jan karon

Reading Round-Up: November & December 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

It’s always hard to judge when I should start writing up my December round-up post. As we edge past Christmas and toward the new year, I start to wonder: can I finish this last book by the 31st? Should I wait until January? The answer for 2022 is a definite no — I’ve got a good 400 pages to go and that is not happening today. So without further ado, my last two months of reading:

November:

  • Mary Poppins Returns (P. L. Travers)
  • The Burning Page (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Lost Plot (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Mortal Word (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Secret Chapter (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Dark Archive (Genevieve Cogman)
  • The Untold Story (Genevieve Cogman)

December:

  • Shepherds Abiding (Jan Karon)
  • How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind (Dana K. White)
  • Something Wilder (Christina Lauren)
  • Rattle #77 — Tribute to Translation
  • A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
  • The Firm (John Grisham)
  • Decluttering at the Speed of Life (Dana K. White)
  • The Machine Stops (E. M. Forster)

After reading P. L. Travers’s sequel to Mary Poppins, which was as bizarre and delightful as the first, I dove headfirst into the rest of Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library series (I read the first one in October). This was an incredibly engrossing series, and I was very happy that my library had electronic copies of all of them so that I never had to wait for the next one! It wrapped up in a very satisfying way, tying up the loose ends and following through on clues established all the way back in the first book. A++ would read again.

I started December in a Christmassy mood with Jan Karon’s Shepherds Abiding, a shorter addition to the Mitford canon. Father Tim works on restoring an antique Nativity crèche as a surprise for his wife, as he and the other Mitford residents prepare to celebrate Christmas. It’s sweet and comfortable reading, just like the rest of Karon’s sprawling series. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol scratched a similar itch for me — though no matter how often I read it or watch one of the film adaptations, the Tiny Tim switcheroo still makes me cry.

Something Wilder was a departure from Christina Lauren’s usual M.O., which was surprising and fun. It’s still a romance, but it’s also a thriller involving puzzles, manslaughter, multiple gunfights and hostage situations, and searching for Butch Cassidy’s lost treasure stash in Utah’s labyrinthine slot canyons. It certainly was “something wilder” and I hope to read more from Lauren in this vein. 

The Machine Stops was simultaneously one of the best and the very worst book I read this month. Forster’s sci-fi novella was first published in 1909 and is set in a world where humanity’s needs are wholly provided for and overseen by a vast Machine. All of human experience is mediated by the Machine, and the story’s parallels to a world dominated by social media and the almighty algorithms are… spookily prescient.  That’s what made it one of the best books. It was the worst book this month because my edition had very obviously been neither copy edited nor proofread, and was absolutely riddled with errors. It was outrageously sloppy, and my reading experience was frustrating-bordering-on-enraging. (If you want to read a clean copy, there are several ebook formats available for free here.)

I enjoy Grisham novels, most of them at any rate — but especially in his earlier books like The Firm I can’t help but laugh/sigh at his hilariously terrible understanding and descriptions of female anatomy. This one contains gems like “The [woman’s] breasts were resting comfortably on the table” (just… what? no! those words don’t go together) and this absolute masterpiece:

She coughed, a hacking, irritating cough which reddened her face and gyrated her huge breasts until they bounced dangerously close to the typewriter keys.

Ladies, if you ever find your breasts gyrating off your keyboard — or anywhere else, for that matter — you need (1) a better bra and (2) to make an appointment with your doctor. 

Moving on!

The two Dana K. White books were really clutch for me this month. Clutter and organization is something I’ve struggled with my entire life, and I’ve tried and failed many different systems and methods over the years. But with Dana I’ve found something that just works for my brain, not just with the system she uses but also just helping me to reframe the way I think about these things. Like how it’s a process, not a project; and you can clean and declutter without making a bigger mess in the first place; and how the goal is not “finished” (house stuff will never be finished; I will be doing dishes and laundry for ever and ever amen) but “better” and “less”. And that sometimes (a lot of the time) the problem is not that we don’t have a good organizational system, the problem is that we just have too much stuff. On that note I took about seven boxes to Goodwill this month and have another two ready to go… and I don’t think anyone in the family has even noticed what’s left the house. (If that’s not a sure sign of “too much,” I don’t know what is!)

I’ve been recommending her books in person to people when it won’t come across as a passive-aggressive dig at the state of their home — but as I cannot see your home, dear reader, consider this recommendation a gift rather than censure. These books are so helpful. Start with How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind.

Rattle, as ever, remains one of the best poetry magazines going, and well worth the annual subscription fee.

And that’s a wrap. Happy New Year!

