Lately I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction.  This just sort of organically happened, although I had made a New Year’s resolution to make a point of reading more.  I’m usually so deep into my fiction choices that I miss out on good non-fiction, although I’ll pick up a biography or a funny memoir now and again.  This year, I wanted to really explore deeper into the genre, while still (hopefully) sticking to choices that created a vivid atmosphere or brought the “characters” to life, which is what I really like in a fiction book.

Here’s what I’ve read, non-fiction style, so far this year:

• The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in the South of France, by Carol Drinkwater – Fun memoir about a couple that buys and renovates a dilapidated olive farm in Provence.  I liked, but didn’t love, this.  There were shades of A Year in Provence (and progeny) but not quite as much charm as Peter Mayle brings.
• Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed – The book blog world went crazy over this, and rightfully so.  Strayed’s writing is incredible, and the situations in the book are searing and troubling.
• Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey, by Simon Armitage – Meh.  I love English walks, so I thought this stunt memoir would be fantastic, but I never really engaged with the journey and the ending was infuriating.
• The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France, by John Baxter – Fun, fun, fun!  I love France, and I love foodie memoirs, and I really love books that combine the two.
• At Knit’s End: Meditations for Women who Knit Too Much, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee – I used to be on a huge Yarn Harlot kick and I remembered why when I dusted off this old audiobook.  Fun, funny, and makes me want to buy yarn.
• Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World, by Matthew Goodman – This was just as thrilling to read in 2013 as the original newspaper articles must have been in 1889.  See my post about the book here.
• Leonardo and the Last Supper, by Ross King – Leonardo isn’t my favorite Renaissance artist, although I do love his Ginevra de Benci, but it was fun to learn about his life and artistic process (or lack thereof).
• The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century, by Ian Mortimer – Lately I’ve been wanting to explore more history, and the format of this book (a travel guide) made it so much fun.
• The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, by John Baxter – Two Baxter books this year!  I liked The Perfect Meal better, but this was engaging and fun and made me want to go back to Paris, so win.
• She-Wolves: The Women who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, by Helen Castor – Dense history, but wonderful writing; Castor really brought her “she-wolves” to life.  (And helped me to spot a mistake on the Wikipedia page for Game of Thrones – Isabella wasn’t the “She-Wolf of France” – that was Margaret of Anjou!  Get on that, Wikipedia!)
• Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion – Meh, I thought this acclaimed book would be amazing, but I found it hard going.  The middle section, about the Scopes trial itself, was fantastic, but the beginning and ending were not as interesting – skimming happened.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve gravitated toward history more this year; usually I’ll go for biography and memoir, as I mentioned, with a bit of popular social science sprinkled in.  I’m back on the fiction train for the moment, thanks to my library reserves, but I’ve been eyeing the non-fiction choices on my shelves and my library holds.  On deck:

• The Crosswicks Journal, by Madeleine L’Engle (four volumes) – I love L’Engle’s fiction work, and I was lucky enough to meet and talk with her for awhile when I was a kid, but I’ve never explored her non-fiction work.  Must change that soon.
• Provence A-Z and French Lessons, by Peter Mayle – These are the last two of Mayle’s France books that I have yet to read.  His writing takes me back to the sun-soaked hills of Provence.
• The Second World War, by Winston Churchill (six volumes) – I’ve been dying to read this ever since I read (and loved) Churchill’s four-volume History of the English Speaking Peoples.  I have the set of six in paperback and can’t wait to dig in – but when I do, I know this will be an undertaking.
• The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, by Ian Mortimer – I’m #3 on the wait list for this at the library, so I expect to have my copy as soon as the orders come in.  Hurry!
• The Tao of Martha: My Year of Living, or Why I’m Never Getting All That Glitter Off the Dog, by Jen Lancaster – I’ve never read any of Lancaster’s pop memoirs, but I hear this one is hilarious.  I’m #41 on the wait list at the library, and not moving until the orders come in, which I hope they do soon.

Do you ever go on a non-fiction kick?  What types of non-fiction writing do you enjoy?

Those banging sounds you kept hearing over the weekend were the sound of bookworms’ heads exploding, one after the other, all over the world, at the sudden revelation that a little-known detective novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling, by “debut author” Robert Galbraith, published quietly back in April, was actually penned by J.K. Rowling.  You know, she of worldwide fame and wingardium leviosa and quidditch and Defense Against the Dark Arts and O.W.L.s and being richer than the Queen?

