⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Books So Far This Year
2023
Digression: I just ordered started a three-season sweater kit on sale from Wool and the Gang made from eucalyptus yarn. I love using unusual yarns. When anyone asks me about this tunic, I’m going to tell them it’s made of lip balm. My Chapstick three-season sweater. So I am on a high. Have a 20% coupon on me!
It’s so silky and light I can’t stand it.
My yarn goal of course is yak. Oh, why yak, other than I myself am strange and unusual? Because it is sustainable and kind, and also, so when someone asks what my sweater, hat, reading gloves, or socks are made from, I can say, with Harriet the Spy gusto: “YAK!” For I am a doofus, verily. But you know this.
Second on my list is buffalo. Same reasons: it is obtained as it falls off in tufts, not bugging the animal at all, also 🎶where the deer and the antelope play🎶. I am dorky, but I make my friends laugh. Score.
What you came here for: every book I have read so far this year that I have rated five stars, both cut off at the halfway point and continued (scripture listed at the bottom, as I continue to read non-canonical works):
Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga by Michael McDowell—originally published as six individual books (audio, narrated by Matt Godfrey)
Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross
As one contemporary chronicler lamented, it was “a sword age, a wind age, a wolf age.”
Seasonal Slow Knitting: Thoughtful Projects for a Handmade Year by Hannah Thiessen
The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (10 books plus her 7 last poems)
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning,in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning,in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning,in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning,in the spoon and the chair that cry “hello there, Anne” each morning,in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning.All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds.So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken.The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard, dies young.
The Best of Simple: Stories by Langston Hughes (short stories)
(true crime) Bitter Remains by Diane Fanning (friend): review
(autobiography/music) Welcome to My Panic by Billie Joe Armstrong (audio, narrated by author)
Great Courses: The New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman (audio, narrated by author)
(true crime) Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls by Kathleen Hale (audio, narrated by Therese Plummer)
(autobiography/journal) A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor
(true crime) My Sweet Angel by John Glatt (audio, narrated by Shaun Grindell)
(true crime) Pretty Little Killers by Daley Berry and Geoffrey C. Fuller (audio, narrated by Pam Ward)
(true crime) Twisted by John Glatt (audio, narrated by Shaun Grindell)
The Witches by Roald Dahl
Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
But if happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.
(autobiography/journal) South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion
In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray: the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence. The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.
Malorie (Bird Box) by Josh Malerman (friend)
I don’t wear the new world very well. And I’m okay with that.
Happiness in This Life: A Passionate Meditation on Earthly Existence by Pope Francis with Gonagh Stransky
Theological work by women sheds light on the unknowable: I invite you to reflect on the role that women can and must have in theology…By virtue of their feminine genius, women theologians can detect, to the benefit of all, previously unexplored aspects of the unfathomable mystery of Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). I invite you to take advantage of the unique contribution women can make to our understanding of the faith.
Hell Bent (Alex Stern series) by Leigh Bardugo (audio, narrated by Lauren Fortgang, Michael David Axtell)
Happy Go Lucky by David Sedaris (audio, narrated by author)
The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime (Evil series) by Dr. Michael H. Stone and Gary Brucato
No Right to Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech by Lucinda Roy
something wild is growing in our midst, something untamed and eager, some brooding energy we are afraid to acknowledge.
The Virgin Suicides (25th Anniversary Edition) by Jeffrey Eugenides
The girls’ signals reached us and no one else, like a radio station picked up by our braces. At night, afterimages flashed on our inner eyelids, or hovered over our beds like a swarm of fireflies. Our inability to respond only made the signals more important.
Mrs. Lisbon thought the darker urges of dating could be satisfied by frolic in the open air—love sublimated by lawn darts.
How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix (friend)
When you don’t like the way a conversation is going you deflect with personal attacks. You’re like some kind of emotionally abusive octopus entangling everyone in your word tentacles.
Fairy Tale by Stephen King (audio, narrated by Seth Numrich, Stephen King)
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
January-June, 2023: 34 books out of 70 five stars
and onwards…
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Test by Jon Ronson (audio, narrated by author)
Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly by Jim DeRogatis (audio, narrated by author)
Bitter Apples ed. Eric Raglin (BookSirens ARC; short stories by Corey Farrenkopf, Emma E. Murray, Cynthia Gómez, Christi Nogle, D. Matthew Urban, Eric Raglin, and Aurelius Raines II): review
Poetry is off the wall. Half the good ones sound like prayers to ancient gods or something otherworldly.
