In the New Yorker...

[Jeff Wrangler]

What book?

Some weeks ago I decided that over the course of the summer I was going to re-read the entire series of Brother Cadfael mystery novels. After I finish, probably all will go in for recycling. I need to start thinning my library, and my copies are all mass-market paperbacks. They go back to the Eighties, so the paper has gone brown. The cover of the first book was so brittle that a large piece of the back cover broke off while I was reading the book, and by the time I was finished the back cover had come off altogether.

I'm reading the third book now. It's called Monk's Hood, after the poisonous herb also known as wolfsbane. All of them are very nice little mystery stories. It's been so many decades since I last read them that they're all new to me again.   

[serious crayons]

I've done that with Raymond Chandler books. And someday I'd like to read an old Rex Stout/Nero Wolfe book or two.

But I'm always reading about 20 books at a time already, not to mention the New Yorker, the newspaper and the internet, so it's hard to fit in re-readings.

Maybe I'll save the Nero Wolfe books until I'm in a nursing home and a) have plenty of time and b) won't remember the endings! 

[Front-Ranger]

That sounds like my copy of The Virginian. Very brittle covers.

I didn't read all of the fiction in the fiction issue, so I'm saving that issue to read over the course of the summer. I often get ideas of books I want to read from the stories in the NY.

A series I like is the Isabel Dalhousie novels by Alexander McCall Smith. The main character lives in Edinburgh and is the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She is a philosopher and gets entangled in adventures and mysteries, nothing as serious as a Sherlock Holmes problem. Perfect summer reading. But, why is everyone always talking about summer reading? Winter is the time for reading, when you can't go outside.

[serious crayons]

Perfect summer reading. But, why is everyone always talking about summer reading? Winter is the time for reading, when you can't go outside.

That's why they distinguish summer reading. In summer, you want to read something you can absorb while lying on the beach or in a hammock, something you would take on vacation to fill the time between sightseeing. Summer books are light in mood, not too intense or deep or difficult. More effortlessly entertaining. So for me that would be, like, a Tom Perrotta novel or Gone Girl or Raymond Chandler or maybe something like The Great Gatsby.

Winter is when people tackle books that require more time and attention: War and Peace or Ulysses or Moby-Dick or maybe, if something relatively light is needed, Middlemarch

[Jeff Wrangler]

Some weeks ago I decided that over the course of the summer I was going to re-read the entire series of Brother Cadfael mystery novels. After I finish, probably all will go in for recycling. I need to start thinning my library, and my copies are all mass-market paperbacks. They go back to the Eighties, so the paper has gone brown. The cover of the first book was so brittle that a large piece of the back cover broke off while I was reading the book, and by the time I was finished the back cover had come off altogether.

Since posting this, I have learned that there have also been "omnibus" editions of the Cadfael mysteries, with three stories per book (there are 21 stories in all in the series). I'm thinking it might be nice to assemble a collection of the omnibus editions, as that way I can still have all the stories to read again in retirement (if I live that long), but they will take up half the space on a bookshelf.

I wonder why they call them omnibus editions?    Isn't omnibus the real, full name for a public transportation "bus"?   

[serious crayons]

I wonder why they call them omnibus editions?    Isn't omnibus the real, full name for a public transportation "bus"?   

According to the internet, that usage is dated.

om·ni·bus
/ˈämnəˌbəs/

noun
1.
a volume containing several novels or other items previously published separately.
"an omnibus of her first trilogy"
2.
DATED
a bus.

adjective
1.
comprising several items.
"Congress passed an omnibus anticrime package"

"Omni-" means "all; of all things," as in omnipresent or omniscient. They must have called it omnibus because compared to a car it seemed huge at first and able to hold all, but once they got used to them they just called it bus.

[Jeff Wrangler]

The June 24 issue finally arrived in yesterday's post. The articles about Elizabeth Warren and Boris Johnson look interesting.

I've read Anthony Lane's reviews of The Dead Don't Die and A Bigger Splash.

I can't believe he wrote, in his review of A Bigger Splash, "[W]hen Hockney examines his Proktor portrait, he does so with the aid of a lighter's flame, and the scene ignites."

 

[Front-Ranger]

I could easily spend the summer reading articles about the perfect summer reading. Here's one:

https://lithub.com/20-perfect-summer-books-for-this-and-every-year/

I'm curiously what you all think about this list. I saw a couple of books I'd like to read.

[serious crayons]

I could easily spend the summer reading articles about the perfect summer reading. Here's one:

https://lithub.com/20-perfect-summer-books-for-this-and-every-year/

I'm curiously what you all think about this list. I saw a couple of books I'd like to read.

I've only read one of them: Sophie's Choice. I've read other books by about six of the authors (Jennifer Egan, Elizabeth Gilbert, Michael Ondaatje) and someone once gave me Angle of Repose. Most of the others I haven't heard of, but the excerpts from their reviews are enticing. The one I'm most likely to read is Sally Rooney's Normal People, because I've heard such good things about that from many normal people.

[southendmd]

"Omni-" means "all; of all things," as in omnipresent or omniscient. They must have called it omnibus because compared to a car it seemed huge at first and able to hold all, but once they got used to them they just called it bus.

"Omnibus" is the dative plural case of "omnis" (all) in Latin, so it means "for all".  Initially it was the French "voiture omnibus":  carriage for all.