RidgewayGirl Carries On Regardless

I'm officially finished, but with almost three months to go until the new year, I'm going to do a bonus round. Ten new categories, three books each (because it should be a stretch, right?).




Give me an evening to come up with my new categories. I'll also summarize my reading in the first 1010 Challenge.

Summary

Category One.

Franzenfreude
Books that have stirred up controversy

1. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
2. This is Not Chick Lit edited by Elizabeth Merrick
3. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

Category Two.

Bad Attitudes
Books about lives gone wrong

1. The Devil's Rooming House by M. William Phelps
2. Old City Hall by Robert Rotenberg
3. Diary of a Wimpy Kid The Last Straw by Jeff Kinney
4. The Dork Diaries by

Category Three.

Last In, First Out
Recent acquisitions

1. Bound by Antonya Nelson
2. Pride and Prejudice and Jasmin Field by Melissa Nathan
3. Earth by Jon Stewart

Category Four.

New Recipes
Books about food

1. The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
2. Passing for Thin by Frances Kuffel
3.

Category Five.

Booze and Cigarettes
Books about addictions

1. The Lost Child by Julie Myerson
2. Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley
3. Worth Dying For by Lee Child

Category Six.

Anklebiters
Books about parents and children

1. The Cruel Stars of the Night by Kjell Eriksson
2. The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy
3. Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez

Category Seven.

Ja Wohl, Mein Herr
Nazis!

1. All Clear by Connie Willis
2. Mayhem by J. Robert Janes
3.

Category Eight.

She Turned Me Into a Newt!
Books about witches, zombies and other monsters

1. World War Z by Max Brooks
2. Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire
3. No Doors, No Windows by Joe Schreiber

Category Nine.

Shoes and Chocolate
Chick-lit and romance

1. The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen
2. This is Chick-Lit edited by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
3. Sleeping Arrangements by Madeline Wickham

Category Ten.

At the Last Minute and at Great Expense
Library books (which will be returned on time)

1. Hav by Jan Morris (my first ILL!)
2. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham
3. Gunn's Golden Rules by Tim Gunn

Yay! Glad you've started this new mini-challenge for yourself.

Okay, I have my categories figured out and now I can relax and get going on Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, my first book for this challenge.

Nazis!

Congratulations on finishing and thank you for sticking around. A great little mini challenge you've got there!

Too bad you should end your challenge with such a mediocre read. On behalf of my country, I apologize :)
Läckberg sells like hot cakes here, true, but she isn't exactly loved by critics or fans of...for lack of a better term..."literary crime fiction". It's more the books everybody gives a dad who never reads for christmas.

Congratulations on completing your first 100 and good luck with this next mini-challenge! I'll be interested in seeing what you fill your categories with.

Ja Wohl, Mein Herr! I laughed aloud. Have fun with that one ;)

With the good to bad ratio of books by Swedish authors coming in at 25 to 1, they certainly have the Canadians, Brits and Americans beat. And I suspect that Lackberg will prove popular here.

I couldn't resist Nazis. They make for such satisfying reads. It helps knowing that they lose in the end!

Yah! A mini challenge to follow! I am looking forward to seeing what you read for the Franzenfreude and Bad Attitudes categories.

Just dropped by to star you, looking forward to see you fill these categories.

My original 1010 challenge went well. I hadn't realized how many books I do read. That's a good thing, right?

There were three stand-out books, all historical novels by British writers. I don't usually go for books set more than a hundred years ago, so I was surprised to love each of these.
1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel was easily the best book of the year for me and it deserved the Booker Prize.
2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell told the story of a principled man as he discovers that it's not so easy to see what the right thing to is among the Dutch trading with a closed Japan.
3. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt moved at a slow pace, but provided a wonderfully detailed picture of the world leading into WWI.