Upon its printing, The Cuckoo’s Calling (image source) only sold about 1,500 copies.  My library doesn’t even have a copy (I checked).  But now that the author is revealed as J.K. Rowling, they’re selling out everywhere.  Evidently, Rowling had hoped to keep her identity secret for a little while longer (hmmmmm, kind of like Lord Voldemort stayed behind the scenes while he was raising his evil army in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix… no, no, wait, I didn’t just compare J.K. Rowling to Voldemort, I didn’t, I’m sorry Jo!) and it seems that she wanted to write a novel under a pseudonym so as to get honest reviews, not tainted by having her name on the cover.  (Well, I can’t fault her for that – she’s got to wonder if The Casual Vacancy, which got okay reviews, would have done better with critics if it didn’t have to compete with Harry, Ron and Hermione.)  And as it happens, The Cuckoo’s Calling did get very good reviews before Rowling was revealed as the author.  It was called “scintillating” and “stellar,” and the dialogue “sparkling” – one reviewer even expressed surprise that it was a debut novel (well, it wasn’t).

This will probably come as a shock to some, but I haven’t made up my mind yet whether or not I’m actually going to read The Cuckoo’s Calling.  I wanted to read The Casual Vacancy not only because Rowling wrote it, but because I thought the premise sounded interesting – small-town election politics?  Right up my alley.  (My actual impressions after finishing the book were more conflicted, but I’m not going to deny that I was itching to read The Casual Vacancy for reasons that had nothing to do with the author.)  Supermodel suicides and the fabulously wealthy and movie stars and rappers?  Not as much up my alley.  I’ll probably get on the waiting list at my library (once my library shakes off its surprise at the news and orders a copy, that is) just because it’s a sensation and I don’t want to be the only person who hasn’t read The Cuckoo’s Calling.  But I’m not falling all over myself to read it, even though it’s supposed to be fantastic.

That’s not because “Robert Galbraith” is misleading – and by the way, check out my friend Amal’s very well-considered post on whether the fictional biography the publishers invented for “Galbraith” amounts to consumer fraud – I’m just not convinced I’m going to enjoy it, good as it is supposed to be.  But I guess I’ll find out.

Have you read The Cuckoo’s Calling, or are you planning to?  Were you completely shocked at the news, too?

Well, this is it – my last library update (at least until the next time), because I’m DONE with this stack!  Most of it was non-fiction, and most of that pretty dense, but I’ve managed to get through every book in the pile except for Far From the Tree, which I might try to circle back to at some point in the future.  It was a better week in terms of stress (not perfect, but better) and I pushed through my last two books from the stack even though they were hard going at points and I would have rather been reading some comfort books.  And now that I’m done, I’m going to reward myself for my perseverance by finishing out my journeys in Fairacre.  But more about that in a minute.  First, my week of reading:

• Took a quick break from the books with deadlines to read Much Ado About Anne, the second book in the Mother-Daughter Book Club series.  More on this to come in my July reading round-up, but I liked it better than the first.  I felt a bit guilty, since I should have been reading She-Wolves, but it only took a day and was a good mental break.  And then there were… still two.
• Finished She-Wolves by concluding the Isabella of France section, then learning about Margaret of Anjou and finally Mary Tudor.  The book was really fascinating, but I was more interested in the personalities that I knew from literature (Isabella and Matilda) or remembered spending ample time on in history class (Eleanor and Mary) than I was in Margaret.  (I need to read more about the War of the Roses.)  She-Wolves was slow going – it was very, very interesting but very, very dense and I had to pay close attention to what I was reading.  And then there was one.
• Read through Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.  Since my knowledge of the Scopes trial is pretty much limited to Inherit the Wind (which apparently wasn’t an accurate portrayal of what really happened at the trial, but was more a symbolic stand against the McCarthyism of thirty years later) I was eager to learn more about this important moment in American legal history.  And… well… the middle parts of the book, about the trial, were really interesting.  The beginning part (setting up the debate) and the end (media portrayals and continuing attempts to introduce creationist legislation, with litigation immediately following) weren’t as exciting and even got down into “slog” territory.  But I pushed through!  And then there were none.

So, that’s it.  I’ve either read or postponed all of the books in the above stack, and the preceding stack too, and now I feel as though I’ve earned a bit of a break and some light/comfort reading.  On deck I have Changes at Fairacre, which I own, and then Farewell to Fairacre and A Peaceful Retirement, which I borrowed.  And there’s a stack of Mother-Daughter Book Club books waiting for me at the library too (don’t throw things at me – I can renew those and they’re fast reading anyway; they won’t cause any more of these updates, I SWEAR) and I’m still planning to re-read the Anne of Green Gables books and I’m plotting a Laura Ingalls Wilder re-read, too.  I’m going to be all about comfort books for a little while – after the stress of the past few weeks and this dense non-fiction, I think I deserve to kick back now!

