Joyride

Hi all. Have you sprung your clocks forward? Argh, the time change always makes me feel out of step for a while, but I usually like Daylight Savings much better. Our neighbor province — British Columbia — is moving to having permanent Daylight Savings Time, so this will be its last time change. Lucky them. Apparently Arizona stays on Standard Time to conserve energy during the hot months. So it’s all about where you live. Meanwhile, all of our snow melted away last week under warm conditions … but now we’re having a full-on blizzard today, woohoo! The birds at the feeder are taking refuge. The rest of the week looks wintry too. So winter is returning for a bit. It’s supposed to officially end by March 20. But we’ll see. 

And now here (above) are the books I finished last month in February. In January I finished seven but in February just four. I’m going backwards. I think it’s because I was taking the Wharton class on The House of Mirth and we had to prepare to discuss for four Fridays. We went over passages aloud and I read the novel a couple times over. I liked all of these books pictured, so it’s hard to pick a favorite, but after all that I should go with The House of Mirth. 

• Crux by Gabriel Tallent was a buddy read with Tina (novel, hardback)
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (classic novel, ebook) 
• Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton (audiobook, nonfiction)
• The Typewriter and the Guillotine by Mark Braude (audiobook and hardback, finished twice) 

And now here is a photo (below) of my recent book loot I picked up from the library (and the Pip Williams novel that I recently bought at the airport, lol). I won’t get to these all in March, but I can get them back another time. Have you read any of these? 

• Kin by Tayari Jones (novel)
• Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself and China by Jung Chang (nonfiction)
• The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (novel)
• Vigil by George Saunders (novel)
• A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter (nonfiction)
• Heart Be at Peace by Donal Ryan (novel)
• The Bookbinder by Pip Williams (novel)
• Cape Fever by Nadia Davids (novel)

Currently I’m reading Jung Chang’s memoir: Fly, Wild Swans, which is a recent follow-up to her first bestselling memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China from 1991. It’s quite a life story of her family’s survival during the Cultural Revolution and the years beyond.

I also borrowed the Elaine Showalter book (pictured above) since she was a guest lecturer at my last Edith Wharton class. She’s a literary expert and a former professor emeritus at Princeton University, so it was very cool to hear her speak about Wharton.  

And now I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately. Coincidentally both of these nonfiction books (below) feature two notable female writers who both wrote for the New Yorker magazine. Go figure. Also they count towards reads I’m doing this year for the Nonfiction Reader Challenge at Book’d Out.

Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean / Avid Reader / 368 pages / 2025

4.5 stars. As you might know, Susan Orlean has been a longtime nonfiction writer at the New Yorker magazine where she’s written many articles and profiles over the years on a wide variety of subjects, large and small, funny, quirky, and informative. Some became books that turned into movies like The Orchid Thief that became the movie Adaptation in 2002 and her surfer girl article was made into the movie Blue Crush in 2002.

She also wrote about Rin Tin Tin (2011), and her 2018 nonfiction The Library Book was a big hit. I saw her then at our book festival where she came to talk about it and I became a fan. She followed that with her On Animals collection in 2021, which also hooked me. Overall I can relate to her love of libraries, animals, and reading and writing.

So when her memoir came out last October, I knew I had to get to it. I listened to the audiobook version, which Orlean candidly reads. Much of the book is about her career as a writer: how she got started and went about her writing projects, as well as the publications and editors she worked for (like Tina Brown), and her subjects. Personally, she grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, with good parents and got a job after college in Portland, Oregon, at a local publication, doing music reviews for a while. But it wasn’t long before she was writing for national magazines like Rolling Stone. And in 1992, she became a staff writer at the New Yorker where she has been ever since.  

Her memoir moves chronologically and openly throughout her life and career, telling things as they happened … and describing how she went about writing, her ideas, and interviews along the way. It’s safe to say she’s been all over and written on a wide variety of topics: from life in NYC to gospel singers, basketball players, back packers in Asia, animals, and travel stories and everything in between. 

She’s often funny and entertaining … even if her books at times can be meandering and sprawling. I didn’t miss a beat of her memoir. If you’re interested in journalism, you’d probably like it … as most of it is about her career in the business and her ideas on writing. She mixes in her personal life as well. She’s been married twice and has one son. She once enjoyed living in N.Y.’s Hudson Valley with chickens and other animals before moving to a historical house in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. And there she continues on at age 70, giving readers bits of wisdom and amusement with her written words … on things both large and small. 

The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII by Mark Braude / 427 pages / 2026

3.75 stars. This nonfiction true story features an interesting brisk look into the life of Janet Flanner who was a correspondent for the New Yorker — writing the magazine’s Letter to Paris column — starting in 1925. It focuses on her years in Paris in the run-up to WWII in the 1930s … and thereafter during the war. I had not known about Flanner before, so I enjoyed finding out what she wrote and her gay personal life story. 

Flanner seemed a smart trailblazer of sorts in her work as a correspondent in Paris … along with her friend Ernest Hemingway. In addition to her Letter to Paris columns, which she signed Genet, she profiled Edith Wharton for the magazine in 1929, did a two-part profile on the Queen Mary in 1935, and then wrote a three-part profile on Adolph Hitler in 1936. 

Flanner was born in Indianapolis but wound up living in Paris, as a prominent member of America’s ex-patriate bohemian community. She lived with her longtime partner Solita Solano at the Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte, and later had another love interest, Noel Murphy, in the French countryside. (Her partners didn’t seem to mind about one another.) Flanner eventually left France in October 1939, out of Bordeaux and went by ship back to the U.S. She later returned once Paris was liberated in 1944 to write about the end of the war, including traveling to a couple of the concentration camps. 

An alternating part of the book, which introduces the reader to a serial killer — Eugen Weidmann and his story — is a bit bamboozling … but it seems to have coincided around the same time in Paris and apparently Janet Flanner wrote about his case. Eugen Weidmann was a petty criminal from Germany who crossed over the border into France after a time in prison. His crimes there started in 1937 when he kidnapped (and later killed) a 22-year-old American tourist girl who’d come to Paris. Along with a few accomplices he then went on a crime spree of murder that eventually ended when he got caught and later went on trial. Weidmann seemed an unremorseful killer, whose crimes — apparently for money — were brutal and disturbing. 

The combined narratives about Flanner and Weidmann make for a pretty revelatory account of pre-WWII Europe, providing plenty of atmosphere  overseas between WWI and WWII. You get a sense of the run up to war in the 1930s — with Flanner’s exposes on the 1936 Olympics, the 1937 World’s Fair, and her frequent travels to Germany — and the rise of fascism, and what people were thinking and dreading. There are some parallels with today that I couldn’t help but notice. Flanner had quite the life and career. Apparently she didn’t retire until 1975, after nearly a half-century chronicling European life.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these pictured and what did you think?