May/June Book List

Whoops! Been busy enough that I definitely didn't think to post this. My bad... I still have some books in process, *cough* Plutarch's Live *cough*, but as per usual they'll just go in the books read once they're fully read, y'know?  Anyway, I realized and decided to finish it up and post it now since tonight I'm just staying at work til the wee hours or sunrise when I'll head home. (It's all depending on if I lose track of time and it gets too late/early AND how late it is when I finish watering all my indoor plants, which I haven't really started yet because also working on the end of month deposit tonight)

I actually think that once again I didn't read as much as usual for me. I didn't read much while at my sister's or while busy at concerts or driving to shows -- I tend to only read in cars when I'm not the one driving. With the ADHD, I have absolutely no circadian rhythm or sleep cycle unless it's externally imposed on me (like when kids and thus family are involved) so if you give me sugars and enough caffeine it helps me focus but not so much caffeine it makes me sleepy, then I am wide awake chipper happy to late night or early morning drive while my body/mind are full of post concert/show dance endorphins and thinking about the experience. So I generally drive whenever headed somewhere out of town -- and really the only factor for how far/late I'm willing to drive is generally that it's a bad idea for ANY woman (even if she is martial arts trained and has a knife on her) to have to stop for fueling up the car or bathroom breaks by herself. So it means that any plans that involve driving, generally assume I'm driving. I don't mind other people driving, but I like highway driving and I don't get tired late at night or early morning or too many hours awake as easily as most people do. But it does mean that unless I'm flying or someone else is driving, when I'm traveling a lot for shows/events, it's taken out of reading time opportunities.

 

Books Read: 

~Bill Watterson & John Kascht, The Mysteries [This is a claymation/photography art book parable for adults written by the long quiet author of Calvin & Hobbes ; don't necessarily need to own it but you should read it. especially if you're into existentialism and understanding the human place in the universe and concerns about rising authoritarianism and non scientific method twisting of science into technocrat social constraints.]

~Toni Morrison, Beloved (275 pgs) 

~Travis Novitsky & Annette S. Lee, Spirits Dancing: The Nights Sky, Indigenous Knowledge, & Living Connections to the Cosmos (154 pgs) [this is a stunningly gorgeous well thought out designed book and I like that it talks about the scientific understanding of the aurora borealis AND the various tribal teachings/stories about them.]

~Roger L. Welsch (ed.), Mister, You Got Yourself a Horse: Tales of Old-Time Horse Trading (207 pgs)

~Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (370 pgs)

~Patricia A. McKillip, The Sorceress and the Cygnet (248 pgs) [I love her fantasy novels dearly, even though they often are tales of the mythic as much hidden as seen and never fully unfold to explain themselves. They are to be understood in the heart and the soul and the knowing of mythos beyond time itself, never by the head or linear logic unfolding. But I do love her fantasy novels and the glimpses they give into the unending Divine.]

~Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (242 pgs)

~edited by Kathleen Hoagland, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry (768 pgs) [I read the first section back in August, the second section at some point over the winter, and picked this back up in March after finishing the book of Black poetry I started during Black History Month and after finishing the third section decided to go ahead finish the last and longest section of poems across April/May]

~Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (210 pgs)

~Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves (520 pgs) [I wanted to love this book, it's beloved by so many witchy wild women and there are quotes from it I love. But overall? It tries too hard and has nothing behind most of its assertions. I was disappointed by it more than anything else. But also it grew on me sometimes. It tries too hard and imposés it's own confines of what she thinks the world is/should be as a woman. But sometimes she gets things exactly right and the insight she give is profound. Or perhaps, sometimes the insights she has are not for me. Or maybe just not yet for me. Or most accurately, not currently for me.]

~Voltaire, L'ingénu (159 pgs)

~Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot (69 pgs) [This was a remarkably funny little farce of a magical realism play and I think it would be a lot of fun to see it staged or even a modernized film version of it. I don't remember when I picked this play up secondhand, but I'd never read it before and I've never seen it staged and I would really love to see it staged...]

~Lang Leav, Self-Love For Small-town Girls (200 pgs) [I was disappointed in this. There have been so many of her poems and books of poems that I have loved that rang of truth echoes in me, but this newest one was just banal and I didn't connect to any of them. Not sure if this is because of changes in me or changes in her as a writer, but it left me underwhelmed and disappointed.]

~Good Wives and Warriors, Mythopedia: An Encyclopedia of Mythical Beasts and Their Magical Tales (128 pgs)

~Blake Crouch, Dark Matter (395 pgs) [this book was incredible. Not sure what took me so long to finally get around to reading it, but thoroughly loved it couldn't put it down. Highly recommend, especially if you're into the idea where quantum mechanics and philosophy of free will intersect in theories of multi verses based on choices. It's a page turner delightful quick read that's written in a fast paced not super dense style -- once I got over the weird synchronicities of it like one of the central characters having my name and a pivotal event to her in one of the timelines happening on my birthday, I finished it very quickly. Or at least, it's quick if you can hold your own in discussions contemplating quantum superposition, dark matter, string theory, philosophical thoughts on free will, true love shining between two matched souls across all the timelines, and you can keep track of multiverse storylines and character arcs. Anyway, even if you can't quite keep up with all that but love the ideas of them, read this novel -- it will make your brain and heart happy! This is the first novel of his I've read, I picked it up at a bookstore in the Seattle area a couple years ago, but damn now I have to find more of his works!!]

~Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts (286 pgs)

~Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices (341 pgs)

~Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers (502 pgs)

~Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea (208 pgs) [This was short but unexpectedly denser than i expected because it got darker than expected about human social breakdowns under short sighted dogmatic authoritarianism. It's a good thinking and "what if" book about human nature under certain types of circumstances and how easily people are cowed into conformity until it's too late to fight back.]

