Valkyrdeath's 2024 Reading Record

After a couple of years with no posts on Club Read and a couple of years before that where I failed to keep up with my thread, I’m returning to make another attempt for 2024. I think by the closing months of last year I finally managed to get my reading back on track again so hopefully that will continue. As ever, my reading will me a complete mix of fiction and non-fiction in a variety of genres and subjects. I’ve got a few books I plan to read soon but otherwise no particular plans for the year, so I’m ready to see how it goes.

Currently reading:
Hellish Nell by Malcolm Gaskill
Found in Translation edited by Frank Wynne

Reading soon(ish):
Saturnalia by Lindsey Davis
The Dragon Republic by R. F. Kuang

Books read:
1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
2. Bad News by Donald E. Westlake
3. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles by Dominic Sandbrook

4. Gentian Violet by Edward Hyams
5. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
6. The Comforters by Muriel Spark
7. Thoughtcrime Experiments edited by Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson
8. Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
9. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
10. The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall
11. The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
12. The Fraud by Zadie Smith
13. The Insider's Guide to Inside No. 9 by Mark Salisbury
14. The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis

15. Brothers Keepers by Donald E. Westlake
16. Influenca by Jade LFT Peters
17. The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories by Terry Pratchett
18. The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman
19. The Curse of the Pharoahs by Elizabeth Peters
20. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
21. The Third Man and The Fallen Idol by Graham Greene
22. Transformation and Other Stories by Mary Shelley
23. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
24. The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral by Diane Ackerman

25. We'll Always Have Paris by Ray Bradbury
26. Ivory Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown
27. The Trial by Franz Kafka
28. A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
29. Totem by Laura Perez
30. Bunbury by Tom Jacobson
31. Kafka's Other Trial by Elias Canetti
32. High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson
33. Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire
34. The Time Traveller's Almanac edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

35. Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy by Benjamin Balint
36. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
37. Viscera Objectica by Yugo Limbo
38. Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom
39. Why Art? by Eleanor Davis
40. Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega

I’m so happy to see you back here. Warm welcome, Gary.

Happy New Year, and welcome back to Club Read! I went AWOL for a couple of years when my life was crazy and I wasn't reading much. It's been nice to be back for a couple of years. I hope you have a great reading year and enjoy getting settled back into CR with old friends and new.

>2 dchaikin: Thanks Dan, I'm glad to be back posting again and hopefully I'll do a better job of sticking with it this time!

>3 labfs39: Thanks Lisa, Happy New Year! Life can have a habit of getting in the way of reading sometimes but it's definitely nice to get back to it.

Book stats for 2023:
80 books read made up of:
30 novels
28 graphic works
15 non-fiction books
5 short story collection
2 plays

Books from 13 different countries and by 58 different authors.

A few random reading highlights from 2023:
Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes by Rob Wilkins
River of the Gods by Candice Millard
Babel by R. F. Kuang
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Conan Doyle for the Defence by Margalit Fox
Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis

>5 valkyrdeath: I enjoyed Millard's River of Doubt and own, but have not read Destiny of the Republic, but I may get River of the Gods and let it jump the queue. I just finished a year of reading African Novels, and this would tie in nicely.

>5 valkyrdeath: Nice. A great reading year. I loved All the Pretty Horses.

>6 labfs39: I've really enjoyed all of Millard's books, though Destiny of the Republic was the first I read and probably still my favourite.

>7 dchaikin: It was the first McCarthy I've read and I really liked it, so I'll hopefully be getting to The Crossing fairly soon.

>8 valkyrdeath: i loved The Crossing too. But don’t expect to be quite as swept away. 🙂

>8 valkyrdeath: I'm starting Destiny of the Republic tomorrow for one of my book clubs that meets later in January.

>10 WelshBookworm: Oh, I love that book! Such a marvelous combination of tragically awful and insanely absurd.

I should read All The Pretty Horses. My first McCarthy was The Road, and I was blown away by the stark minimalist writing. After that I struggled with the baroque style of Blood Meridian, and I added pretty horses to my wishlist but never got round to it.

Thanks for putting me on to Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. I put it on to my TBR group which is rather full, but I pushed it to the top. It’s just what I need right now.

>13 kjuliff: I'll be interested in how you find Super-Infinite. Do you know much about John Donne? Other than a poem or two we covered back in my school days I knew pretty much nothing about him, but something drew me to read the book anyway.

>12 FlorenceArt: I've no other McCarthy works to compare it to, but I found the style of All The Pretty Horses to be very easy to read.

>14 valkyrdeath: I know very little about him either, but when I saw you were reading it I looked it up, as I like his poems and recently read an article about him. Can’t remember where. It certainly looks like an interesting read.

1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
This book was a bit of a spur of the moment pick for me. My knowledge of John Donne was extremely limited, so that’s the level I’m working from for this book. In fact, my sole experience of his work was studying one of his poems back in my GCSE days, from which my only real memory is of the teacher telling the class that discussing the connotations of the phrase “suck'd on country pleasures” wasn’t on the GCSE syllabus.

So with that in mind, I found this an interesting and enlightening read. It drew me in by the list of all the things that Donne had done throughout his life, which made him an interesting man to read about. But aside from the biography side of the work, Rundell is hugely enthusiastic about his work too, to the point where she states in the introduction “This is both a biography of Donne and an act of evangelism.” The enthusiasm pays off and I began to enjoy the excerpts and brief discussions of his works and to understand the inventiveness of his work and why he is so highly regarded. Rundell herself is an excellent writer and has a way with unusual and sometimes amusing metaphors.

This is still primarily a biography though, and it works well in that regard too, though with the one flaw that there really are very limited sources of information for Donne’s life. It’s not the author’s fault of course, and she does well with what information is available, making it clear from the start where there are gaps in what we know about him. Izaac Walton’s biography of Donne is one of the earliest sources of information about him but seems of questionable veracity and more intent of fawning over Donne than anything, something Rundell acknowledges and a trap she doesn’t fall into herself despite her enthusiasm.

The lack of information does lead to sections that, while interesting, Donne himself doesn’t really come through as a fully rounded character. It’s intriguing to read that he joined a privateering fleet, but we’re mainly learning about what happened to the fleet with little information available about what Donne’s role actually was in any of it.

Still, Rundell can’t be held responsible for the limited historical resources and she doesn’t pretend to know anything she doesn’t and presents the information that is available in a readable and enjoyable way. It makes this a worthwhile read, even for someone as generally bad with poetry as me. A pretty good start to my reading year.

>16 valkyrdeath: I am about to start reading this now, so your review popped up at an ideal time.

>16 valkyrdeath: it’s nice to have you back. This was a great review, and of a book I’m really interested in. (And I’m glad your professor clarified that one bit.). Enjoyed your take.

>17 kjuliff: look forward to your response too. Especially, I’m curious how this works on audio.

>18 dchaikin: it’s narrated by Simon Vance who is a professional narrator with a straight style. Very suitable for this sort of book. He’s narrated a few Dickens and I like his style as he does not intrude.

>19 kjuliff: thanks! 🙂

Looking forward to following along. I get behind regularly, but I usually get there in the end!

>18 dchaikin: Thanks! If you get to it I'll be interested in how you find it, but I know there's always so many books.

