Book report for July 2024

A pair of very good books enlivened this month’s reading. When you follow a link to purchase a title from Bookshop.org, the doctor earns a cup full of nickels as commission. Plus, Bookshop returns money to independent booksellers, and who wouldn’t want that? As always, dear Jogglers, thank you for reading.

Completed

• James, Percival Everett. Superb retelling of Twain’s Huck Finn from the perspective of the runaway slave, Jim. By turns funny, sly, devastating, and enthralling.
• Gin: A Global History, Lesley Jacobs Solmonson. Short history of the juniper spirit. Worth a few evenings if you bring a prior interest.
• Wrong Norma, Anne Carson. Reading anything by Anne Carson is either mesmerizing for what she can do with language and how her mind works, or opaque and baffling. Wrong Norma is the latter. I’ll read anything by her because I never know what will turn up, but this book was mostly a puzzle.
• The Man in the Red Coat, Julian Barnes. A smart, inventive portrait of Belle Époque Paris refracted through the life of Samuel Pozzi, a singular figure in too many ways to enumerate and the subject of the John Singer Sargent portrait referred to by the title. Barnes is a master.
• The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, Sara Wheeler. Wheeler is a capable writer and intrepid reporter. This book has lots of interesting bits and sad stories about what has happened to indigenous people across the Arctic. But it lacks intent; I never did understand why the author wrote it. I waited for the book to cohere, and it never did.

In progress

• The Best American Essays 2002, Stephen Jay Gould (ed.)
• On Color, David Scott Kastan
• The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, Gretel Ehrlich

Purchased

• Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, Robert Wright