Dixie Tenny's Blog: Born to Read

1. The Most Pleasant Surprise
The Pleasure of My Company
Comedian Steve Martin’s first-person narration by a neurodivergent person of this lovely piece of fiction was a revelation. I knew he could be funny but this went far beyond that.

2. Made Me Laugh Loudest (tie)
Rental Person Who Does Nothing and
My Life and Hard Times
Two completely different approaches to humor, but they both made me laugh out loud, repeatedly.

3. Best Duo
David Copperfield and
The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep
A great classic followed by a clever and creative modern fantasy into which Uriah Heep, among other characters, is woven.

4. Most Engaging
The Daughter of Time
This was a slow starter that turned into the book that riveted me more than any other this year. And it completely turned my interpretation of a historic mystery around 180 degrees.

5. Best History
Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens
An excellent history of the kings and queens of England, incorporating humor that never becomes crude or annoying. Quite a feat!

6. Most Atmospheric
After Dark
The haunting tale of half a dozen interwoven characters over the course of one night in Tokyo.

7. Best Memoir
The Puma Years
A young English woman’s experiences in Bolivia working with rescued wildlife. This book does a better job of illustrating the impact of deforestation and climate change than anything else I have read.

8. Quirky Pleasure
Bilgewater
The unusual daughter of an unusual professor at an unusual (but not magic!) boarding school has experiences that might be run-of-the-mill, except she is the one having them. Sent both me and the friend I gave this book to down a rabbit hole of reading this author’s work.

9. Opened Up a New World
This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You
This unusual book by a sound engineer, music producer, and neurologist explains why people enjoy the music they do, illustrated by musical examples that can be listened to on YouTube. Completely fascinating.

10. Best Biography
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
The ideas of this brilliant polymath influenced everyone he met, from Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Mark Twain to Simón Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, Goethe and Darwin. He truly created the idea of the world as “nature” and should be familiar to everyone today.

11. Best Science Fiction
The Bobiverse
I read the first book in this series, We Are Legion (We Are Bob), last year, but read through all four books in the series this year. What clever, original, thought-provoking, and funny science fiction.

12. Best of 2024 Overall
The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72
Mrs. Delany is another person who deserves to be known far and wide. She invented the art of mixed media collage, and she was sought out and befriended by the likes of Jonathan Swift, George Frideric Handel, and the entire English royal family. Her life is fascinating; this book was a joy to read

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book should be read by every American, especially now. It tells the true story - not the simplified and fudged version we heard in school - of how America was founded, not by the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock but first from the south, and then in many waves from Europe. Each group had its own reasons for coming to America and its own agenda. After the union was formed and immigrants from other countries arrived, like gravitated to like and in the end the regional differences - the "nations" - become stronger, not diluted. We are seeing the impact of the different "nations" in politics to this day. The reader learns where settlement started and how it progressed, and why there are so many strong divisions and differences of opinions about how our country should be run. For example, yes, everyone came to America to be "free", but for some that meant freedom to have strong communities with everyone working together; for some it meant individual freedom FROM such communities; for some it meant freedom from overlords; for some it meant freedom to BE overlords. It's very illuminating to realize that even the issues on which it appears all Americans agree, such as the wish for "freedom," are themselves sources of dispute and dissent.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who wants to better understand America.



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A friend of mine sent me a set of books he loved as a child, and I just finished reading them, or, I should say, devouring them. They are the "Tripods" series, by John Christopher. If the idea of aliens referred to as Tripods seems funny to you (as it did to me), you won't find anything about them in any way humorous once you start reading the books.

As we begin, in The White Mountains, Tripods have been in control of the Earth for over a hundred years, and have made many changes. Humans are "Capped" at age 14 and from that point on, they are serenely happy doing whatever the Tripods want them to do, even if that means being taken into one of the three Tripod cities as a servant, never to return. Serene and happy, that is, unless Capping turned a person into a Vagrant, the few who are adversely affected by the procedure and wander their areas of the Earth forever afterward, mostly talking gibberish and being compassionately cared for by the Capped.