>21 AlisonY: I'll be following along with your reading too, I've been gradually catching up on everyone's posts but haven't got around to commenting on many yet.

>22 valkyrdeath: I was going to pick up an audio copy. I needed a new audiobook yesterday. But...it's too short. I only get my 12 credits audible credits, I need to use them for longer books. So, I'll have to pursue this one in text.

Super-Infinite is on my wish list and so I enjoyed reading your review. I like biographers who are enthusiastic about their subject. Writing about somebody with whom you have little personal interest must be a galling experience.

>23 dchaikin: That’s like me. I bought a short audio book this week rather than wait for my point to arrive at the end of the month. How many dollars per hour is a book worth, wonder. It’s a bit Larry-Davidish

>23 dchaikin: For the most part I tend to avoid anything too short on Audible too. It takes me ages to choose anything on there. I only tend to sign up for a few months at a time, or just for a discounted period, and I spend ages finding something I want but that isn't easily available on any library I have access to.

2. Bad News by Donald E. Westlake
The tenth book in the Dortmunder series. The previous book felt like a perfect end point to the series, but Westlake didn’t stop writing them and this came out five years later. This time Dortmunder gets reluctantly dragged into a complicated con involving digging up and switching bodies. It’s not the usual thing for Dortmunder, though he does get to a heist to plan later in the book. It’s not quite up the standards of the previous few books, though it’s still got plenty of funny moments, and it’s always good to have more scenes with the regular gang. Sometimes it does feel like Dortmunder has become a supporting character in his own book when quite a few chunks of it focus on the new character Little Feather and he doesn’t have much to do himself, but the new character is an interesting one. The book also opens with him escaping a heist gone wrong and the way he gets out of it is classic Dortmunder and very funny. Not the best in the series but an enjoyable read.

>27 valkyrdeath: I’m not familiar with the series, but sounds fun

>26 valkyrdeath: i thought i was the only who struggled to choose an audiobook on audible. It’s weird to have so many choices and how each suddenly has some fatal flaw. Somehow when i used the library it was an easier process.

>28 dchaikin: I’m with you on the problem of choosing an audiobook and each one you think of getting having a fatal flaw. It’s even worse for me as I’m dependent on them

I recently bought with points The Undertaking as I enjoyed her other work. It’s OK-ish so far but not as good as her Colony. Understandable as The undertaking was her debut novel.

3. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles by Dominic Sandbrook
The first of Sandbrook’s 20th century British history books. This one covers 1956 – 1963. It was originally supposed to cover to the end of the 60s, but it was eventually decided to split it into two books, which was probably for the best considering that in my edition this one is around a thousand pages long. Moving between politics and major events to social history and popular culture, he’s decided to throw in everything including the kitchen sink dramas. It covers from the Suez crisis and the rise of the consumer society through to the Profumo scandal and the start of Beatlemania. It charts the whole of Harold Macmillan’s term as prime minister but also covers literature, theatre, film and television as well as trends in society in general. The most impressive thing is that he does all this without anything ever feeling disjointed. One chapter flows into the next, the political events influence the social history, the trends in literature and film reflect general attitudes which feed back into the next political decisions. Sandbrook balances everything extremely well and draws on and quotes from a huge number of sources. It’s very well written, making it a really enjoyable read as well as an informative one. I’m intending to read the rest of his books, though given the size of them, perhaps not immediately. A definite 5 star read for me.

>30 valkyrdeath: This looks interesting I had not heard of this series of histories.

Wow. That’s a lot of pages. Sounds fun, though.

>16 valkyrdeath: Great review. Donne is one of my favourite poets: I bought this book last year but have yet to read it. I'm glad that you enjoyed it.

>31 baswood: I hadn't come across them before, but last year my friend got me hooked on the history podcast Dominic Sandbrook does with Tom Holland, and then put me onto this series of books. I've definitely been inspired to read more history since then.

>32 dchaikin: Very long, but thankfully never boring.

>33 rv1988: Thanks, I'm generally not great with poetry so I'm not sure if I'll get around to reading his work, but it was interesting to learn about him.

4. Gentian Violet by Edward Hyams
One of the many sources Sandbrook mentioned and quoted from in the last book I read was this novel. I really liked the quote he used and the plot appealed, so I decided to try and find a copy to read, which turned out not to be easy. Hyams seems to have been quite a prolific author and was apparently praised by Anthony Burgess but none of his novels appear to be in print.

The novel was written in 1953 and is a satire revolving around Jim Blundel, a working class man who during his time in the army during the war gets his middle name conflated with his surname by a rogue hyphen in the records. With this mistake, he starts to mingle with the upper classes and develops an entirely different persona, living as both Jim Blundel with his family and James Stewart-Blundel in his new life. This escalates to the point where Jim Blundel is elected as a Labour MP for his home constituency while Stewart-Blundel is simultaneously elected Conservative MP elsewhere.

I loved the central concept of one man being two different MPs and it leads to some very funny scenes towards the end where he becomes directly opposed to himself, giving speeches in parliament against his opponent and even criticising him for not being present to answer them. Hyams is clearly a good writer too, and there were some really great lines throughout the book. It is very much of its time though, and I can understand that it wouldn’t really hold up generally now. It’s also a bit uneven in terms of the actual plot, having sections where it hurtles along and others that drag a bit, but also this could be partly because the satire of the situation at the time doesn’t quite hit the same now.

I don’t regret reading it, especially coming to it from a book about the history of the era, but it’s not really one to recommend. But I thought I’d preserve a few of my favourite passages from it:

"Children are said to understand character instinctively: the origin of this belief is not clear, since it takes children fifteen years to discover their parents are frauds"

"Mrs Cream liked to have her nephew stay with her, to give him the benefit of the country air and of food out of a better class of tin than the boy's mother chose to afford."

On the House of Commons: "A Member might be on his feet talking away yet boring nobody, as nobody was obliged to listen... If democracy was to be found anywhere in the world, it was here, in the House of Commons, and Jim soon began to feel very proud of being two Members of it."

"But in the case of marginal seats the leaders are forced to take risks; for, in order to appeal to the electorate, their candidate must have some positive quality... and some moral attributes. And it is impossible to be absolutely certain that these qualities will not entail independence of mind. It is for this reason that despite every precaution a few Socialists become Members of Parliament under the aegis of the Labour Party; and a few genuine Tories are elected as Conservatives."

"But all she ever got out of hundreds of hours waiting in hospital ante-rooms was a name for her only daughter. She had overheard two neighbours in the hospital queue mention Gentian Violet, and Mrs Fletcher thought it a pretty name for a girl. Happily, she had only herself to please, for Mr Fletcher had, as it were, died in childbirth. The prospect of supporting an infant out of the thirty-two shillings a week he received as farm hand had driven him to get drunk in the village inn, and reeling from The Iron Horse at closing time he had stepped in front of a fast car."

>35 valkyrdeath: Great review, and the bits you excerpted are really an invitation to read the whole book.

I loved the central concept of one man being two different MPs and it leads to some very funny scenes towards the end where he becomes directly opposed to himself, giving speeches in parliament against his opponent and even criticising him for not being present to answer them.

