Some Novels I've Read

Mail! My favorite!
I got a package from my friend Tracy and her Sjölind's Chocolate House in Wisconsin, where she makes chocolates from bean to bar, as well making many other fine things, like knitted–coffee cup sleeves/wrist warmers I'm wearing, and linocuts--you can just see her print of a coffee cup.
The girlettes are most excited about the doll-sized Radio-Flyer wagon, to be featured at Halloween. (I'm wearing my black-cat Halloween shirt from the thrift store.)

I was inspired  by the upcoming visit of a pal who's never been here to start organizing my apartment.
I finally--after two years--finished organizing my books, including shelving all the Novels I've Read together, in alphabetical order.

I'd gotten rid of most of my books over time, and when I moved to HouseMate's in August 2019 I only owned a few shelves' worth. Then Covid closed libraries seven months later on St. Patrick's Day 2020, leaving me high and dry.
Once the thrift store reopened, I started bringing books home for myself. Insurance!
"As God is my witness, I'll never be bookless again!"

I've filled three tall bookshelves. "Novels I've Read" (not counting sci-fi) fill only one shelf.  I'll just show you them, here, because I love seeing other people's shelves.

My criteria for keeping books is that I'd read them again––some for comfort reading, say if I were sick (Less, by AS Greer)––or they're personally significant to gaze upon, even if I'd never read them again (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, which I loved at thirteen but now can't stomach).

•Jane Eyre is one of the first novels I read that stands up to reading every decade.

•I read Name of the Rose while bicycling through Ireland in 1986. Finished it one night at a hostel in an crumbling monastery--don't want to reread it, but looking at it takes me there!
•Novel without a Name (1995) by Duong Thu Huong is practically the only thing I've read about the Vietnam War from the pov of the North.

•I only just read Turtle Diary this summer--because I'd loved Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker--also his Frances the Badger books! What an amazing writer. I loved Turtle Diary--nothing dramatic happens when the characters rescue a couple turtles from the zoo, except, it sort of does...? So true to life.

•I faced The Dubliners forward because the spine is gone. Really I only have it for the last lines of "The Dead" ("snow was general all over Ireland").

*Makkai's The Borrower is about a children's librarian who runs away with a library kid, a boy whose evangelical parents have enrolled him in a gay-proofing ministry. Not a great book, but it has a great ending.

•I couldn't believe what a great writer Wodehouse is when I read him this summer. I'd watched Fry & Laurie's Jeeves & Wooster TV series, and it's delightful--but Wodehouse's writing is. . . well, people always say this, but really, it's flawlessness is a delight in itself.

•Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit-- my favorite scene--in her school sewing class, the girl growing up in an evangelical home wants to needlepoint "The summer is over and we are not yet saved" (Jeremiah 8:20).
•I kept Curtis Sittenfeld Sisterland and J Walter's Beautiful Ruins for rereading when sick in bed.