2018: The Second Quarter Summary

I’m pretty far behind getting this posted, as it’s now late August. I finished it in July but just sort of forgot about it, apparently. It’s going on the blog on August 19th. I’ll try to do better at the end of the third quarter…

It was another quarter in which I didn’t finish very many books. There’s no great mystery where my reading time went, though. I have done quite a bit of writing this quarter, and completed a podcast episode almost every week. It seems like we’ve raised the difficulty level on our everyday life, too.

Books Completed

• The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee et al.
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (read out loud to Grace)
• Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin
• The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher
• The Wonderful O by James Thurber
• The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
• City of Glass by Paul Auster
• Unspeakable by Chris Hedges with David Talbot
• Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds

That’s nine, which is still fewer than a book a week, but not that much fewer.

Just Missed the Cutoff

• Butcher Bird by Richard Kadrey (I finished it on July 4th, so it’s technically a 3rd-quarter book)

Started but Not Finished

• Ghosts by Paul Auster (the second book in the omnibus volume _The New York Trilogy)
• The Ill-Made Knight by T. H. White (the third book in the omnibus volume The Once and Future King)
• Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

Unfinished Bedtime Reading

• D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire (we’ll finish it when the mood strikes us)
• Peter Pan and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie (Arcturus paperback) (the style just couldn’t keep the kids engaged, although I want to finish it for my own curiosity)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling (probably abandoned; just doesn’t work that well as a bedtime story)

On to the third quarter. If all goes well, I will keep up with the weekly posting, and at the end of 2018 I’ll have 52 posts, a wordy, strange, and wildly uneven journal of the year. I have no idea yet whether I’ll want to try to continue the weekly journal into 2019. It seems like good practice or a good source of raw material for something, though, even if I don’t know what that thing will be.

Ypsilanti, Michigan
July 13th, 2018