Books:

August
The Botany of Desire (Pollan)
Tintenherz (Funke)
The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Kaplan)
The Mother's Recompense (Wharton)
The Language Police (Ravitch)

September
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
The Closing of the Western Mind (Freeman)
A Little History of the World (Gombrich)
The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine's Last Years in Paris (Pawel)

The Botany of Desire was excellent, so good I wanted to read it out loud, so good I could have turned back to page one as soon as I finished it. (By the way: when I asked for this title in a bookstore, the assistant leered at me. Part of me wanted to laugh & say, "Read the back, you dummy!" But I managed to keep a solemn demeanor.)
Tintenherz was not so good. It pains me to say that, because Funke has her heart in the right place: she evokes the magic of reading very well, and the first chapter was so promising. I won't go into the details, but Tintenherz made clear why in all the great children's books adults are for the most part evil, or, if they're good, they're befuddled, oblivious, helpless. It's a capital mistake to put a strong, capable, good adult at the center of a children's book; it means that the child protagonist never comes into her own.
But I'm glad I've read it, because my students mention it, and because now I can say I've read a 550-page book in German.

The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach was superb. In writing about the novels, Kaplan speaks of Brasillach's characteristic "turn of the century charm and childlike joie de vivre," with WWI as a sudden, incomprehensible parenthesis; his pet notion of "brother enemies," so useful when he wanted to be forgiven by the Resistance figures whom he had hounded and betrayed to the Germans (going so far as to publish addresses of hiding places). One of his novels even features a love triangle involving a Frenchman, a German, and a woman named Catherine. Doesn't this all sound a lot like Jules et Jim? Now I know that movie is based on a different book, but maybe Henri-Pierre Roché was recycling something by Brasillach? I found a website that spoke of Truffaut's "predilection" for literature of the extreme right, and elsewhere I read that the editor Roché worked with had signed the clemency petition. (But that doesn't mean much, since so many men of letters did.)