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What I Read -- July 2020

"Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness" by Susannah Cahalan. Recommended by my sister. I accidentally got the audio book out of the library. 

"Mozart's Starling" by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Terry Windling recommended this one on her blog. I really appreciated the end notes being properly linked for a change. My favorite starling fact I learned is that the reason my dad (who owned a small plane) passionately hated starlings was because a flock of them had taken down an aircraft at Logan in 1960. 

LHC #85: "Your duck is my duck" by Deborah Eisenberg. Short stories, much more about character than plot. Really rich. I should read more of her. 

LHC #86: "Music, sense and nonsense: collected essays and lectures" by Alfred Brendel. Physical library book! I know nothing about piano and a lot of this was over my head so I had to make a schedule in order to finish it. I used Spotify to play him while I listened, which maybe helped? I don't know. 

Canadians beware: he kind of dissed a bit on Glenn Gould. 

LHC #87: "Bear" by Marion Engel. Another physical book! Every Canadian should read this book. It won a Governor General's award, despite being about a woman who has sex with a bear. Or maybe because of. Really good character, setting, etc. 

LHC #88: "Song for a new day" by Sarah Pinsker. I think I requested this on Overdrive without realizing it was already on my main TPL holds list (I had read an awesome short story). There was quite a wait. Found her on Spotify as background music for Luce. 

This book might need a trigger warning for pandemic talk? (One of the sub forms I filled out this month said they would reject pandemic stories unread to avoid triggering people in this time.) But I actually loved the treatment of post-pandemic world. One of MCs in my project Persephone is a professional musician, and there's a pandemic in that project, which is maybe why I'm finding it so hard to work on. What exactly are musicians supposed to do, sit inside, waiting for the pandemic to end? 

So, while I suppose some people might find this book triggering, I was amazed that it was so prescient. But also, what people say is wrong with zombie stories -- that there's a shockingly large percentage of the population that will insist there's nothing going on? SP missed that. Her population is remarkably compliant. I sort of wish there were less actual 2020 references, though. It was distracting. 
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