Meredy's 2022 Reading Journal

Welcome, and thank you for checking out my reading journal.

2022 is my eleventh year of cataloguing my reading on LibraryThing and posting my reflections. The last few have been very much off the norm for me, each worse than the last. Will this year turn the tide? I don't know. But being here helps, conversing among warm friends while nestled in a cozy space amongst the books.

Most especially, I value the genuine friendships and interesting commenters I've found on LibraryThing.

Here's to a great reading year for all.

Meredy

Link to 2021 reading journal.

This is my reading record, begun January 1st and updated over the course of the year, with links to comments and reviews. I truly hope to have more of those this year than last. And I look forward to seeing the thoughts and recommendations of my fellow readers on LT.

January

• The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffmann. 5 stars.



February

• Golden State, by Ben H. Winters. 4 stars.



• The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, by Margareta Magnusson. Good. Don't know how to rate it. Oh, well, 3 stars.



March

• Constance, by Matthew Fitzsimmons. 3 stars.



April

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, by Joan Didion. 5 stars.



May-June

• Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan



• The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen



• Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel



July

• Mothertrucker, by Amy Butcher, 7/19/22, 4 stars



• Dirtbag, Massachusetts, by Isaac Fitzgerald, 8/3/22, 4 1/2 stars



August

Abandoned:

• Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature, by Zibby Owens



September

• Mafia Democracy, by Michael Franzese



October

Currently reading

• How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt



• Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, by Maggie Haberman

We are gathering and looking forward to your reading and comments.

Sincerely hoping this year will be orders of magnitude better for you, Meredy! Looking forward to conversations here with you.

Happy New Year, my dear! It's going to be better than the last one, I just know it.

Starred, thanks for the link!

*waves* Looking forward to hearing about your adventures in reading this year.

Hello lady. Hope to see you here often. I know life is weird and often gets in the way, but we will be here.

Happy new year Meredy! I hope it is better in every way than the last one. Looking forward to following your reading here.

I hope your year will be tons better. Hugs.

Happy New Year and I hope 2022 is better.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for such wonderful and heartening greetings. I do have hope for better times in this new year, as I dare to look forward and see possibilities. There are still matters from the past that I must deal with, but I feel a little braver than I did a while back.

And maybe that's why I was ready to be hooked by the book I started just a few days ago: The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman. I've drifted away from a number of books I've begun lately, feeling swamped by troubles and having difficulty keeping my mind on any one thing otherwise. But this book is about brave women daring to find their way to safety, Jewish women in 1941 Berlin. Women who have the aid of some ancient magic to match their courage. It sounds inspiring to me just now.

Happy new year, Meredy! I hope it's an improvement on recent years.

Sounds like a good read. Hope the rest of your year is much less stressful

Thank you so much. I'm progressing slowly with the book, because so often I just don't have the stamina to read at night. Instead I lapse into some kind of word puzzle and then turn out the light. But so far I'm loving this book.

The year, though...it's getting worse by the day. I have to take some drastic, agonizing steps, and I just don't know if I have the strength. The good wishes of friends and relations, and solid offers of help, do give me some courage. The hard parts, though, I have to do alone.

>16 Meredy: I'm keeping you in my thoughts. I hope that you will find the strength to do what you need to. And I completely understand how seemingly impossible those things can appear to be.

>16 Meredy: I'm so sorry that the year is not improving. Please know your friends in LT are here if you need us.

>16 Meredy:
What >17 clamairy: & >18 Marissa_Doyle: said.

Sending you best wishes and good thoughts.

Thank you, friends. I wonder if you have any idea how much your comforting words and warm wishes help.

>16 Meredy: Strength to you, Meredy!

Thanks, Hugh.

Lately I've been wondering if endurance is the key to strength or if it is in fact an obstacle: bearing more than we should instead of taking action to be free of it. History has shown that people can get used to pretty much anything. What it must take to resist, rise up, repel, revolt! ("They're yelling in Atlanta!") I am watching for those themes now in what I read, very much including my current book, The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman.

I've finished the Hoffman book and given it five stars. My final notes contain some language I don't remember ever using before for a work of fiction. Review to come. I want to do it justice.

Very glad to hear this. I see this book has an incredibly high rating here on LT. I believe I might have taken a bullet!

I've reread the last two dozen pages, and I have to read them once more before I'm able to comment. A lot happens in them. A lot happens in the whole book. I could read it again right away and not be bored.