—“There’s a Reason They Collect the Pencils” by Corey Farrenkopf
The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (friend)
“We’re just the high school quarterback, talking about the touchdown pass he threw in ’72,” she said. “High school was everyone’s glory days. For us, high school is all tangled up in memories of our trauma. We have the same normal nostalgic inclinations as other people, but when we walk back in our minds to this supposedly wonderful time we have people trying to kill us. For us, nostalgia and violence are inextricably linked.”
Thank you for this, Grady.
The Six Deaths of a Saint by Alix E. Howard
The Dead Pennies by Robert Ford (friend;
early reader ARC: yesterday was its birthday—now you can buy it!)Burner by
(friend)
A swarm of frozen bees flowed through her veins, making her insides hum with current.
The Last Firefly of Summer by Robert Ford (friend)
I’m the Girl by
I don’t remember letting go and this is what terrifies me the most: to be so acutely in my body one minute and then, suddenly, not there at all, and then, just as suddenly, returned, someone else’s story writing itself in my gaps.
Thank you for this, Courtney.
The Crow and the Cardinal by Robert Ford (friend)
Charmed Life (Chrestomanci series) by Diana Wynne Jones
The Magicians of Caprona (Chrestomanci series) by Diana Wynne Jones
Samson and Denial (Samson Gallows universe) by Robert Ford (friend)
Witch Week (Chrestomanci series) by Diana Wynne Jones
The God Beneath My Garden: Collected Short Stories of Robert Ford (friend)
He wore grief on his face like a birthmark, and I think it scared people away.
—“Bluebottle Summer”
(autobiography, of sorts) On Writing by Stephen King, with
and (audio, narrated by all three)Ring of Fire (Samson Gallows universe) by Robert Ford (friend)
Inner Demons by Robert Ford (friend)
The Lion’s World: A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia by Rowan Willams
[In reference to Susan and Lucy physically romping with Aslan to celebrate his life, and to Aslan’s endearments, such as the beloved “Courage, Dear Heart”:] The ‘ordered state of sin’ clearly isn’t just the tyranny of a White Witch or a King Miraz; it is whatever makes drab and oppressive the flow of joy and energy in the world of animals, humans—and even rivers. And there is also here another element that tends to be overlooked, one that is not easy to discuss sensibly. Aslan speaks, here as elsewhere, to those he meets in terms of strong endearments; for the adult reader, there is bound to be something very like an erotic charge to this intimacy. These are children’s stories, so Lewis is content to leave it close to but not quite breaking the surface. But in That Hideous Strength we have a much more explicit hint in the same direction.
…what Lewis is trying to evoke is a world in which the profoundest physical enjoyment is one of the best and clearest images of what it is to meet God. That meeting is therefore never a substitute for physical fulfillment, nor is physical fulfillment a means to encounter with God. It is simply that erotic satisfaction fully enjoyed is one of the most powerful glimpses we can have of what union with God is like—a point entirely consonant with a great deal in the tradition of Christian contemplation. Remember that Lewis is constantly trying to get us to sense afresh what it is like to be confronted with God. In the Narnia stories, he goes as far as he can towards this erotic realm without breaking the proper boundaries of a narrative for children.
[‘whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind’]
Aslan loves his world and yet he cannot spare it – in the sense that he cannot make the experience of meeting him easy for persons who habitually settle for much less than the truth in their account of themselves and their world. And one of the simplest and most popular distractions we have developed so as not to have to cope with the truth about ourselves is to spend time and energy looking at others and their failings. A recurring theme in Narnia is the warning not to be lured away in this fashion from the actual moment and from our own specific condition. It is part of Aslan’s sometimes unwelcome respect for the reality he has created that he will not allow us either to comfort or to console ourselves by thinking ourselves into alternative histories. Things are as they are; our choices have been what they have been and have made us what we now are; there is nowhere else to begin.
So far: 55 books out of 99, and that doesn’t count all of the 4.25, 4.5, 4.75 ratings (The Story Graph allows these incremental ratings).
Apocryphal Scripture I’ve read this year (unrated)
The First Book of the Maccabees (NRSV translation)
The First, Second, and Third Book of Enoch (translated by R. H. Charles in Buried Books of the Bible)
All of my five star ratings logged at The Story Graph
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“Mrs. Lisbon thought the darker urges of dating could be satisfied by frolic in the open air—love sublimated by lawn darts.”
—The Virgin Suicides