24-27 January: books before a break

I kept saying our blog would take a winter hiatus. It hasn’t, much, but with some real reading weather approaching, I think it will go quiet for just a few days.

Sunday, 24 January 2021

I read a book by Chuck Klosterman, an amusing writer of essays and opinion pieces. He says in the preface to this book that it is not a book of essays and should be read in order….which I always do.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter about books, especially this bit about obscure books.

My personal library has some obscure writers like Marion Cran, EM Delafield, Gladys Taber, and some obscure novels that I adored in my twenties and keep meaning to read again to see if I still adore them. (Foul Matter by Joan Aiken, which was once my favourite novel, Benefits by Zoe Fairbain, A Canticle for Leibovitz, Don’t Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee, Odd Girl Out by Elizabeth Howard, and a series of novels by Margaret Laurence). My bookshelves have a lot of science fiction and fantasy (the complete works of Philip K Dick), even though I have gone more to non-fiction and memoirs now. I used to dislike non-fiction and read mainly two genres: science fiction/fantasy and British writers from Iris Murdoch and Margeret Drabble to PG Wodehouse. It all changed in my late forties to memoirs, maybe when I started reading gardening books, many of which are also memoirs.

I also especially liked Klosterman’s chapter about music. Below, he’s talking about the Sex Pistols compared to The Bee Gees. When I went to punk rock clubs in the early 80s, there was a shtick about hating disco. I adored disco, too, probably best of all! I think he is insightful about its cultural influence, which was probably not realized at the time it was happening. Many is the night that my friend Carol and I went dancing; “our” songs were I Love the Night Life and Boogie Oogie Oogie. (A day later, I am adding this link to a charming video that I remembered while about to fall asleep. I haven’t found a source for it other than Facebook, so I hope you all can watch.)

Klosterman is very funny.

He has an entire fascinating chapter about the idea of multiverses or parallel universes being a real scientific thing. More on this later. I read several books by him over a decade ago and now I have a few to catch up on. It will be a pleasure.

In one chapter, he writes about a hedgehog incident in Ohio. I was so bothered that I stopped to Google whether hedgehogs could possibly have lived there. No. I was amused to find this at the very end.

Apparently Chuck has never dated an Anglophile gardener, either.

Monday, 26 January 2021

We heard sad news a week ago, that a beloved local man who had a perennials nursery in Seaview had suddenly died, at just my age. It was called The English Nursery because he and his wife are English. Of course, over the years, we enjoyed stopping by not only because he was a good and witty conversationalist but also because of his accent. We went there today to help his wife out by taking some of the smaller empty plastic flower pots. We stuffed our van full. Most plants in a nursery look sad in winter. That and the bitterly cold day added to the poignancy of the situation.

There will be a close out sale of plants at the nursery. I will be sure to announce it here.

We got almost all the pots neatly sorted and stashed away at home just when some serious rain began.

I then read a rather grim psychological suspense novel by an author who was recommended to me in another book I just read (but can’t recall which). I devoured it in one rather stressful sitting. I then began, and finished the next day, a much lighter suspense novel about a blogger trying to disappear from social media!

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Tuesday, 26 January 2021

After finishing Unfollow Me, I read another book straight through. It was about “the multi-worlds interpretation of quantum physics” about which Chuck Klosterman had written. Cosmic coincidence! And about being given a chance to try out multiple versions of one’s own life and to explore what would happen if a different road had been taken during those moments one regrets, something I had just been mentioning recently in this blog. And it was science fiction/fantasy, the speculative fiction genre that I don’t read much of anymore. I adored it all to bits.

I love this book so much…

“Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.”

Many years ago, I read another novel about getting a do-over in life, Replay by Ken Grimwood. I thought about it for years, at about what moment I would make a different choice. It is on my shelves of obscure books to reread someday.

Wednesday, 27 January 2021

As I read this, it’s been what feels like a wasted day. Actually, despite sleeping extra late because the cats kept me awake till four AM (Zinc wanted to sleep on my head; I did not want Zinc to sleep on my head), it was productive with work-related bureaucratic paperwork and tax forms. A cat food mail order box came. The cats adore the nest of packing paper which will remain until I cannot stand the mess anymore.

I listened to the zoom meeting from the Public Health Dept and revised my hope of us getting the vaccine really soon. There are over 3000 people on the county wait list, the county has no idea how much vaccine they will get each week but could manage to do 500 doses a week if they got enough doses, and they are asking the state to recognize that our county has more old people and more people living in poverty than most Washington State counties. Because of demand for the vaccine so far outweighing the current supply, I am now thinking we might even have to wait two months for our first dose. It’s frustrating. Sounds like we might be able to find out where we are on the list with a phone call, which I will make tomorrow! Our health department is so small, and is working so hard.

I am thinking of embarking upon reading Proust. I read a good book years ago called How Proust Can Change Your Life but never actually read his books. I always thought they were memoirs but, sadly, apparently not. Last night I read ten pages of Swann’s Way and found it wonderful, but maybe I should save the thousands of pages for next winter’s reading project. Whatever I choose to read for the next few cold and rainy days, I’ll be back here when I actually either do something outside or get around to writing something about the Dodie Smith memoirs that I read last month.