I read several excellent crime novels this year, finding new authors and new books by old favorites.
4. Queenpin by Megan Abbott is an old-fashioned hard-boiled with a feminist twist.
5. The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh pulled no punches and was seriously good.
6. One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson was the intricate follow-up to Case Histories and gave me more reasons to love Jackson Brody.
7. The Master of Rain by Tom Bradby was an old black and white noir set in Shanghai in 1926.

And the remaining stand-outs were
8. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky got much of its reputation from the author's history, but this book was seriously good.
9. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters was a Dickensian tale with more startling twists than a roller coaster.
10. The Help was clearly Kathryn Stockett's first book, but it was a strong beginning to what will hopefully be a shining career.

I'm glad you're sticking around! I'll be back often to see what you are reading. Suite Francaise is going to be a group read for 11/11 and I 'm looking forward to it.

Great categories! I look forward to your reviews.

More for my wishlist.....The Cutting Room. Have you read anything else by her?

I have the Kate Atkinson books on my massive TBR. Must move them to top.

Congrats on finishing, and I look forward to your reads!

I just know that your review of Freedom will probably make me want to read it before my challenge for next year.

Love your recap, you know how much I loved Queenpin, and I thought that the Help was beautifully written. I read Suite Francaise a while ago and thought it was great also. And how could I overlook Jackson Brody? Love him!

Now I am off to look into the Master of Rain.....

KAzevedo, I've also read The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh, which was good, but not as good as The Cutting Room. She does not pull any punches, so if you're easily offended you may want to skip her, but if you like noir written from the gutter of the seediest street in town, she's your girl.

Kate Atkinson is fabulous.

Jonesli, I think you'd love The Master of Rain.

I'm intensely into Freedom now, which is like The Corrections, only more so. Franzen has a way of compassionately portraying flawed and unlikeable characters.

Freedom is much like Jonathan Franzen's last book, The Corrections, only more so. If you liked his story of a dysfunctional family from the midwest, you'll love his new tale of a liberal, midwestern family with issues of their own.

The book begins with a summary of the life that Walter and Patty Berglund built for their young family in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows how neighbors saw the nice Berglunds, but quickly moves on to Patty telling her own story in the third person, a very different tale altogether.

Franzen's not one who will amaze the reader with the beauty of his prose or the delicate intricacies of his language. Where he excels, and excels in a startling, astonishing way, is how he can write simultaneously with contempt and with great compassion about his all too human characters. He also is able to detail the way family members love each other and yet can't communicate or willfully miscommunicate with each other. And even as the Berglunds royally mess up their own lives, he allows them moments of forgiveness and grace.

I've never been a fan of James Ellroy's noir-tinged novels set in post-war Los Angeles. He's got the hard-boiled patter down, but the stories never felt real. Twenty years ago, however, he wrote a book about his mother and, despite the unrelenting patois, the book sizzles with dysfunction and a reconciliation forever lost. In My Dark Places, Ellroy revisits his mother's murder from the direction of a cold case. He'd been ten years old at the time, his parents were divorced and his relationship with his mother was not great. He had wished her dead just three months earlier. My Dark Places is an amazing book. It's not particularly well-written, Ellroy can't leave the detective magazine lingo behind and refers to his mother, somewhat disconcertingly, as the Redhead throughout the book, but it resonates with emotion and regret.

The Hilliker Curse is his follow-up memoir and in it he attributes his string of failed relationships to his abruptly truncated relationship with his mother. He's not without self-awareness, something that is usually missing in books about infidelity (see Julie Powell's Cleaving): I always get what I want. I more often than not suffocate or discard what I want the most. It cuts me loose to yearn and profitably repeat the pattern. He's selfish to an astonishing degree, driven, self-obsessed and deeply religious (the justifications for breaking up marriages, his own and those of the women he meets are a little shaky).