Our hero Will encounters a Vagrant shortly before he is due to turn 14 and be Capped. Eventually he realizes this is no ordinary Vagrant, but an un-Capped adult posing as one, in order to recruit those young people who have doubts about the Tripods and the Capping into a growing resistance against the alien overlords.

The first and second books end with cliffhangers. I recommend buying all three (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire) at once, because no reader is going to want to wait to find out What Happens Next.

There is a fourth book, When the Tripods Came, a prequel that was written some twenty years after the series. I recommend reading the original three first. The prequel is equally gripping, but part of the pleasure of reading "The White Mountains" is having to figure out as you go who the Tripods are and how the Earth got into the state you find it in at the beginning of that book.

These books are not for the faint-of-heart youngster. They are truly scary, and truly gruesome in some parts. But for the older child (or adult) who can handle them, these are outstanding books that tell a fascinating story.

I love Jane Austen's novels, and my favorite is Pride and Prejudice. Many, many novels have been written that are updates or variations on, or follow-ups to that famous book. Because I love the original so much, almost all of the wannabes turn me off by the time I'm at the bottom of the first page. Trying to be Austen's voice: not Austen's voice. Taking up where Pride and Prejudice ends; why, when it's the perfect ending to the perfect novel?

I have, however, found three books (actually two books and one three-volume series) that play with the Pride and Prejudice story in ways that I find fun and clever.

The first is Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field, by Melissa Nathan. I love this book in its own right, and have given at least half a dozen copies of it to deserving friends. Jasmin is a funny, clever columnist for a UK women's magazine. As a lark, she auditions for a part in a stage version of Pride and Prejudice, and to her surprise wins the part of Elizabeth Bennet. Academy Award-winning actor Harry Noble, playing Mr. Darcy, is supercilious, humorless, and scornful of the writer-who-would-be-Lizzy. Author Nathan does an amazing job of weaving Jasmin's chaotic home life, which reflects many aspects of the Pride and Prejudice story, with the play rehearsals, and in the end the story is both hilarious and charming.

(If you are an Austen fan and enjoy Pride, Prejudice, and Jasmin Field, check out Melissa Nathan's novel Persuading Annie, based on Austen's novel Persuasion.)

The next selection is a series of three books under the umbrella title of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman, by Pamela Aidan. These books (An Assembly Such as This, Duty and Desire, and These Three Remain) retell the entire Pride and Prejudice story from Mr. Darcy's point of view. Somehow Ms. Aidan manages to create a narrative voice for these stories that, while not Austen's, suits the time and tone of Pride and Prejudice very well. Who has read Austen's novel and not wondered what was going on in Mr. Darcy's mind throughout the story? These books are a very satisfactory response to that question. The middle book, which takes place during a period when Darcy was away from Meryton, is the weakest link if only because there is little or no connection between the action in that book and the action in Pride and Prejudice. But the first and third are excellent, and all are well worth a read.

Finally there is Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride & Prejudice, by Curtis Sittenfeld, just released in 2016. Sittenfeld moves the P&P story to the US and the time frame to the present. Jane is a serene yoga instructor, Liz is a sharp and witty columnist for an upscale women's magazine, Mary keeps to her room except one night a week when she goes out to an unknown destination, and Kitty and Lydia are rude, crude, and heavily into CrossFit. Cincinnati is Meryton; the coasts are where the best and brightest want to be (Jane and Liz, New York) and where the wealthy come from (Bingley and Darcy, California). Sittenfeld does a very nice job updating the story in a believable and entertaining way. This is a page-turner: I swept through its 488 pages in a day and a half.

Expanding successfully on Jane Austen's world is no mean feat. I admire these authors who have pulled it off so well.

Recently I pulled every book I own off my bookshelves and sorted them into piles, by subject. There they sat for several days. A few dozen went onto a "Hall of Fame" bookcase together; these are the books I love, re-read, and will never give away. That left, oh, several hundred books in the "To Be Read" category.