The only book I ever actually did that with, read the last page and immediately turned to the front and started it again, was Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love. It's probably still worth another read.

Oh I'm so glad you liked it. It reminds me a bit of the Hand novel, too, (because of the intense inter-connectedness) which I loved and think I picked up because of your recommendation. It's on my TBR shelf which means I really have to read it again. Golden State is a bit of a mind bender at the end, but in a good way. I have it as an audio and have listened to it twice and I think I went back and listened to the end again on my first time around because it I had to be sure I heard what I thought I heard. Will you join us reading Arcadia? I think you'd love that one, too.

Wait, I thought you were talking about the Winters book, but you're talking about the Hoffman, right? It's early and I've only had one cup of coffee. LOL.

>27 Bookmarque: Sorry, I guess that was confusing. I have reread the end of the Hoffman book and have to read the end again.

I am now halfway through the Winters, and, recalling your comment about rereading for the clues you missed, I am watching for clues. At 51% I have a pretty good guess about the metanarrative. I will write it down before I go further, either to prove my guess was right or to admit that it wasn't.

The Hand book is the one I did reread immediately.

I'm delighted to hear about the group read, but I can't commit to that in preference to other things at the moment. I've just purchased a 680-page tome on Putin and Russia: Putin's People, by Catherine Belton, which darned well ought to bring to completion my series of readings on this subject. Anyway, I haven't figured out the knack of group reads. How do you discuss the work in progress without spoilers in all directions?

Oh, look, the book just came, and it's only 624 pages. Man, I do like a nonfiction book with a deep index and plenty of notes and documentation. The text proper ends on page 500; the backmatter amounts to 124 pages.

I'll bet it was fun to index, too. I have done indexing jobs as a freelancer and honestly enjoyed it, the logic and the system and the memory and the process of lumping and splitting and all. It looks like they don't let indexes go to four levels any more, though; two levels are a lot less fun.

And editing an index is as excruciating as making one is entertaining.

>29 Meredy: Way back near the beginning of my technical writing career, before we abandoned books for infocenters, I used to enjoy indexing and editing indexes, especially on material that hadn't written. We weren't supposed to go beyond three levels, and I admit the third level could look pretty funky with a two-column format. Thank you for reminding me of that bit of fun!

I'm waiting eagerly for your final thoughts on The World that We Knew. It sounds like a good direction in which to expand my reading.

>30 Jim53: Probably tomorrow if other people's drama will just leave me alone for a day.

>31 Meredy: Best of luck with that wish. Keeping my fingers crossed for you.

>32 clamairy: Thanks, and please keep them crossed. I'm falling behind again. One of these days I want to do my own drama.

I've just read a review of INDEX, A HISTORY OF THE
A Bookish Adventure
From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
By Dennis Duncan

here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/books/review/index-a-history-of-the-dennis-du...

Anybody else aware of it and have a comment?

>30 Jim53: I wonder if it would shed light on whatever sort of warped personality some of us must have who have admitted to enjoying the process of indexing.

So ... I just purchased it.

>34 Meredy: That sounds potentially fascinating. I am pleasantly surprised to see that my public library has copies, although there is currently a bit of a line. Just as well, as I have quite a line of my own to work on.

>34 Meredy: I bought and read Index: A History of the A few months ago and found it absolutely fascinating.

>36 Jim53: >37 haydninvienna: My copy came about 14 hours after I ordered it. That's almost too fast. I didn't even have time to anticipate it.

I'm in a futuristic mystery right now, and the 600-page book on Putin is throbbing on my coffee table, but I'm going to have to at least take a peek at Index, A History of the, which I trust will not be scary, tragic, dystopian, or (please not) political.

I'm about 30% along in The Bookbinder's Daughter and having a hard time with it. The story is interesting, but the writing is not to my liking at all. I'm giving it one more night.

Maybe two.

(Edited for touchstone.)

I've just bought another book about Russia, this one Masha Gessen's esteemed The Future Is History. I haven't even read the last one yet. At least I remembered to get this one on Kindle.

Gessen's March 10th interview with Ezra Klein in the New York Times was very interesting and enlightening.

>39 Meredy: Did you give up on this one?

>40 Meredy: I think she's brilliant, but I was too busy to listen to that interview on the 10th. Maybe this week I will get to it.

