Photo: A peek inside the brewery at the Big House Brew Pub in Walla Walla, WA.
August was a different sort of month for reading.
Wednesday, the 1st, revolved around 4-H interviews for the county fair and my Dad’s arrival on his return trip from South Dakota. Thursday was spent doing fun things with Grandpa. Then early Friday morning, we all left at 6 AM – Dad with the kids and the dog back to Kentucky and Steve and I on a road trip to Seattle to visit a childhood friend of mine who has stage-4 breast cancer.
We took the south route on the way out, spending the night at an airbnb in Ogden, Utah and arriving at another airbnb in Pulyallup, WA after dark Saturday. My friend is not a morning person and we were still on Central Time so we took an early morning ferry from Bremerton over to Seattle where we had coffee at Starbucks and browsed at Pikes Place Market. We had a lovely visit with Sara, returning to our airbnb once again well after dark. The next morning I awoke early, unable to sleep as my mind was racing and I was still [possibly] on Central Time. There are one or two Starbucks locations in Lincoln that open at 5 AM, but when I got on my app, I found one nearby that opened at 4 AM so I got up, dressed, and headed there to muse over a chai tea latte until Steve woke and was ready to go.
We hit the road for a relatively short drive down to Yelm where a college friend of mine (and our maid of honor) lives and spent a couple hours with her. From there, we headed down to Walla Walla where Steve would finally get to see my alma mater, Walla Walla University (across town from Whitman College whose “bookstore” is shown in the photo atop this post). On the way, we took the scenic route and enjoyed some great views of Mt. Ranier. The drive to Seattle was 24 hours with another 5 down to Walla Walla. It was on that stretch that we finished our first audiobook, All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren, which clocks in at 21 hours. We listened a lot on the open road, but turned it off when it was time to navigate with Google Maps directing.
I’ve wanted to read All the Kings Men for several years, but my interest in it was again piqued with the election of Donald Trump as it is about politics and corruption in the south during the 1930’s. I didn’t find it as engrossing as I had hoped, but considering the reason for the trip, perhaps I was asking more of it than ought to be asked. I enjoyed it enough that I will likely return to it at some point and read it more closely. It did surprise me that women played such a key role in the story. If you follow the news, politics is generally a playing field for men, but in this case, the women behind the scenes were by no means minor characters.
The next audiobook was Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr recommended for Ambleside Year 10. A Harvard student takes a sabbatical from his studies and spends two years as a sailor on a ship trading for hides along the Pacific coast. Listening to his travels to the sites of various modern cities while they were yet small villages before the gold rush made it the perfect book for a road trip. His description of life at sea was significant enough to merit a paragraph in Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, which I am also pre-reading for the upper years of Ambleside Online.
Somewhere between Montana and North Dakota we began another audiobook. I turned to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (also for Ambleside Online Year 10). I had started reading it on my Kindle before we left, but I started over with the audio version even though Steve said he had read it before. We got several hours into it, but it’s a long book and on our last day of travel, I started listening to my favorite podcasts that I’d missed during our week of travel. I’ll come back to it later.
We got home Thursday night, but early Friday morning I was on the road again, this time by myself as I headed out to Kentucky to retrieve the kids (and the dog). I left early because I wanted to dally in ways that one cannot with children and a dog along for the ride. I stopped in St. Louis to get the oil changed in the car. They told me that it would take two hours but I tartly informed them that it only takes 45 minutes at my dealership, so somehow they figured out how to get it done within an hour including a car wash. I then stopped at The Novel Neighbor nearby just to browse. Anne from Modern Mrs. Darcy has done a couple of events there, and while I prefer reading books on my Kindle, the one thing I will say about independent bookstores is that I am far more likely to find good books there than I am at Barnes & Noble which never seems to carry any of the books I want to read. I ended up purchasing a copy of Sing, Unburied, Sing which I had tried to listen to earlier this year but couldn’t quite follow so I set it aside thinking I would get my hands on a hard copy at some point. I ate lunch at the St. Louis Bread Company whose signs look very much like Panera Bread but of course the name is different; turns out once you go inside, the menu is exactly the same, including “Panera Kids” on that section of the menu. Why the name differs, I do not know.
While driving I listened to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the Bookening podcast selection for October. The audiobook itself is about 13 hours, which was longer than my 11-hour drive, but I managed to get three quarters of the way through it. After I got home, I borrowed a hard copy from the library and began reading it since I hadn’t seemed to catch the plot line and feared I once again hadn’t been paying attention. I’ve since read the book up to the point where I stopped with the audio and if I missed anything it wasn’t much. The story follows a kid who leaves Tennessee and gets swept up with a band of soldiers fighting along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s. The details are brutal, and perhaps the lack of obvious plot is part of the story itself.