I don't know if you're familiar with the TV series M*A*S*H, but if so, this reminds me of the episode 'Tuttle,' about an officer who didn't exist.
(Edited for formatting)

>35 valkyrdeath: Although you don't recommend the book, the quotes are very funny and enticing. You are acting much as poor Jim, arguing against himself!

>36 rv1988: "I don't know if you're familiar with the TV series M*A*S*H, but if so, this reminds me of the episode 'Tuttle,' about an officer who didn't exist. "

And then there's the movie "Brazil," written by Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, an alternate universe dark comedy in which a dead fly falls on to an old manual typewriter as an arrest warrant is being typed out, causing a man named Buttle to be falsely arrested instead of the real criminal, named Tuttle. Or maybe it's the other way around.

>36 rv1988: Ah yes, the tragic death of Captain Tuttle and his forgotten parachute. I think I've seen every episode of MASH at least three times, but that didn't actually occur to me while reading the book. Though in that, both MPs do make an appearance, one with and one without a beard, just never at the same time.

>37 labfs39: I'm now regretting not writing two reviews with contrasting opinions of the book! There are some great quotes in the book which is what drew me to it in the first place, so I'd hoped I'd enjoy it more, but it didn't quite hold together as a novel.

>38 rocketjk: I did wonder the first time I saw Brazil whether using that name was a reference to MASH.

5. Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
I’ve had this book for years and have only now finally got round to reading it, though I’ve read some of the stories before in other places. Ted Chiang is far from a prolific author and this book compiles all his published fiction from 1990 to 2002, a total of only eight short stories. Every story is really good though. Many of the stories lie at a strange intersection between hard sci-fi and fantasy, taking a world where science works differently but following the internal logic of that through the story. It’s full of great ideas. Story of Your Life is the original story the film Arrival was based on, and is probably the centrepiece of the collection, following an alien visitation and the attempts to translate the alien language with unusual consequences. Hell is the Absence of God is a very striking portrayal of a world where the existence of God is plainly and horrifyingly obvious to anyone. Seventy-Two Letters treats both golems and the concept of preformation as if they were scientific facts.

I think my favourite of the collection is the last story, Liking What You See: A Documentary. As the title suggests, it’s written in the form of a transcript of a documentary where a technology has been invented that can stop people being able to judge other people based on their appearance, stopping the brain from being able to tell the difference between beautiful and non-beautiful faces. It follows a campaign leading up to a vote at a college trying to make it compulsory to use on campus, with various people telling their stories and putting arguments for and against. It was so well written that I could really see it as a documentary in a world where this had been invented. And while this story is from 2002, with changes in society and technology, if anything some of the themes that come up in it only feel more relevant now.

I’ll hopefully get to his other later collection soon.

>35 valkyrdeath: such a fun review! Cool find.

>39 valkyrdeath: “I'm now regretting not writing two reviews with contrasting opinions of the book!” 🙂

>40 valkyrdeath: sounds terrific. I loved the movie Arrival.

>35 valkyrdeath: Good to read a positive review of Gentian Violet. I have 988 or Sylvester by him published in 1951 on my to read list. I am sure it will be hard to find, but I enjoy the searching

>42 baswood: I'll be interested to see your review when you get to it. I'm certainly tempted to read more by Hyams.

Abandoned The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History's Most Astonishing Murder Ring by Patti McCracken

"Most first names have been anglicized, and some surnames have been, as well. Some first names have been changed for clarity, as many of the people portrayed had the same name."
"This is a true story... However, to fill in gaps, I have had to imagine or assume certain scenarios."

Those are quotes from the brief author’s note at the start of this book, which didn’t bode well for me. The idea that a supposed non-fiction writer can just decide to change the names of real people because she finds it easier I find quite unpleasant and disrespectful. But even worse is the second part. There is no “had to” about it. Not only do you not have to make things up in a history book just because there’s a gap in the historical records but you absolutely shouldn’t be doing that!

I decided to start the book anyway, thinking that maybe she makes it clear when she’s speculating, but sadly that’s not the case. It’s not even written as a non-fiction work, it’s written in the form of a novel from the perspective of the characters, switching perspectives to different characters at times, full of unnecessary details that the author clearly has no way of knowing. I don’t know if the author just wanted to write a novel but this was the only way she could get published or if she just feels like people won’t read real events without them being wrapped up in fanciful nonsense, but it really doesn’t work for me when I’ve picked up a history book. I was listening to this one on audio and I gave it an hour, thinking if it improves after the opening then maybe I’d continue with it. It doesn’t, so I didn’t.

This seems like a really interesting piece of history. I’ll try and read a non-fiction book about it sometime instead of an historical novel in masquerade.

>44 valkyrdeath: That author's note is quite astonishing.

>39 valkyrdeath: Since you are a MASH fan, I thought I'd let you know that I'm currently living in a house once owned by a relative of McLean Stevenson.

>45 labfs39: Definitely wasn't what I was hoping for at the start of the book.

>46 RidgewayGirl: Interesting fact!

>40 valkyrdeath: Great review! That sounds like my kind of book. I loved the movie Arrival so this book is definitely going on the wishlist.

>48 avidmom: I loved Arrival too. When I was reading the sections of the story about decoding the written language I was definitely imagining the symbols they created for the film.

>16 valkyrdeath:
Super-Infinite Features prominently (and very positively) in the latest New York Times Book Review podcast. The Book Club Review people also raved about it when they read it last year. I also enjoyed her 'The Golden Mole', a very different type of book!

>50 Willoyd: The Golden Mole does sound very different, but interesting. I'll add it to my list!

6. The Comforters by Muriel Spark
At this point in the narrative, it might be as well to state that the characters in this novel are all fictitious, and do no refer to any living persons whatsoever.”

In contrast to the previous book I tried to read, here’s a book that’s definitely a novel and is happy to draw your attention to the fact at all times. The book opens with Laurence staying at his grandmother’s house when he discovers diamonds hidden in a loaf of bread and is convinced she’s running a diamond smuggling gang with her strange visitors. Ostensibly we’ve got the books plot started. So far, so comic thriller. Then the next chapter switches to Laurence’s partner Caroline, who soon begins to hear typewriter sounds and a strange voice narrating her own actions and thoughts, a narration that happens to be exactly the same as the narration we’ve been reading in the book, including the quote above.

Aside from the main threads there’s a bookshop owning friend known as the Baron who’s incorrectly convinced that another character is a Satanist, while horrendous busybody Mrs Hogg intersects everything with her nosy intrusions and blackmail attempts with what she learns. There’s a lot going on in this fairly short novel. It doesn’t get simpler when the characters catch Mrs Hogg apparently disappearing completely whenever she’s not directly involved in the plot. It’s quite hard to comment on the book, though via the narration the book probably comments on itself better than I can.

This is Spark’s debut novel, and you certainly couldn’t fault her for ambition. The copy I read has an introduction by Ali Smith which frames it as a response to the social realism of the “angry young men” of the time (which makes it fit in nicely with my earlier non-fiction reading on the subject in the Sandbrook book!) It's an interesting context that I probably wouldn't have thought of. The book feels like it’s almost sending up the conventions of novels in general. It’s very clever, well written, and often funny, but there are so many characters and subplots and I feel I lost track of it all at times, and couldn’t always grasp where she was going with things. Some of this is probably part of the point of it. I’m glad to have read it and absolutely love the concept, but it didn’t work for me as well as I hoped it would, especially with how much I’ve enjoyed some of her other works.