Reading Round-Up: July 2018

/ Christine Pennylegion

One of the things about July being a long month (and feeling like a longer one, since we had some travel and suchlike in it) is that I can barely remember what I read just a few weeks ago. Oh well, that’s why I write things down! Here’s the list for last month:

  1. Come Rain or Come Shine (Jan Karon)
  2. To Be Where You Are (Jan Karon)
  3. Pilgrimmage: The Book of the People (Zenna Henderson)
  4. The House on the Strand (Daphne duMaurier)
  5. Something Other Than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It (Jennifer Fulweiler)
  6. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (Antonio García Martínez)
  7. Kindest Regards: Collected Poems (Ted Kooser)
  8. Beartown (Fredrik Backman)
  9. Us Against You (Fredrik Backman)
  10. Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to be Noticed (Sara Hagerty)
  11. The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict (Trenton Lee Stewart)
  12. Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
  13. And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer (Fredrik Backman)
  14. The Art of Stillness (Pico Iyer)
  15. The Deal of a Lifetime (Fredrik Backman)

Two of those have their own posts up: Chaos Monkeys and Unseen.

Unlike June, July was pretty heavy on the fiction — I seem to get into waves that way. So let’s tackle the nonfiction first:

Something Other Than God is Jennifer Fulweiler’s first book, which I read second (I wrote up her second book, which I read first, here). This is the testimony of her conversion from a rationalist atheism to Roman Catholicism, a lovely and moving story. I found One Beautiful Dream a little more engaging — perhaps because it was dealing with a lot of the sort of questions I’ve been asking myself lately — but this was an enjoyable read.

I started reading Kindest Regards in June, and then put it down to read other things because I wasn’t enjoying it very much. But then when I picked it up again, I enjoyed it greatly — which just goes to show that sometimes it isn’t the book, it’s just the timing or your mindset. What I love about Ted Kooser’s poetry is how tight his imagery is: not a single word is wasted.

The only other nonfiction I read this month, besides the two that got their own posts, was Pico Iyer‘s The Art of Stillness. He has a TED Talk of the same name if you want the Cliff’s Notes version (though The Art of Stillness is so slim a volume that hardly seems necessary). Pico Iyer thinks that we should all slow down and practice stillness, in meditation or sabbath-keeping or various other forms, and he’s doubtless right. But the book didn’t really grab me and I can barely recall anything in it. Sorry, Pico.

On to the fiction: last month began with the final two installments of Jan Karon’s sprawling Mitford series. Come Rain or Come Shine is about the wedding of Dooley Kavanagh, Father Tim’s adopted son (well, the wedding and the preparation thereof). In To Be Where You Are, Father Tim is wrestling with his sense of purpose after retiring from the parish he pastored for many years. Like the others, they are sweet books; although they often deal with heavy themes, Karon handles them in a gentle and good-hearted manner. A+ comfort reading.

Zenna Henderson‘s Pilgrimmage: The Book of the People was a blast from the past for me; I read the copy that resides at my parents’ house which I probably hadn’t touched since high school or so. This is one of her books concerning “The People”, a group of extraterrestrials stranded on earth after the break-up of their home planet. The People look human, but they have powers — telekenesis, some telepathy, things like that — and a lot of her themes concern the tension between blending in and staying true to your self/heritage/home. They’re very thoughtful books.

Also in the fantasy realm, I loved Daphne duMaurier’s The House on the Strand. I hadn’t picked it up previously, despite owning it for ages, because the cover of my copy makes it look very blah. I know, I know, don’t judge a book by its yadda yadda whatever. But it’s actually tremendously exciting, with drug-induced time travel and family unravellings and all sorts of delicious medieval drama. I’ll read this one again.

The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict is fourth in Trenton Lee Stewart’s Mysterious Benedict Society series, which I have been reading all out of order. That doesn’t matter a whit in this case, as it’s a prequel, about the childhood about the aforementioned mysterious (Mr./Nicholas) Benedict. Orphans! Mysteries! Adventures! And also some salient questions about the kind of people we choose to be, and how we make those choices. It’s good stuff.

Farenheit 451 was also a re-read for me, although it’s been so long since I read it (circa age fifteen) that I didn’t remember anything about it except that I hadn’t liked it very much. It definitely reads very differently in my thirties than it did in my teens! I was struck by Bradbury’s prescience in predicting not the precise political and technological details of our age, but its spirit: where we are quickly forgetting how to think in a pervading ethos of soundbites and entertainment over all. We don’t need to install parlour-sized TVs for this, of course; we carry our distractions around in our pockets.

Last, but certainly not least, we come to Fredrik Backman: two novels (Beartown and Us Against You) and two novellas (And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime). Fredrik Backman, Fredrik Backman… Fredrik Backman will break your heart every time. Beartown and Us Against You are hockey novels (although they are so much more than that), set in a depressed town in the heart of the forest in Northern (I assume Northern) Sweden, where the only thing the town has going for it is that its Junior Hockey Team has a chance at the playoffs for the first time in twenty years. But then the team captain rapes the GM’s daughter at a party and everything unravels. I won’t spoil either book for you — but they’re fantastic. You know, in a heartbreaking way.