>41 clamairy:

Yes, I did. I gave it two more nights and then quit. My discomfort with the author's narrative style was too great to be overcome by my curiosity about the library.

I didn't listen to the interview either. I read a transcript, which of course took less time than listening to a program, and you can skim and still get a lot out of it.

Gessen sounds more solidly knowledgeable than just about all of the commentaries and opinion columns I've read, even though most of them have contributed something to my understanding. (Stopping now lest I veer too close to politics.)

(Edited to correct an error.)

Proceeding slowly through Gessen's dense 500-page volume The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. I'm about a third of the way through.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, one essay per sitting.

And a few other things.

Also, er, doing a lot of Wordle-type puzzles in that spooling-down hour before bedtime. It's still a bit of a novelty.

I've finished Joan Didion's remarkable Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays and given it five stars. I probably can't add anything to the acreage of praise her work has garnered through the years, latecomer that I am to this author's work. So instead I'll try to say how it makes me feel.

One thing I love about good writing in any genre is that I feel as though I were trying on somebody else's head. The view from Didion's head has crisp, bright edges and an underside of unsparing vulnerability. She has a way of turning--turning not magically but gyroscopically--keen observation into still meditation. I feel that I'm experiencing a crystalline vision of whatever she sees, in all its rounded and jagged reality, and also the echo of pain in the tender being of the observer.

And yet she never fully exposes her mind and its secrets. Instead she steers us toward our own, bringing clarity as well as deeper questions.

In this volume, images of the 1960s in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere are served with a quality of moving air that makes me feel that I am breathing in these scenes as the author experiences them. In the title essay in particular, the poignancy of her depiction of the Haight in the summer of 1967 is almost too vivid for my sensory imagination. I wasn't there. I was in Boston that summer, Boston's own summer of love. A summer that bridged the nation.

I've already read and drunk in The Year of Magical Thinking, which helped me greatly in my first months of widowhood. I'll be seeking out the rest of her work.

I've begun Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan. It promises to be not only a good read but also a calm, safe ride, emotionally speaking. I need that right now.

>44 Meredy: I have had Slouching Towards Bethlehem on my radar for years. I may listen to it rather than read it, as I don't usually do well with essays. (I did enjoy listening to The Year of Magical Thinking.)

>45 Meredy: Hope you enjoy this one, as well.

>46 clamairy: Thank you. I'm not a big reader of essays either. I usually bog down pretty early. But this collection was compelling reading.

I bought the Index book in hardcover so I could enjoy making my notes in it. Very rewarding so far.

>45 Meredy: Apparently you are unaware of the great Index controversy of 1582, wherein the world went to war over the argument of whether or not to list persons by their first or last name? Heartbreaking I tell you. Beware, and bring your hankie.

>44 Meredy: A wonderful review. We've had a copy of this sitting around for many years, but I never tried it. If I can find it, now I will give it a shot. Thank you.

>48 MrsLee: Oh, I've heard some disturbing rumors to that effect. I'm prepared for a tragic resolution.

>49 Jim53: Thank you. I hope you find it worthwhile. I'm also mindful that I promised you a final take on The World that We Knew. My notes on the last pages used the word "transcendent." I will get to it.

>44 Meredy: I first read Slouching towards Bethlehem on my 2nd year American Lit course at university. I'd never heard of it, or Didion, before and had no idea what to expect from the book. It just blew me away. Didion's prose captivated me and brought the parched, sunbaked landscapes of Southern California to life. Your comment I feel that I'm experiencing a crystalline vision of whatever she sees, in all its rounded and jagged reality sums my experience up perfectly.

Somebody around here winged me with Sea of Tranquility. It arrived today and is headed for the top of the teetering bedside tower. I'm still short of halfway through the Gessen book but proceeding apace with Index, a History of the. I tend to make faster progress with books if I don't stop reading them.

>52 Meredy: I tend to make faster progress with books if I don't stop reading them.

So many distractions! It's really not fair that there's only the 24 hours in the day.

I finished both the Gessen and the Index book, hurray! I learned a lot from both of them and enjoyed them, each in its own way, but it took a long time. They left me ready for something much lighter. Now I'm zipping (relatively speaking) through Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, which I believe was a BB from hereabouts.

>54 Meredy:
Sea of Tranquility was one of our book club books for last month. I did not read it but have it on my Kindle. Heading off for two weeks' holidays on Friday, so may have a chance to read this.