Spark was special. It was nice to learn about her 1st novel. I would like to try this one.

>40 valkyrdeath: Great review. I read a story of Chiang's online, but now will seek out the book too.
>44 valkyrdeath: This reminds me of when I first went to the US. I had a colleague from an Arab country who had a fairly simple, two syllable name starting with S. In our first graduate class, a midwestern classmate told her that her name was 'too difficult' and that she would henceforth be calling her 'Swan'. That wouldn't fly (pun unintended) these days. Re: your point about historical novels in masquerade, I find it regrettably occurs a lot in the true crime genre. I'm thinking particularly of American Kingpin, in which the author decides to make up his own richly textured inner dialogue for living people instead of simply interviewing them.
>52 valkyrdeath: Great review again. Adding it to my list.

>53 dchaikin: I've really enjoyed some of her other books that I've read. She certainly had a distinctive style.

>54 rv1988: I've certainly read books like that where they put thoughts into the heads of real people, and it can be annoying but I try to deal with it if the book is interesting enough. That one went way over the top with it though, and the strangest thing was that most of the stuff she was adding was minor details she couldn't possibly actually know but also weren't interesting or relevant anyway.

If you've enjoyed anything by Chiang before then the collection is definitely worth a read. I'm hoping Exhalation will be to the same standard too.

7. Thoughtcrime Experiments edited by Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson
This is an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories available for free at https://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/. It was a project created by the two editors to see if they could put together their own independent sci-fi anthology under the creative commons license, requesting submissions and offering 200 USD per story and with a preference for stories that had already been rejected by the more regular sci-fi sources. Apparently they mostly wanted lighter stories and were surprised at the number of dark Orwellian stories that were submitted to them, despite the fact that for some reason they’d used an Orwellian term as their book title. The purpose of this book was apparently to show how many high quality stories are getting rejected and also to put out an anthology with the only theme basically being things that they liked. Presumably it fulfils the second part of that, but I’m not so sure of the first.

I discovered this book off the back of the Chiang collection. While looking up the story Hell is the Absence of God, Wikipedia informed me (possibly spuriously) that the Ken Liu story Single-Bit Error was written in response, and this is the book that the story was published in. The intro does say he sought permission from Chiang to be allowed to publish the story, but other than the fact that the line “hell is the absence of God” appears within the text of the story and both deal with an angel visitation, there’s really nothing in common. The visitations aren’t even of the same form. Still, it was a decent story and one of the best of the collection. The final story, the strangely titled Friar Garden, Mister Samuel, and the Jilly Jally Butter Mints by Carole Lanham, was another I enjoyed and had a surprisingly dark ending. Goldenseed was a reasonable enjoyable fable-like story. All the things I liked were at the end of the book. Most of the earlier stories felt so insubstantial as to leave no impression at all, focused almost entirely on humour but not funny enough to me for that to carry them. I didn’t find much of it completely terrible but the hit rate for the stories wasn’t anywhere near as high for me as the best anthologies.

8. Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller by Oliver Darkshire
This is an entertaining non-fiction read about Oliver Darkshire’s time working as as an apprentice bookseller at Sotherans in London. It’s often very funny in its account of the various eccentric customers and employees and their chaotic ways of working. It’s basically a book full of little stories of life as an antiquarian bookseller. He occasionally touches on more serious subjects, but for the most part this is just a charming, good-natured read by someone who clearly has a great fondness for the place he’s writing about. Even better is that I listened to this one on audiobook, read by Darkshire himself, who reads it extremely well and made the book all the more likeable.

>57 valkyrdeath: Oh, great review. I've placed a hold on the audiobook at my library.

>58 rv1988: Hope you enjoy it! It's a fun light read.

9. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
I’ve been wanting to read this since it came out, since I really like Pat Barker’s books, but I was wondering whether I really need another Iliad retelling. The answer was clearly yes, since I loved this. This one is from the perspective of Briseis for most of the book and centralises her story and that of the other women around her. Told in raw, modern English it becomes a story of the effects of war on women, and gives a completely different perspective on events by focusing on a character who is usually treated as a catalyst for events rather than as a person. As usual from Barker it’s brilliantly written and I’ve already got her follow up book The Women of Troy from the library to read soon.

A couple of quotes:

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achielles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles... How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him 'the butcher'.

Like everybody else, I'd been shaken by the sudden appearance of Priam in Achilles's hall. I'd felt blank and at the same time abnormally attentive. I could still hear him pleading with Achilles, begging him to remember his own father - and then the silence, as he bent his head and kissed Achilles's hands.
I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.

>60 valkyrdeath: Pat Barker is such a good writer. I haven’t read this one though as I’m not into re-telling of the Greek classics. But your review has ser tempted me.

>60 valkyrdeath: Ooh, good to hear that this is a good one. I just reread Song of Achilles and was tempted to start this one right away as I have it on my shelf. I'm glad I waited though, as I think the difference in perspective and tone would have been jolting. I'm looking forward to it though. I enjoyed Barker's Regeneration trilogy but haven't read anything else by her yet.

>61 kjuliff: I've enjoyed everything I've read by Pat Barker. I don't know how this one would be if you generally don't like re-tellings, but her writing is always good and she did a lot to make it feel relevant to the effects of war in general.

>62 labfs39: It probably would be strange to go straight from Song of Achilles to this one. I liked them both but they're very different in tone and style. That's one of the things I've discovered I like about these sorts of books though. It's interesting to be able to get such totally different perspectives to essentially the same story.

10. The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall
This was a really fun one. It’s a fantasy Sherlock Holmes pastiche, narrated by Captain John Wyndham as he moves in to lodge with Shaharazad Haas, consulting sorceress. Hall mimics Conan Doyle’s style very well and the book is often very funny. It’s also very strange, set in a world that borrows from all sorts of aspects of fantasy and science fiction, from fairy tale witches to Lovecraftian horror to Orwellian dystopias. I recognised a few references to specific works within the book and, not being the biggest fantasy reader in general, I’m sure there were many more I missed. I’ve read a couple of other books by Hall and this is the first one that’s had either fantasy or mystery components in it, so I’m impressed to find how good he is at the genres. I loved the characters and am only disappointed that he hasn’t returned to them again since this book. It’s one of the most entertaining fantasy books I’ve read in recent years and also a better Holmes pastiche than most I’ve read.

Also worth a mention is that I listened to this one on audio, read by Nicholas Boulton. I was very impressed by it and found him to be an excellent reader, and loved how he managed to make all the characters so distinct.

>44 valkyrdeath:

I'm sorry to hear this is disappointing! I came across that fascinating story about ten years ago, in a fictionalised account by a now-forgotten novelist, Maria Fagyas: The Widowmaker. I can't recall the details at this remove, but I was intrigued enough to check out an academic study of the case, Tiszazug: A Social History of a Murder Epidemic. That was great, but too expensive, so I would have welcomed a cheaper historical work.

