It’s the last day of school. It’s been a tough, tough week. The last week of school is always complicated. The schools always plan many activities that require a parent in the audience with a camera. This last week of school was especially complicated, because of special ed bureaucracy nonsense and Jonah’s broken wrist. I dodged out of this morning’s reception for Ian’s graduation a little early, because I need a couple of quiet hours before I go on parent duty.
What’s should I read? I need to escape for a bit. Anybody read anything good today?
Apt. 11d 
I’m getting into Nero Wolfe books. I’m going to try to be more like him. I require a well-located brownstone, a whole bunch of beer and gourmet meals, and somebody from Ohio to narrate and grab witnesses for me.
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That was me.
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We knew.
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The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson was great.
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Have you read JK Rowling as Robert Galbraith? I started the second Cormoran Strike book last night.
If you like romance writing with a feminist twist making money for a social cause, try the book mentioned here. I haven’t read it yet but Knox, O’Keefe, and Rivers are auto-buys for me. The editor is a former academic and FoaF/FB friend.
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I’ve just re-read the Betsy/Tacy books, the high school series. I’ve found them particularly interesting as a foil for modern middle-school antics. Betsy’s “crowd” and the building of it, and the role that boys play in their lives all seem to point to some universals (though, perhaps coming developmentally earlier these days).
Also re-read some Anne of Green Gables, and other LM Montgomery and Agatha Christie. I like to re-read when I’m looking for escape, though the precise degree of familiarity required can be difficult to titrate.
I read fantasy, and fairly recently, I have found the Mistborn and Stormlight series, by Brandon Sanderson, the Name of the wind, by Patrick Rothfus, and the Riyria series by Michael Sullivan absorbing as easy, escapist reads.
For more serious reading, I’ve been reading the original Dweck papers (Carol Dweck, Mindset), the original marshmallow test papers (Mischel et al), research on tracking (USAF academy study, Carrel, Sacerdote, West, 2013), and research on “adolescent pseudomature behavior” (Allen, Schad et al, 2014). The second two were both found as links in NY Times articles, which I love, the ability to read the research behind the news reports.
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PS: All those journal articles are available without subscriptions, though some only at the authors’ sites.
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I just read What’s Up Bernadette for my book club. The author used to write for Arrested Development. It is a very very quick read and quite funny. (Has this book been mentioned here before or did I just read too many amazon reviews?)
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I hear you on the death of me time. I’m more fortunate in that I have excuses to go into work (meet the new colleague, check in with my grad student, check out more library books) at least some of the time. Otherwise, I juggle my reading and writing in between the needs of Autistic Youngest and our Rottweiler.
For reading recs? I really liked “The Monuments Men” (I haven’t seen the movie but the book was standalone excellent) and I had great fun with Shannon Hale’s books, “Austenland” as well as “Midnight in Austenland”. The latter is a rare example of a sequel which is better than a good opening. Both of Hale’s books are light, fun reading.
Also, anything by Rainbow Rowell. Counting down the days until her latest, “Landline” releases, but I really enjoyed “Attachments” as well as her fabulous YA titles.
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Ooh, Landline coming out soon. Yay! I was meh on Attachments (which I read first) but intrigued enough to check out E&P, which I loved.
I really have to put down the laptop and go read more Silkworm (the Galbraith novel). It really makes me appreciate Rowling as a writer; she’s not experimental or post-modern or transcendent or imagistic. She’s just really really good at what she does.
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I second the Nero Wolfe recommendation; I’ve read them all and they’re what I go back to when I really need to relax. I liked the Bernadette book, which my frivolous book club read and all enjoyed. What you should really read is John Williams’ Stoner (not about a “stoner” but a man named Stoner), which my serious book club all loved. In addition, several of the book club husbands also read this book – something that rarely happens – and they all loved it too. As it happens, the NYT agrees, though I read it first (though I have to acknowledge that my mother and sister loved it and recommended it to me):
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I haven’t read anything escapist in a long time. If you want intellectually interesting–or interesting to me, at least–I read Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, and I’m reading Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy. I had never realized the change that took place in the legal organization of British agriculture between 1500 and 1900: how the yeomanry (in a legal sense) disappeared, replaced by a structure of gentry landlords, who received cash rents not feudal dues, farmers who managed large acreages under long-term leases, and agricultural laborers, who worked for the farmers in return for wages.
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The first stages of that are commonly called the enclosure movement. Now that refers to one of the suspicious signs we’re supposed to look for when opening the mail.
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True, but I had vaguely thought of enclosure in England as being similar to the same process in Sweden and Denmark (which occurred much later), in which the former freeholders ended up as landowners. In England, the large prosperous farmers of the 19th century, though possibly successors to the yeomanry in some social or political sense, were in law mostly leasehold tenants.
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They really screwed the poor there. I thought that was pretty well known as one of the precursors to industrialization. They were much worse to the Irish.
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