BOOKS OF THE SECOND HALF YEAR, 2022
BOOKS READ, HALF-READ AND STOPPED, AND OTHERWISE PERUSED FOR THE SECOND HALF OF 2022. (TITLE, AUTHOR, PUBLICATION DATE, READING DATE, REVIEW SUMMARY)
A Portable Latin for Gardeners: More than 1,500 Essential Plant Names and the Secrets They Contain by The Royal Horticultural Society, Compiled by James Armitage. Pub. 2017 and Latin for Gardeners: Over 3,000 Plant Names Explained and Explored by The Royal Horticultural Society, Edited by Lorraine Harrison. Pub 2012. Read June. Probably unnecessary to buy both, but both contain a wealth of information on the wealth of information stored in Latin plant names. Discover the dozen words or so used just to mean white. For those who keep books in the Greenhouse for reference, the 1,500 is the friendlier one to keep there.
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser. Pub. 1976; 2016 Edition. Read June. The difficulty with all books such as this is the necessity to already know a bit about writing in order to understand what the author is getting at. If it happens that you know a fair bit about it already, the book is largely useless to you until you get to the bits you aren’t aware of yet. So, the value of the book varies depending on what you already know. For me, this book was about one third useful. Mostly I was using it to brush up on my script writing chops.
The Summer Game by Roger Angell. Pub. 1972; 2013 Edition. Read June. Roger Angell is, or rather was, a celebrated Baseball writer who did most of his writing from the fan’s perspective. This book had been on my reading list for probably 10 years or so and it took me this long to get to it. Which says something about how long my reading list is and why I haven’t read that one book you recommended to me a couple years ago yet. What made The Summer Game so surprisingly interesting to me was that a good portion of it deals with the first few seasons of the Baltimore Orioles as they try to patch together a contending team. For me, the book shadowed my experience of becoming a shiny new real fan of baseball and the Orioles this year. I picked them randomly based on a completely subjective set of criteria and what I accidentally got in return was a surprising club that looked to be on the rise at last. I knew none of this at the time, of course, but neither did Angell realize what Baltimore was going to do with their seasons at the time he wrote about them. So, in that way the book was a pleasing echo.
The Crass Menagerie: A Pearls Before Swine Treasury by Stephan Pastis. Pub. 2008. Read July. Pearls Before Swine is a newspaper daily comic and contains, among a multitude of truly terrifically terrible puns, the ongoing adventures of a cohabitating rat and pig. The pig is a true cloud-cuckoo-lander and the rat the biting cynical curmudgeon who lives within us all. On no account should you listen to anyone who tells you newspaper comics are dead.
Super Freakonomics, Think Like a Freak, and When to Rob a Bank by Steven Levitt. Pub. 2009, 2014, 2015. Read September. Sequels would be the wrong word. As would follow-ups. But each of these is a continuation of the very popular Freakonomics book from 2005 which went on to spawn a very popular podcast of the same name. Reading about microeconomics turns out to be far more interesting and entertaining that reading about macroeconomics. The advantage being that the sort of microeconomics presented in these books lean more towards explaining why people really behave the way they do rather than trying to convince you that money is real, and you should make a career out of following it around. I’ve read them before, but the occasional reread is always justified when nothing else entices.
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. Pub. 1869. Unfinished October. I know, I know. It’s Mark Twain. And honestly, I did try to finish it. But even as short as it is, I couldn’t get anywhere in it even after three months of trying. I finally had to admit defeat and abandon it entirely. Twain goes on a Grand Tour with a boatload of characters and brings an end to an era but don’t ask me how it all winds up. I barely got out of the harbor.
The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. Pub. 1977. Unfinished October. I will never, ever finish The Silmarillion. I know because over the years I have tried no less than five times to read the thing cover to cover and I just cannot do it. There are so many characters to track and so many people running in one direction or another and it isn’t as if the whole thing is really a cohesive story. It’s more like a collection of short stories except that they are all intertwined with each other and you, the reader, are supposed to be able to track it and make sense of it all so as to really, really understand the whole world Tolkien created and really, really, appreciate the depth behind The Lord of the Rings. And I suppose part of the problem must be that I just didn’t feel as if I didn’t understand the world and appreciate the depth in the first place. So, I send this book into the West to its deserved rest.