Alright kids, I know I said this would be my last of these updates, and that I was going to finish She-Wolves this week.  The best-laid plans… It’s been another bear of a week, friends.  I’m still completely swamped and utterly overwhelmed, and I’ve barely even been able to read this week, unless you count legal documents.  I even worked yesterday – a bummer, since the Fourth of July is normally one of my very favorite holidays, but there were things I absolutely needed to get done, and so I powered through.  I’ve tried to at least get through a few pages of “fun reading” each day, but She-Wolves is dense non-fiction and, well, I just haven’t been able to blaze through it like I normally would.  (It’s really good, though.)  Here’s what I’ve done:

• Returned Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity to the library.  I’m just not up for it right now.  I need comfort reading. I’ll try to check it out again at some point in the future, but now’s not the time.  And then there were two.
• Made it about halfway through She-Wolves.  I’ve been completely fascinated by the tales of these extraordinary women: first the Empress Matilda, then Eleanor of Acquitaine, and now Isabella of France.  Reading their stories has informed some of my fiction reading, too: Matilda features (as “Maud”) in the background of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth; Eleanor of Acquitaine features in Sharon Kay Penman’s novels, such as When Christ and His Saints Slept, which I’ve been itching to read; and Isabella of France is a prominent character in The Iron King, which I just read this spring.  So I’m taking my time over this and enjoying it, but I’m not done.

Next week, finally, I think I’m going to get a reprieve.  Since my plans for taking off Friday and having a nice, relaxing four-day weekend went out the window, I might even try to take a “mental health day” or two to relax, hang with Peanut, and catch up on my reading.  This is something I’ve been trying to do since mid-May, so I desperately need to unwind.  I expect that next week will see me finishing up this library stack, so I promise this time: one more update and then I’ll refrain from embarrassing myself any further with library shenanigans… at least for awhile.

Cornwall, UK, October 2011

It’s summer – hurrah!  I know that technically, summer started a few weeks ago.  But I always measured summer as beginning around the Fourth of July.  When I was a kid, I lived in upstate New York, and early July was when things really started to heat up.  That was when it was warm enough to swim in the lake and sit out for hours after dark.  In northern Virginia, it’s been hot for awhile (but not as hot as I hear it is out west – stay safe, everyone).  So to celebrate the beginning (for some) and continuation (for others) of summer, I thought it would be fun to pull together a list of good beach reads.  But I don’t just mean “beach reads” as “fluffy books to read on the beach.”  I picked out books for you that not only would be great to read on the beach, but that feature beaches or the ocean as an important part of the plot.  Enjoy…

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter – There’s no beach in Porto Vergogna, but Pasquale Tursi is determined to change that fact.  Pasquo wants to make Porto Vergogna a genuine travel destination for Americans, like its neighboring Cinque Terre villages.  And it’s in building a beach that Pasquo is engaged when a boat pulls into Porto Vergogna’s rocky harbor bearing an American actress whose arrival will change Pasquo’s life forever.  You’ll feel the hot Italian sun baking down on you as you read about Pasquale and Dee and all the broken, but beautiful, people they encounter.  (Fully reviewed here.)

Seating Arrangements, by Maggie Shipstead – The beach here is a classic New England beach.  Winn Van Meter and family have returned to their summer cottage to prepare for the marriage of Winn’s daughter, Daphne.  Winn is preoccupied by his ongoing inability to get into an exclusive golf club, and he finds his eye wandering toward Agatha, one of the bridesmaids.  Meanwhile, Winn’s other daughter recovers from heartbreak near her beloved ocean.

The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller – This is a moving re-imagining of The Iliad, focusing on Patroclus and his relationship with Achilles.  Much of the action takes place on the great Trojan Beach as the reader witnesses the Greek forces massing on the sands and regrouping after each bloody day for ten years.  (Fully reviewed here.)

Skios, by Michael Frayn – Nikki Hook is the cool, efficient brains behind the operation of a cultural organization resident on a picturesque Greek island.  While coolly, efficiently managing the organization’s annual conference, Nikki is pleasantly surprised to discover that the keynote speaker is not the paunchy windbag she was expecting, but instead a rakish charmer.  Meanwhile, elsewhere on the island, Nikki’s friend Georgie squats in a villa preparing for an affair with a rakish charmer.  Imagine her confusion when, instead, a paunchy windbag shows up.  A simple case of mistaken identity leads to wacky hijinks under the hot Greek sun.

