Catching Up on Reading

I really am into my booktube channel now.  So I guess I can only do some much social media at once.  This blog is dying a slow death.  But to prolong the agony, I will post what I've read since my last post way back in April.

The Marriage of Katherine by D. E. Stevenson.  A gentle novel in a trilogy perhaps? (I think this one is the second book, but it works as a stand alone as well).  Very pleasant escape.  Made me want to go to Scotland!

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.  A disappointment for me.  I have been wanting to read it for ages but found a lot of it annoying.  I did a video on it here.

Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.  This is a classic I've heard about all my life.  My interest in it renewed when I reread Little Women recently which references it a bit.  I did a buddy read for this one which really increased both my discipline in sticking to it and my enjoyment of it.  I actually found it an interesting read.  I am glad I read it.  The language is antiquated but the story line is simple and fairy tale like.  The underlying theology though gets a bit arcane at times.

Rose In Bloom by Louisa May Alcott.  This was April's read for the A Year With Louisa May 2020 challenge.  I enjoyed it but reading too much Louisa May Alcott is getting a tiny bit old for me, unfortunately.

Eagle Against the Sun by Ronald Spector.  This was a big survey of the Pacific Theater in World War II.  Very well written but chock full of facts and numbers and military stuff.  I don't know how much I retained, but I was rather ignorant of a lot of what went on in the Pacific at this time.  I read this because I wanted to know more about my father's experience as a fighter pilot in the Navy during WWII.  He fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.  It took me 2.5 months to work through this book, but I am really glad I did!  Worthwhile.

Radical Prunings by Bonnie Thomas Abbott  This is an odd but very funny novel in the guise of a collection of a gardening columns.  Sometimes scathingly funny, sometimes sweet, sometimes absurd, sometimes actually giving good gardening advice, it was a fun, light romp.  I enjoyed it.

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott.  Alcott poses as Nurse Periwinkle here but it really is a memoir of her time working as a nurse in a Civil War hospital in Washington DC.  She tells her story with a lot of humor, wisdom and pathos.  It's as if Jo March were talking.  She doesn't dwell on the fact that she got really ill while working at the hospital and that the doctors treated her with mercury which caused lifelong health issues that eventually led to her premature death.  I guess when she wrote this she wasn't aware of the damage done though she did experience insanity for a bit after getting home, probably the mercury poisoning.  Anyway, none of that is in this book, but it does give a good sense of how they did things during the war.  It was a break from the type of novels I've been reading by her this year (Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom) and I appreciated the different flavor!

Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson.  This is a classic of nature writing.  Williamson, a veteran from WWI, wrote it between the wars.  He moved to Devon which he loved.  He studied the natural world there.  Tarka isn't a children's book at all.   It is not sentimental but a dark and beautifully written book about the sheer joy of existence and the brutality of survival and death as told through the eyes of an otter.