So I needed a brand new one. I picked one of my 2024 Reading Challenge books: Faster: How a Jewish Driver, and American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler's Best. It was an especially appropriate choice because I was headed out of town with the friend who loaned me the book.
More thoughts once I have finished it!
S and I were at a wedding on Saturday. There was a touch of a library theme to the decor. The seating assignments were printed on those vertical index-card-sized slips that you used to find in library books. Among the decorations, they had rented some vintage books from a local thrift shop.
Browsing the selections, we found a book called Enduring Passion: Further New Contributions to the Solution of Sex Difficulties being the continuation of MARRIED LOVE. (Yes, that capitalization is in the actual subtitle.) This seemed like an odd selection to have on display at a wedding. It turns out the bride and groom had not selected specific titles, but merely identified which color groups they were looking for; the shop made the selections. I wonder if the shop owners had picked that one out specifically; seems rude, if you ask me.
It's one of those books -- published in 1928 (though this version was printed in 1931) -- that was advanced for its time but reads as comical now. I had such a good time paging through it at the reception that I kept it so I could finish it up. (Don't worry, I told the bride, and I offered to send the shop the $1.00 price that was written inside the cover if they desired such remuneration for this gem.)
It wasn't until we were on the way home the following day that I noticed that the author was a woman: Marie Carmichael Stopes. She was quite an accomplished young scientist, earning D.Sc. and PhD degrees by the time she was 24 years old. However, she had then what was a controversial position on birth control and has now a complicated history when it comes to other social issues, including eugenics and abortion. I've no desire to do a full recitation here, but you can read about it on the interwebs if you'd like.
Regardless, an entertaining collection of pages to flip through ... especially at a wedding!
I automatically give extra credit to any movie which is set in Great Britain or Ireland. People We Hate at the Wedding is one of those. It's a 100% predictable story of wedding shenanigans, but if what you need is some brain candy with a few extra-funny zingers, it's not a bad pick.
Initially, I didn't quite know what I was getting into. The first 20 pages or so were pretty entertaining. Then it just started to get weird and go a bit off the rails. So I looked up a few things about it and came away with this summary: "nothing happens, it's pretty dumb, but there are some real gems in the prose."
My reading experience could not mirror that summary more exactly. I really had to push myself to get through the pages. I thought this one would be easy because it's so short, but the total lack of plot made it a real slog. But every now and then I would either burst out laughing or come across a passage that was so spot-on that I had to go back and read it aloud to S.
Despite that, I don't expect I will be reading any of the other books in the series.
So far it doesn't really seem like my ball of wax -- I like a bit of logical plot, typically -- but it's short and amusing, so I'm sticking with it.
Meanwhile, I have continued - at least mostly - my habit of reading a book about a place when I am traveling there. And sometimes even writing about those books.
Recently, S and I took a boat trip in and around the San Juan Islands, a small group of islands off the coast of Washington state at the Canadian border. In his preparation for the trip, S had learned about an event called the Pig War. A bit of light googling revealed a book of the same name: The Pig War: The Most Perfect War in History, by E.C. Coleman.
It's not so much a war over a pig, but that the shooting by an American of a British pig (or at least a pig owned by a British person) brought attention to the dispute over the boundary between the US and then-British-owned Canada.
Some years prior, an agreement had been reached placing the land boundary at the 49th parallel. When the land ran out, the boundary ran, "to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island; and thence southerly, through the middle of said channel, and of Fuca's Straits to the Pacific Ocean...." The trouble was that the agreement didn't say which channel it meant. The Americans took the position that it meant the Straits of Haro, which would place San Juan Island itself on the American side of the line. The Brits took the position that it meant the Rosario Strait, which would place San Juan Island on the British side of the line. So when the San Juan pig wouldn't quit rooting around in the American's garden and was shot, a decades-long detente ensued.
It was 1854. Both sides were busy with either internal or other external concerns. In a bilateral show of restraint, diplomacy, and common sense which seems rarely demonstrated in global politics of late, both sides sent small military detachments to San Juan Island under instructions to protect their own country's interest without provoking the other until a final determination of ownership was made.
Despite a road bump here and there, it worked remarkably well. [SPOILER ALERT!] The "war" came to an end in 1872, when the Emperor of Germany found in favor of the Americans' claim. The British force, upon receiving the news, peaceably withdrew, turning over the keys to their fort with kind words: "I now beg to express to you personally my warmest thanks for your ready co-operation with me at all times, and permit me to subscribe myself with feelings of the highest order."
The author does a nice job of placing this litter territorial squabble in the context of bigger national and global events. Without that, this story might have been an interesting long article, but a book might have been a bit much. He also has a decent sense of humor. It's not often that a book of history makes me laugh out loud or read passages to my companions, but this one did. The author has a clear belief, which becomes more evident as the book goes on, that the final decision was an incorrect one; frankly, the final chapter - which speeds through everything from the Boer War to the War on Terror - should be skipped entirely.
But until that point, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read.
- I have bought new laundry soap;
- I have bought new stain remover;
- I (by which I mean K) have painted my laundry room a sunshiny yellow.
Regarding the last item, this is something I have wanted to do/have done for some time, prior to even knowing about (much less reading) Laundry Love. The book was just the final kick in the pants that I needed to make it a priority.
