“Le chien jaune” by Georges Simenon

Check it out! I've read a book in French! (Did it take me almost six years? Yes. Yes, I literally started reading this book in 2019. This teeny, teeny tiny book of only 183 pages.)

Here's how it went. 

1. I took 5.5 years of French in school, which was only enough to make a bank clerk giggle when I said, "Je voudrais échanger de l'argent." (I still don't know what I did wrong there. Was it just my accent? Or did I somehow word it the way a pirate would, asking for pieces of eight?) I always intended to get better at French, so maybe next time I ask a waiter "Avez-vous du beurre," he won't superciliously reply, "Oui, nous avons du beurre" instead of just bringing me some dang butter. 

2. I took a few decades off from learning French and probably forgot most of the little bit I'd learned in school.

3. In September 2018 I discovered Duolingo, and started learning French again. 

4. Sam told me that reading books in French would accelerate my progress. On one of our too-rare but always-fun visits to Half Price Books, I discovered a teeny tiny foreign language section, and picked up this slim mystery novel called "The Yellow Dog." 

5. I tried reading it and found it very very difficult. I felt like I had to look up almost every word (or ask Sam if I was getting it right, which made it feel too much like work for him). I started keeping a list of new words in a little notebook . . . that list goes on for pages and pages. Some words appear on the list more than once, because I forgot that I had already learned them. 

6. I was initially trying to read a little bit every night before I went to sleep, but I don't think I stuck with that for very long. I don't remember for sure, but I probably let this project lapse for quite some time. 

7. About a year and a half ago, I decided to get back to it, and decided on the more reasonable schedule of once a week, working through one or two pages in each session. I also started writing down an English translation. (Believe me, the end result is not impressive. But it did help me keep the story straight in my mind.)

8. Now here I am, at the end! 

Did it work? Did my progress accelerate? Hard to say. I continued needing to look words up until the very last page. Maybe, just maybe, by the end it was more because I wasn't sure I was getting it right, as opposed to having no idea what was going on. And possibly I could work my way through a page marginally faster by the end than I could at the beginning. It HAD to have done some good, right? I mean, it can't possibly have slowed my progress. But I must admit it didn't do as much good as I had hoped and expected. 

So what about the story itself? It's part of a series built around a particular character, a police inspector named Jules Maigret (or Le Commissaire Maigret), who is a less flamboyant and less obviously arrogant Hercules Poirot. He is called in to investigate a series of incidents linked to l'hôtel de l'Amiral in Concarneau: Mostaguen, the wine dealer, is shot (but not killed) through the letter box of an abandoned house on his way home from the cafe; his friend Yves le Pommeret has drinks in the cafe, goes home for dinner, then dies of strychnine poisoning; their acquaintance, the journalist Jean Servieres (also called Goyard), disappears, leaving behind his bloodstained car. What is happening in this formerly sleepy seaside town? Leave it to Maigret to get to the bottom of this mysterious business.

Obviously I was more interested in what this book could do for my French than in the story itself, but it helped that the book wasn't dry and dull. And I plan to keep going! I have three more French books lined up and waiting for me. Get ready, because I'll be reviewing the next one in about six years . . . 

“The Whisperwicks, Volume I: The Labyrinth of Lost and Found” by Jordan Lees

The day I’m too old for children’s books will be a very dark day indeed. 

So says the surprising Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth. And suddenly I'm feeling off-kilter because I hadn't really been enjoying reading this book. It has plenty of elements that I love, taking place in a magical world discovered on the other side of a doorway in the basement of a bookshop. It's full of adventure, intrigue and mystery. But somehow this book wasn't hitting it for me. I couldn't possibly, finally, actually, be . . . old??

We bought this book purely for the cover art, which is by Isobelle Ouzman. If you're not familiar with her work, you really should check it out. But, being a book that we own that I had not yet read, it ended up on my TBR shelf (which is actually multiple shelves) and I decided it was time to give it a go. So it's a little disappointing that it turned out to not be my thing, but I aim to keep it on display!

“I’ve never met a reader who wasn’t special in one way or another. When you read, you connect with the world . . . As it once was, as it is, and as it one day might be. To read, to be curious, is the most astonishing kind of magic.”

“Insignifiant Events in the Life of a Cactus” by Dusti Bowling

So get this. My 12-year-old baby read this book in school last month, then decided I needed a copy of my own to read. He conspired with Sam to get me one, it arrived on Monday, and Baby gave it to me as a surprise gift. Which marks the first time in about 15 years that one of my kids has been so strongly affected by a book that they coerced me to read it; I can remember Bookworm Child (who is now Bookworm Adult) reading a children’s novel and then telling me, “You have GOT to read this book!!” (Although now I can’t remember which book that was. I was sure I blogged about it! But I searched for it to no avail.)