Ellroy begins with his own parents' marriage. They divorced when he was young, or as Ellroy put it: My parents split the sheets later that year. Jean Hilliker got primary custody. She put my dad on skates and rolled him to a cheap pad a few blocks away. Ellroy's father gets him back after his mother's murder, but isn't what could be even loosely termed a good father. Ellroy ends up in a wretched basement apartment, hooked on Benzedrex inhalers and any pills he finds in the Hancock Park homes he breaks into. He has, not surprisingly, trouble finding a girl willing to go out with him.

Surprisingly, Ellroy's odd pulp-fiction language serves this book well. It would just be too intense without the distance of obsolete idioms. He gets clean, using AA as a support and a place to meet women: Only lonely and haunted women would grok my gravity. They were sister misfits attuned to my wavelength. Only they grooved internal discourse and sex as sanctified flame. Their soiled souls were socked in sync with yours truly.

As Ellroy's fortunes improve, it becomes more apparent what an ass he is. All the heavy lifting in relationships is done by his partners. When married, he does not do any domestic chores, but needs to eat well and live in nice surroundings. He prefers solitude with his partner of the moment and so discourages any sort of social life in his wives. He hates other places. Amsterdam is described as Truly Shitsville and he leaves sightseeing in Paris for the geeks, freaks and fruitcake artistes.

What saves this book in the end is Ellroy's honesty and a sense of fair play toward the women in his life. The relationships may have all soured, but he's willing to put the blame squarely on his own shoulders, and even figures out toward the end that his mother was not the bad guy in his story.

23
That is a great review, but wow, does that book sound depressing....

You leave me conflicted re these Ellroys. Sounds like a compelling story, but the language seems like it could be a bit much. "grok my gravity"? "grooved internal discourse..." Yeah. I don't know...

But anyway. Congrats. Good luck with the bonus round. You and I frequently like the same books but, I hated The Corrections, and it seems I'm pretty much alone. I hated it so much that I get a slight headache whenever I see it in a bookstore, so thanks for letting us know that Freedomland is much like The Corrections. Useful info.

Gonna have to check out this Wolf Hall sooner rather than later.

Some more great reviews Ridgwaygirl. Glad to see you're continuing. I like that Last in, First Out category!

Thanks for the introduction to Megan Abbott.

Thank you all for your kind comments. They go straight to my head.

I understand where you're coming from, citygirl. I feel exactly the same way about Phillip Roth. And I don't like Joyce Carol Oates, which I think is a kind of heresy in certain circles.

I was thinking that the first two books of this bonus round were kinda testosterone fueled, so I went back and discovered that only 36% of my reading this year has been by male writers.

23 I didn't realisse Mr Ellroy had a new non fiction book out, I really enjoyed My Dark Places probably, as you say, mostly for its brutal honesty, not sure if had such issues I would admit to some of the things he did!

You know, I think I like JCO, but sometimes I'm not sure. :s

And I echo pamelad in re thanks for introduction to Megan Abbott. I've continued with Hard Case Crime and I have another Abbott on the shelf waiting TBR. I think it will not be long.

Also, thanks for the intro to The Cutting Room, one of the best new mystery writers I've come across in some time. Did you say she has another out?

Bad typing day.

Re Joyce Carol Oates: Back in the 70s, I adored her. Read everything she wrote, bought magazines just because they contained a story by her. But then I didn't keep up with her new books, and a couple of years ago I bought one, thinking that I was in for a treat. Three times I tried to read it and then sent it to Goodwill.

And as for Roth, he's another writer that I once really liked, but I quit in disgust in the middle of the last book of his that I tried to read.

I thought maybe it was just me.

23 I've always been an advocate of separating the author from the work. I read and enjoy Hamsun, Céline and Dostojevskij.

But with Ellroy, I've come to realise this is only true if I have read the author before I stumble on their personality flaws. In every interview I've seen and read with this guy he comes across as such an increadibly unlikeable, flag-waving, hateful elitist that I have a hard time seeing me picking up any of his books ever. Despite how good they might be.