>55 pgmcc: It's a good one to have along, although you'll go through it pretty fast. Mandel is a skilled writer who keeps control of her material. In this one, she also takes a risk in presenting a writer as a major character, and in the process she gives some glimpses of the writer's life on tour that I haven't seen before.

On casual impulse, I picked up Mothertrucker as a freebie on Kindle, not knowing anything about it. I turned to it after finishing Sea of Tranquility just for something completely different. Unexpectedly, it grabbed me right away. It's not at all the sort of thing that the title suggested. I expect to give it a good report when finished.

>57 Meredy: How did you like Sea of Tranquility? I am waiting for it to go on sale for Kindle.

>58 clamairy: Here you go, a whole real review.

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel (2022)

Six-word review: Space-time dream shimmers in watercolor layers.

Sea of Tranquility is a beautiful novel. It has a certain mystical quality. Watching it unfold is not like watching an artist at work--Mandel's touch is too subtle for that--but like watching a wind-stirred diaphanous veil alternately conceal and reveal the landscape beyond. The prose is spare but not naked, just very carefully pruned: nothing superfluous, digressive, or self-indulgent. I can see a firm yet delicate hand trimming frills away.

The story is multilayered and multidimensional, yet it has a deceptive simplicity owing to the author's exquisite command of the language. Like a Japanese brush painting, her rendering of scenes and dialogue does more in a single sentence than many writers can achieve in paragraphs. You see one stroke and it conveys an entire image. Where in another author's hands I would see smoke and mirrors, in Mandel's I see expert control of her material with a light touch and a clear instinct for pacing and revelation.

The incorporation of a pandemic into the plotline affords some very relevant observations, notwithstanding the fact that in her narrative it occurs several centuries hence. Even beyond that, I find the author's exploration of classic what-if type conjectures brilliant and stimulating.

She integrates intriguing philosophical questions, mostly in the voice of her fictional counterpart, novelist Olive Llewellyn. Some of those quotes are transcribed below.

I salute Mandel's courage in using the author as character. I have groaned many a time on meeting this trope in film and fiction, sometimes barely veiled as artist or musician, because it usually plays out as some sort of self-serving self-justification or, equally, self-mortification. Here, to the contrary, I believe she has broadened its dimensions even while anchoring it in the domain of mortal humanity.

A few choice excerpts:

"There's a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones." (page 116)

"It's shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn't actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake in ignorance and by evening it's clear that a pandemic is already here." (page 173)

"I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world. ... What if it always is the end of the world? ... Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world as a continuous and never-ending process.” (pages 189-190)

“My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.” (page 191)

I gave it five stars, a rare rating in my scheme of things.

>59 Meredy: Great review! And I sort of agree about wanting to live in a world with less technology. I still want it, but I wish it were less visible.

>59 Meredy: I’ve been wanting to read this one. Your review is wonderful! I’m off to see if it’s available at my library. :)

>59 Meredy: I already wanted to read this but your review has made it more urgent.

>59 Meredy:
I am delighted to see the return of your six-word reviews.

>63 pgmcc: Thanks. I didn't realize I had been in practice until I found that I was out of it. It's a lot harder than I remembered.

I've finished Mothertrucker and begun reading Dirtbag, Massachusetts, both memoirs. I'm not usually much of a memoir reader, and both of these are well off my beaten path, but each caught me right away. So hmm.

Why don't touchstones seem to work on my Kindle Fire tablet?

>65 Meredy: I've noticed that when I'm on a mobile device I often have to edit a post to get the touchstones to load properly.

Good to see you posting. Hope all is well. Are you still considering that move back to the Northeast?

>65 Meredy: With regard to your issue with the touchstones, it may have to do with the Silk browser that Amazon has on that tablet. It's not "up to snuff" in many respects.

>66 clamairy: I'll try that, thanks.

I can't say that all is well, but some is well, and that's not always the case. And I do have a trip planned, starting in August: four weeks on the East Coast, two of them in Mass. I'll be trying on the idea of moving back to see how it fits.

>67 jillmwo: Thanks, I didn't think of that. Silk falls pretty short as far as I'm concerned, although I do like the device.

I've completely bogged down on Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature and am ready to give it up.

Next up: one of my September adds, not sure which one yet. I guess it depends on my appetite for gloom and despair in the moment of choice.