We, the Drowned, by Carston Jensen – The newest addition to the pantheon of seafaring literature, We, the Drowned follows the residents of the seaside town of Marstal from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II.  There’s a touch of magical realism, a bit of war, and pages upon pages of adventure on the high seas.  (Fully reviewed here.)

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Ben H. Winters – Reader beware: much like Jaws, after you read this, you might find it hard to go back into the water.  Ben Winters takes Jane Austen’s classic Sense and Sensibility and recasts the Dashwoods and their acquaintances as island-dwellers terrorized by monsters from the deep.  It’s good fun, if a bit gory.  And very, very irreverent.

The Outermost House: A Year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, by Henry Beston – Beston’s memoir is more like poetry than prose, containing such gems as the phrase “I walked in a shower of stars” to describe an evening stroll on the beach.  I read this one years ago, and I lingered for a long time over the gorgeous writing.  It would be best read alone on a craggy New England beach.

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan – I love, love, love Ian McEwan’s work, and this tale of an awkward couple trying to honeymoon was a quick, but sad read.  You’ll feel the chill of the British seaside… and repression.  Brrrrrr.

N or M?, by Agatha Christie – Christie grew up in Devon, and several of her mysteries take place by the seashore.  This one is, maybe, my favorite.  The intrepid married detectives, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, have been sent to the English seaside to try to unmask a Nazi spy.  Well, Tommy is sent there, and Tuppence follows.  They take up residence in a boarding house and settle in to observe the comings and goings of their extremely suspicious housemates in the beach town.  I read this in high school, and several times since, and I might need to pick it up again this summer.

Rule Britannia, by Daphne du Maurier – Twenty-year-old Emma wakes up one morning in her sleepy Cornish town to find no telephone service, a warship in the harbor, and American troops walking the streets.  Soon, the government announces that the US and UK have merged back into one country, which will be called USUK.  But Emma, her eccentric grandmother, and the other residents of the village have their doubts about this “friendly” military occupation.  Soon the residents of the town, led by Emma’s family, are in revolt, and the beaches of Cornwall present a perfect location for sabotage.

If you’re going to the beach this summer, what book will be in your tote bag?

Here we go again.  I think this’ll probably be my second-to-last of these updates, because I’m getting a grip now (slowly).  Somehow I managed to work my way through three books this week.  Don’t ask me how I did it, because this has been one of the most stressful weeks I’ve ever had.  Seriously, pretty much the only thing that got me through Wednesday was an Instagram photo of Britney Spears with her crew cut, and the caption, “If Britney can get through 2007, I can get through today.”  Have you ever had one of those weeks where every single thing seems to go wrong?  The best I could do all week, when anyone asked me how things were going, was to mutter, “I’m surviving.”

The one and only thing that’s gone right for me this week was that I was able to renew Summer for the Gods.  So that one’s now due back… I don’t know.  Later.  What I care about at the moment is the fact that I don’t need to worry about it.  Reading-wise, here’s my (somewhat miraculous) progress for the week:

• Finished The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England, which I really, really enjoyed.  I’m looking forward to getting my copy of the author’s new book, The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, from the library just as soon as my hold comes in.  Yep, I went there.  And then there were five.
• I wanted something light and easy, so I went for The Mother-Daughter Book Club and finished it in a day.  Loved the sweet premise of moms and their middle-school daughters forming a book club and reading Little Women over the course of a year.  I had some thoughts about the moms’ un-Marmeelike behavior, and you can read my rant here.  All things considered, though, I really enjoyed this and will definitely be continuing on with the series.  And then there were four.
• Next up, I felt like I needed some Paris in my life, so I grabbed The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, which was another fast read.  This was spotty for me: there were some parts I found extremely enjoyable and informative, and other parts that bored me or put me off.  But the book worked its magic and I’m now dying for a trip back to Paris.  And then there were three.
• Started She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth and I’m nine pages in.  Yep, only nine: I picked it up on a plane flight but was only able to make it that far before a headache I was battling escalated to the point at which I just had to close my eyes.  Advil helped when I got on the ground, but I ended up working late and didn’t get a chance to read any more last night.  Shame, because the little bit I did read was good stuff: fascinating history written in a great narrative style.  I can’t wait to read more.

So, yeah, between fighting off stress headaches and feeling like everything is otherwise falling apart on me, I’m sort of amazed that I read as much as I did.  Or maybe I’m not – reading has always represented an escape for me, and escape is just what I’ve needed this past week.  Next week… well, it’s shaping up to be another nasty one, and I don’t know that I’ll have much time to sink into a good book.  I think I’ll finish She-Wolves, but I may end up returning Far From the Tree and getting back on the waiting list for that one.  I’m okay with that option, since I have a lot of other books that I am itching to read.  Onward.