Girl Detective

Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has been on my shelves over ten years, and through three or four different domiciles. I purchased it because Neil Gaiman used it as a reference for his Sandman collection, World’s End. I finally committed to reading the Calvino. While very good, and important, it was a tough, and not often enjoyable, read.

The conceit is fascinating. A man and woman reader begin a book, then are interrupted at a point of suspense. In numbered chapters, they try to find out more about the book, and it leads them on a less-than-merry chase. Alternating with chapters of their quest are first chapters of the books they find that are supposed to be the same, but instead have a different set of male female characters, different title, different setting, different country of origin, and different style. Each introduces you to a situation, then pauses at a conflict. The overall affect is deliberately frustrating. Further, many of the number chapters are told in second person, addressing the reader. This was sometimes unnerving, as Calvino seemed to be looking out of the book and into my life:

The kitchen is the part of the house that can tell the most things about you: whether you cook or not (one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly)….whether you tend toward the bare minimum or toward gastronomy (your purchases and gadgets suggest elaborate and fanciful recipes, at least in your intentions; you may not necessarily be greedy, but the idea of a couple of fried eggs for supper would probably depress you)

The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it…my reaction is one of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me…rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort.

I enjoyed the ten beginnings of the stories. Like the readers in the book, I was loathe to quit them just as I was going deep. With both the stories and the characters of readers, Calvino frustrated my desire for a story, as well as my attempts to like the characters, since he took pains to make them all different, yet the same, and all readers, just like me.

This is a book about how we read, why we read, and our desire for stories and character. It’s brilliant stuff, but too often purposely dissatisfying–intellectual with a dearth of emotional attachment.

Continuing my way through Bryan K. Vaughan’s widely acclaimed post-apocalyptic comic-book series Y the Last Man, I finished Volume 5, Ring of Truth. Several important things take place, most notably the explanation for why Yorick Brown and his monkey Ampersand were the only male mammals to survive the plague. Between a murderous ninja (redundant?), and a hallucinating Hero (capitalization intended), Vaughan throws some backstory and red herrings into the mix. It’s a fast-paced story that caused me to switch after book 5 to the monthly individual issues, since I couldn’t wait the many months for the next collected volume to come out. Now that the series is done, however, I recommend you seek out the volumes, not the individual issues. They’re filled with distracting ads; the collections are concentrated story.

I read on in individual issues to the end putting off both a nap and bedtime; I value sleep so much, given its lack in my life because of small kids, that this is a high compliment. I cried at the last issue, yet found it hopeful and satisfying. Y is a good story, with strong characters, and lots of savory subplots that support that strong overarching narrative.

To Terra is a manga graphic novel that’s been on my shelf since last year; I got it after seeing this rec from Entertainment Weekly:

In Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra: Vol. 1, a computer developed to produce children accidentally creates mutants with telepathic abilities. This exiled race, the Mu, turns to impetuous young Jomy to lead them back to their home planet, Terra, which was nearly destroyed by generations of wasteful humans.

For Fans of…
Classic manga minus the blood and gore; Star Wars.

Does It Deliver?
With sharp illustrations and a fast-paced, cerebral plot, Terra is good, clean fun. B+

I’d add that it might also be for fans of Lord of the Rings; there’s a Frodo/Sam relationship going on with two of the characters, and a blind psychic who’s reminiscent of Galadriel. I didn’t have much fun; this wasn’t my cuppa. I did enjoy reading back to front and right to left, but I didn’t always find the illustrations sharp enough to read quickly, or the word bubbles placed in a clear order. In the end, I think this might be best for younger readers and manga fans.

I took a breather in my bender of 2007 books for my book group’s pick, Jill Ker Conway’s Road from Coorain. It’s a memoir of her girlhood on a sheep farm in outback Australia, her education through university, and her difficult and changing relationships with her family, especially her mother.

Conway is a skilled writer. The beginning of the book is a eulogy to her childhood and the few happy years her family lived on a successful sheep farm, prior to a five year drought.

