For a while I feel like had been so good about reading books I own instead of library books… or maybe it’s just that I was really slowly making my way through The Captive & The Fugitive, so it felt like I was reading books I owned instead of library books, but really it was just one book I owned. But now I am in the library habit again, which is both exciting (new reads! all the time!) and dismaying (my TBR list languishing with exactly three books completed so far!). But, well, mostly I think it’s exciting.
Here’s what I have checked out from the library at the moment, from bottom to top in the above picture:
The Happiness Project by Gretchen Craft Rubin. I forget where I heard about this, but it seems exciting. The subtitle is “or why I spent a year trying to sing in the morning, clean my closets, fight right, read Aristotle, and generally have more fun,” and it’s about one woman’s year-long quest to learn to enjoy her life. I love the idea of finding joy or contentment in small ordinary things, and think happiness is, basically, the life goal that makes the most sense to me, way moreso than “success” or “achievement” or what have you. So I’m looking forward to reading about someone else’s adventures with happiness.
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis: I just checked this one out today, and was pleased that it was actually checked in! I just finished Willis’s newest book, Blackout, and loved it. This book is set in the same universe as that one, a universe where time travel is possible and is something that historians do to learn about the time periods/places/events they’re studying.
The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet: I read about this one on A Work in Progress and remembered the title. It’s a fictionalized life of the French poet/actress Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. I don’t know much about it beyond that, but it was sitting on the new books shelf and caught my eye.
The Other City by Michal Ajvaz is one that just caught my eye. It’s about an alternative Prague/another wold, and at least one review has called it “Borgesian.” The first few sentences are as follows—pleasingly bookish and atmospheric, I think: “I was walking up and down the rows of books at the antiquarian bookseller’s in Karlova Street. Now and then I would take a look out the shop window. It started to snow heavily; holding a book in my hand I watched the snowflakes swirling in front of the wall of St Savior’s Church.”
Eunoia by Christian Bök is a book of poetry with a twist: it’s divided into five section, and within each section, there’s only one vowel used. So there’s a whole bunch of poems in which the only vowel is “a,” and so on. Publishers Weekly called this book “a mythology of sound.”
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan is the book I’m reading now. I heard about it from one of my friends from high school who is a big fan of John Green; I hadn’t read anything by Green yet, but I am a big fan of David Levithan. This YA book is about two guys named, yep, Will Grayson, who end up meeting by chance. The story’s told in alternating chapters, one written by Levithan about one Will Grayson and the next written by Green about the other, and I’m really liking it so far. Levithan’s chapters are, as his writing always is, funny and charming and sweet; Green’s chapters are wry and were less immediately endearing to me, but his style has grown on me. (Edited to add: Funnily, I realized after finishing the book that I had my authors confused and the chapters I thought were by Levithan were by Green and vice versa. Well, so much for me recognizing an author by style—it was actually Levithan’s writing, in this book, that took more time to grow on me. But that’s OK.)
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