Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Short books update for February through now

 I don't feel like writing up reviews for them, but the other books I read in February include Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, and The Great Divorce (all by C.S. Lewis, of course). I have now finished my CSL class but I feel like rereading Til We Have Faces (the grad student-only read that I skipped as I enrolled in the class as an undergrad), which I only read once at least ten years ago. We'll see if I get around to it. 

I have still not finished reading bell hook's All About Love: New Visions, which I started back in early February. She writes so well, beautifully as well as straightforward, and I am interested in the topic, but I keep dragging myself through one chapter at a time and then not reading again for days if not weeks. I don't know what the issue is. I will say I tend to have this problem with nonfiction over fiction, even if the book topic interests me (remember how I started reading that nonfiction book about the linguistics of/on the Internet right before the pandemic, and never finished it?). I don't want to abandon it; maybe now that I've finished my CSL class I can finish this book. 

I dread going to my [none of your business] doctor for obvious reasons, but I also love it when I have an appointment, because just a block or so away from the building there is a quiet little street that has a cute trendy indie coffee shop where I buy an oat milk latte (mocha or chai or seasonal but always sweet) and then go across that street to an Assistance League thrift store and browse for a while. It's heaven. I bought a khaki mini-skort, two half-priced scarves, and three books, all five dollars or less. The books were 50 cents each (!); one was a Pike Place Market cookbook that I gave my sister (she used to live near Seattle and we visited there once), and the other two were for me: The Eyre Affair and The Daughters of Artemis. I had heard of the Thursday Next series (of which The Eyre Affair is the first) from back when I was reading author blogs (remember blogs?), but I never started it because it felt daunting or something. It's a bookish series that is maybe mysteries and maybe fantastical; I'm not really sure. It being bookish is enough to recommend itself to me. The other one sounds like a thriller mystery book, and judging by the title and summary, I suspect it is sapphic.

This online indie bookstore started by two of my college friends had an International Women's Day sale on their female authored books, so I bought two: Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterton, who I've read and liked before, and Bookshop Cinderella, a romance novel that is also a Cinderella retelling set in a bookstore. I find the title kind of obvious, but it worked on me, so. Tanglewreck looks like a time travel sci fi book. 

The March Disneybound challenge has been taking up all my free time, so I haven't posted anything about books since February. Also, me reading nothing but C.S. Lewis has been uninspiring for bookstagram posts, even though I love him. Ah well.

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