If I understand correctly, you would prefer to read a history, but failing that I'd still note a recommendation for Fagyas' book (although that may be difficult to find too--I did suggest it as a worthy candidate for the NYRB Classics imprint, but so far no luck). For one thing, Fagyas was Hungarian herself and very familiar with the context, and as I recall on comparison to Bodo's study, she stuck to the known facts consistently. Even the explanations Bodo offers are very similar to hers--after all, this wasn't some sort of occult affair, the biggest mystery isn't why the women (mostly) turned to poisoning their husbands (mostly), but rather how it took on such proportions before anyone intervened. Not that this Hungarian case was unique, or the first (and presumably not the last either).

>65 LolaWalser: Interesting that you mention the Bodo book, since after my failed attempt at The Angel Makers, I was looking at that and have been considering reading it. Thanks for the recommendations, I'll make a note of the Fagyas book too. I have no problem with historical novels, my problem with the other book was just with it posing as something it wasn't, and also not being well enough written to hold my attention even taking it for what it was.

11. The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
This short novel is a fragmentary account of the life of Shostakovich, told in three parts focusing on three major encounters with power. While using the real events, it also uses the composer to represent the ethical dilemmas of artists under an oppressive regime. Presented as an imagined internal monologue, Shostakovich goes from his initial resistance through having words put in his mouth by those in power to ultimately being pressured into joining the Communist Party. It captures an oppressive atmosphere well and you can feel the anxiety of the narrator coming through the writing. I liked the structure of it, which given the music theme I assume is intentionally based around the form of a sonata or concerto, with the three part structure and events and themes from the start turning up again at the end but with slightly different context. A good read and as well written as expected from Barnes.

>67 valkyrdeath: I loved this Julian Barnes novel. I used to wait for a new Barnes’ novel to be published and buy it immediately . Thanks for reminding me; I haven’t read any Barnes for a while.

>67 valkyrdeath: I haven’t read Barnes. This sounds terrific though. Great review.

>64 valkyrdeath: and i’ve never heard of Alexis Hall. Enjoyed reading about how much you enjoyed it. I’m interested.

>67 valkyrdeath: Great review. I've never read Barnes, either, but always meaning to start. My father keeps raving about Arthur and George by him.

>64 valkyrdeath: Aha! I do enjoy a good Alexis Hall. Great review.

>68 kjuliff: I've not read a huge amount of his work but I've enjoyed all the ones that I have.

>69 dchaikin: Thanks! Both good authors but in very different ways.

>70 rv1988: I've yet to read Arthur and George, though having read the non-fiction book Conan Doyle for the Defence a few months ago and watched a Conan Doyle documentary recently, it would seem an appropriate one to get to.

12. The Fraud by Zadie Smith
An historical novel based around the Tichborne impostor case in 19th century England. It focuses on the character of Eliza Touchet, cousin of the author William Ainsworth, whose life is also a large part of the story. It’s made up of very short chapters that move backwards and forwards in time, but I didn’t have trouble keeping track, especially as the chapter headings often contained the year. Over the course of the book, the fraud of the title turns out to refer to more than just to obvious one on trial. It’s got lots of elements and themes and it took me a little while to get to grips with the style, but once it all fell into place for me I ended up really enjoying it, and the end pulled it all together.

I first learnt of this book via an episode of The Rest Is History podcast about the Tichborne case, with Zadie Smith on as a guest. That helped to provide some of the historical background to the book for me, but it’s well worth a listen regardless of intent to read the book since the case is fascinating in itself.

>72 valkyrdeath: Interesting review. I’ve been back and forth on whether to read this and now I’m convinced it’s worth a tbr. Thank you.

Well, that leaves me really really interested. Excellent review and glad you enjoyed. I’ve been thinking about this one, which is partly why i listened to White Teeth recently.

>73 kjuliff: jinx ? 🙂

>75 dchaikin: Snap 😊

>73 kjuliff: >74 dchaikin: It seems to divide opinion so I certainly wouldn't like to say how anyone else might react to it. It's quite a complex structure but it worked for me in the end. It's certainly a very different book to White Teeth.

13. The Insider’s Guide to Inside No. 9 by Mark Salisbury
An episode by episode guide about the making of the first five series of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s anthology show. It’s long been one of the best written and most inventive shows on TV. There’s not many shows you can put on that will have a silent comedy one week, a family drama another, a Shakespearian style comedy written in iambic pentameter the next, followed by a chilling horror story, and it’s almost annoying that they seem to be so good at whatever they turn their hand to. This book has between 6 and 12 pages about each episode, and I found it really interesting to read about the origins of the ideas for the scripts and about how they were made and the level of detail that went into them. There’s a lot of photographs and images of the original handwritten notes showing their initial ideas which are interesting. Each chapter does spend a bit too much time running through the story of the episode for me, since I don’t see why anyone would be reading this without already having seen them, and it would have been nice to have a bit more depth to everything, but overall I enjoyed reading it. I’ve been reading it gradually, rewatching the episodes before reading the corresponding chapter, which was an enjoyable way of doing it. Obviously only of interest to fans of the show, but a good read for anyone who is.

14. The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis
I saw this non-fiction book about the 16th century impostor case talked about on a few other people’s threads already this year and since it seemed to be popular it seemed like it would be a good companion to The Fraud. I don’t have anything much to add to what anyone else has already said about it, but it was a concise and well written account of the case, I enjoyed reading it.

>78 valkyrdeath:

I love Inside No. 9 too. The episode in the hotel, Zanzibar, where everybody speaks in Shakespeare-inflected rhyme, is among my top-ten TVs.

Have you seen Psychoville? They mined it for a lot of stories in IN9. And then there's The League of Gentlemen... it comes in for a lot of stick nowadays but it still blows me away.

>80 LolaWalser: I saw the first series of Psychoville but missed the second. I do intend to watch the entire thing at some point. I always loved The League of Gentlemen. I've liked everything Shearsmith and Pemberton have done, and with Inside No. 9 coming up to its last series I'm curious what they'll do next.

>78 valkyrdeath: I’ve never heard of this

>79 valkyrdeath: glad you enjoyed Davis’s little history classic

15. Brothers Keepers by Donald E. Westlake
Brother Benedict belongs to a monastery on Park Avenue in New York, but finds out via a newspaper article that the land it’s on is set to be sold and the monastery demolished. He and the rest of the monks set about doing whatever they can to stop it. Despite the cover and the Hard Case Crimes label, there’s relatively little actual crime in this book. It’s a fairly gentle book for Westlake. The monastic order doesn’t believe in travelling, and much of the story and humour of the book is in Brother Benedict’s trials in confronting an outside world that he doesn’t understand, and falling in love while doing it. As always with Westlake, there’s plenty of funny moments, especially a battle of wits argument carried out entirely in back-and-forth biblical quotes. And being the pun lover that I am, I can’t resist the mention of another monastic order made up of ex-criminals being referred to in passing as the “felonious monks”. This is minor Westlake, but it’s still an enjoyable read and an interesting show of how varied his work could be aside from his Parker and Dortmunder books.