When my father left in the morning to work on the fences, or on one of the three bores that watered the sheep and cattle, my mother heard no human voice save the two children. There was no contact with another human being and the silence was so profound it pressed upon the eardrums. My father, being a westerner, born into that profound peace and silence, felt the need for it like an addiction to a powerful drug. Here, pressed into the earth by the weight of that enormous sky, there is real peace. To those who know it, the annihilation of the self, subsumed into the vast emptiness of nature, is akin to a religious experience. We children grew up to know it and seek it as our father before us. What was social and sensory deprivation for the stranger was the earth and sky that made us what we were. For my mother, the emptiness was disorienting, and the loneliness and silence a daily torment of existential dread.

After she leaves the outback, she begins to recognize Australia as a country unto itself. She was raised and schooled with England, the great colonizer, as the ideal in all things. She carefully chronicles her developing consciousness of Australia’s social and historical tensions. On visiting England for the first time:

My landscape was sparer, more brilliant in color, stronger in its contrast, majestic in its scale,and bathed in shimmering light.

Conway went on to become a noted historian of women’s history in America, and the president of Smith College. This memoir of her early years is an engaging look into one woman’s struggle for intellectual independence from the constraints of Australian education, and emotional independence from her mother.

Interestingly, there were a few things in this book that reminded me of Marianne Wiggins’ Shadow Catcher, written last year. The description of the self-crushing isolation above is similar to how Wiggins writes of the drive from California to Las Vegas. And both books feature fathers who die early, and somewhat mysteriously, and the children’s subsequent troubled relationship with the mother. I was surprised and pleased to find common threads in these two seemingly random books from my reading pile.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is very good. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Morning News Tournament of Books, and the Pulitzer.

Oscar is a pudgy social outcast whose family came from the Dominican Republic. In short segments, we learn about him, his sister Lola, his mother, and finally, about the narrator Yunior and his relationship to the family. Theirs is an immigrant story, about the old world and the new, told in a unique snappy, geeky, Spanish-slang-filled patois. Is the family’s string of tragedies a curse, “fuku”, or is their survival good fortune? Is it just life?

The world is full of tragedies enough without niggers having to resort to curses for explanations.

That’s Yunior’s take at one point, though he wavers. What the reader thinks is left open. There are passages of magical realism, of unbelievable survival, of astonishing love. This book reminded me of Middlesex because of its old/new world ancestral histories, and of Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay because of its brazen comic-book and sci-fi/fantasy geek love. My only regret is that I was whisked out of each character’s life just as I got deeply into their story.

Yet another book from 2007 that I discovered through the Morning News Tournament of Books was Marianne Wiggins’s Shadow Catcher. It won its first and second matches, but lost in the semis to the juggernaut Oscar Wao.

The Shadow Catcher is a postmodern novel, intermixing photography, biography, autobiography, fact and fiction.

How the average person dreams is how the average novelist puts a page together. Random bits of seen material float in, dismembered parts of memories, skeins of information knit and shred in contrast to their logic.

The narrator is a woman named Marianne Wiggins, who meets with movie studio execs to discuss a project on Edward S. Curtis, who famously photographed Native Americans in the early 20th century. The character of Wiggins wrote a novel on Curtis, and their stories become strangely intertwined when Wiggins drives out to Vegas to see a man identified as her father, who committed suicide decades ago. At a few points I felt it was over my head. I didn’t doubt the skill of the author, but rather my skill as a reader. Uneasy at times, but also fascinating, towards the end I raced to finish it and find out what happened.

What was funny about breast cancer?

We didn’t have an answer, and it was making us nervous….One crap ad could make the difference between the person they kept on and the one they let go….But it wasn’t just our jobs at stake, was it? When we had trouble nailing an ad, our reputations were on the line. A good deal of our self-esteem was predicated on the belief that we were good marketers, that we understood what made the world tick–that in fact, we told the world how to tick….

