Currently reading
Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities
Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause
Julia Child: A Life (Penguin Lives)
Delightful short biography of The French Chef. I had no idea Child was in the OSS, but she was- and she kept her signaling mirror in her kitchen drawer ever after, just in case. Lots of fascinating facts, warmly told. Too short by half.
Things to Bring, S#!T to Do... and other inventories of anxiety
Delicious book of lists. In fact, it's a life told in lists, by turns hilarious, ordinary, touching, and heartbreaking. Rizzo grows up before your eyes in this book, marries, had kids, loses parents, the whole ball of wax. The conceit of letting the lists show how her life is changing worked really well for me. For list-makers everywhere.
My Pet Virus: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure
Clear-eyed and wryly hilarious. Decker is an HIV+ hemophiliac, or as he prefers, a positoid thinblood. This memoir is charming and accessible, decorated with almost enough photos. The tone is just exactly right, and Decker never misses a laugh or an opportunity to educate. A delight.
Fup
Contrived and overly mannered little fable. I must be missing something, as the Amazon & Goodreads reviews are uniformly raves, and it came highly recommended. But I thought the level of cleverness never rose above naming the main character Fup Duck.
Clutter's Last Stand: It's Time To De-junk Your Life!
This book changed the way I think about STUFF and enabled me to be much freer than I was before I read it. When I moved across the country, I brought a box of books and a few articles of clothing, some music and very little else.
Leroni of Darkover
I loved this when I read it over and over as a young woman. I think, now, that the writing is weak though the stories are interesting.
The Jump-Off Creek
Spare prose and writerly style give this slight story of a pioneering woman homesteading alone in Oregon some real staying power.
Loving Letters from Ogden Nash: A Family Album
A window to the family man behind the funny poet. Truly intimate without ever descending into impropriety, this portrait-through-letters shows that Nash was just as sweet as he appeared. For Nash junkies.
Feed
A wonderful audio rendition. The live feed portions are chillingly well-done, and I recommend this dystopian young adult story highly.
The Gilded Bat
Hands down, my favorite Gorey. I don't know what, exactly, touches me so deeply about this little tale, but it's so haunting and delightfully melancholy that I treasure it.
Do One Thing Different: Ten Simple Ways to Change Your Life
How this got in my library queue is a mystery to me. It's an interesting spin on self-help books, but that's still what it is at heart- and as near as I can tell, they are all pretty interchangeable.
Enslaved by Ducks
The gold standard, for me, of animal writing is Gerald Durrell. Tarte's not even close, in my eyes.
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Original Edition
There's never been anyone else like Thomas. Every word lit from within, every silence measured.
Dylan Thomas: The Caedmon Collection
This collection of CDs remains the best present I have ever received in my whole life. There is no voice like Thomas' voice, and no collection of words to match his. Extraordinary and way too short.
