The Tower of What I'm Reading

This has been missing from my life for a while now: 

a big pile of books to read or browse for fun––and, key, ones that I don't have to return to the library! 

(I spilled coffee on a couple of them and didn't have to worry about fines.)

And I don't have to read any of them at all, unlike the wonderful but required-reading books I used to pile up when I was editing or writing nonfiction for teens.

You can see I have no Central Reading Plan--I randomly chose these books, half from work,  where I will eventually return them (though the coffee-splashed ones will have to go on the 33¢ shelf).

I have, however, recently adopted a plan to pick up Newberry Medal books, awarded "for excellence in American children's literature", when I come across them at work.
When You Reach Me (2009), by Rebecca Stead, on top, is one. It was disappointing, like a good cake with a wet, fallen center: the central plot point (a mysterious writer needs a girl's help) is weak and wobbly. It seems to me he could have done what he needed to do without her.

I also read Newberry winners Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (2008), which is lightweight but which I enjoyed––it doesn't pretend to be more than it is, a graveyard frolic, with a message that growing up means leaving things behind––and Miss Hickory, (1946, by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey), whose message bothered me:

Miss Hickory's nut head is eaten, and she's supposedly better off NOT THINKING SO MUCH. 

Oh, also Walk Two Moons,(1994, Sharon Creech), which also was disappointing. Among other things, the girl has a great-great grandmother who was Seneca Indian, but the girl is so entirely separate from any Native culture, it's just an embarrassingly meaningless feature.

Come to think of it, my guiding principle is The Pleasure of Finding Things Out--not necessarily facts, you know, but ... um, finding out what's inside someone's head, or what it ... smells like.

The book that stands out in this regard, by far, is the novel Troll: A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo (2000, translated from the Finnish).

I don't have much patience with fiction anymore––after reading nothing but for thirty years, the stories became over-familiar, the errors glare, and I tend to wander off, halfway through.

And then I read something unexpected like this. It reminds me of eating cilantro for the first time--I thought it tasted like underarm odor, in a good way. How can that be?

The story is, on the surface, about a man who adopts and becomes enraptured by a young, wild troll. But it's weirder than that--it's about the power of scent and wildness... 
Like, do we love the scent of books because they were once living pine trees, which we have cut down and pulped?

Publisher's Weekly good review says, "Sinisalo's elastic prose is at once lyrical and matter-of-fact, but this is not a comfortable novel."

Pair with the also-not-comfortable story of feeling more akin to moss and mushrooms than to trains, planes and automobiles, the 2018 Swedish film Border, (Swedish title, Gräns), from a short story, newly released on its own--cover below.

P.S. I was excited to borrow the graphic novel Berlin from bink (on the rec of Orange Crate Art), but the 3-in-1 volume is too heavy to hold and read on the couch, so I haven't started it yet.