The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy and Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford. Pub. 2013, 2016. Read October. Well, once you’ve read one economist you must certainly read another. True, Levitt talks to economists and Harford is one, but that hardly matters. They both take a similar approach to trying to understand why people do what they do and then telling others about it. And besides, I needed to try to understand this Earth after trying to understand Middle Earth.
Peril at the Exposition by Nev March. Pub. 2022. Read Unfinished November. Look, I’m already in trouble for not finishing this book with someone else, so it is unnecessary for anyone else to add to my shame. This is the sequel to 2020’s Murder in Old Bombay which I very much enjoyed and highly recommend especially if you want a taste of what 19th century India was like while also having a mystery to solve. It’s good stuff and I was really looking forward to this sequel. Really, I was. But this feels terribly amateurish and very poorly plotted with all the notes of the story very out of place and people behaving in ways entirely uncharacteristic to those established in the first book. In fact, almost every person encountered in the book up to where I stopped reading failed to act like a real person at all. I stopped before all the core characters of book one were ruined forever. I liked them too much.
The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman. Pub. 2022. Read November. That’s better. The third part of the Thursday Murder Club series does an excellent job of not only promoting its own plot, but of also advancing the characters in new directions while remaining true to those characters as established. A fun, quick, enjoyable read about old people who have no business doing what they are doing except that some of them do and they’re actually quite good at it. Old people and Crypto currency. How delightful. Also, very few people react like actual people would in these books, but that’s because the oldsters are very good at getting them not to. Which is different than the previous book’s problem.
Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler. Pub. 2022. Read November. There’s a certain satisfaction to a good Locked Room mystery. From the original example of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 which ushered in the modern era of the detective story to the examples contained in this book which play with the basic concepts of a room which it would either be impossible to escape or impossible for the murderer to have entered -- even up to playing with the concept of “room” itself – working it out ahead of the detective has almost always been the point. Therefore, it was a delight to read through these and see the artform well executed and still be able to beat them to the punch at least a few times.
Murder by the Book edited by Martin Edwards. Pub. 2021. Read November. Yes, November was Mystery Month it seems. The gimmick for this one is that all the mysteries revolve around some form of the book. Whether that be canny editors, perceptive writers, or just a book as catalyst makes no difference. They’re all delightful short little mysteries designed to appeal to book lovers whose most loved books are mysteries.
Kwik Krimes edited by Otto Penzler. Pub. 2013. Read November. When I was in grade school there were basically two lines of mysteries you could read. One was the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew and the other was Encyclopedia Brown. The chief advantage of one over the other was that while HBND were novel length stories, Encyclopedia Brown tended to have a collection of shorter mysteries which had all the clues laid out in front of you. You’d read them and then turn to the back of the book where the solutions were explained, and some little-known fact given that helped explain how young Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown had worked it out. Almost all of them were written by Donald J. Sobol starting in 1963. Several years later, however, I discovered that this was not where Sobol had started. Instead, in 1959, he began by writing a syndicated series called Two-Minute Mysteries which starred someone called Dr. Haledjian. They took a couple minutes to read and followed much the same pattern as the Encyclopedia series. In fact, many of the plots and key clues were reused for Encyclopedia. All of which is to say that Kwik Krimes is exactly the same sort of thing except written for adults by a variety of different authors. And it was fun to read.
Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards. Pub. 2022. Read December. Much like Murder by the Book this collection of short mysteries are all involved in some way with animals. From the opening Sherlock pastiche to what might be the best in the book involving rats, the stories are all acceptable mysteries but… well, for whatever reason this was the least enjoyable of the end of year mystery collections for me. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but these seemed less involving and perhaps less elegant in their machinations. A decent read all told, but just not as appealing for me.
That’s 58 books read for the year. Or at least read as far as they ever were going to be. If I had to pick favorites for the years reading, I could easily recommend The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman (about which see the first half of the year and this not a review) and Terry Miles’ Rabbits for fiction and Moneyball by Michael Lewis from the first of the year along with The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler. Which is not to say the rest of the year’s reading was a waste, just that those were the ones that particularly stuck with me throughout the year.