Turning the pages of the first half of 2014

After a slow start in reading this year, June was a reading month, almost all of it fiction.

In last month's post, I forgot earlier this year I'd read Several Short Sentences about Writing, by Verlyn Kinkenborg, the definitely-not-a-text-book  I'm now using in my classes and writing workshops, most recently with the Oklahoma City Writers group.

You can tell when I have read a good book

Any time a writer tells you to forget everything you've been taught about writing, he's bound to be on to something. This  former columnist for the New York Times, "The Rural Life," is just so sensible. You can tell by the way I've marked a couple of the pages up, how full of ideas and inspiration I found it, both for my own writing, and for teaching.
But June has been a month of fiction. When visiting my daughter, son-in-law and grand kids, the Bells, in Amarillo a month ago, I "checked" out a big book from the shelf in their garage.
I'm late reading this, but Douglas Adams' books all gathered in a compilation, beckoned.
So this past month I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish; and Young Zaphod Plays it Safe.
I didn't finish the last one, Mostly Harmless, until this month, so it becomes the second book of July, after reading Job the night before. More on that later.
Adams "science fiction" is revolutionary, and humorous, and certainly full of satire and irony about the human race. Great wordplay. His bring to 11 books in the first half of 2014.