Books Read: January 2021

Instead of my annual end-of-the-year report on books read, I decided to do it month-by-month.  Why?

Because I can, of course.

So, in January, I knocked off ten books.  I'll admit that one of them was really short and geared towards kids but hey, the others were pretty substantive on the whole, mostly.  Whatever.  I read a lot, which is one of my goals for this year.

Well, truth to tell, it's the only goal I've actually set for myself so far.  Pretty easy to do, too.  Set the bar low for 2021 -- I think that's a sound strategy, don't you?

Right.  Here are my January 2021 Books Read, in the order of finishing:

I decided to re-read the Holmes canon.  This is one of the four novels, and except for the lengthy "story within the story" bit, it held up pretty well.

The Cards Can't Lie was purportedly a history of playing cards, but its focus was so solidly on the tarot deck that I found it disappointing and rather a slog to get through.  Only a few short chapters address anything other than the tarot cards.  

This was my "cheat" book -- geared to middle-grade readers, short, lots of illustrations, took about an hour to read.  Charming drawings by the author.

The second novel in my pursuit of all things Holmes and Watson.  

A succinct history of Hanford's role in the Manhattan project, with plenty of photos.  Decent enough intro, though a bit narrow in focus (mostly about life at the site works).  

An illustrated collection of newspaper and magazine articles about all things Holmes/Doyle, from the 1890s through the 1960s.  For diehard fans only.

A different view of what Hanford wrought, through the eyes of a naturalist surveying the lands that were left undisturbed for 60 years because of the security buffer around the Manhattan Project and its aftermath.  The Reach is now a National Monument.  Susan Zwinger is the daughter of Ann Zwinger, a naturalist who wrote a favorite of mine, A Desert Country Near the Sea, about the Baja Peninsula.  

And again, the Holmes re-read continued with this collection of short stories.  Good stuff, all in all.

I stopped reading Penny's series about Quebec detective Gamache many years ago, due to what I felt was character assassination for the sake of more melodramatic plots.  I decided to give it another try, starting where I'd left off (this is number 7 in the series).  I'm sorry to say that despite good writing overall, the melodrama continued to annoy me.  It's a pity, because I do like Armand Gamache, and his second-in-command, but the storyline was not to my taste.  And I really, really disliked the major (and recurring) characters of Clara Morrow and her husband Peter, both artists, who I find weak-minded, and self-centered, with childish emotions.  No thank you.  I'm done.

This biography came out in 2017, and it's excellent.  Leonardo was a fascinating man who had a habit of not finishing what he started -- in too many fields to list -- and still managed to accomplish ten times more astonishing works than anyone else did during the Italian Renaissance.  Who would have predicted that an illegitimate, gay, left-handed vegetarian would become famous in his own time, patronized by dukes, princes, and kings--and lauded, applauded, and beloved nearly everywhere he went?   

The reproductions of the art and the notebooks are quite decent for a relatively inexpensive paperback.  The best book I read in January.   

"Talent hits the target no one else can hit.  Genius hits the target no one else can see."   (Schopenhauer)

Sums it up nicely.