I love surprise books! And it's even better when it's a book that I enjoy. I'm sure I never would have picked this book up (or even heard about it) on my own, but it definitely wasn't a chore to read. It was actually quite interesting. It's about a 13-year-old girl named Aven who moves from Kansas to Arizona in the middle of the school year so that her parents can manage a failing theme park called Stagecoach Pass. Such a move might be hard on any adolescent, but it's especially so for a girl who was born with no arms. Aven is very self-sufficient and has learned to do amazing things with her feet (including writing and playing guitar), but being "unarmed" certainly sets her apart as different. But instead of being mired in self-pity and moping about all the things she can't do, Aven is spunky and sarcastically funny and doesn't let her armlessness stop her. 

I think my favorite part about this book was how, every morning, Baby asked me how much I'd read and what I thought. You should have seen his eyes bug out on Thursday morning when I told him I'd already finished it!

“The Tree” by John Fowles and Frank Horvat

It's strange how memory works (or doesn’t). Sam read this book years and years ago, and he loved it. Then, a while back, we bought a copy and started reading it aloud to each other  . . . and it wasn't very long before Sam said, "Wow, this book is kind of boring." So we set it aside, but (as usual) I always intended to finish it.

When I finally pulled The Tree out again (though not to read aloud), Sam smiled and said, “I love that book!” He still remembered his initial experience with it and had forgotten all about the boredom since then. 

This book is more like a long essay, with each facing page a different tree photographed by Frank Horvat. It was first published in 1979, and while the photographs seem to me to be "of their time" and may not be the type of art you want to hang on the wall in large format, each one has its own subtle beauty. The writing could be described in the same way. It is a call to protect our natural world--more for the wildness of it than specimen preservation, arboretum-style--which I think may be even more warranted now than it was decades ago. It ends with a fascinating description of Whistman's Wood, which I would love to see in person someday, but for now I'll have to be satisfied by the Wikipedia entry.

By alex jane from london, uk - ancient woodland, CC BY-SA 2.0

“Cheese, Wine, and Bread” by Katie Quinn

Cheese, Wine, and Bread is part travelogue, part memoir, and part exploration of the most delicious of human creations, with a few recipes scattered throughout. The title makes it pretty obvious what the main topics are; author Katie Quinn delves into how each of these things are made, going to England to learn about cheese, Italy to learn about wine, and France to learn about bread.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this book a cookbook, especially considering the fact that I tried one of the recipes (yes, just one!)—the “drunken spaghetti”—and did not love it. If the first recipe in a book is a dud, I am hardly tempted to try any more of them. 

My sweet friend RME gave this book to me for Christmas 2021. It took me a while to make my way through it! I wasn't consistently reading it at first, but I finally found a rhythm with reading a few minutes of it every night at bedtime. I know I was reading it regularly by May 2024, because our visit to Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden was inspired by this book! 

Speaking of inspiration, this book did NOT inspire me to up my bread-making game. Can more amazing bread than mine be made? Yes, I’m sure it can. Can it be made more easily and efficiently than mine? Well, if this book is any indication: no. No, it cannot. So I plan to remain content with my great-if-not-amazing, easy-and-efficient loaves. As long as they're good enough for Sam, they're good enough for me!

“Taft” by Ann Patchett

Another one moves from the "I'd Like To Read All Of Her Books" group to the "I've Read All Of Her Books" group! 

Ann Patchett's writing is magical. While I haven't unequivocally loved all of her novels (see Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant, though these were still Very Good), I have found most of them to be brilliant, beautiful gems. Taft is up there with the best of them. 

Taft is the story of John Nickel, a former drummer who now manages a bar on Beale Street. He has a nine-year-old son, Franklin, who has moved to Miami with his mother Marian. Nickel hires a young waitress named Fay Taft, whose life (and that of her brother Carl) quickly gets tangled up with Nickel's. And there's a parallel story running through it all: Fay and Carl growing up back east, out in Coalfield, before the sudden and unexpected death of their father.

So have I done it? Have I really read them all? Well, apparently Ann Patchett collaborated on a book called Nashville: Scenes from the New American South, which (although it was published in 2018) I only heard about for the first time about ten minutes ago. I'll probably end up reading that someday, just because I can't not, but for today I'll give myself a pass so she can be in The Club. I'll just change it from "I've Read All Of Her Books" to "I've Read All Of Her Novels." 

“The Heavens” by Sandra Newman

I found this book really depressing and I’m failing to see any redeeming qualities in it. I don’t mean that it was terribly written, or that it was boring, but what I mean is that I could not find a good excuse in the story for being so depressing. (I found the excuse in the author’s acknowledgments, though.)

This, I think, is a difficult book to summarize. It's a love story between Kate and Ben, who live charmed lives of perfect happiness in New York City when they first meet. But life is complicated by the fact that Kate repeatedly dreams about being Emilia in 1593, in England. And life is further complicated by the fact that, every time Kate wakes from this dream, something about the world is a little bit worse. Things get darker, and darker, and darker still.