What then, to make of an empty sketch pad or blank computer screen? …. Our souls were as screwy and in need of guidance as all the rest. What were we but sheep like them? We were them. We were all we–whereas for so long we had believed ourselves to be just a little bit above the others. –Then We Came to the End

I appreciated last year’s much-hyped first novel, Then We Came to the End, a great deal. Such hype could easily crush the tenuous first novel of most authors, but Ferris is tough. The book is funny, sad, wise and true. It manages the impressive feat of first person plural narration, which hardly ever bugs. Further, it drew this reader in, and reminded me fondly and painfully of my own time in advertising. I was actually a non-creative creative (see the book for explanation of this term), but I dwelled in a cubicle among the creatives after the dot-coms burst. I knew this world, and Ferris gets it dead on.

What struck me most, though, was how he pulled off a non-angry, non-small book about work. This is a compassionate book about working, but also about people. I truly miss the characters now that the covers are closed, and I still wonder–”Where’s Joe Pope?”

Still another 2007 book inspired by The Morning News’ Tournament of Books, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England was on my TBR list already, based on the strong review in Entertainment Weekly:

One little mistake, and Pffft – your life goes up in smoke. Ten years after Sam Pulsifier accidentally burns down Emily Dickinson’s childhood home, he becomes Suspect No. 1 when other scribes’ homes get flamed. Who’s really to blame? This absurdly hilarious mystery, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England about a bumbler’s guilt-consumed life skewers the whole memoir thing and offers a fact/fiction-blurring meditation on the risky business of self-deception: ”Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.” A killer line in Brock Clarke’s searingly funny book. A-

Sam is an engaging guy, whose bumbling sometimes induces cringes, and sometimes demands sympathy. It’s a funny book, and the clever, quotable lines come fast and furious. But it sometimes felt a little too meta, at the expense of real, human emotion.

If you find lines like this funny:

She thought for a while, her forehead wrinkled, as if I were an especially difficult passage in a novel and she were trying to unpack me.

you’ll likely enjoy the book. Arsonist’s Guide didn’t win its match, but its blend of smart, funny, and sad made it well worth reading.

Kay came to realize that she preferred her books to other people’s company. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being. At home she had to be hyperconscious not to use books to retreat from her own children.

Continuing my Tournament of Books 2007 book binge, I finished Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know in double-quick time. I guiltily admit that I retreated into the book, and away from my kids, a few times. The premise is a grabber, and the storytelling delivers nicely. A woman flees the scene of a car accident. When she’s picked up by police, she has no ID, and claims to be one of two sisters who disappeared from a Baltimore mall thirty years ago in a famous abduction.

Lippman’s writing is tight. She switches back and forth in time and among characters so deftly that she makes it look easy. The mystery unfolds at a steady pace, with just enough revealed along the way to lead to the very satisfying conclusion.

Lippman is a former news reporter from Baltimore, and has a successful and well reviewed mystery series. This is a standalone novel, and a thumping good read that’s also well written. Highly recommended.

Another one from the Morning News Tourney of Books, Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, was quite good. It won Match Two of Round One, and is moving on to challenge Tree of Smoke. Vida is married to Dave Eggers, though this is not detailed in the backflap bio or in her acks.

Clarissa is 28 when her father dies, and a quick search of his desk yields surprising and unpleasant news. Given that her mother disappeared when she was 14, Clarissa has already experienced life at the short end of the stick. Slipping into girl-detective mode, she decides to travel to Lapland, the region of Europe that includes the northern tips of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Painful truths about who she is arrive thick and fast on her journey. In the end, she incorporates them into choices that are both redemptive and unexpected.

The grieving, bewildered Clarissa is easy to like, as are the handful of characters she encounters on her odyssey. At times, this read like a young adult novel to me; Clarissa’s age of 28 didn’t ring true. She seemed more like 20, in speech, action, and emotion. But the fast-moving tale swept me along, and fascinated me both with details about Lapland and the indigenous Sami people, as well as with Clarissa’s absorption of the newly updated facts of her self.

I get off the library book wagon with On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, the first of (I hope) several books in the Morning News 2008 Tournament of Books that I hope to read.

And what they had here, on the shores of the English Channel, was only a minor theme in the larger pattern.

