by Cass R. Sunstein

Not what I thought it would be…. It seemed mostly about nudges. He’s covered nudges elsewhere.

by Willa Cather

A little tragedy about a gay-hearted young woman in the early 20th century Great Plains. It really brought a feel for the times and the location. I liked it as a story; it kept me reading; though sometimes it risked getting a little too talky-feely. And I wish things could have gone better for Lucy.

Part of it reminded me of THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin, particularly this: “Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself – except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.”

Why she had to lie to her old beau, implying something had happened that hadn’t – and really why she couldn’t marry him in the first place: “She had tried to tell him the truth about a feeling; but a feeling meant nothing to him, he had to be clubbed by a situation.” I love that, “clubbed by a situation.”

by Madeleine L’Engle

Actually had never read this. It was a little wacky. But it all kind of made sense and had a good ending.

by Anne Bronte

I wish the middle had been much, much shorter. Very repetitive, and the protagonists were each over-the-top good or over-the-top bad. I was drawn in by the beginning section; it felt like it was going to be a slightly humorous family light comic novel. Bait & switch! It’s PAMELA/CLARISSA all over again. But I’d try another Bronte.

by Katherine May

Winter as a metaphor for hard times in your life.

“We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer & that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves.” That’s why I recommend the anti-gratitude journal.

“Have we really got so far into the realm of electric light and central heating that the rhythm of the year is irrelevant to us…” That was me when I lived in the city. All I cared about was how heavy a jacket to wear. Or maybe it was because I was young. I have such a yearly rhythm now, though.

“Misery is not an option [sarcasm]. We must carry on looking jolly for the sake of the crowd.” Ha. I always hated the mandate to be happy.

Regarding someone with bouts of mania and depression, a GP changed her life by saying, “This isn’t about you getting better. This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.” Isn’t that what it’s about for all of us?

by Michael Cunningham

This was a good story and a realistic depiction of middle age – a realistic middle-aged marriage, realistic middle-aged sex, realistic middle-aged insomnia. I loved that he woke up at 3 am every night and I love that he took pills for it. AND vodka.

by Delia Owens

Spoiler at the bottom.

Pros:
I like to read about strong independent women. I liked that she had a calling that involved both art and science.

Cons:
I had a bad reaction to an early scene. The young child Kya is hungry, and she gets a chance to go to school and have hot chicken pie for lunch. At lunchtime some kids make fun of her. So she doesn’t eat her pie. She stuffs it into her milk carton and brings it home – and feeds it to gulls. This reminds me of a scene in A LITTLE PRINCESS where the hungry girl Sara Crewe is given a penny by a pitying little boy – and she doesn’t use it to buy a loaf of bread, she “bore a hole in it” to wear around her neck. These authors know nothing about hunger.

And second, I saw the ending immediately. SPOILER IS HERE. This is chick lit. Of course she killed the guy and of course it was because he sexually assaulted her. It’s always like that in chick lit. If it’s not secret parentage and secret pregnancies, it’s secret sexual assault.

by Natalie Babbitt

Deep children’s book. To be immortal, to not change, is to not live, to be like a rock by the side of the road.

I bet it was a good movie.

by Teddy Wayne

Kind of rough – watch a man deteriorate one failure at a time, all the while listening to him blow kneejerk liberal sanctimony at every turn. Paul’s been demoted from senior lecturer to adjunct. His daughter is turning 12 and checking out of their relationship. He has to move in with his 80-something mother – and she’s started watching the fictional stand-in for Fox News. And then things get worse!

The short chapters kept me turning (swiping) pages.

I didn’t much like one of the subplots where he starts boinking a high-level employee at the faux Fox News, pretending to be a conservative misplaced in academia, in order to gain access… to what, for what? But it turns out to be key.

64 books read in 2023. Up from 58 in 2022 and 61 in 2021 and 59 in 2020. I am counting a few “Charlie Brown Cyclopedias” but why shouldn’t they count! 

Best book and best fiction was The Greengage Summer.

Best non-fiction was What’s Our Problem.

#64 for the year:

by Torie Bosch (editor)

It’s nice to read about coding. Usually in the world of books it’s like we don’t exist.