Book report for August 2024

This month’s report feels skimpy. Dr Essai had to deal with several distractions. He had an actual magazine assignment with an actual deadline—yikes!—and that took time away from reading. He had to put time into preparing for his ongoing Greenland adventure. Plus, many hours went down the drain before the abandonment of a novel considered by many to be an American classic. These things happen.

Book links send you to Dr Essai’s Bibliotheque on Bookshop.org. When you order a book, Bookshop.org passes money along to independent bookstores and tosses spare change to the doctor as commission. Winners all around.

What have you been reading, Joggle Nation?

Completed

• On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence, Robert M. Pirsig. Hard to imagine this book will mean much if you haven’t read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. But if you have, this compendium of excerpts from those books, and from letters, lectures, and interviews, will convince you of the seriousness of Pirsig’s pursuit of the metaphysics of quality. Mind-expanding.
• This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, Gretel Ehrlich. Ehrlich spent seven years traveling about the Arctic, principally Greenland, and one outcome was this excellent account of the Greenland ice and the people who somehow survive on it. It takes a while to gain speed, but it gets hold of you. She writes some exquisite sentences and brings deep knowledge to her subject.

In progress

• The Best American Essays 2002, Stephen Jay Gould (ed.)
• The Good German, Joseph Kanon
• The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, Seth Godin
• The Wolf Age: The Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Battle for the North Sea Empire, Tore Skeie

Abandoned

• The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald. What an absurd novel. A cascade of overwrought sentences about worthless people—could have been titled The Vapid and Insufferable.

Purchased

• So Much Blue, Percival Everett
• On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence, Robert M. Pirsig
• Concerning the Future of Souls, Joy Williams
• Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton
• The Glorious American Essay, Phillip Lopate (ed.)
• The Good German, Joseph Kanon