Florence and Ted are young newlyweds in 1962. Ted is a scholar and Florence a classical violinist. And both have serious concerns about the actions required of them on their wedding night, yet “they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

McEwan painstakingly, and often painfully, etches their thoughts, fears, history and conversation. Both Ted and Florence are rendered ever more complex over the course of the 200 small pages in this slim volume. The night becomes a microcosm of their relationship, and another key event in the lives of the two young people.

This is beautifully written, compassionate and it contains profound, universal truths about relationships, marriage, and communication between men and women. It is not a thumping good read; it requires care and attention to appreciate. Also, to me, this is not a novel. By artfully plumbing the depths of two people, and one encounter, this reads more like a short story, or at most a novella.

As I continue to race through Bryan K. Vaughan’s Y the Last Man series, Volume 4: Safeword went down less easily than the previous three.

A plague wipes out all animals with a Y chromosome, except for Yorick Brown and his monkey, Ampersand. With a secret agent and a geneticist, they’re making their way across the country. This volume features BDSM that I initially felt was a little gratuitous, though it’s later explanation made sense. It also featured a band of deluded militia that I’d like to feel was over the top, but I fear might not be.

I’m not sure if it’s the book or me that’s slowing down, but I’m continuing on till the end. Stay tuned for future volumes.

I reread Fforde’s Eyre Affair because of my recent re-read of Jane Eyre, and because I hope to venture further in the Thursday Next series, which many friends have recommended to me. EA is great fun–a thumping good read. It contains some clumsy writing, but this hardly intruded on the breakneck pace of the story.

Thursday Next is a literary detective in a fictional England that so loves literature that citizens routinely change their names to that of their favorite poet; there are about four thousand John Miltons in London alone.

Claire Tomalin’s recent Guardian piece on her Milton collection of poems was linked to this week from Arts & Letters Daily. It gave me some timely insight into why Milton was Fforde’s fictive first choice.

After the theft of Dickens’ original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit, Thursday pursues a villain named Acheron Hades. He’s nearly invincible though, as he can read minds, is bulletproof and doesn’t appear on camera. There is a wild chase (but not a wild good chase; see below for why not), guns, vampires, evil corporate goons, an unending war, time travel, and many wonderful scenes with Mr. Rochester.

For other books I’ve read this year and last year, plus music and movies, visit my shelves at Gurulib.

From Dictionary.com, because the relevant passage in EA eludes me:

wild goose chase
1592, first attested in “Romeo and Juliet,” where it evidently is a fig. use of an earlier (but unrecorded) literal sense in ref. to a kind of follow-the-leader steeplechase.

My re-reading of Bryan K. Vaughan’s comic-book series Y The Last Man continues with volume 3, One Small Step. A plague wipes out all creatures on the planet with a Y chromosome except for Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. They team with Agent 355 of the mysterious Culper Ring, and Dr. Alison Mann, a geneticist, to cross the country in search of more information. Along the way they encounter Russian special forces, Israeli commandos, astronauts, and travelling actors. There are secrets, lies, at least one love triangle, and a ninja, to boot.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s crappy works of fiction that try to sound important by stealing names from the Bard.

This volume, like the previous two, was a quick read that I found hard to put down.

The review by Jennifer Reese in Entertainment Weekly was so good that I borrowed Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions from the library, instead of reading something off my shelf. It did not disappoint.

The novel is situated in Vietnam-era England. Mike Frame’s carefully constructed life shows its fragile foundation when one, then another, person appears and reminds him of his radical past. At a young age, he was Chris Carver, a suburban kid drawn to the counter-culture. Starting with peaceful protest, things escalated for him physically and psychologically.

Standing in the crowd that morning with my fist in the air, there was one thing I was certain of: I’d had enough of my father’s world, enough of the idea that life was a scramble to the top over the heads of those poorer, slower, or weaker than yourself.

Carver’s story shifts fluidly between past and present, and back and forth within them, too. Impressively, Kunzru pulls off this complex non-linear narrative; I always knew where I was in time. Kunzru spins out his tale to the end, filling in details that he’d hinted at along the way; the shift from revolutionary youth to the suburban Mike Frame, is finally made clear and sensible.

