Banned Books Watch!
The Real Reason North Dakota Is Going After Books and Librarians by Taylor Brorby is a good opinion piece recognizing how LGBTQ books are among the first they are coming for and how those very same books can be a lifeline when needed most.
New Book from Katherine May
You can fight censorship by joining the movement, Unite Against Book Bans, and also sign the petition Glen Ridge United Against Book Bans.
Katherine May has a new book out called Enchantment and the New York Times published an article about it on How to Feel Alive Again. May talks about how a simple series of actions helped her discover little things that “filled her with awe and wonder.” I enjoyed her previous book Wintering during the Pandemic which was about a hard and difficult time in her life and how sometimes we have to have “fallow” times in our lives before we experience growth. It was the perfect pandemic read and I suspect this may be the perfect post-pandemic read.
P. G. Wodehouse
Joy in the Morning by P. G. Wodehouse
Very Good, Jeeves! by P. G. Wodehouse
Thank You, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
I quit Twitter over the holidays and while my mind is much more at peace, I do miss all my book Twitter peeps from around the world. One was @Unwise_Trousers or the Caustic Cover Critic who provided much-appreciated wit and snark about book covers and design all the way from Australia. I’ve taken to occasionally haunting his Blogspot account, Caustic Cover Critic in the absence of Twitter in my life. It was there that I learned about some Wodehouse books published by Norton a decade ago with some nice covers (example above). So I had to order them. I think I like the cover for Very Good, Jeeves! the best. Caustic also gives a great rundown of Wodehouse covers in Wodehouse Old & New.
P. G. Wodehouse often pops up on Best of Lists and is cited by authors as a major inspiration. I’ve been reading Wodehouse since first introduced by Christopher Hitchens in the pages of Vanity Fair a decade ago in the article, “Jeeves Spoken Here.” Amy Bloom wrote sharing a love of Wodehouse with her father would laugh out loud and share passages with her in The Book That Changed My Life. Several of his Jeeves novels also made the Guardian 1000 novels everyone should read list in 2009.
Unfamiliar with Jeeves and Wooster? Here is a Jeeves and Wooster in a Nutshell with impossibly young Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Or just read one of the 11 novels or 35 short stories they appear in. They are jolly good fun!
Finished!
The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading by Francis Spufford.
"When I caught the mumps, I couldn't read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of The Hobbit was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and joined hesitantly together...
I. N. In. A. In a. h, o, l, e. In a hole. I,n,t,h,e,g,r,o,u,n,d. In a hole in the ground. L-i-v-e-d-a-h-o-b-b-i-t. In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit...And then I never stopped again." —Francis Spufford
Author Francis Spufford takes you on a journey back through the stories and books that made him and may have also made you. From The Forest of fairy tales where the fear is being on your own, the books where you stepped through and landed into another world like Narnia, the towns like those in the Little House series and To Kill A Mockingbird that teaches you about the lives of others and societal expectations. You may find many favorites you share with Spufford from Pooh to Tolkien and authors like Bradbury, King, to Le Guin.
I recently read his first novel, Golden Hill, and then picked this book up. I highly recommend Golden Hill if you like historical fiction. I enjoyed Spufford's insights in this book and I found an author who feels like as Anne Shirley would say, "a kindred spirit."
Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum Events I’m Attending
Middlemarch Book Club… only two more parts left!
Colson Whitehead Book Club… we finished zombies now on to The Underground Railroad.
SEISMIC: Seattle City of Literature Happy Hour… celebrating the launch of Seattle City of Literature Map.
Drinks, Drugs & Debauchery: A History of Seattle’s Prohibition with Brad Holden
I hope to see you there! Check out all upcoming Folio events.
What is this?
Right now, this is my sandbox to play around in, an outlet for writing about books, and whatever interests me at the moment.