Monday, on the way home with the kids and the dog and after a couple of days not driving, we listened to Fablehaven by Brandon Mull which was the Read-Aloud Revival selection for August. The storyline was decent, but the narrator was awful. It was all the same speed with that mundane sing-songy, informative [condescending] tone of voice you overhear on modern children’s television. It about made my skin crawl, but the story was fine and the kids were enjoying it so I let it roll. The plot escapes me now, but I still remember the narrator.
We hit the ground running with school after we returned, and that week I finished William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with Ben. I had listened to it with the Close Reads podcast last December and hated it. I would have started something else last winter but Ben wanted to continue it, and obviously it took us quite a while. But we finished it. I still would put it in my bottom tier of Shakespeare’s plays (likely with the rest of his comedies), but Ben said it is one of his favorites. Clearly we have differing tastes. The next week, Ben Joey and I began doing King Lear together. Close Reads has spawned a new podcast, The Play’s the Thing, in which they plan to do all of Shakespeares plays one act at a time. I’m reading through King Lear myself along with the podcast, then going back and reading it with the boys with help from Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare.
The Waverly Library kid’s book club discussed Gary Paulsen’s Lawn Boy the next week. I read it in one day, much to Joey’s chagrin. He read it one chapter per day and got through the whole thing. He much prefers listening to audiobooks rather than having to go to the trouble of reading them. Once again Paulsen’s borderline ridiculous scenarios filled with comic exaggerations make for a fun read.
The next book I read was a welcome break from the seriousness of my month. Marisa de los Santos’s I’ll Be Your Blue Sky was the August selection for the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club. It had a bit of historical fiction but only from the 1950’s, a time which many people still living today experienced firsthand. It was an Anne-and-Gilbert type love story, which is my favorite. So often light reads turn out to be disappointing, but this one hit the spot.
My light reading was short-lived as I turned next to When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Another book that’s long been in my queue, it popped up from my hold list at the library so I finally read it. It is a cancer memoir written by a physician who obviously knows more about the disease than the average person writing a cancer memoir. He begins by telling the story of how he was diagnosed, then he goes back and tells about his education and career to that point. He then continues with his treatment and returning back to work, followed by a relapse at which point he quit working and stayed home to write. His wife, also a physician, wrote the afterword in which she tells of his death, once again with more medical detail than the average memoir. If cancer memoirs interest you, this one is not to miss.
Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky was the Now Read This selection for August. It is a collection of short stories which I read over the course of the month. Quite frankly, none of them made any more sense than the title, but I kept reading it because I either thought I was too consumed with other things to be paying enough attention to understand what I was reading or the stories were short and I needed something to read without going to the trouble of getting into a novel and keeping track of a storyline and all the characters. There was magical realism in it, of which I am not a big fan. Our local library didn’t own a hard copy (or ebook) of it, dare I say for obvious reasons.
At some point I gave up reading Knowing God by J.I. Packer which is suggested in Ambleside Online Year 10. It’s an evangelical classic from the 1970’s. It has many rave reviews on Goodreads, but it is a series of articles based on a series of sermons. I am not a fan of evangelical sermons, nor am I a fan of articles that are written to be the same length with the same format. Unfortunately, the content wasn’t appealing enough for me to push beyond the style and finish the book.
Our family read-aloud at the beginning of our school days was Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. I’ve seen her books and know their covers well, but I had never read one of them. Lowry is definitely worthy of the Newberry Awards she has won. This book tells of children in Denmark during World War II as one of a pair of best friends has to escape to Sweden because she is Jewish. This book is great for introducing World War II realities to kids without mention of the concentration camps or anything really gruesome like that.
Every summer I listen to one of the Harry Potter books – this year Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I listened during my morning walks but finished it while running errands by myself after choir resumed the last Thursday in August. The Bookening podcast did a series on Harry Potter this month, and I hate to say it, but they made me so mad I deleted their podcast from my phone. They did two episodes in which they argued each side of whether or not Christians should read Harry Potter. That was fine, but in the next podcast they spent their time rating the books from best to worst—I’m sorry but there are too many wonderful things to discuss about Harry Potter to spend time trashing the books in a silly discussion like that. I may listen to their episodes on Blood Meridian in September as I am curious as to why they selected that book and what they think of it. Or I may not. I’ve already read all of their selections for the remainder of the year, save one by Charles Dickens whom they supposedly love/hate so I’m not dying to hear what they think. I still love their theme music, but I’m done with their show for now.
And that brings us to the end of the books I finished in August—only ten which is a rather short list for me. That said, usually by the end of the month I wrap up enough books to whittle my current reads down to about ten to twelve; this month I ended with twenty-two. So perhaps I read more than it seems.