December Didn’t Disappoint
Posted: 2019/01/03 Filed under: E-Books, Fiction, NonFiction | Tags: africa, Anthony Burgess, astronaut, audio books, Bill Adler Jr, books, Carl Raswan, childrens book, Delia Owens, Diana Athill, Dorothy Dunnett, e-books, editor, fantasy, Fiction, historical, Jeffrey Kluger, Jim Lovell, Mark Owens, memoir, middle east, NonFiction, Philip Pullman, racism, sad, science fiction, Sena Jeter Naslund, series, southern, Tahar Ben Jelloun, time travel, Ursula Le Guin Leave a commentI may not be happy with my personal life in regards to fitness, health, and so on, but I am definitely satisfied with the number of books I was able to check off my Challenge list for the month of December. Special thanks to my kisa who did all the driving up and back and around the great state of Maine.
Fiction:
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (EB/print).
- Any Old Iron by Anthony Burgess.
- Four Spirits by Sena Jeter Naslund.
- This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun.
- Time Machines: the Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written edited by Bill Adler, Jr.
Nonfiction:
- The Black Tents of Arabia: (My Life Among the Bedouins by Carl Raswan.
- Lost Moon: the Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.
- The Female Eunuch by Germain Greer.
- Stet: a Memoir by Diana Athill (EB and print).
- Cry of the Kalahari by Mark and Delia Owens (EB and print).
Series continuations:
- Unicorn Hunt by Dorothy Dunnett. Confessional: I did not finish this.
- The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman (EB/print/AB).
Stet: a Memoir
Posted: 2018/12/07 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust II, NonFiction | Tags: 2018, book lust ii, book review, december, Diana Stet, editor, memoir, NonFiction Leave a commentAthill, Diana. Stet: a Memoir. New York: Grove Press, 2000.
Reason read: Read in honor of Athill’s birth month being in December.
In the editing world, stet means “let it stand” when a copy-editor wants to rescue a deletion.
To explain this book, here are Athill’s own words, “All this book is, is the story of one old ex-editor who imagines that she will feel a little less dead if a few people read it” (p 5).
The first part of Stet reads like any other job related memoir, “here is how I came into my occupation and kept it for nearly fifty years.” Athill is careful to keep her private life out of the equation until she gets to part two. Here she dishes about her favorite authors who became quasi friends in the process. The story of Jean Rhys sadden me the most.
Confessional – the didactic history of the Caribbean Dominica bored me just a little.
Quotes I liked, “Even now I would rather turn and walk away than risk my voice going shrill and my face going red as I slither into sickening humiliation of undercutting my own justified anger by my own idiotic ineptitude” (p 58) and “Jean has been right – she was the only person who could make sense of the amazing muddle seething in those bags” (p 165).
Author fact: a Google search of Diana Athill’s name told me Athill will be 101 years old at her next birthday (on the 21st).
Book trivia: Sadly, there are no photographs in Stet.
Nancy said: the only thing Pearl said was Stet is an “interesting book about [Athill’s] career in the publishing industry” (p 163).
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Me, Me, Me: Autobiographies and Memoirs” (p 163).