@32 Sadly I think it somes through in his books too. Although luckily for me I have never read an interview with him so it doesn't grate that much :) I do have The Cold Six Thousand on my tbr pile and I am finding it hard to summon the energy though.

I agree with you, GingerbreadMan, that the personality of the author shouldn't have anything to do with how we approach her books. In the case of Ellroy, however, he makes his personality part of his work. He isn't someone I'd want to meet and I doubt I'd go to see him at a bookstore signing. That said, My Dark Places is worth reading.

In Roth, his misogyny is right there on the page. Even in American Pastoral, the female characters, such as there were, were negligible or put there to be a burden for the male protagonist. And by the time you get to The Human Stain, the women are either evil harridans or illiterate sex objects. I can forgive quite a bit of prejudice of varying kinds in an author when those beliefs were a part of their time, such as Dostoevsky's anti-semitism or Hemingway's machismo, but Roth is a modern day author, albeit very, very old, and should know better. I don't want all the authors that I read to reflect my personal views (how boring would that be?), but prejudice generally kills nuance in characterization.

citygirl, Louise Welsh has also written The Bullet Trick, which was good, although not as good as The Cutting Room. I'm waiting for her next book. Megan Abbott takes two years to write each book, so I have one last unread book of hers that I am holding off on reading as long as I can.

My daughter spent the day with a friend exploring the Cherokee reservation up where North Carolina meets Tennessee. (I spent the day sorting books for my favorite project, Books for Keeps, which is working to give books to school children to combat the way the summer months increase the educational disparity faced by lower-income children. I'm a little obsessed by this, so I'll stop now.) She ended up getting home several hours later than originally planned and I picked up The Sugar Queen by Sarah Addison Allen to read as I waited up for her. It was the perfect book for a tired wait, undemanding, charming, light and it kept my attention so much that I had to finish the final few chapters after my daughter got home.

Josey lives with her elderly mother, escorting her to her appointments and committed to caring for her to atone for being a spoiled and reckless child. She pines for the mailman and hides candy and travel magazines in her closet. One day she opens her closet to find it occupied by the town tramp, who pushes Josey to make friends and lead a bit of a life outside of her mother's sight.

Allen writes light, romantic fiction with a touch of magic thrown it. Here she invents a character for whom books appear when needed, and for whom water boils whenever she's with her true love. It could be on the wrong side of whimsy, but Allen knows how to work her magical elements in seamlessly. This is a perfect escapist read.

Not my usual type of read, but that does sound intriguing so I'll look for it. I love discovering books on LT. Good review!

I love Allen's books - they are such great whimsical comfort reads for me when I need something light. Glad to see you enjoyed The Sugar Queen!

I also love Allen's books, I am looking forward to getting my hands on her third book The Girl Who Chased the Moon. They are the perfect escapist reads!

I read Garden Spells and loved it. I keep saying I ought to read The Sugar Queen, but I haven't gotten around to it. Good to see an endorsement for it here! Maybe I can fit it into next year's challenge. I've got most everything picked out for the rest of the year.

I preferred The Sugar Queen to Garden Spells.

Then there was The Devil's Rooming House, which could more accurately be called The Devil's Assisted Living Care Facility but I can see why they went for the somewhat snappier title. This is a book in the mold of The Devil in the White City, combining the story of a serial killer with a larger event, although this one was a bit of a stretch, using a twelve day long heat wave as the framing event.

I enjoy social histories, with their emphasis on how ordinary people lived. When they are done well, they are riveting, as in the aforementioned The Devil in the White City and in The Worst Hard Time. The Devil's Rooming House is not one of the good ones, however. The story concerns one of the first retirement homes in the United States, set up in Windsor, Connecticut a hundred years ago to provide a place to live, meals, assistance and a funeral for those elderly in need of a home. The owner, Amy Archer, allowed inmates to pay monthly, but the real bargain was a lifetime residency for a thousand dollars. It took a surprisingly long time, several years in fact, for the unusually high death rate in the Archer home to be noticed and even longer for enough evidence to be collected to arrest Archer. She might have continued for decades had not many inmates had relatives greedy for any money left over.

