Thanks to me feeling like hammered shit for a couple of months, my reading list got skipped, but what there was to document wasn’t much anyway.  I’m breaking the list down into fiction and non-fiction because I found that there were themes within those categories which are worth noting.  Here we go…

Music as a Mirror of History – Goldberg – This was supposed to be a relisten, but damned if I remembered much about it.  Still, it was worth listening to because Goldberg is so good at contextualizing music and how it reflects the events of the time in which it was written. His series of musical courses are so very good.

The Song of the Dodo – David Quammen – Starting with this book, I went on a reading binge that focused on extinction, evolution, and diversity. Oh boy did I read about diversity.  Sometimes it felt as if that was the single most important word in this and the next two.  Diversity is more critical than I’d ever imagined to the health of a species.  And while so many factors contribute to growing healthy populations of animals – and we are, in fact, still arguing about and testing those factors in search of remedies to extinction – without diversity animal populations don’t really have a chance to hold their own.  Much of the information is less than hopeful, but it’s important.  I’d venture to say that it’s applicable to human populations as well.

Eating to Extinction – Dan Saladino – Saladino covers a lot of the same questions Quammen does, but from the viewpoint of our eating habits, and how we choose to grow our food. We breed our food for certain qualities such as pest and disease resistance, yield, flavor, etc, giving favor to the species that seem to have everything we need.  But nature is tricksy, and we may manage to breed an orange with spectacularly good flavor, but in the process we may also have created an orange that has requirements that can be a burden on the ecosystem.  But people love it, so we plant more and more, squeezing out other crops in favor of flavor, and thus we lose diversity.  Those genes are gone, and with them any benefit we might find we require in the future.  Again, not a really upbeat book, but one worth reading if you care about stuff like this.

The Secret Life of Groceries – Benjamin Lorr – You are what you eat, right? Also you are where you choose to shop for your food, a fact that Lorr explores in his examination of grocery stores in the west.  He gives us histories of places like Trader Joe’s, and fills us in how supermarkets are run, and what goes into getting the food from farm to grocery cart.  There’s a huge human toll in that process when you take into account the raising of the food, harvesting, shipping, and marketing.  It’s fantastically competitive and everyone is always looking for the next big thing in aid of making a buck.  And here, diversity means choice, it means that fads can have far-reaching effects.  Fascinating book.

The Wild Places – Robert McFarlane – McFarlane, who is a wonderful writer btw, takes the reader on trips around the British Isles to places where wildness still exists.  Not just sparsely populated rural land, but honest-to-god wildness, something of which there is precious little in the world. He has an eye and a voice that work in tandem to refresh our sense of wonder about our natural world, and in his work he tackles many different aspects of it. If temporary separation from the man-made world appeals to you, this is a book you’ll probably enjoy.

Aspects – John M. Ford – John Ford’s final book, and unfinished at the time of his death.  While I enjoyed it (and it’s the only Ford I’ve ever read, so maybe this wasn’t the best choice for an introduction to his work) it was difficult to connect with the characters in any meaningful way, at least by my standards.  I don’t really feel like I can do justice to it here, so let’s just say if you’re already a Ford fan, you’ll probably love it.  If you’re as clueless about his work as I was, start somewhere else.

Earthlings -Sayaka Murata – Oh god, this book… I started telling The Housemate about it, and she almost immediately asked why I kept on reading.  I told her that I felt I needed to figure out what the hell was going on.  When I got to the cannibalism part, she just shook her head and said something to the effect that I was nuts for sticking it out.  And yeah I think I may have been.  It’s a deeply unsettling book, but not in the wow-that-gave-me-a-lot-to-think-about way, as “A Little Life” was.  More in the way a narrative about people being hacked to pieces both physically and emotionally would be.  I don’t mean to dismiss it entirely because there are important issues hidden within its pages, but I’m not sure the digging was worth it.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid – Total surprise to me.  I’ve been aware of it for months, but nothing I’d heard about it had seemed particularly appealing.  Boy was I wrong.  Sure there were moments when I thought, “why am I bothering?” But in the end I’m so happy I stuck it out.  Wonderful book.

The Locked Room – Elly Griffiths – The newest Ruth Galloway mystery.  I didn’t think much of the mystery per se, but it did start to resolve some of the problems I’d been having with Ruth’s private life which made it much more satisfying than the last couple.  I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, but I think it’s worth reading, particularly if you’re already a fan of the series.  Also there’s some scary stuff with a character I love, and that overshadowed everything else for me to the point where I started doing the whole If-she-kills-(character)- I’m-finished-with-her thing.  Yeah, yeah, I know…

The Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman – I read the two books in the series in reverse order, so I already knew stuff about how the series would progress.  But I loved it.  A group of cranky, brilliant seniors who solve murders?  Come on, how could anyone not love that?

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders – If you’ve been reading my reviews/lists for any amount of time you’ve probably seen me in raptures about this book.  This reread I opted for the audio because it’s so perfect.  Normally I don’t like full cast audiobooks, but this one is sheer poetry with a brilliant cast of voices so perfect, so evocative that it’s often like listening to music. I became lost in the sound of it.  It’s miraculous, IMO.

That’s it for these last two months.  I’m currently reading The 1619 Project which I have to tell you is not for the faint of heart.  I hope my commentary next month will do it justice.  See you then.