I didn't see this as I was reading, but maybe the story is an extreme metaphor for romantic relationships in general. At the beginning, everything is lovely and beautiful, but time has a way of exposing the ugly bits. And when all that's left is ugly bits, it takes a conscious decision to stick with it, to stay, to grit your teeth and bear it even though you know there isn't any way to save this world.

For the record, I want to point out that I don't see this as a metaphor for my relationship! 

“House of Leaves” by Mark Z Danielewski

This book took me more than a decade to read. 

No, really. It wasn’t the book itself that was the problem (or at least that’s mostly true); it was my timing. I first started reading House of Leaves right before my life turned upside down (actually, with hindsight, I can see that what happened at that time is that my life turned right side up after having been upside down for years) and I could not continue reading it. It became tinged with sadness.

But I always intended to finish it someday, and so I have. Although even the finishing of it was beset with difficulties. First, I had to start again at the beginning. It had been far too long, and I remembered nothing. Then, after I had gotten perhaps halfway through, we went on a ten-day trip, and if you are trying to pack light, this is not the book to bring. That was last May. I did not touch the book again until this past week.

And the reading of this book was . . . an experience. It reminded me of reading Ulysses, but it was simultaneously both more and less creative. (The similarity was in the inscrutability.) HoL is, shall we say, very meta (in the pre-Zuckerberg sense). The story at the very center is The Navidson Record: a family moves into a house and finds out that it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This starts as merely an intriguing curiosity but ends up as a horror show, and it is all recorded on film. A mysterious scholar named Zampanò analyzes the film and leaves an unfinished manuscript that is bursting with eclectic quotes and academic citations. LA tattoo apprentice Johnny Truant finds this manuscript and attempts to transcribe it, adding his own experiences along the way. The book itself is full of footnotes and appendices and even a 42-page index that I think might possibly include almost every word in the text (even and is in there, though not the). Many pages have "creative" text placement (upside-down, sideways, diagonal in the corners) and there are even some full-color copies of pages scribbled with Zampano's original notations (many of which I had to use my cell phone camera to zoom in on in order to read). Towards the end, Sam looked over my shoulder and said, Ugh, I feel sorry for you reading that. 

So, yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to reading a plain and simple book next. 

“The Last Supper” by Rachel Cusk

The Last Supper is a summer-long memoir of a three-month visit to Italy.

This book called to me for two reasons. One, I’m a sucker for reading about travels in Italy. Reading about traveling in Italy is obvs not as fun as experiencing it firsthand, but it's definitely cheaper, and I can fit it into my usual daily life. While I read, I reminisce about my own travels in Italy, I daydream that I'm the one I'm reading about, and I tuck ideas into the back of my mind for the next time I go there (if I am so lucky). 

Two, I’m also a sucker for Rachel Cusk. I have a list of favorite authors, who appear there for a variety of reasons: either they have written a book (or books!) that I love, or I have read all of the novels they've had published (or I aspire to do so), or I would put anything they publish on my TBR. (There is considerable overlap between these three categories.) Cusk is #5 on the list. 

But what I most want to remember about The Last Supper appears on page 196, and I will quote it here:

The longer we stay in Italy, the less we are able to conduct ourselves like visitors. Yet to live here, really live, would involve the same things as living anywhere. There would be school and routine, anxiety and conformity, judgment and separation, success and failure. There would be all the ripples of effect that are sent out when people establish themselves among other people. . . To live in another country requires a fundamental acceptance of things that are true in all countries. . . [People] seem to believe that when they moved, the bad things would remain behind. And perhaps they did: but the good things stayed there also.

Maybe that's a bit depressing when considering a dream of living somewhere else, somewhere better. How many times have I been on vacation, blissful and relaxed, looking around and thinking, Wouldn't it be great if we could live here? I typically follow that thought with the pragmatic downer of But if we lived here it wouldn't be like this. This doesn't stop me from dreaming, though. I just want to do it with my eyes wide open.

Cool side note: This book was published the year I started my blog! Which was also the year I first traveled to Italy.

“Case Closed” by Gerald Posner

Case Closed was first published in 1993, but I only recently heard about it from an interview with Gerald Posner on one of the older episodes of SGU (specifically, I believe it was #435 which was recorded 11/16/2013). I was intrigued enough by what I heard in the interview, especially the parts about how the author doesn't ascribe to any of the conspiracy theories and how several of the Rogues had read the book and were impressed by it, that I got myself a copy to read. 

This is an extensive and detailed look into the assassination of JFK, focusing on Lee Harvey Oswald. I'm no history buff, nor have I ever been one of those who is obsessed with the details of that fateful day in 1963. And obviously I can't answer the "where were you when" question (I may be getting old, but I'm not quite that old). But I have actually been to The Sixth Floor (a museum in the old Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas), and the assassination has always seemed mystery-shrouded, swirling with speculation and questions. 