It’s a powerful, politically unsettling story, well written. It reminded me a bit of Sigrid Nunez’s Last of Her Kind, one of my favorites of 2006, which was set in Vietnam-era New York. Both revolve around a magnetic and politically adamant woman that the narrator is unable to forget, even after the passage of years, and much pain. I highly recommend them both.

Wow. I’d forgotten how good this graphic novel was. I thought the first Whiteout was a good mystery, crime and spy thriller. Whiteout: Melt is excellent, one of those rare sequels that outdoes the original. US Marshal Carrie Stetko is called in to investigate a fire at a Soviet base. Danger and intrigue ensue:

Carrie Stetko, WHAT are you THINKING? You’re in an emergency shelter, in a storm, in the middle of Wilkes Lane in East Antartica…blackmailed by your government into finding three pocket nukes stole from Russians by Russians…working with a Russian agent who you’ve been ordered to betray if you get the opportunity…and who will probably do the same to you… you’ve nearly died twice today…and you’re thinking about THAT?

Bryan K. Vaughan has recently concluded his well-reviewed comic-book series Y the Last Man, so I’m re-reading the graphic novels from beginning to (I hope) the end. A mysterious plague has wiped out all animals on earth with a Y chromosome, excepting Yorick Brown and his pet monkey Ampersand. In Volume 2, cycles refers, at least, to the motorcycle Yorick trades for their passage, and as well as to the women’s monthly event. Yorick travels with Agent 355 of the mysterious Culper Ring and Dr. Alison Mann, a cloning specialist. They’re heading from the east coast to California, where Dr. Mann has a laboratory. They stop somewhat short of California, though:

Yorick: Where the f*** am I?
Sonia: Marrisville. In Ohio? Where did you come from, Yorick? I thought all the men were–
Y: Wait, how the hell do you know my name?
S: Oh, it was on the your membership card for the um… “International Brotherhood of Magicians.” Are you really a magician? Like David Blaine?
Y: No, I am NOTHING like David Blaine, thank you very much. I’m an escape artist.
S: Is that how you survived? You…You escaped death?
Y: That’s cute. But listen, I really have to get out of here.
S: Actually…you should probably stay put.
Y: And why’s that?
S: um…
Y: Jesus! What did you do with my pants!

Complicating things, there are Israeli soldiers, a desperate woman who speaks Russian, and a very angry woman from Yorick’s past. This quick-paced volume is by turns funny and serious. It’s a good entry in a thus-far good series.

‘Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.’ –Catherine Morland

‘The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. –Henry Tilney

A few years ago, I bemoaned how I didn’t re-read books, and made the decision to change that. As I’ve become a re-reader, I’ve also become a better reader. The first time through a book, I’m feeling my way in the dark; I read quickly to find out what happens. On subsequent readings, I can relax and focus on examining the craft, since I know the major plot points, and how it ends.

This was the second time I read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which was her first-completed and last published novel. Last time, I didn’t much enjoy it. Since then, though, I’ve read the six Austen novels, re-read Karen Joy Fowler’s Jane Austen Book Club, seen several screen adaptations of the works including the 2007 Northanger Abbey, done online research about Austen and her novels, and become a regular reader of Austenblog. This reading of NA was very different, because I was a different reader, made more aware from all those experiences.

On this read, I “got” the comprehensive irony that characterizes this novel. NA became much more sophisticated to me because of this. The first time, I felt it was a kind of middle-school romance, and I found Henry Tilney condescending. This time, I saw Austen’s signature incisive social commentary. The book wasn’t a critique of people who took trashy novels too seriously, as I thought before. I also didn’t find it the diatribe against popular novels it’s often assumed to be; Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho is praised by Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who are the characters of discerning taste. Instead, it’s an indictment of social hypocrisy, when people say one thing and do another. Novel reading is an example of something people denied doing, or liking, when the reality was opposite. Novels as a reader’s only object, as they are for the naive Catherine, are problematic. As part of a well-balanced reading diet, as the Tilneys have, though, popular novels are to be championed.

