April 2021 Reads

In April of 2021, I read just one book! And it took me less than an hour. I spent a lot of time working through A Promised Land, Obama’s most recent memoir, but didn’t finish it by the end of the month. This hurts me on my quest for 52 books this year, but who knows, maybe I will still get there.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy:
This one book I received was a Christmas present from my godmother. It is hard to rate in the same sense as most books I read. It was more a piece of art, with the illustrations at least as moving as the text. It is full of sweet sentences that help fill up your heart, and I could imagine coming back to it again. You can read it very quickly. 60/100

This is a short month, so I figured I would add something. I have a note on my phone filled with quotes I have found in books that I enjoyed when I read them. Sometimes I will write down one or more from every book I read for a span, and other times I will go months without writing one down. Often, when I go back and look at them, I can’t make sense of what I found important, or I can make sense of it, but I don’t even agree with it any more. On short months such as these, I will include one of these quotes, and my thoughts on it. I will just go in order, from oldest to most recent, so I do not need to choose.

The oldest two quotes are from August of 2019, and are both from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction - so we are told.

I’m not sure I agree with this quote, and then I reach the last clause and agree. I love fiction for what it teaches me about the world; it makes me more empathetic and, I believe, a better human. Woolf also makes a distinction between truth and facts, and I think it is telling she uses facts here. If I substituted “truth” for “facts”, I would have an easier time cutting off that last clause.

That is all as it should be, for in a question like this truth is only to be had by laying together many varieties of error.

I think I like this quote because I believe it about humans. We are all bad at getting to the truth, as we carry with us too much bias and baggage. Some of this we can recognize and adjust for, but lots of it we cannot. But I believe that if we lay all those varieties of error on top of each other, we should end up somewhere approximating the truth. It won’t be right, but it will be more right than if we just trusted our own instincts. My pub trivia team does this on answers where we have no idea; if we each guess independently, our average guess should be better than any of ours. We have never tested to see if that’s true.