This book scratched whatever minor itch I may have had about JFK's assassination. I found it really comprehensive, logical and reasonable. I guess if it were in any way lopsided, or if it left out any important information, I wouldn't know; but it sure seemed to cover all aspects and left me certain of its merits. I would be curious to know whether any conspiracy theorists could actually successfully attack it (though not really curious enough to put any effort into finding out). 

“Nobody Wants Your Sh*t” by Messie Condo

Now, was that really necessary?

Despite the fact that the note at the beginning of Nobody Wants Your Sh*t assured me that it wouldn’t just rehash all the same info from the previous book… it turned out it pretty much does. Reading it was necessary for me (I had to know what it said, just in case it said something useful). But I didn’t really come away from it with any new information.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. NWYS takes the first book’s question “does this make me happy?” and adds “what happens to it when I’m gone?” The concept of "death cleaning" is introduced: getting rid of all the crap that you don't really want anyway, to avoid passing that responsibility on when you pass on. And it addresses the issue of future plans for all the crap that you really do want, taking a good hard look at whether it will immediately turn in to crap that no one wants after you're gone. 

I was on board with the idea of death cleaning long before I started reading the book, and I was looking for concrete ideas and instructions. (I definitely didn't need Chapter 1, which is the motivation to do death cleaning.) Here are a few tidbits I noted: 

• The author lists fifteen benefits of “death cleaning”, and suggests you focus on the benefit that “calls to you”. I’m going with “a deeper appreciation of what you have” and “a clutter-free space you can be proud of.”
• Fear is not the best motivator; pick a motivator that makes you feel good instead. 
• Make declutterring a priority.
• Start small: declutter for five minutes a day, or get rid of one thing at a time. 

Guess what? This book was the first thing I decluttered when I finished reading it. 

“tidy the f*ck up” by messie condo

It’s been almost ten years since Marie Kondo both baffled and inspired me, but during that time I’m sure I’ve accumulated way more stuff than I’ve tossed. And I’ve never tidied a room, or even a closet, by removing everything from it and putting it all in one big pile to sort through. I’ve never been tempted to empty my purse nightly, or to thank my old belongings for their years of service before dropping them off at Goodwill. 

I have, however, retained the desire to pare down and tidy up. So obviously when I first saw this *new tidying book (*from 2019), I was tempted to give it a try. On closer inspection, I saw that it is marketed as a parody (which I could have guessed from the author's name if nothing else) so I initially gave it a pass. I don't have anything against a little humor, but I assumed this book would be heavy on the laughs and light on the actual helpful tidying ideas. 

But I kept seeing this book, and eventually I gave in and bought it. I think that's mainly because there is a sequel related to "decluttering before you die"--I think I've already mentioned that's a life goal of mine--but I figured I should start at the beginning. 

This is a quick, fun read, to the extent that I realized I was enjoying my way through it so fast that I wasn't really retaining anything, so I slowed down and started taking notes. And now you will be the beneficiary of said notes. This, in brief, is "the american art of organizing your sh*t":

1. Get rid of sh*t that doesn't make you happy (and anything that is useless). Do you like it? Do you use it? Do you need it--REALLY need it? Does it fit into the life you want? If the answer to these questions is no, especially if it is something you could replace cheaply and easily, LET IT GO. That includes the "shoulds" (I should keep this because . . . ) Start with the easy stuff--leave sentimental items for later, when you've gotten good at tossing things. Finish this step before moving on to Step 2! (Note: I can not get on board with the Step 1 advice about books to only keep a "desert island" selection. I LOVE having shelves and shelves full of books in my house. Besides, the author also says "let your home reflect who you are" and I'm nothing if not a reader and book-hoarder lover.) Obviously most of the work is in Step 1. 

2. Find a place for what's left. Store things where it makes sense! Keep it simple, and avoid stacking things: if you can't see it, you won't use it. Step 2 is the fun part (at least it is if you like to organize). 

3. Stop buying sh*t you don't need. This step is more of a mindset-change than a task, but that doesn't mean it won't be difficult. 

Some extra tips to remember: 

Don't expect instant gratification, but stop to appreciate the small victories. Don't aim for perfection, aim for happy. But to reach happy, you need to do some thinking. What makes you happy? Start thinking about how the things in your house make you feel, rather than focusing on how they look. Prioritize what's important to you. If you don't know what you want and why you want it, browse Pinterest or home decor magazines to try to figure out what you want from your space. The whole process will take work, and part of that work is getting past the laziness. You're never going to FEEL like doing it, so you need to just push through and DO it, knowing the result will be worth the effort. Because remember: mimosas are for winners!