~Richard Wilhelm (Ed), The Chinese Fairy Book (213 pgs)

~Catherine Raven, Fox and I (311 pgs) [I very much enjoyed this non-fiction memoir/nature book. It was like a breath of fresh air and a retreat into a cabin in the woods even when you were in the middle of busy city areas or even busy places like airports/airplanes that are nowhere near retreating to a cabin in the wilderness. But, spoiler alert warning: I don't cry easily, but this is a book that made me cry. Multiple times. So go into it with that understanding about what you're getting into reading this book. It's beautiful, but it will make you care so deeply you will cry at certain parts of it.]

~Rumi, Rumi's Little Book of Love (229 pgs)

Books Acquired: 

I was VERY good these last couple months, didn't buy any books at all for all of May and half of June -- not until my trip out to Seattle and then only one airport book and about half dozen from the spiritual bookstore Cath Cath and I visited in Edmonds (it was called East West Bookstore, or something like that.) You will likely be able to tell which ones those are as they are pretty well all new age or Native American or Asian spirituality related texts, lol. I also bought three plays form the Touchstone Theatre gift shop of plays that will be shown in that theatre and will be picking up the ones from Up the Hill that I don't yet own at one or the other gift shop this coming Friday when I'm next at Americna Players Theatre to see this season's production of Much Ado About Nothing. Other than those handfuls of books/playbooks, all the rest were acquired free from little libraries tbh.

~Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday [I'm very excited to read this one! When I was peeking through it, it reads like how I talk when I'm sitting in my highest self and my best most magical version of myself. So I'm going to save it for a time when I lose contact with that normal bright shiny happy me because life in the modern world is HARD and it's only going to get harder with the rising authoritarian everywhere, not just US. Go check out the elections in France and Germany and Italy and all over Europe.... We're entering the 30s with both the US and Europe looking like it hasn't since, well, leading into the 1930s.... So hearing words that remind me of my inner truest self is something I and everyone is going to need in coming years.]

~Harold Courlander, The Fourth World of the Hopis 

~Nathan Alan Davis, Nat Turner in Jerusalem

~Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair 

~John (Fire) Lame Deer & Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions [I already owned a copy of this and thought I might, but it was only $1 on sale cart outside at East West. The $1 copy has photos from his life story, the one I already owned has a good introduction about Lame Deer and his tribe's beliefs about the sacred vision quests and spiritual meaning of the badlands to various plains Indian tribes. I may end up keeping both editions even though the bulk of the texts are identical.... Otherwise I need to determine if the introductory essay or the pictures are more important to me... Maybe I'll find a third copy relatively cheap that has intro AND pictures so I can have both in one volume and get rid of both these two, lol.]

~ Little Golden Book, Figment [My sister picked this up for me along with a very adorable very huggable Figment plush stuffed animal while they were at Disney World during the Creative Arts Festival which Figment is the mascot for that festival. I always loved Figment and the Imagination ride as a kid so she was very excited over all the Figment related everything and bringing me back souvenirs that weren't all branded for the event with my beloved purple and orange dragon from childhood visits to Epcot. She also brought me two of the clear plastic (NOT dishwasher safe!) glasses with Figment painted on them that they were selling specialty smoothies in during the festival. She also picked up copies of the Figment book for both Mo who wanted a copy for herself and Elliot who just loves books almost as much as me even though she's only 2 and can't yet read. It reminds everyone of how I was before I learned to read.]

 ~Deirdre Mullane (ed.), Crossing the Danger Water: Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing

~F. Max Muller (trans.), The Dhammapada [Yes I have other copies of the Dhammapada, but I liked this translation a lot and it was only $5. And also, depending on source materials and what is/isn't included, both the Dhammapada and the Upanishads can be very different texts with very different sutras.]

~Miyamato Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

~Marisela Trevino Orta, Wolf at the Door [This is the script for the first APT play we saw this season; I take in written word differently from spoken/sung word so I like to have both to compare/contrast. Thus I usually like to read/re-read scripts right before or after I see a play, even a script I know well like a lot of Shakespeare plays, so I will be reading this first thing jumping the queue as soon as I finish the book I'm currently in the middle of at home.]

 ~Nick Payne, Constellations

~Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

~Rebecca Thorne, Can't Spell Treason Without Tea [This is the book that I bought in the Madison airport when I stopped in a souvenir/convenience store to buy cow cheese for the niblings (literally mild cheddar shaped like a cow and wrapped in black wax with a sticker of a cow on it) and to get a fresh pack of gum as mine was super stale and chewing gum is the only thing that helps me with popping/relieving the ear pressure during takeoffs/landings. Anyway, this book looks super cozy fantasy mystery with pretty turquoise edges and it's about like the queen's knight protector and top sorceress just wanting to retire to a cottage run a library b&b serve people tea and read books but the outside world keeps interfering with the plan. It looks like a good rainy/snowy/gray day sit by the fireplace with a glass of red wine or a pour of whiskey/scotch and just hygge it up while ignoring the rest of the world. And while it's the first in a series, it doesn't seem like a series you need to read all at once or re-read old books before reading the new books same as you don't need to re-read murder mystery books generally to just start in on the next in a series.]

~Chase Twichell, Horses Where Answers Should Have Been [this is a poet I've never heard of and found for $4 in the sale cart outside of East West -- and when I did the random page opening "do I like your writing style" poet's test, I fell in love with literally every poem I opened to -- so I'm excited to read this whenever I choose it for my poetry book.]

~James R. Walker,  Lakota Ritual and Belief