January: it was a good month for reading

It was a good month for reading.

I'm working on the Boise Public Library's reading challenge -- a book from fifty categories over the course of the year -- and although you give up some freedom of choice, it's a good way to just set a goal and plow through pages. I'm trying to frontload the reading to allow for slacking off later in the year, so I wrapped up seven books this month.

For a book written ten years before I was born (one of the Boise Library challenge's categories), I read through Ian Fleming's "From Russia With Love". I had never read a Bond novel, and it was just as incandescently sexist as I had expected. This was somewhat balanced out with my reread of Hesse's "Siddhartha", which I admittedly didn't really enjoy until the final third, at which point it became downright transcendent and life-affirming.

For a book from or about Asia, I happened to pick up from the library "The Accusation", a collection of seven stories by an anonymous author which was smuggled out of North Korea several years ago. It read as a companion piece to "1984" with the disconcerting distinction of being based squarely in reality. While the plots of the stories themselves were fictional, the settings were not. 

Lois Lowry's "The Giver" provided a similarly dystopian setting, and checked off the box of "children's book you missed the first time around". Miles read it for school about three years ago, and although I try to keep up with what he's doing in class, for some reason I didn't read this in parallel with his work at the time. At just over 120 pages I sailed through it, loving every disturbing moment, wishing it had been around when I was in high school.

"The World in Books: 52 Works of Great Short Nonfiction" satisfied my "books about books" requirement, and synopsized some of the best non-fiction from the Greek era up to the present day. As much as I loved this, I enjoyed even more another collection by Kenneth C. Davis, "Great Short Books", his review of his favorite novellas. Since the library challenge includes reading a novella, I'm paying close attention to this one. Apparently he also also written a little something called "Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy", which seems, um, timely.

Wrapping up the month's reading, I inhaled "Wires and Nerve" for the "teen graphic novel" and absorbed my third Emily St. John Mandel novel, "The Glass Hotel".

Haymarket Books won't stop sending me books, mostly likely because I joined their book club, so leftist titles such as "Unbuild Walls", an academic study of the prison-industrial complex in the United States, and "Blood in the Face", an overview of the history of white supremacy in this country, so it might become challenging to keep up with all of this material.