I love buying books. It is the most soothing activity in the world to me; finding a new title that looks fascinating, buying it, holding it, smelling its new book smell (or used book smell) before putting it on one of my shelves. The problem with this is that I have accumulated so many books TBR that I found myself somewhat paralyzed. How could I possibly choose what to read next?

I used to keep all my books neatly categorized, ever since childhood. My mother was a librarian and the books I still have from my youth have handmade library "cards" taped inside the front covers, in case someone wanted to check one out of my personal bedroom library. I loved looking at all the neat categories, books with similar themes hanging out together as God intended them to: science fiction, nature, humor, novels, travel, and more.

When my first husband and I moved in together, he convinced me that sorting our books randomly onto shelves was the better way to go. You might have to search longer for a particular book you wanted, but serendipity might lead you to one that you hadn't considered reading instead. Even though we have lived apart for many years now, I continued to use his method, until a few days ago when I realized that I missed the neat categories of book types that I used to have on my shelves. Hence the pulling off of all books, sorting, and now tonight, replacing in a way that makes me happier. Once a librarian's daughter, always a librarian's daughter.

Handling and studying all of those books intensified my overwhelmed feeling, however. I want to read every book on my shelves. I bought them for that very purpose. But how to choose what to read?

I am trying out two methods. One is to dedicate a shelf of books especially to the book clubs, groups, and challenges I am working on this year. There are quite a few: Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge, Emma Watson's feminist book club, my own KidLit for Grown-Ups book club, the Left Bank Books monthly early-release novels club (a local indie bookstore's picks), and the Lithographs Book Club, which offers a choice of several selections each "season," though they are not very successful at this, since it's the end of July and the only book I have received from them so far has been their "winter" selection (which was excellent, though, so I'm hanging in there).

Having those books together on a shelf makes it easy to go pull off something to read that will allow me to tick a box on one of my reading lists. If I really enjoy these books and expect to re-read them in the future, they move onto my Hall of Fame bookcase. If not, they go into bags to be sold to the local Half-Price Books store.

The second method, which I am just beginning now, is to use these intriguing "summer reading" guidelines from a Book Riot article: http://bookriot.com/2016/06/07/how-to...
I like the way different types of books are mixed here: books that support different goals in one's life, beloved re-reads, and more.

My final thought on this subject is that pulling all my books off my shelves and looking at each one to see how to categorize it was very helpful in itself. I now have a much better idea of what I actually own, which categories are sparse and which are overflowing. I will try to curtail my book purchases for awhile now as I focus on reading through the wonderful books already on my shelves.

Mirror in the Sky is a first novel for young adults. Anyone who ever navigated high school from an outsider's position, and anyone who has ever dreamt of alternate universes with alternate Earths should really enjoy this book. I read it in one sitting, without a moment's thought of putting it aside to finish the next day. Without spoiling anything, the protagonist of this story is dreading her upcoming junior year of high school, yet another year as a lonely outsider made even worse because her one friend will be at a year abroad in Argentina ... when something happens that is so incredible that it threatens to completely overshadow the drama of high school social life (and yet doesn't, quite: is anything more profound to a teenager than social life?). A planet is discovered that appears to be a lot like Earth, and as more transmissions are received, the similarities grow from surprising to eerie. Many mysteries are left for the reader to ponder at the end of this book, along with thoughts such as the following: "That's the odd puzzle of time: It's a shoreline that keeps eroding. Every time you look, you're struck by the realization that once upon a time there was more -- the more that you never really saw, because all you ever saw was the past."

