Welcome to our annual summer time studying ballot! (And we have carried out a lot of additional studying polls within the final 12 months, so if you need extra suggestions, see fall, winter and spring.) Writer birthdays this weekend: Paul Dunbar, Helen Keller and Alice McDermott on Saturday; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Eric Ambler on Sunday.
The ballot: please advocate an incredible guide so as to add to our summer time studying lists, and inform us what perfume we must always put on whereas studying it.
My latest studying:
I’ve spent a lot of the final quarter portray varied rooms in my home, so my podcast listening is up, and my studying is down.
On the non-fiction entrance, I learn three books, though all three concerned some skimming: The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung, Sharon Salzberg’s Actual Happiness: The Energy of Meditation and Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Modified the World by Laura Spinney. (You could possibly put on Le Jardin de Monsieur Li for Actual Happiness, however the different two are in all probability finest learn commando.)
On the thriller / thriller entrance, I learn the final two within the collection of old-school British mysteries by Edmund Crispin, Glimpses of the Moon and Fen Nation. (I actually loved this collection and I want there have been extra. Eau Sauvage or Eau de Guerlain.) Then I learn guide 12 in Dorothy Simpson’s Thanet collection (Bvlgari Eau Parfumée au Thé Vert).
Turning to fiction, I’m nonetheless studying Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Gentle, and I could be for a very long time but. (I like the guide, however I’m having a tough time transferring Thomas Cromwell in direction of his finish. As soon as I bought about midway via the guide, it started to appear intolerably unhappy for pandemic studying.) I completed Angela Thirkell’s Excessive Rising (Angie beneficial her, and when you’ve got entry to The New Yorker archives, you would possibly learn Good Present, a 1996 article about Thirkell by Hermione Lee, and also you would possibly put on Penhaligon’s Artemisia or Bluebell), and I’m about midway via The Parisian by Isabella Hammad (unbelievable novel beneficial by my stepmother; one thing old style, possibly classic Caron Tabac Blond).
Be aware: high picture is element from the Library of Congress Nationwide E-book Competition poster for 2016, by artist Yuko Shimizu. You will discover a gallery of all of the E-book Competition posters on the Library of Congress web site.
