A continuation of April’s list of books. I completed slightly few books this quarter, though I think I may have actually read more text. I’m not aiming to read for the sake of numbers, though completing a book sure does tickle a particular part of me.

I’ve found myself doing something I’ve never done before: reading two books at once. This has mostly been combinting a fiction and a non-fiction book, giving me something a bit easier to read when history becomes too much of a slog.

An editorial note: Each book listed comes with a link. It turns out it’s pretty difficult to find something like a canonical or authoritative link for a lot of these books and I don’t really want to be sending you to Jeffy B’s. Where possible, I link the author’s website. If that’s not available I go in the following order:

• Project Gutenberg, where you can get eBooks of classics for free!
• The book’s publisher
• Bookshop.org, which allows you to order books from independent book stores across the US and UK¹.

Here’s what I read in the second quarter of the year:

Nonfiction

Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution

By Mike Duncan

I don’t remember how he got there but Lafayette has been on my list of subjects to learn about for quite some time. I really enjoyed Duncan’s almost-conversational tone. It was no suprirse when fifty or so pages in I looked him up and learned that he’s a podcaster!

I really enjoyed this book. Duncan executes a good balance of getting into details while keeping things moving along. I left this book eager to learn more about several of the topics it touched, especially the French Revolution and Napolean.

Malört: The Redemption of a Revered and Reviled Spirit

By Josh Noel

I’ll admit that I picked this up expecting it to be little more than a low effort dump of bullet points, like the Guiness book someone brought me from Dublin. Instead, Malört is a lovely little history. It skips much of the origin story and instead begins in the mid sixties, running up to just about today. It focuses on the handful of people who loved Malört and wanted it to stick around, eventually turning it into a Chicago cultural touchstone.

This is a definite recommend for any Malört fan!

The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard

By John Birdsall

I went into this not knowing anything about Beard beyond the awards that bear his name. When the foreward mentioned how under-discussed Beard’s queerness was, I worried that I was getting into a book that was too focused on one particular aspect of the man’s life. That worry turned out to be unwarranted. The telling is perhaps over-long and a bit sad. Given the foreward, I was somewhat confused when the book quickly wraps up, jumping from shortly before Beard came out (which I would’ve thought would be fairly important to this telling) to Beard’s death.

Fiction

The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

A continuation of my attempts to mix in some of my childhood reading (and required reading). Once again, one of my first conclusions is that we were far too young to be expected to understand the things in this book. What took weeks of high school, with lectures and Cliff’s Notes took me three days as an adult. Also, wow, I hadn’t realized how these people were hammered all the time.

Incidentally, I picked Gatsby after having read Careless People last year, which takes its name from Gatsby.

Hatchet

By Gary Paulsen

Another of my childhood reading, Hatchet is the story of a boy whose small plan crash-lands in the wilderness, he survives for a few months, then is rescued. It’s a pretty basic story but detailed enough to stay interesting. This was darn near required reading for all the scouts when I was a kid.

The River

By Gary Paulsen

The River is the sequel to Hatchet, which I never read as a kid. Looking at the one-sentence synopses of the other sequels, The River is the only one that looked particularly interesting. It hits many of the same beats as Hatchet while being different enough to remain interesting. When the climax didn’t come until less than a dozen pages before the end of the book, I realized maybe this is how Paulsen gets kids to read all the sequels; they’re so pumped by the end of one book that they need to read the next one. While I breifly had that desire at the end, I moved on to other things instead.

The edition I read (pictured above) shows a raft about to go over a waterfall. There is no waterfall in the novel.

Player Piano

By Kurt Vonnegut

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Vonnegut and want to read more. I decided to start at the local place: His first novel. Player Piano takes place in a dystopia where many people have been automated out of their jobs. This was a particularly affecting thing to read in our present era. As many great novels do, Player Piano left me wanting more of it at the end. I suppose I ’ll just have to read one of Vonnegut’s other thirteen novels.

Feature image by Dawn Endico, CC BY-SA 2.0 via flickr

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