January 2019 TBR

It is the fifth day of January, 2019 and I am thumbing through my stack of library books, already exhausted at the idea of yet more of my holds becoming available and adding to the stack on the table. I've already finished the first of these:  No One Can Pronounce My Name and I'd like to settle in to appreciate how much I enjoyed this book, the twists and turns of friendship, the negotiation of Anglicized names and how easy it is to elide someone's name and just not see them...the background, the typical example, the assumed.

And then I pick up All the President's Men and it's 1972 and I am not yet one year old...my mother isn't pregnant yet with my younger brother and the Watergate Building is a grand building full of Republican money and not yet half a byword for scandal and corruption. What strikes me in these initial descriptions is that the building was supposed to be beautiful and yet, for all the images I've seen of it, it's always lurked in my brain as another dirty, off-white stack of tiny windows and cramped offices...I imagine shag carpet and humming lights and nice desks stark amidst cheap office furniture and filing cabinets. There is no fall in my mind for the building--it was born graceless for a dirty business. Now, though, I'm curious about what it really looked like.

I remember the buildings my nephew toured us through at A&M, the grand rotunda where rings are ordered and received, storied campus buildings and the library that smelled like libraries are supposed to smell, not like our neighborhood library that rarely smelled of the books it contained. The buildings that, with faded photos and slightly darker stories, could seem dingier than they are in person, lighter than the way they feel on a summer afternoon, full of shade and places to escape the razor-sharp Texas sun.

This month's TBR is going to depend a little on what comes in from the library--so far it includes Space Opera, The Bear and the Nightingale, Who is Mary Sue, and Creative Quest. I'm curious how many of these books are going to be as instantly, weirdly evocative as ATPM and which are going to be non-starters. Hopefully, each one will be slightly different and engrossing as only a good book can be. I'm trying to work my way through the 2019 Pop Sugar Reading challenge just to shake up my reading. I felt like few of the books I read in 2018 were as surprising as some of this year's books have been. I'd also like to finish up books that have been sitting around, either half finished or not yet begun. Books like The Perfect Meal and All the Windward Stars. I love Elizabeth Bear's writing, but I need to spend time with it, not power through it like non-fiction. The Perfect Meal was perfectly charming until the section about consuming animals from a French zoo in the middle of a war. Cruelty never feels like a seasoning, more like a spoilage.

One of the challenges I'd like to meet for this year's reading is a book set in my home town (either Lake Jackson or Port Arthur), if I can find one.

Hope everyone's reading year is off to a great start!

-- Chrissa