The Complete Persepolis was a new experience for me in two ways. It was the first time I have ever read a long graphic novel. They have never appealed to me: boy, was I wrong. I don't know what I thought would be so different about them: tiny dense hard-to-read text bubbles? "Cartoons?" Whatever it was, I was completely and very pleasantly surprised. This was a sophisticated picture book for grown-ups, with a gripping story that I could not put down. And that was the second new experience: reading about a very ordinary child's then teenager's life in revolutionary Iran. So many books about growing up in a culture so very different from my own are clearly a looking-back from adulthood; this felt absolutely immediate, as if the heroine was describing events as they happened. And the mix of wide scope -- the revolution and all it brought with it to the ordinary Iranian -- with tight focus -- the childish and teenaged thoughts and concerns that any American of the same age could easily identify with -- made this a truly singular reading experience. If you haven't read The Complete Persepolis, I highly recommend it.

One of the reading challenges I have taken on this year is Book Riot's "Read Harder Challenge." This involves reading one book from each of 24 categories during 2016. It's exposing me to types of books I would never normally pick up to read, many of which I'm really enjoying.

(Warning: minor spoilers ahead)

One of the categories is "Read a dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel." The first title that came to my mind was On the Beach by Neville Shute, which I recalled classmates reading and talking about when I was in high school. I believe a movie based on the book came out around that time, too. So I read that one for the challenge. Not surprisingly, as the novel was written in 1957, the source of the apocalypse is nuclear war, WWIII. It was a chilling and sobering book in spite of certain dated aspects -- fewer than one might imagine, actually.

Tonight I finished a recommendation from my son Paul, The Last Man by Mary Shelley. The novel was written in 1826, and the story begins in 2067. As was typical for that time, the book was written in three volumes, and would, I believe, have benefited from being quite a bit shorter. There are many pages of reflection on surroundings or detailing the emotions that a character is feeling that made me want to skip ahead to the point where the action continued.

Trying to look ahead 2-1/2 centuries into the future is ambitious, and there are quite a few charming anachronisms, such as the fact that the characters still fight with muskets and swords, and travel by horse and carriage. On the other hand, Shelley's England is one where there is increasing pressure to remove the monarchy, something that is timely now. Her agent of apocalypse is "the plague," also a timely choice. Of course today's busy international air travel would have made her scenario even more likely than she knew at the time of writing.

I read a marvelous biography of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, earlier this year (Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon), which made me aware that Shelley wove several of her own personal tragedies into the story of "The Last Man". Undoubtedly this contributed to the powerful scenes of grief and mourning in the book.

I'm taking a break to read some cheerful books next...but I do have "Wool" and "Station Eleven" on my bookshelf, ready for the next time I want to look ahead to the apocalypse.

A deceptively simple quote from Catharine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and author of A Treatise on Domestic Economy For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (1841):

"There is nothing, which so distinctly marks the difference between weak and strong minds, as the fact, whether they control circumstances, or circumstances control them."

I am reading a very interesting book entitled Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own In Chapter Three, the author Kate Bolick refers to a study done by two social psychologists. The subject is self-knowledge, "a technical term for the store of information you draw on the answer the question "Who am I?" This "information bank" draws from ideas about oneself created throughout a person's life (past) as well as the person's current self-impressions (present). But there is also the "imagined future." "(The psychologists) posited that along with our "past selves" and our "now selves" we all contain "possible selves" -- our ideas about who we wish to someday be, as well as who we're afraid of becoming. These possible selves could simultaneously be the rich self, the thin self, the married self -- and also the lonely self, the sick self, the homeless self."

With that background in mind, I found this paragraph particularly interesting:
"(One of the psychologists) said there's an inarguable cultural discrepancy. Our Western emphasis on the individual makes us believe we are singularly responsible for and have control over the shape of our lives, she explained, whereas in the East there's a greater awareness that many factors -- norms, obligations, expectations, other people, the situation, luck, circumstance -- determine how our lives turn out, and if they turn out the way we want. "In those Eastern worlds, the idea of having a positive self is less important, because the individual isn't afforded as much efficacy," she said."

Food for thought. What do you see when you imagine your future self? Are there different future selves depending on how certain circumstances in your present life develop? How responsible do you feel for crafting your own future self? To what degree do you acknowledge the many other factors that may take control out of your hands?