Booknotes: June 2010

Continued to read, slowly, big chunks here and there, my two books on crows: Crow Planet and Caw of the Wild. In Caw, the author makes the acquaintance of her neighborhood crows (whom she comes to know by sight and personalities) by tossing peanuts onto her roof every day at the same time. This amused and delighted me, because the crows here fly passes over our yard every morning to see if I have chucked our bread crusts out the back door yet. I started clicking my tongue when I put out the crusts, and now if I walk out back in the morning and click, I’ll hear the sentry crow, perched in our neighbor’s tree with an eye on our yard, call a heads-up to his fellows. I get a little thrill of delight every time.

To Serve Them All My Days by R. F. Delderfield (a reread, only half finished at the end of June).

The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. I have not managed to be coherent about it yet.

Mindblind by Jennifer Roy. ARC sent by publisher. YA fiction about a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome. Mentioned here.

The Whisper of Glocken by Carol Kendall. Sequel to The Gammage Cup. From my notes: “Even better than Gammage, though The Firelings still holds the top spot in my heart. I want to write at more length about Kendall’s beguiling, quirky, suspenseful books, especially her fondness for bands of unlikely heroes whose faults turn out, Meg Murry-like, to be their strengths. For now I’ll just say that I highly recommend all three of these novels as family read-alouds or as satisfying read-alones for boys, girls, and fantasy-loving adults.”

A God Somewhere by John Arcudi, illustrated by Peter Snejbjerg (graphic novel).

Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles by Margaret Leslie Davis (parts).

Now it’s July. Three weeks to Comic-con. That’ll shape my reading choices this month.