I have attempted one radical washing experiment since getting this book. I washed a many-years-old (and accordingly many-years-soiled) goose down sleeping bag. It had gotten a touch mildewed in our basement, so my choices were either (1) trash it right now, or (2) attempt to wash it and see what happens.
It did not start out promising. First of all, the bag was so dirty that gray water was coming out of it after even several rinses. But bedtime approached, the bag was still soaked, and it of necessity became a project for tomorrow me to deal with.
I squeezed as much water out of it as I could, but I had to go to work when it was still dewy outside. S obliged me by spreading it out in the hot summer sun to bake when the dew cooked off. He turned it over midway through the day. He put it in the dryer with some dryer balls for hours to try to break up the clumps. We went to bed.
I went back to work the next day. To hear tell, the dryer smelled like a moldy dead animal, and the bag wasn't much better.
But, we repeated this cycle for several days. Ever so gradually, the smell decreased. And once enough water dried out, the clumps broke up, the dryer balls did their magic, and the bag was fluffy again. I'm not sure it's fluffed quite to its original level -- or perhaps more to the point, I think due to the age of the bag, many of the internal baffles are busted and so the down shifted around quite a bit during this process.
But the takeaway is that -- though this was a much longer and much more complicated process than the book makes it sound like it should be -- it worked. I have a home-washed goose down sleeping bag. I always thought it couldn't be done.
I'll count that as a win.
This is a quick, easy whodunit. The writing is not great but it's good enough to keep things moving along. What I can say about it, and part of the reason I kept on with it, is that it has an unreliable narrator.
I love an unreliable narrator.
What you learn quickly is that the narrator is suspected for, though was never charged with, the murder of her best friend. She has no memory of the event. As the story unfolds, you -- and she -- figure out how everything went down.
I read Eric Ryback's first book, The High Adventure of Eric Ryback, as part of my 2022 Reading Challenge. As I said in my post at the time, I found it more readable and less and-then-this-happened than many travel books are. Plus, controversy always makes things interesting to talk about, even if it's the second book. We'll see if it's as interesting.
So, it's summer. Somehow it went from April to June. I missed all of May lost in a fog of work. June is better. July will be better still.
Also, Happy Father's Day!
Poetry is one of those genres that seems to have a pretty broad definition, so I suppose this all does count as poetry. But if you asked me to describe this book to a friend, I would describe it as a cross between poetry and one of those page-a-day collections of inspirational sayings. Why does it feel that way? For one thing, most of the poems are quite short, often not more than a few lines. For another, many of them are positive, or at least could be interpreted that way.
I've lent the book to a friend, but when I get it back, I probably will go back and read it again, but one poem at a time rather than in the drinking-from-a-fire-hose style that I read it in for my first go-around. I think it will be a good one to keep around and dip into when a tiny breath of goodness is needed.
And if that's not high praise from me for a book of poetry, I'm not sure what is.
But I will take a few moments to get you up to speed on where I am with Isaac's Storm.
I finished it. That is all.
Kidding, kidding. I mean, I did finish it, but that's not all. I liked it. And now that I've been finished with it for a couple of days, I like it even more.
The good: the descriptions of the weather phenomena and the strange things that were happening were quite evocative. I really enjoyed the background pieces about the development of what was then called the Weather Bureau, and how a lot of these guys, and sometimes even the forecasts, were just pawns in a political game. (I thought the National Weather Service was the one thing we could count on to just give the facts and likelihoods as best as they can be estimated!)
The bad: perhaps because I took such a long break in the middle of the book, I really had trouble remembering who was who. Isaac is obviously our titular main character, and his brother Joseph was pretty easy to keep track of. But the various friends, neighbors, and other Galvestonites whose stories were featured were hard for me to keep straight.
But all in all, it was a good read, and pretty quick once I set aside a bit of time to devote to it. And what a story.
For some reason this one escaped my notice for years.
But, when a category came up in the 2024 Reading Challenge for a "book based on a real event," I dusted it off.
I didn't love this book, and I think it's because I didn't really like the characters much. The main character is sort of a bumbling doofus through much of the book, and I never developed a liking for him. The one character I thought had potential to be very interesting -- one of the Rickys -- played only a bit part that served mostly to provide a few setting-based nuggets that the author comes back to later. So in that sense, I suppose it was constructed reasonably well.
It also drew a lovely picture of the town of La Plata, in Andorra, and the sparkling seaside harbor around which the town was constructed. The only problem is that Andorra, in real life, is a land-locked country. So there were a few liberties taken there.
Overall, it was a quick and easy read, but had some problems.
What I really liked about his take on the whole "I don't want to wear my fanciest clothes, because I might stain them" question was that he had such a logical response. Basically, it was "don't worry about that, we'll just get the stains out." He had such a lovely attitude about, yes, laundry, that I got his book from the library.
As I started reading it, I realized that it contained a mix of general ideas and very practical tips, so I decided I should probably get my own copy. I did that, and returned the library's copy, but unfortunately I haven't made much further progress since then. But, it's still there on the table, waiting to be read. I'll get it done.
I have had this book for a long time and had absolutely no recollection of what it was about when I picked it to start the year. Given how busy I've been with other things (mostly work) which delayed my start, this seems like it was probably a good choice.
I'm one chapter in, and what I know so far is that the narrator has fled his prior life to move to Andorra, a tiny bubble of a country on the Spain-France border, which I have actually been to! I remain hopeful, because often books with a mystery at the core are quick reads, so perhaps I can get back on track.