(Edited to fix touchstone.)

>69 Meredy: I have no interest in gloomy reads, best wishes for you.

>70 fuzzi: Thanks. Sometimes I relish a good helping of the dire and disturbing, especially in (putative) nonfiction. It's almost like escapist reading when there's too much dire and disturbing stuff going on in real life. I opted for Mafia Democracy, which only two LTers before me have added to their catalogs. So far it's almost like good horror fiction.

(Edited to fix touchstone.)

Mafia Democracy turned out to be a rapid and enlightening read. I'm not sure how much salt to take it with, but this analysis of how U.S. politics works, as viewed by a former Mafia capo of one of the five crime families in New York, is decidedly scorching in places. With few exceptions, politicians from the top down are seen as practicing Mafia principles and policies, all to their own personal gain and that of their close associates. The notable exception is rules of honor and secrecy, which make the Mob out to be a more principled bunch than the folks we've elected to positions of public responsibility.

A respectable list of resources follows the text. I skimmed it but did not check them out. As always, I look for an index, and this has none.

Whether or not I can take this as fair and objective reporting, which I think unlikely, its allegations are so bold that I think some of them must stand up. In any case, it does give cause to think differently about how our democracy functions, what we are saving when we talk about saving it, and why so very many politicians leave office with personal wealth far greater than what they had going in.

>72 Meredy: That sounds pretty interesting.

>73 Narilka: It was. Even if it were entirely divorced from facts, which I do not believe to be the case, the parallels made me see current U.S. politics in a new way. To me, any book that broadens my perspective like that is a worthwhile read.

I've now tackled a major tome: Maggie Haberman's Confidence Man, which could easily consume the remainder of my reading year. It was released yesterday, and I consider it an important read, but it won't be a quick one. If I'm diligent, maybe I'll be able to squeeze in something fun before Christmas.

(Edited to fix touchstone)

>75 Meredy: I've been eyeing that, but I don't know if I can handle it.

>75 Meredy: I caved. I just used one of my Audible credits...

>75 Meredy: and >77 clamairy: Just how much of a dense read are we talking? From what you're saying, I gather that this is not a quick one that can be done in a weekend? I'd been considering it as a possibility, but would like to hear from either/both of you before I add it to the TBR pile. Is it a full biography of his life or is it just documentation of his political career?

It's 607 pages (and 17.3 hours) long. Not short...
And I won't be starting it for a week at least, so I can't tell you much about it.

>78 jillmwo: & >77 clamairy: The text runs to page 508, and the rest is backmatter: a lot of notes and documentation. I'm at about fifty pages. On the basis of descriptions, I'm expecting it to be not a biography as such but rather a compendium of personal and family history and experiences that shaped the (then) future President Trump, and how that all played out in his term in office and beyond. Author Maggie Haberman was a close witness to much of that drama. To me, even only 10% of the way through, it's full of glimpses and insights that tell a bigger story. Connections are clicking in a way that brief news and opinion pieces haven't prompted.

For instance, here's a passage I noted in my reading journal last night. After discussing Trump's early efforts to break into New York real estate and obtain needed permits, forcing him to confront some big legal and procedural obstacles, Haberman says this (page 37): "Trump had survived his first encounter with the fearsome power of the federal government." Might he not have become enamored of the idea of wielding that power himself? That becomes a data point.

It seems that Trump's interest in holding top office goes way back, much further than I had read elsewhere, and he was willing to play a long game.

I won't get into politics here, but you can't talk about a book like this without touching on it. Suffice it to say that I think the Trump phenomenon is terribly important for us to understand and that I am doing my part.

>80 Meredy: Thanks for the info! Yes, this is going to be a very tough one to discuss in here. I'll be going heavy on the spoiler tags, I suspect.

>80 Meredy: and >81 clamairy: Thank you for this. I need to seriously consider this one. Meredy, I'll look forward to anything more you feel you can comfortably share here in the Pub. Because you're quite right that one needs to be as aware and as thoughtful as possible about the political environment.And as @claimairy says -- spoiler tags!

Rem to self:
"Aimee Pokwatka’s SELF-PORTRAIT WITH NOTHING (Tordotcom, 293 pp., $26.99) is a beautiful debut about the people we aren’t and the paths we don’t pursue."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/books/review/babel-anchored-world-self-portra...