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer is a poignant and touching story about a grandson and his grandfather, whose brain is giving up before his body — about memory and what happens when we don’t remember anymore. It’s beautiful and sad, and all the more so for me as we have an elderly family member who is now in the first stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The Deal of a Lifetime is a letter written from a father to his grown son, about the choices he’s made in the past, his triumphs and (mostly) his regrets, as he contemplates one last choice that will change everything. I thought it was the weaker of the two novellas, but I’m still glad to have read it.

And that’s my month in books. I hope yours was enjoyable as well!

Reading Round-Up: June 2018

/ Christine Pennylegion

June was a good reading month for me, unusually heavy on the non-fiction. I found that once I finally made my way through the massive … And Ladies of the Club, I was ready for a significant palate cleanse (although I did dip into fiction again towards the end of the month). I read a lot of poetry, and a fair amount of memoir, and it was deeply satisfying.

Here’s the final list:

  1. … And Ladies of the Club (Helen Hooven Santyer)
  2. Felicity (Mary Oliver)
  3. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Natalie Goldberg)
  4. Upstream: Selected Essays (Mary Oliver)
  5. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Tracy Kidder)
  6. Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home (Natalie Goldberg)
  7. The Secret Keepers (Trenton Lee Stewart)
  8. A Phone Call to the Future (Mary Jo Salter)
  9. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Jaron Lanier)
  10. Aimless Love (Billy Collins)
  11. One Beautiful Dream: The Rollicking Tale of Family Chaos, Personal Passions, and Saying Yes to Them Both (Jennifer Fulweiler)
  12. The Rooster Bar (John Grisham)
  13. Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good (Jan Karon)

A handful of these were already featured in their own posts: … And Ladies of the Club, Writing Down the Bones, One Beautiful Dream, and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. And I’ll take the rest on by genre this month:

Poetry: This month I greatly enjoyed reading a few new-to-me poets, Mary Oliver (Felicity; the other book by her was essays) and Mary Jo Salter, and also re-acquainting myself with the inimitable Billy Collins. I like all three of these poets very much, and I think there are a couple things they have in common: they write a lot about day-to-day living, they are very grounded in natural surroundings, and while their poetry is of an informal, contemporary style, it still has recognisable structure: stanzas, rhythm, occasional rhyme. Above all their work is clear: I don’t mind working at poetry a bit, but I dislike poetry that reads as if it’s obscure for obscurity’s sake. But Oliver, Salter, and Collins are all masters of clarity and I adore them for it.

Memoir: I read several books of memoir this month. Mountains Beyond Mountains is not quite memoir, I guess, because it’s biographical about Dr. Paul Farmer — but on the other hand, it’s also Tracy Kidder’s account of meeting Farmer, and so it’s memoir-ish as well. I accidentally read the dumbed-down-for-middle-schoolers version of the book, but it was still a fascinating account of Farmer’s work among the poor, chiefly in Haiti, focusing on infectious diseases such as TB. It’s an inspiring read — I don’t like using that word because it’s become such a cliché, but sometimes that’s all you can do — and a good spur to remind us that for Christians, caring for the poor is not an optional item.

On a very different note, Let the Whole World Come Thundering Home is a slim little book by Natalie Goldberg, remembering the year (or so?) when she and her partner were both diagnosed with cancer. When I flicked through it at the library I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy it, but it is a deep and tenderly-wrought book and I am glad to have read it.

Finally, Mary Oliver’s Upstream is also on the kinda-sorta memoir scale; it has some personal essays, but also some literary criticism and other things. I was particularly struck by Oliver’s accounts of how she came to treasure the natural world, and her take on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which is very influential on her own writing.

Fiction: It was mid-month before I cracked any fiction, but Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Secret Keepers was a great place to begin. I had previously read a few books in his Mysterious Benedict Society series; The Secret Keepers is a stand-alone novel that encompasses all of the same charm, following eleven-year-old Reuben after he discovers a powerful artifact that must, at all costs, be kept out of the hands of the sinister ruler of his city, known only as The Smoke. It’s great fun.

Striking a very different tone, I read The Rooster Bar, which is John Grisham’s latest-but-one, published in 2017. Although it tackles some compelling issues in America these days — including crushing student debt, for-profit law schools, and family deportation — I had a hard time rooting for the protagonists, who got away with what they were trying to do in the end (well, sort of) but made some bad mistakes that harmed people along the way. It felt as if the ends were meant to justify the means, but I’m not sure that they did.

And last in the fiction department as well as in the month, I picked up Jan Karon’s latest three Mitford novels, and finished Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good right at the tail-end of June. This is a long-running series following Fr. Tim Kavanagh, an evangelical Episcopalian priest serving in the small town of Mitford, North Carolina. They’re sweet books, funny but above all warm-hearted. Some people feel as if they have to apologize for liking the Mitford books because they’re not, you know, high literature — but I don’t. They’re some of my best go-to comfort reading and I love them.

And that was my month of reading! I hope that yours was equally satisfying.