Reading through my wish list

Lame theme, but this year I am tackling my wish list of books, which is over 10 years old and has hundreds of books I've added because they sounded interesting. My goal is not to buy any for my Kindle, but to get them all from the library.

Sounds ambitious! Nice, practical theme, too. I will be checking in from time to time. (we just bought a Kobo to "share"...I plan to use it when I re-read Middlemarch so I can enlarge the print :-)

>1 nohrt4me2: It would make a nice list to share with us?

>3 baswood: Way too long and embedded in a list of home projects and other notes. As I go thru, I will note which books I dropped off the list and why.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I enjoyed this one, though I was prepared to dislike it given that I could not make head nor tail out of her earlier Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Piranesi is speculative/occult fiction involving parallel universes and witchcraft, which sounds like a lot of woo. But the human story in which the title character is enslaved and exploited in a parallel universe but who finds meaning and humanity without fully understanding his situation was unexpectedly moving.

I found the world-building a bit excessive.

The Great Night by Chris Adrian

This book is written by a pediatric oncologist whose novel is supposed to offer a sublimated view of grief in a kind of magical realism treatment that brings in characters from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I thought, OK, well, it sounds a bit convoluted, but intriguing.

Turned out to be less intriguing than convoluted. I honestly couldn't finish it, which only happens every five years.

Nearly finished with a re-read of A Canticle for Leibowitz, so ordering more library books today.

Let's see:

Skipping Kristin Lavransdatter and In This House of Brede because I have read both of them at least twice before. However, leaving them on my wish list.

No ILL results for A Quartet of Cornish Cats by A.L. Rowse, whom I met during my summer at Cambridge University. ILL did have Three Cornish Cats by Rowse, so I ordered that instead and deleted the Quartet off the wish list.

ILL has Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple, but none of her other books on my wish list. I'll revisit those "wishes" after I read this one to see if I've gone off Whipple or if it whets my appetite. I really liked The Priory.

And finally, ILL has Rajiv Joseph's anthology of three plays, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Animals out of Paper, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. Not really sure why I put these on my wishlist back in 2011 (yikes, that list goes back a lot further than I thought), but I don't read much drama or Middle Eastern lit, so this should be an interesting change.

>7 nohrt4me2: I keep meaning to get a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz. I don't know how I've gone this long without reading it.

>8 labfs39: Let me know what you think if you read it. I took in the first go-round about 1975 in a big rush. I'm more critical now, but it's still holding up for me.

>9 nohrt4me2: I'd be interested in what you have to say about Canticle. I read it in the 80s....

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller

This was less engrossing than it was 50 years ago, but I still marvel at the scope, depth, and imagination of the novel, never mind the amount of information about medieval monasticism Miller has woven into a doomsday dystopian.

Some quotes:

"Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God."

"The same fool with great delight accepted the inheritance of ancestral glory, virtue, triumph, and dignity which rendered him courageous and noble by reason of birthright, while protesting the inherited burden which rendered him guilty and outcast by reason of birthright."

"Fire, loveliest of the four elements of the world, and yet an element too in Hell. How strange of God to speak from a burning bush, and of man to make a symbol of Heaven into a symbol of Hell."

Peter, the White Cat of Trenarren by A. L. Rowse

Short memoir of Rowse's life with Peter, his favorite cat. It is mix of treacly sentiment and sharp observations about this particular cat. Rowse's charm is that he knows that a cat is not a cat, but that each of them has different personalities. Enjoyable.

From the wish list:

I passed over In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden because I have read it several times. Ditto Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset. Left them on the list though. I cut people out of my life easier than I cut some books out. Not sure that says anything good about me.

Also passed over The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, which just didn't appeal right now, even though it is an Important Book of the 1970s. I did order from ILL: Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 1972 by Hunter S. Thompson.

Also on order from ILL: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and The Empty Room by Colm Toibin.

Deleted An Education by Nick Hornby because I saw the movie and it was OK, but not so good that I would want to read the screenplay.

>12 nohrt4me2: I cut people out of my life easier than I cut some books out.

Lol, I know the feeling. I unpacked some books this week that have been in boxes since I left Seattle five years ago. Clearly ones I don't NEED, but I was only able to cull a few that were damaged. Some were my mother's, and sadly dated, but I couldn't say goodbye.

>13 labfs39: I give away most of my physical books, but actually blotting those titles off my wish list felt so wrong! Just having the titles there to remind me that it was a possibility to read them again seemed important. Maybe bears more thinking about ...