I'm 300+ pages into Confidence Man and have added some marginalia, as well as recording three pages of notes in my reading journal. One of the interesting points is the author's documentation of things that long predated and foreshadowed Trump's conduct in office; for example, planning in advance to declare an election rigged and stolen if he did not win.

Only 200 pages to go.

>84 Meredy: Yes, I'm using profanity out loud constantly while listening to this. I'm only on chapter 9, so I'm well behind you. (Sometimes I'm just not in the right frame of mind for this.) It's very disheartening. Fascinating, though!

>85 clamairy: Disheartening and fascinating: excellent summation. It certainly informs my expectations for November 8th, the day after tomorrow, which I see as a more consequential election than 2024. The author does seem to have had a front-row seat for a number of performances.

>86 Meredy: Yes, I'm trying to stay hopeful and realistic at the same time. It's not working so well.

It's my eleventh Thingaversary. Hurray! I am going to try to celebrate by eliminating eleven books from my library today.

>88 Meredy:
Congratulation on your eleventh Thingaversary.

"Eliminating" is such a harsh word. Might you substitute, "rehoming"? :-)

>88 Meredy: Happy Thingaversary! May your day be peaceful, however you choose to spend it.

Happy Thingaversary! Share or re-home those books with some friends and strangers.

Thank you!

How about "deacquisitioning"?

I'm thinking of sending a nice assortment to my niece in Baltimore. She has offered a welcome to selections from my library. I took a picture of her bookcase so I'd know what she likes. I have about seven full bookcases and lots of stacks; not going to make it to one anytime soon.

Sending books to nieces is my absolute jam, so I support this.

>93 reconditereader: Happy Belated Thingaversary!
Re-home those babies!

>92 Meredy: my coworkers and I exchange books all the time. I usually tell them to just pass mine along to someone else. I just don’t have room in my house to keep them all.

>95 catzteach: That's a great idea, and I wish I'd thought of it while I was still working. The readers among my friends tend not to share my tastes. I have managed to donate some, though, and there are two Little Free Libraries on my street.

>96 Meredy: we’ve thought of setting up a book exchange area in a little office in our building. I’m sure if we did that, then the little office would be turned into a tiny classroom. That’s how it goes in education. :)

>97 catzteach: Oh, that does sound like a good idea. How about setting it up in a place the teachers won't claim? like, say, the bathroom--?

I wish I had worked in an environment where a book exchange would have been a welcome addition. Actually, I did, years ago, but we didn't think of it then. That was back when Amazon first entered the online marketplace as a giant bookseller.

>98 Meredy: Actually, that’s not a bad idea…. At my school, the bathrooms are where we put staff communications and write messages to each other. We do a puzzle exchange as well. That one is in the staff workroom.

I've just abandoned Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity at 10%. Beautifully and engagingly written, but I could see where it was going and I didn't want to go there.

Whatever I pick up next will probably be first on my "finished" list in the new year, so I have to make a careful choice. One year my first listed book was an utter dud, and the sight of the title at the top of my page annoyed me all year.

(Edited to add touchstone.)

>100 Meredy:
Zweig's books are never cheerful. While I consider the ones I have read to be good, well written books, they are not books I would recommend for pleasant reading. He dealt with a lot of personal darkness.

Perhaps you need something like The Dublin Trilogy to put a smile on your face for 2023.

>100 Meredy: the sight of the title at the top of my page annoyed me all year

I absolutely understand how that can be dispiriting and annoying!! Perhaps you might re-read something you know and love? Or at least, a familiar author whose work you trust?

>100 Meredy: that would be annoying. I agree with jillmwo in that a preferred author might be a good choice for the first book of the year.

>101 pgmcc: You caught me in a very susceptible moment. I have just ordered the first three of the multivolume trilogy. I now owe you a major blast of BBs.

>102 jillmwo:, >103 catzteach: It is so very nice to be among people who instantly relate to a remark like that. Thank you for . . . well, just thank you.

*High-fives pgmcc*

I hope you will enjoy the "trilogy," these books have given me many happy hours and new character friends.

>104 Meredy:
I hope you enjoy the, as the author described it, more and more inappropriately titled, Dublin Trilogy.

>105 MrsLee:
*High-fives right back at you*

:-)

Team-work is so rewarding.

Continuing to my 2023 reading journal:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/347223

Thanks for following.