Young Catherine’s overactive imagination is contrasted with her inexperience of people; at the beginning of the novel she thinks life is very like what she reads in novels. As NA progresses, however, she learns painful lessons about the world and her understanding of it. With that comes the knowledge that, while real life may not be as dramatic as in novels, it can be as cruel and punishing, or sweetly rewarding, as author-created fiction.

On this read, I quite enjoyed NA. It was very funny, though not an easy read because of the pervasive irony; I had to read closely to catch all the “only”s and “but”s. I still found Henry Tilney a bit supercilious; he doesn’t hide that he thinks he’s the smartest person in a room. But I liked him better this time, and suspect that he often spoke with Austen’s own voice.

One of the few books I bought during the November to January “From the Stacks” period was The Illustrated Jane Eyre. I could think of few things to better spend holiday gift money on; I’d “promised” it to myself for my next re-reading.

The story of Jane, and Bronte’s prose, is more stirring each time I read; this is my third time, I think. I came to this classic late in life, but immediately embraced it as a favorite. The Illustrated Jane Eyre is a lovely edition, from the faux weathered-leather binding, to the gatefold cover, to the thick, rough-cut pages. Most beautiful of all are Dame Darcy’s illustrations: on the cover, in full-page painted color glossy tip-in pages, and full and partial page pen-and-ink drawings. Darcy clearly embraced the task. Her illustrations are numerous and reflective of the text. They manage to capture both the dark passion of the book as well as the more ephemeral inner thoughts of its characters.

Bronte’s strong language and passionate tale were daring at the time, even though she wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell, who was assumed to be male. Many critics might have echoed the words of the character St John to Jane:

Your words are such as ought not to be used: violent, unfeminine and untrue. They betray an unfortunate state of mind: they merit severe reproof: they would seem inexcusable;

Jane noted something like this of herself in an earlier conversation with St John:

He had not imagined that a woman would are to speak so to a man. For me, I felt at home in this sort of discourse. I could never rest in communication with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female, till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their heart’s very hearthstone.

Indeed, both Jane and Charlotte have earned their places by mine.

For more Bronte-related goodness, visit the excellent Bronteblog. (Apologies for lack of umlauts throughout; writing this post has exceeded the nap time of 2yo Guppy.)

Added later: This is an unadorned edition of the text. There is a fascimile page of the first edition, and the book is divided into three volumes, which are then subdivided into chapters. The Dame Darcy edition includes the preface to the 2nd edition, as well as its dedication to Thackeray that was later removed–he had a wife who was institutionalized for madness. It also includes CB’s note to the third edition. There is no scholarly introduction or afterward, and there are no notes. This lets the story and the art shine, but I did still crave some explanatory notes, and bought the paperback Penguin edition to get some.

Around the time Guppy was born, I spent a fair amount of time participating in online reading challenges. I soon discovered that these interfered with the spontaneity and enjoyment of my reading. Sometimes, though, the challenges are enough in line with what I want to read anyway, or they give enough leeway to choose, that they still draw me. Such was last year’s From the Stacks challenge, which I read about at one of my favorite book blogs, Pages Turned.

I set out the books I wanted to read. Instead of the suggested five, I chose ten–five graphic and five prose novels. I took several pictures, trying to get the book ambience just right. (Does it strike anyone else that the shelf pics of book blogs are something akin to book porn?) I then found I can’t post pictures on my blog, which is just as well. I’m hard put enough to post regularly without something else to obsess nerdishly over. It is also just as well, because of those ten, I read only five. Of those, I loved only one; several of the others I didn’t even much like. Additionally, I veered off my list to read seven others from the shelves, nearly all of which I liked a great deal. (Several of which were quick-read graphic novels, in case this sounds more impressive than it is.)

I am reminded once again that online book challenges aren’t for me. I’ve begun using Gurulib to log my books and my considerable to read/watch/listen titles. My hope for this year (I prefer hopes to goals; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a simple transposition makes them gaols) is to read two shelf books a month, to continue my library patronage, and to keep book buying to a minimum. I count over 100 shelf books (gulp) so even if I manage my hope, I still will reduce my home stash by less than a quarter. But this is my annual memo to self that I hope to shop and select from the home shelves as I can, rather than haring off after every challenge and alluring coupon.