One of the favorite parts of the year are here. The Christmas lights are twinkling. There is magic in the air. I get to go back and revel in the books that have made it so. Some books evoke a feeling, and trying to capture that is a joy in itself.
Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives.
This year, I get the strange sense of being in a floating Universe. I seem to have whizzed past centuries reading things in the past, zoomed and ducked out of alternate worlds with all the science fiction and fantasy adventures, while being thoroughly grounded in making sense of today’s world with its AI, and its technological advances.
I get the familiar sense of time slipping through the sieve with extra large holes once again, but then, will it always be like this? I hope so, for in its speed lies its charm.
Here are some of the notable ones – I find the neat classifications all being thrown out – every year, I seem to have a different classification system and therein lies the charm. Nothing is immutable and all that.
I also see that I have dozens of unfinished posts for some of these books that have never made it to the blog. Oh well! I need to take inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson I suppose.
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
Peek back into time:
- A Sense of Life – Antoine Saint Exupery
- The thrifty guide to medieval times : a handbook for time travelers – Jonathan W Stokes, Illustrated by Xavier Bonet
- History Flashers – Plagues and Pandemics – By Kate Messner, Illustrated by Falynn Koch
- Case closed? : nine mysteries unlocked by modern science / written by Susan Hughes ; illustrated by Michael Wandelmaier
- The Worst Children’s Jobs in History – Tony Robinson
The World Around Us:
- Embroideries – Marjane Satrapi (Iranian women and generational wisdom)
- What the Elephant Knows – Eric Dinerstein (into the forests of Nepal)
“The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest (people) of the past centuries.” ― René Descartes
Non-Fiction:
- Lives of the Musicians – Good Times, Bad Times (And What the Neighbors Thought) – By Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt
- Flights of fancy : defying gravity by design & evolution / Richard Dawkins ; illustrated by Jana Lenzova
- Around the world in 80 plants – Jonathan Drori, Illustrated by Lucille Clerc
- Putting the Science in Science Fiction – compiled by Dan Cobolt – Brilliant – sections on mental health, nanotechnology, marine life etc
- Life in the Ocean – The Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle – By Claire A Nivola (Author of Planting the Trees of Kenya) – Booklegger award
- The Vocation of a Novelist – Haruki Murakami on Writing
Beautiful & Informative:
- Nanoscale – visualising an invisible world – Kenneth S Deffeyes, Stephen E Deffeyes
- Atlas of the Invisible – James Cheshire & Oliver Uberti
- A celebration of Beatrix Potter : art and letters by more than 30 of today’s favorite children’s book illustrators
- In the woods / David Elliott ; illustrated by Rob Dunlavey
Alternate Worlds/ Science Fiction/Magic:
- The Three-Body Problem – By Cixin Liu, Translated by Ken Liu
- Malamander – Thomas Taylor
- The Apothecary : By Maile Meloy (Booklegger)
- Many Worlds of Albie Bright – Christopher Edge
- Crane Husband – Kelly BarnHill
- Harry Potter Universe (All the Young Dudes – both from @MsKingBean89 & @RollerCoasterWords – Remus and Sirius perspectives of the Marauders’ Era, and a few books of Harry Potter series themselves) 🐺Moony 🌷, 🐀Wormtail ❄️, 🐕🦺Padfoot 🍁 & 🦌Prongs 🍀
- The twelve topsy-turvy, very messy days of Christmas / James Patterson and Tad Safran
- The House on the Cerulean Sea – T J Klune
Tech Tech:
- Impromptu : Amplifying our humanity through AI and GPT-4 – Reid Hoffman
- The Age of AI and our Human Future – Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher
- Do/Design : Why Beauty is Key to everything – Alan Moore
Inspirations:
- Vincent and Theo – The Van Gogh Brothers – By Deborah Heiligman, Phil Fox, et al.
- On the Move – Oliver Sacks
- Maggie Smith : a biography / Michael Coveney
- Just Jerry – How Drawing Shaped my Life – Jerry Pinkney
- Teddy : the remarkable tale of a president, a cartoonist, a toymaker and a bear / James Sage, Lisk Feng
- Listen to the Echoes – Interviews of Ray Bradbudy – By Sam Weller
Books that ought to be classified as warm cups of tea 🙂
- News from Thrush Green – Miss Read
- The White Lady – by Jacqueline Winspear
- Much Obliged Jeeves – P G Wodehouse
- A Song of Comfortable Chairs – Alexander McCall Smith
- What would Maisie Do? – Jacqueline Winspear
“Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.” ― Louisa May Alcott
- In a Jar – Deborah Marker
- Grandude’s Green Submarine – Paul McCartney Illustrated by Kathryn Durst – brilliantly written and illustrated
- If I had a Gryphon – Vikki VanSickle, illustrated by Cale Atkinson
- The Mermaid’s Purse – a book on the love for books and libraries
- Once upon a Goat – quirky fable on a king and queen asking for a kid who has golden hair, soft curls
- By the light of the moon – by Frann Preston Gannee
- Mabel a Mermaid Fable
- Dozens more 🙂
I hope 2024 continues to be as varied and inspirational in its moments of magic and learning for all of us! I shall put in a comment the complete list of books. I only put in a few in the post here.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Dr. Seuss
Happy Reading!
Nourish-n-Cherish 