16. Influenca by Jade LFT Peters
A graphic novel that’s a brief look at a relationship in a world where zombie apocalypses have become so common that it’s become normal. Dodie is a zombie hunter who is followed around and photographed by her partner Beatriz, chronicling their exploits on social media, accidentally creating a movement called the influencas. As well as the comic scenes it’s also told through a few simulated social media posts and a magazine interview. It mostly focuses on their relationship with the zombie apocalypse in the background. It’s not bad, but it was extremely short and it felt like it needed more to me, not really seeming to go anywhere with its premise.

17. The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories by Terry Pratchett
This is some of the earliest and latest work by Terry Pratchett. Earliest because it’s collecting some of the stories he wrote for the children’s section of a newspaper when he was very young, and latest because he edited them and added to them for this book, writing an introduction which must be one of the last things he ever wrote, the book being released posthumously. As you’d expect given where they came from, these are very much stories aimed at children, and they’re definitely not up to the incredible standard of the older Pratchett. But as children’s stories they strike me as a really fun collection, probably mostly helped by his edits. Even as an adult I still got a few laughs from it, particularly enjoying a story where a librarian accidentally summons a 16th Century magician who starts reverting everything back to how it was in Elizabethan days and everyone’s language starts to change accordingly, and a set of stories set in Llandanffwnfafegettupagogo in the Wild West of Britain, Wales. Though maybe I liked the Wales stories mostly because I was listening to this one on audio and I enjoyed hearing the Welsh accent Julian Rhind-Tutt read them in.

There’s one story that’s repeated from his regular short story collection, A Blink of the Screen. The story is Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor, and it was probably included there because of its importance as the story which inspired his classic Bromeliad Trilogy, not to mention clearly influencing the name Rincewind. The one in the earlier collection was the original version though, so it’s interesting to compare what the older Pratchett added for this children’s book.

Only really one for young children for the most part, but I was happy to have a few more words by him that I hadn’t read before.

Nice reviews, Gary. I love the "felonious monks."

a librarian accidentally summons a 16th Century magician who starts reverting everything back to how it was in Elizabethan days and everyone’s language starts to change accordingly

LOL, sold!

Enjoyed these latest. The Pratchett sounds fun.

>85 valkyrdeath: Great review. I've read most of Discworld, but not of any of his works for younger readers. This sounds like fun; perhaps I will try and read with my niece and nephew.

>85 valkyrdeath: Oh dear. I might have to read this just for the Welsh stories. (!)

>89 rv1988: Nothing beats the Discworld books, but for his children's books I think the Bromeliad trilogy is best. These short stories seem like they'd be really fun for younger children though.

>90 WelshBookworm: I forgot to mention one of my favourite jokes from those stories. A character in one of them is a poacher turned policeman. He still goes poaching, but now sometimes he catches himself and gives himself a stern warning before letting himself go.

18. The Museum of Human History by Rebekah Bergman
This one was quite an ambitious debut novel. The book revolves around a girl who following being rescued from drowning has been asleep for 25 years, yet somehow has never aged in that time. The book then jumps backwards and forwards in time and between different characters, gradually uncovering what has happened, also revealing the story of a new anti-ageing treatment that stops the physical appearances of ageing and can also help eliminate pain, but may have some not to pleasant side effects. The characters sometimes seem to be completely separate stories but they all connect in some way by the end, and you get events revisited from the perspective of another character, revealing the other side to the story and sometimes how the characters misinterpret each other. It’s cleverly done, though the coincidences can be a bit much at times and the perspective change isn’t always clear and I could be a few lines into something before I’d realise I was reading another character and would have to mentally change gear. The book covers a lot of themes and it’s often quite dark, with suicide (or assumed suicide), terminal illness, parental death, and lots of other non-cheery things. I do wish it had wrapped things up a bit better by the end, but it was still quite an impressive debut.

19. The Curse of the Pharaohs by Elizabeth Peters
The second of the Amelia Peabody historical mystery novels, set in Egypt in the 1890s. It’s another entertaining book, and the main character continue to be a lot of fun, though I think I enjoyed this one slightly less than the first one. The plot felt a bit more muddled and there was a bit too much stereotyping amongst the other characters than I remember there being in the first book. It was a fun mystery read despite that and I’ll happily read more at some point.

20. The Women of Troy by Pat Barker
The follow on to The Silence of the Girls which I read the previous month. It continues to follow Briseis, now married to Alcimus and pregnant with Achilles’ child, in the aftermath of the fall of Troy. Being a sequel, it maybe has slightly less immediate impact than the first one, but otherwise it’s just as brilliantly written and once I’d got a couple of chapters in just as gripping. It’s also interesting to read something set in a part of the tale less often told.

>94 valkyrdeath: I reread Song of Achilles recently and was tempted to immediately dive into Silence of the Girls to stay in that world. Upon reflection I decided not to mix authors, as they have different takes. Your review reminds me that I do want to read it soon though.

>95 labfs39: It's well worth reading once you've got some distance from Song of Achilles, it's about as different a take as you can get I think.

21. The Third Man and The Fallen Idol by Graham Greene
This book consists of a novella and a short story. The Third Man was an enjoyable and well written story, but Graham Greene’s introduction was just as interesting. The novella wasn’t written originally for publication but just to give him source material to adapt into his film script, since he didn’t like writing a script from scratch. Because of this, he considers the film actually better than the novella because it’s the finished project with all the changes being by or approve by himself. It’s hard to disagree with his assessment, since the film is a classic, where this is just a decent quick read. Also interesting was that the famous “cuckoo clock” speech was an invention of Orson Welles for the film.

The Fallen Idol, originally called The Basement Room but renamed to match the title of the film adaptation, didn’t have a great impact on me. It was interesting enough in premise but badly dated thanks to some general misogyny and a few instances of horrible racist language, albeit from the mouth of an awful character.

22. Transformation and Other Stories by Mary Shelley
Three short stories by Mary Shelley. Two were well written and enjoyable enough, though nothing especially memorable. I didn’t really care for the third one at all. The book has gone back to the library and I’ve left it too long since reading it to have much more to say about this one!

>97 valkyrdeath:

Greene was lucky with film adaptations of his work, Carol Reed (the director of The Third Man) turned The Fallen Idol into an excellent film too.

>99 LolaWalser: Greene did write an intro for The Fallen Idol too and talked about the film. I am interested in seeing it some time. It sounds like the film might be quite different to the story but that's likely for the better.

23. Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
I absolutely loved this one, and it ranks as one of my favourite Victorian novels I’ve read. The characters are all believable and multi-dimensional characters and the writing manages to feel surprisingly modern, which is something I’ve noticed in general with Elizabeth Gaskell’s books. It’s also a very funny book at times, with some great lines. Sadly, she hadn’t quite finished the novel when she died, but there was only another chapter or so to go and one of her friend’s wrote a tribute in place of it explaining how she was going to end it. It’s one of those books that’s huge but doesn’t feel it and just flies by. I think this is my favourite Gaskell novel, or at least up there with North and South as it’s been a long time since I read that now.

I rounded it off by watching the BBC miniseries version which was also a very good adaptation.

