Reading post: Books from the pile by my nightstand, part 3

March has ended and we are back from our spring break trip, so it is time for another reading update. I chose five more books from the pile by my nightstand to read in March, four of which I finished.

1. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean. I'd been meaning to read this for a long time, so it was a relief to finally get it over with. The title story is supposed to be the best, but it's all about fishing, and I'm not very interested in fishing. I did like the movie (which I got from the library), especially Brad Pitt as Maclean's doomed brother Paul. I tend to forget that Brad Pitt isn't just a pretty face. And I enjoyed the scenes of people fishing much more than the descriptions in the book. I also loved that at the end of the movie they said no fish were harmed in the making of the movie. The fish may not have enjoyed being caught, but at least they were released.
   
   The story I liked better was the third and last, titled "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky." Maclean was terrible with titles (except for the title story), and this story is too long and goes on and on forever, but at the end I was moved by it, more so than by the title story. But I also borrowed the movie, and although it's OK, I thought Sam Elliott was totally miscast as Bill Bell and the movie as a whole was not magical the way the story was.
   
   I am not keeping this book. I'm glad I finally read it, and I would recommend it, in part, but I don't need to have it in my collection. (And if I change my mind, I can always pick up another copy at Goodwill.)
   
   
2. Loving Little Egypt by Thomas McMahon. I can't remember why or where I picked this up, but it probably interested me because it was fiction about scientists, a genre that I kinda sorta like -- kinda sorta because it's usually not done very well. I'd say this novel is middling. The hero, Mourly Vold, is too perfect, and the ending is too happy. But there's a lot of real science mixed in, and the portraits of the real scientists and inventors (Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison) are fun. I would read one of McMahon's other novels (he wrote four). Looking him up, I learned that he died quite young, at 55. He was a professor at Harvard, a successful inventor, and married with two children. That all fits with his generally rosy view of the world in the book. I'm not going to keep this, but I enjoyed it. Since it's our book group book for April, I'll be interested to see what the others think of it.
   
   
3. True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne. Another book that I've had sitting around forever. I wanted to read it, but I'd picked it up a few times and set it down again. Dunne was trying to be Raymond Chandler, and he failed. In fact, his efforts show how hard it is to be Raymond Chandler. I thought there were too many characters, too many Catholic men involved with the church in some way, too many policemen -- I could not keep them straight, and I've never had trouble keeping the characters in a Raymond Chandler novel straight. I didn't find the ending very compelling, though I know I was supposed to. The bottom line, for me, was the interesting fact that Dunne couldn't write as well as his wife, Joan Didion. Didion had her flaws as a writer, but she was the real thing, and I'm not so sure about her husband.
   
   I got the movie from the library and Rocket Boy and I watched it the night before we left on our trip. He'd seen it before, but found it confusing. It IS a confusing movie, but if you've also read the book, it starts to make sense, even though there are a lot of differences between the book and the movie -- including a different murderer.
   
   
4. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Yet another book that's been sitting in that pile a LONG time, this is one I didn't really want to read, but thought I should. A blogger I sometimes read is a big fan of Walker Percy and this book, and knowing that was enough to make me think I should read it. Also, it won the National Book Award. I finished it just before we left on our trip, and I'm glad I did -- although I didn't like it at first, it had kind of grown on me by the end. But I'm not going to keep it. My copy is in bad shape, so it'll go back in a little free library, which is where I think I got it.
   

Book #5, the one that didn't get finished, was A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre. I tried and tried to read it and I don't know what was wrong, but I simply could not finish it. I couldn't even read very much of it. I think I read about 20 pages. I brought it on our trip and tried to read it every day and every night and Failed. It's supposed to be very good, and the movie made of it is supposed to be very good. Oh well. Sometimes books just don't work for me. 

Fortunately, on the fourth night of our trip we stayed in an old hotel that had a couple of bookcases in it that were little free libraries. That is, they weren't labeled as such, but one had a note on it that said "Take a book, leave a book," so yeah, they were little free libraries.

And so, I stuck the Le Carre book in one of the bookcases and waved goodbye. Someone else will enjoy it, I'm sure. (I can actually see it in this photo if I zoom in, but I don't think anyone else will be able to spot it. It's on the second shelf from the top, toward the right.)

There were numerous possible replacements for it in the bookcases, including two more Walker Percy books. But I don't think I'm shaping up to be a big Walker Percy fan. Instead I chose The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt. It's a sort of biography, part of a series of books called Great Discoveries that I'd never heard of before. After reading some of this one, I'm thinking I'd like to look for some of the others. It's so far (I'm on page 81) very interesting. So it's going to be my first book for April. I don't know if I'll keep it or not!

For the rest of April, we leave behind the pile by the nightstand (fortunately much smaller now), and move to the shelves close to my bed (see photo). This is a tricky area, because for the most part books end up here only if I love them. The top two shelves contain favorite old children's books: the Betsy-Tacy books, the Anne of Green Gables books, the Little House books, etc., etc.

The third shelf down is half poetry and half ghost stories, and if that combination doesn't make sense to you, well, you're not me.

The fourth shelf down has books that I like to reread a lot: my Barbara Pyms, of course, but others, too, things I turn to when I feel lost: novels by Laurie Colwin, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Shirley Jackson, and some oddities -- well, anyway, it's a shelf of comfort.

Not very many unread books on these four shelves, in other words.

But occasionally a book makes it onto these shelves without being read, so I thought I'd go after them. Nothing should be allowed here if it's unread. So here is my pile for April: a children's book, a classic poetry collection, a horror novel, and a couple of memoirs. In addition to deciding whether or not to keep these books, I will have to decide whether they belong on these shelves.

My book group didn't meet in March, so I've already read the book for April (see above), and I don't plan to read another presidential biography until May or June. So I may get a little free reading time this month. That would be nice! We'll see how it goes.