Recent Reads

My last post here was on the 31st of March. By all reasonable expectations, I should have done a fair amount of reading since then. In reality, I’ve read some, and enjoyed it deeply. But because I haven’t written about my reading here, I’m not sure I’ll even remember all of the books I’ve read.

One was The Silent Boy, by Lois Lowry. Set in the early 1900’s, with old, nostalgic photos at the start of each chapter, its cover captured my attention at the library. It’s a tale for younger readers (6th grade and up, I’d say) about a boy who’s perhaps autistic, because although handicapped in his connections to people he has areas of genius. It’s a somewhat tragic tale, interesting for its depiction of how a community in the early 20th century handled someone “different.” Its genesis is intriguing as well: Lowry found a pile of old photos, and essentially constructed a narrative to go with them.

Another was a reread: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I reviewed it when I first read it in 2009, and I enjoyed it every bit as much with my second reading. It’s a stunning book, so fully imagined and absorbing that I regularly check to see if this author has yet produced another book. Not so far. But I still have hope. I think I read somewhere that this novel took ten years to write, so perhaps we’re halfway to another one.

I also tried again with Elizabeth Goudge’s Child from the Sea. I’ve picked up this enormous book at least twice — maybe three times — and have worked through about 2/3 of it now. But for some reason, even though I am very fond of Elizabeth Goudge, I can’t read it for long before putting it back on the shelf. The remaining third of this extensive foray into a peripheral, even apocryphal, storyline in English history waits for another season.

On an altogether different note was my first P.D. James story: Death Comes to Pemberley, which permitted me to follow the characters of Pride and Prejudice into their post-novel life. I’m no expert in murder mysteries, but I felt somewhat gypped by this one. The central incident involves the suspicious death of Captain Denny in the woods of the Darcy estate on the night before their annual ball. The ultimate explanation is so incredibly complicated that I wondered if any reader had ever successfully solved the case before the details are finally revealed at the end. That being said, I did like revisiting some of my favorite characters, even though their story is told by someone other than Jane Austen. I felt the characterizations stayed true to the originals, so I was happy enough when I closed the book.

There were a few other books that have adorned the last few months as well, but these are the ones that come to mind. Currently I’m reading Backyard Farming on an Acre (More or Less) and Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education.