24. The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral by Diane Ackerman
This is a book of poetry based around the at-time-of-writing nine planets, plus poems on asteroids, a comet and Cape Canaveral. Ackerman tries to blend science and poetry to show the wonder and beauty in scientific subjects. I can’t really comment on how good this book is. Every so often I feel the urge to give poetry another go to see if I can get along with it, but it’s yet to really work and it’s extremely rare for me to find a poem I even understand, never mind like, so I’m not really capable of judging it. But I’ve read it.

25. We’ll Always Have Paris by Ray Bradbury
A late period Ray Bradbury short story collection, the back of the book states that it’s a new collection of never-before published stories, rather than new stories. This, along with Bradbury’s introduction about how they’re stories that just came to him throughout his life that he hasn’t really thought about, suggests to me that this is just a collection of a bunch of stuff that just wasn’t good enough to publish at the time. That certainly matches my experience with reading it, since little here feels especially worthwhile. Many of them feel like first drafts and initial writing down of ideas that were then abandoned. Some of them don’t go anywhere and have no real ending or are just so slight as to not have any real point to them. The Murder had potential with an intriguing beginning premise of one man betting another that he could make him become a murderer, and has a possibly interesting ending, but doesn’t have anything much in the middle to connect them.

Despite all this, I read through the whole book very quickly. I enjoy Bradbury’s writing style and so it was easy to make it to the end, even if at the end of it there didn’t seem much point and little of it was memorable. Definitely not one of his best works.

26. Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them by Nancy Marie Brown
I always loved the Lewis chess pieces since I first saw them when I was a kid, so was intrigued by this book. The book is mostly history of the Viking era, but considers that history in relation to the specific designs of the pieces and presents a trail of evidence leading to the conclusion that they were made by the Icelandic ivory carver Margret the Adroit. It’s well reasoned and believable, though by no means universally accepted, and the author does state the contrasting opinions at times rather than trying to present it as a proven fact. As with anything from this far back in history, it’s unlikely anything this specific can be proved, but it was a good historical overview and interesting to see how particular details can be used to trace the origins.

Just catching up on your thread. What a great set of reviews.

>92 valkyrdeath: I saw a review that called the The Museum of Human History 'cluttered but satisfying'. Sounds about right, from what you've written.

>97 valkyrdeath: How interesting that he liked the film better than the book. I found an excerpt from his introduction online here: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-astor... I didn't know that it was based on largely true circumstances about the penicillin trade (as he says, 'Reality, in fact, was only a background to a fairy tale..')

>101 valkyrdeath: Gaskell is one of my favourite writers. I would go so far as to say I prefer her to Austen in many ways. So glad you enjoyed this. The miniseries is also very good. Incidentally, the same can be said of Gaskell's North and South - the book is great, the miniseries starring Daniela Danby-Ashe and Richard Armitage is also wonderful. m

>104 valkyrdeath: 'Margret the Adroit' is a wonderful name, especially for an artist.

>104 valkyrdeath: I only read recently about this chess set, and this book sounds very interesting. Wishlisted!

What interesting and varied reading you have been doing!

>105 rv1988: I did watch the adaptation of North and South after reading that book a few years ago too, and enjoyed it. Richard Armitage was on the BBC book show Between the Covers a few months ago and brought on North and South as his book pick too.

>106 FlorenceArt: I do love that chess set. There's so much personality in the designs. The book is an interesting one, though a large part of the book is about general history before it gets to the specifics of the pieces.

>107 labfs39: I do like to keep things varied!

27. The Trial by Franz Kafka, translated by Breon Mitchell
I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time, about a man on trial for reasons not revealed to him, caught up in a slightly surreal bureaucratic nightmare. It’s hard to know what impact the book would have coming into it without prior knowledge, since this is one of those works that has so thoroughly permeated through literature and popular culture. I’d certainly seen the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that borrowed the whole premise as the basis for the Cardassian legal system before I’d even heard of Kafka. Though it was a little drawn out at times, it was an intriguing read that built up the confusion and anxiety well, and I’m glad to have finally got to it.

>109 valkyrdeath:

I have never seen a popular take that does this book justice. In Anglodom, with its various mostly nefarious libertarian and anti-communist positions, it seems to be taken for granted that it's all about the horrors of "bureaucracy" of large social systems (and then a hop and a skip!-and suddenly!-NKVD!)

Virtually no one talks up Kafka's obsession with Judaism and his chronic feelings of isolation and persecution due to antisemitism. K. both knows and ignores why he's on trial. He's a Jew--this is somehow fatal beyond routine ratiocination and without any need for "real" guilt.

Kafka, like Orwell, has been hopelessly enmeshed and deformed by abuse in the Cold War.

>110 LolaWalser: Interesting, not a reading of the book that would ever have occurred to me, but I don't remember spotting any mentions of K. being Jewish in the book. I don't think it's really strange for people to take the book as being about the horrors of bureaucracy when the entire book is literally about a man caught in a slightly surreal bureaucratic nightmare though, and I don't think that's necessarily anything to do with fear of communism.

28. A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark
This was a really fun read and I think my favourite of Muriel Spark’s works that I’ve read so far, other than possibly the very different The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It’s told from the perspective of Mrs Hawkins as she looks back on her life in the 1950s. There’s are a lot of plot threads that make it a hard book to summarise. There’s another tenant in the same boarding house receiving threatening letters and a publishing company run by someone with an obsession with radionics quackery, but the main thread running through it is her encounters with an unpleasant hack writer intent on ruining her due to her refusal to apologise for an insult. While some of the other aspects seems unrelated at first, by the end of the book everything has been tied together. Spark’s writing is excellent as always and it’s probably the funniest of her books that I’ve read.

29. Totem by Laura Perez
Graphic novel. Absolutely beautiful artwork. Absolutely incomprehensible plot.

>109 valkyrdeath: I remember that episode of DS9, and I wasn’t aware that the premise came from The Trial, which I haven’t read. Interesting!

>112 valkyrdeath: Sounds like fun! I guess I should read Muriel Spark, so that’s another one for the wishlist.

>111 valkyrdeath:

See, (and no reflection on you personally), but isn't it far more astonishing NOT to think about Kafka's Jewishness and that of his characters (the identification is simple), OR his lifelong suffering from antisemitism*, in regard to this novel and his entire oeuvre? Bureaucratic nightmares are essentially trivial; besides, Kafka was a good bureaucrat himself. So yes, he was fantastically positioned to use bureaucracy as the framework for his stories of existential angst, but that existential angst had sources far deeper than the horrors of paperpushing.

By the way, I don't mean this is the only reading of the text--as I said, it's just striking how little it's mentioned (I am definitely not the first or only person to think of it!), especially compared to the "big government is a nightmare" and similar shallow takes.

*The antisemitism of his times caught young Kafka unaware and was a major shock to his system, as his family were all striving to be good assimilated gentiles/Germans culturally. So much so that Kafka developed an interest in Judaism apart and against his family's/father's ambitions for him, trying to teach himself Hebrew and investigating Zionism. Also, he was a German in a sea of Slavs, doubly a Jew in a sea of Christians, triply an Other. In short, a human being surrounded with hostility, a human being persecuted and tormented, for no obvious reason (or no reason obvious to himself). The perception that antisemitism had nothing yet everything to do with him personally is precisely of the sort that would engender anguish and doubt, terror and non-belonging and, artistically, all the grand motifs of his writing.

