52 Titles – July Leads to August Which Brings us to September

52 Titles Challenge Weeks 28-36? Can it be possible?

Summer, a time to read when you aren’t busy working, gardening, canning, running errands, grappling with teenagers and school districts and maybe, just maybe trying to have a little fun besides.

So grab a tall glass of lemonade, sit back, relax and enjoy my summer reading notes.

52 Titles Challenge:

Weeks 28, July 25 – July 31: “Sense and Sensibility“ by Jane Austen. I found it a little dry but overall it wasn’t a bad way to spend a week traveling cross the West. I liked Elinor’s sense and faith that things would work out but found Marianne a bit annoying and pathetic.

Weeks 29 & 30, August 1 –14: “Of Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham No truer, title has ever been written. I tried to read this semi-autobiographical novel. I really tried to finish this book but after three or four tries, I still couldn’t get past page 180. I have no idea why I am supposed to care about the whinny, sniveling, bore that is Phillip and frankly, life is too damn precious to try. I know, I know it is supposedly one of the most amazing love stories in literature but if I die from boredom before I get to the good parts what is the point. Have you read it? Does it get better? When? I’d like to know.

Week 31, August 15-21: “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” by Jamie Ford. A fine first novel and a good read to boot. The ending is a little too sweet and convenient but it held my attention and won me over with its details of Chinese-American life, food and customs, and there were times when I was truly wanting more.

Week 32, August 22 – 28: Assorted Rod McKuen poem books. I will write more about McKuen later as he had a huge role in my childhood memories.

June 15

Hurry.

Sunday will not wait,

even for a woman.

 

The ships are in the harbor

and to catch up now

we’ll have to steal a little time from God.

(hard to do with our accounts so overdrawn).

 

Hurry up.

 

– from “In Someone’s Shadow”

Weeks 33 – 34, August 29 – Sept. 11: “The Dream Life of Sukhanov” by Olga Grushin. Another first novel and an extraordinary one at that. The writing is incredibly detailed and lush and heartrending. Are Tolya’s dreams real or imagined? Are they destroying him or are they liberating him? And how does one use art as a weapon against oppression when creativity and free thought are being quashed?

“As I stand without moving, it seems without breathing, my feeling of living in the present tense, my perception of reality, the very memory of my identity leave me like crumbling shells of things that have died, and the world itself falls away from my senses.”

 

Until next time, Happy Reading!

~Editor