WWW Wednesday April 1, 2020

Currently, I am reading Barrel Fever by David Sedaris which I am totally enjoying.  I have to say, I loved his last book of essays a bit more.  I think because they were about him and his family and because the last book was an audiobook that Sedaris read – and he knows the timing of his own jokes to really make them enjoyable.  I find myself reading this book with his reading in mind, getting the delivery he intended down, which really helps!

Before this I read The Electricity of Every Living Thing by Katherine May.  This book was kindly sent to me by fellow blogger My Dream Walden.  From Goodreads: A life-affirming and perspective-shifting memoir of one woman’s walk in the wilds as she comes to terms with an Asperger’s diagnosis.  This book is a life-affirming exploration of wild landscapes, what it means to be different and, above all, how we can all learn to make peace within our own unquiet minds.  Very good read!  Thank you My Dream Walden for sending it to me!

I also read The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri.  I came across this book at a book fair and remember pondering it previously, so it only seemed natural to pick it up for a dollar.  And it was a dollar well spent.  From Goodreads: Udayan – charismatic and impulsive – finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty. He will give everything, risk all, for what he believes, and in doing so will transform the futures of those dearest to him: his newly married, pregnant wife, his brother and their parents. For all of them, the repercussions of his actions will reverberate across continents and seep through the generations that follow.

I also finished listening to Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski.  I was excited to listen to this book, but it happened again.  To me, I feel like the reader of this book butchered it.  I would read the story differently than the way he drawled through half, but overall, I did enjoy the story.  From Goodreads: Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol and women, “Ham on Rye” offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast’s coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan was before that.  If you have ever read Tan before than you she is capable of ripping your heart out, which is why I was hesitant to pick this book up.  Good news!  I came out of this one unscathed.  Bad news, I guess, I didn’t find the story really remarkable.  It was okay.  Makes me wonder what I am going to get the next time I pick up a Tan book.

I finished listening to Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo.  If you haven’t read my previous post on this book, it can be found here.  Overall, once you get passed the “OMG, did he just say that?” it was a good book, filled with well-developed and interesting characters.

I also finished The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver.  Like other Kingsolver books, I enjoyed this one as well.  From Goodreads: Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goal of getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.