Sorry if this is too long of a digression. :)

>116 LolaWalser: Yes, I can definitely see it as a valid take on the book. There's always multiple readings as you said. I didn't actually know Kafka was Jewish at the time of reading The Trial, with my entire sum of knowledge about him being "the guy who wrote The Trial and The Metamorphosis". I have since started reading a book about him though.

My own readings of stories are generally just to enjoy the literal meanings of them. I've never really been one for deep analysis of novels, though I can appreciate other people's takes when they do it.

>112 valkyrdeath:
I love Muriel Spark. I would agree that The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is probably her best, certainly of those I've read - it's not her best known without good reason - but whilst A Far Cry from Kensington is right up there (and must reread it), I think the (scathingly) funniest so far for me has been The Abbess of Crewe - which takes the Watergate story and repositions it in a convent! Still have a lot to go at though!

>118 Willoyd: I read The Abbess of Crewe a few years ago and it didn't quite work for me as well as the other books I've read by her. I don't know if it was because of the mood I was in at the time though, or if it's because I have fairly limited knowledge about the details of Watergategate. I'll probably revisit it at some point.

30. Bunbury by Tom Jacobson
A fun play where two unseen characters from plays, Bunbury from The Importance of Being Earnest and Rosaline from Romeo and Juliet, find they have the ability to go into other plays and set about altering them. It’s mostly an exercise in the playwright emulating the styles of the different plays with comic differences, and it was entertaining enough in the early parts, but as it went on it moved onto plays that I was less and less familiar with, making it much less effective for me, though the play just about held together. The name Blanche was enough to make me realise we were in A Streetcar Named Desire, though knowing the name is the entire extent of my knowledge of the play, but by the time it moved into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I didn’t even know what the play was until it was name checked in a conversation right at the end. It also felt a bit like a missed opportunity and didn’t really do as much as it could with the concept. Though maybe I’ve been spoilt by the early Thursday Next books, which is mainly what it’s made me want to read again.

31. Kafka’s Other Trial by Elias Canetti
I decided to finally read The Trial recently thanks to the library having just got a new copy of it in, and shortly after picking it up I came across this book in the non-fiction section which felt like a good companion to it. From the back of the book:

In July 1914, Franz Kafka's fiancée Felice broke off their engagement in a humiliating public tribunal, surrounded by her friends and family, and the other woman with whom Kafka had recently fallen in love. Broken and bereft, Kafka - at the height of his writing powers - turned the experience into his masterpiece, The Trial, where his lovers became the faceless prosecutors of Josef K.

This is very misleading regarding both the facts and what the book is focused on. At the same time as Kafka was proposing to Felice he was going through periods where he wasn’t writing to her because he was instead writing infatuated letters to another woman. The “public” tribunal was just Kafka being confronted by both these woman along with Felice’s sister, to whom he refused to speak causing the engagement to end. He later proposed a second time to Felice and once again broke off the engagement. I don’t think there’s much there for him to be able to present himself as the victim, but it seems he did. He wrote The Trial around the time of this, which he did refer to as a “tribunal” but aside from that potentially spurring him to write, the actual events don’t otherwise have much relation to the novel. Though they might explain the weird aspect that all the women seemed to be practically throwing themselves at Josef K in the book.

This book is basically a commentary on a book of Kafka’s letters to Felice that had been published. The majority of the book is describing what was in the letters and what it shows about his relationship with Felice and his character, which didn’t seem all that interesting. I’ve never really found the minutiae of these things suddenly become interesting just because they’re about someone famous either. I feel like it’s probably a perfectly good book, and anyone interested in psychoanalysing Kafka would probably find it interesting, as he certainly seemed a frustrating and confused man. It’s just not really the book for me, but it was short enough that it wasn’t a chore to finish it.

32. High Times in the Low Parliament by Kelly Robson
A political satire in fantasy novella form. In a version of Victorian-ish England where fairies live alongside humans, an agreement had been reached that due to how warlike humans are, there would be a parliament where humans could govern themselves, but if they ended up unable to agree on things then the fairies would flood the parliament and drown them all. Of course, humans being what they are, even the threat of death can’t make them reach an agreement on anything and the politicians are more interested in just giving speeches and arguing with each other. Lana is tricked into becoming a scribe at the parliament and needs to find a way to keep herself and everyone else from dying. Oh, and all the characters and everyone in the world is a woman, which isn’t really explained.

It was an enjoyable enough read but nothing too spectacular. Possibly the comedy isn’t really my thing generally, since I’ve seen it described as a “stoner comedy” which isn’t something I’m particularly familiar with, but if it’s about a main character that’s just obsessed with flirting with women and taking drugs then that’s pretty much what this book is. The world building was good and the writing was fun, but the satire doesn’t go beyond the obvious, the characters spent a bit too much time on fantasy drugs, and the ending didn’t feel especially convincing. The book managed to be fairly likeable despite that, and it was a quick enough read that it didn’t wear out its welcome.

33. Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire
The ninth book in the Wayward Children series. Following the pattern of the series, the odd numbered books are set at the school as opposed to the even numbered books telling the individual stories of one of the characters in their particular fantasy world. In this particular case though, despite being back at the school, it’s basically a direct sequel to the story of Antsy from the previous book. Maybe because of this, I found it worked a bit better than the school stories usually do. I still feel the individual stories work better, and I think it might be because there’s so many characters and so much going on in the ones set at the school. This one passes through several different worlds along the way and intersects with the stories of so many of the characters that it feels a bit rushed. I don’t know if it’s the authors choice of a requirement of the publisher that these are all novellas, but while the even numbered books usually feel like the perfect length, I sometimes think it might be better to extend some of these even numbered ones to a full novel and flesh out the stories and give them a bit more depth. Still, as I said, this one worked a lot better for me than they usually do and it was nice to already get a conclusion to Antsy’s story.

>120 valkyrdeath: You mentioned Thursday Next - that is exactly what I thought of when I read this review. I like the concept, and am glad that more authors are experimenting with it, although this may not have been a great success.

>121 valkyrdeath: How unfortunate that the author gets a crucial fact wrong, right off the bat. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I get the impression of misogyny from a lot of Canetti's work.

>122 valkyrdeath: I'm not familiar with 'stoner comedy': likeable but forgettable sounds apt to me, in my ignorant state.

>121 valkyrdeath: I too have put off reading The Trial and you remind me to find my copy and get to it. I'll skip this nonfiction book, however.

>123 valkyrdeath: I read the first five of the Wayward Children series and petered out. My favorites are the ones about Jack and Jill. My least favorite was Beneath the Sugar Sky.

>124 rv1988: I'm not sure if Canetti got anything wrong, it was the back cover which I assume is just the publisher's text trying to make the book sound more interesting. I don't think anything in the book phrased it like that. I'm not familiar with Canetti other than this book, and I'm not sure I'd heard of him before I picked it up.

>125 labfs39: The Jack and Jill story was definitely the highlight of the series for me. I do like the even numbered books well enough to continue and as they're basically standalone stories I've considered only reading those ones, but I end up just reading them all since they're so short anyway.