Bookspotting

Stuff I’ve seen my kids reading recently:

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

The Saturdays and other Melendy books by Elizabeth Enright.

175 Amazing Nature Experiments by G. Morgan. (Oh that’s just freaky. I went to Amazon to check on the exact title of this book; Beanie’s been carrying it around all week. I knew it was called something about nature experiments. When I found the right one and clicked on its page, Amazon informed me that “you purchased this item on July 13, 1999.” I don’t know what’s freakier: that Amazon knows my buying history so intimately, or that it was ten years ago that I bought that book.)

The Art Lesson by Tomie de Paola.

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald.

Peter Pan by James Barrie.

The Crochet Handbook.

Plus the usual assortment of Warriors books, Agatha Christie, Showcase Presents, and Muse magazine.

I Found the Dirt

From Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, that is. It turned out to be a biography of Mötley Crüe. And so, there in the title of his collection of a year’s worth of literary columns, Nick Hornby has given a nod to what seems to be the high and low points of his year’s reading. Marilynne Robinson’s The Housekeeping vs. Mötley Crüe: The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band.

I just took a look at my 2008 book log to see what my own high and low of last year would be, and it can’t be done! There wasn’t a single dud on the list. I didn’t read a lot last year, but what I read was quality. On the whole list there’s only one book I didn’t love, but I recognize that it was well written, penetrating, ambitious (in a good way), and thoughtful. I liked a lot of things about it, but one of its subplots was creepy in the extreme, and I thought the ending was massively, maddeningly flawed.

How’s that for politely cryptic?