Aristotle's Way

Aristotle's Way by Edith Hall

Yesterday, I gushed to the senior Reese like a mad person about how much I loved this book. I listened to it and got many, many ideas about how to enhance my life. From how to approach friendship (you give a friend two chances to hurt you -- but never three), how to spend leisure time, the nature of the good life, how walking aids thinking. Amazing how Aristotle's ideas speak to us today.

The book itself is very easy to read. Not stupid, but definitely designed as self-help for people who might think they're too good for self-help. I'm not one of those people. I unashamedly love self help books. This was a good one.

I am wading to the end of The Bostonians.

In a House of Lies, by Ian Rankin

I read Ian Rankin's latest, "In A House of Lies." The story is very complicated and sometimes hard to follow.  But I don't read Rankin for the story.  I read him for the characters, and the regulars are all here: Rebus, Siobhan, Malcom and Cafferty.  They have come to be like good friends.  I did notice a tic in the writing that grated.  Over and over again, one character "watched [another character] nod."  Once I start noticing it I seem to see it everywhere.   

Some reading failures

Hi guys,

I am bogged down in the middle of Henry James' The Bostonians. I made a resolution to read or reread all of his work in 2019 and I was dashing along until I got to the middle of The Bostonians. I imagine no one is surprised. One of these weeks I'll wade out of this morass.

In my airbnb there are hundreds of books and one night, falling asleep over HJ, I picked up Out of Africa. It is wonderful. The movie eclipsed the book in my memory. That is a shame. The writing is sharp, perceptive, vivid, funny. I'm just worried I won't finish it before we leave. 

The 57 Bus, by Dashka Slater

I read this for the mother/daughter book club I belong to with my 13 year old Stella. It is the true story of a crime committed against a non-binary youth by a black male youth in the Berkeley/Oakland area of the San Francisco Bay Area. Good, but not great. It provided a useful education about terms (asexual, pan romantic, etc). It alternated between points of view, and I kept thinking at any moment it would veer off the rails and become very political, either about the hate crime, or the unjust juvenile justice system for black youths, but it pulled those punches and I liked it better for it.

The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez

I loved this book. It was ponderous, restrained and delicate, but I entered its world fully for the few days it took to read it and will never look at dogs, especially huge ones, quite the same way again.