a passion/obsession, much to the amusement, and sometimes annoyance, of her family to participated in her quest occasionally. She read and researched butterflies, especially those in Denmark. She contacted experts. She read about butterflies in folklore, myth, philosophy, and in personal stories. She makes a plan about which butterflies she can see where and when and prepares to travel to various places. The book is about all of these things--butterfly watching culture in the present and in the past, her own experiences, how she learned how to do this, how she felt doing it, and what she learned from this project. I did shake my head at the people who claim to love butterflies, but, when they find what they're looking for, kill it and put it under glass like a trophy. I guess it's not that different from people who have heads of dead animals on their walls. I knew that people did this with butterflies, but it just really stuck out in the context of this book. I should hasten to add that the author did not do this. She took photographs and also included drawings of the butterflies. I enjoyed this book. I'm always interested in stories about people who have great passions in their lives--what they love, why they love it, how they came to realize that they had this passion. There is some of the 'why' in this book, but the author does just roll with it without understanding why at first and doesn't fully understand this even at the end of the butterfly season she writes about. I should say that the US version has a different cover and subtitle.
Wylder's Hand by J. Sheridan le Fanu (personal copy)
In the past few years, I've discovered that I quite like the work of this author. I'd read a few novels before this one and a couple novella and short stories. I hadn't heard of this one until Bill came across it while looking for something else. It sounded good, so we bought it. It was good! It's a classic crime novel, but doesn't really follow the usual formula. In some ways, it was kind of obvious, but in others, not so much. The story revolves around a marriage that neither the prospective bride nor groom really wants to go through with. They're some kind of cousins--there are a lot of cousins running around this book--and the whole point of the marriage is to unite two sides of a feuding family and the fortune that's involved. The wedding day is quickly approaching when the groom disappears. Then letters start to appear with instructions to his lawyer. He keeps postponing the date of his return. The wedding day comes and the wedding day goes. Where is he? And what about the newcomer who takes quite an interest in the bride-to-be? Of course there are other storylines feeding into this one. I was going to say 'secondary storylines' but I don't think that would be accurate. Unlike some Victorian novels, each of these threads is central to the main plot throughout and not running on parallel tracks until they all meet at the end. I had a great time with this book and I'll be reading more le Fanu for sure.
I was in the mood for a little humor so I borrowed this audiobook. I'd listened to it when it first came out a few years ago and loved it, so I figured I'd enjoy listening to it again. I did. I like his approach to poetry and his sense of humor. I also like his approach to the holiday season. He's British, so some of the poems contain specifically British Christmas things, like The King's Speech. No matter. It's a fun collection.
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (personal copy)
Sticking with the humor, I picked up this book that I found in a charity shop a couple of months ago. I started off laughing so much tears came to my eyes. First published in 1889, the book opens with three guys sitting in the room of a boarding house where one of them lives. Two are talking about their ailments and the third is looking at a circular about liver pills and what symptoms to look out for. With a creeping sense of horror, he reads on and becomes quite sure that he has serious liver problems. He has some experience with this kind of thing and proceeds to tell the story of how he went to the British Museum reading room once to look something up. As he was closing the book he needed, he happened to glance at an entry for typhoid fever and understood that he had this disease. He then decided to start at the beginning and go through the alphabet. By the time he was done, he knew he was a walking specimen of disease and sickness because the only thing he didn't have was housemaid's knee. He felt a bit put out by the fact that he didn't have housemaid's knee, but it couldn't be helped. I read these pages aloud to Bill who also laughed, but not quite as hard as I did. It just reminded me of today when people google things and quickly become convinced that they are very ill. As it happens, when Bill would listen to the Red Sox games online, one of the ads was for a medication and they'd say to ask your doctor about it. They didn't even say what it's for, just urged people to ask the doctor. From 1889 to today, not much has changed in this regard. There were a few more passages in the book that made me laugh like that and that I read aloud to Bill. There were other parts that were amusing. Anyway, after talking over their ailments, the guys decide to take a boat up the Thames to restore their health and this short novel is an account of that trip and also the memories it invokes. A couple of the guys are based on friends and acquaintances of the author. Needless to say, they're inept and often foolish, which is where the humor lies. This is a light, fun, and sometimes silly book, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
I saw this when scrolling through the offerings on BorrowBox. It was available so I borrowed it. I've read Christmas stories from various countries over the past several years and it's always interesting to see what they're like. They're a fun window into the various cultures. The stories in this book range from the early 1800s to the mid 1900s, so there's a good century and a half here. I quite enjoyed this book. The stories were quite varied in tone and there was a good mix of emotions in them.
Blind Corners By Stefania Lucchetti (NetGalley book)
I wrote about this excelent book in my last post.
I also read a few books that will be published quite soon, but in order to keep this post to a reasonable length, I'll post those tomorrow.