Which makes the framing device of a heat wave less than effective. There were chapters devoted to what should have be a magazine article at best. It was interesting, but didn't fit the book. Also distracting was the author's disinterest in the mechanics of the poisonings. Whenever another disease was blamed for a death the author would define the disease using an internet based definition and move on. A stronger book could have been written using the murders as a frame to discuss medical care and common illnesses of the time, but the author chose to quote from dictionary.com and move on before things could get interesting. This left very little book, so he filled pages with the making of the play Arsenic and Old Lace.

I am so glad you enjoyed The Sugar Queen, although I do like Garden Spells just a smidge better.

You find the damnedest books.

I don't mind visiting Ellroy's world every now and then but I wouldn't want to live there. There's a few authors that one can say with accuracy, 'writing saved their life', for a time anyway. Ellroy likely would have overdosed, been killed, or otherwise met his demise long ago without writing. I think Roberto Bolaño is another one. He did die young but he might have died even younger without writing. These guys didn't have college educations (those bridges were burned before they were out of their teens) but they immersed themselves in writing trying to gain whatever handhold they might find there. It probably kept/keeps the desperation demons somewhat subdued.

I have come close to trying some Franzen but I can never quite pull the start trigger. Not sure why.

Thanks for the mention of Books For Keeps - what a great cause. I've just donated some of my spare Bookmooch points. If you are in touch with them though, you could let them know that they don't seem to be on the list of available Bookmooch charities - I was only able to do it by googling till I found their blog and then getting to the 'how to support' page.

Books for Keeps is a great cause. And there's a lot of research that backs up the idea that giving children books works.

The Cruel Stars of the Night is a police procedural by Swedish author Kjell Eriksson and like many of the crime novels coming out of Scandinavia, it has a melancholy air about it. A few old men are murdered miles apart, but is there a connection between them and the disappearance of another? Detective Liddell is a bit tired of being a single mother and of working so hard, but she sees that a connection would lead to the killer and so she follows her instincts.

This is my first book by Eriksson and I will read more. She fits right in that group of Scandinavian authors that include Karin Alvtegen, Karin Fossum and Henning Mankell. I love the sadness and dislocation that permeates these books.

Remember when they caught the BTK killer? How he disappeared for years until he was just another lurid cover in the true crime section at your local bookstore, but then he resurfaced, still in Wichita, to send notes to the cops until he was caught? And then it turned out that he was a church deacon and a husband and had a family? Well, the idea that a serial killer, an especially brutal one at that, was able to conform so completely to society is fascinating, isn't it? I'll confess that I read a book about it and that it was just about as unilluminating as you might expect. Except that there was one little sentence in that badly written book that has stayed with me. A throw-away sentence that says only that this guy's wife knew nothing about his activities and is completely innocent. Think about that. Could you be married for decades and not know that about your spouse? How much do you think you know? How much do you really know?

Antonya Nelson has written Bound, in which she explores this somewhat obliquely. Catherine grew up in Wichita while the BTK killer was roaming the streets. Her best friend lived three doors down from where the first of his victims were murdered. Now she's married and the BTK killer has begun sending messages to the cops again. Catherine's the third wife of a successful businessman, who is falling in love with whom he hopes will be wife #4. Catherine then gets word that her childhood friend has died, naming her as the guardian for her teenage daughter.

I thought it was clever the way Nelson used a philandering husband, rather than a murderous one to explore the themes of secrets and how the past impacts our present. Oliver, the husband, guards his privacy well, even the things that he doesn't need to keep secret from his compliant wife.

She was going to turn from an unattractive teenager into an unattractive woman, large-boned, unsmiling, unflustered, skeptical--a prison guard, a Mother Superior, a landlady. Oliver liked these qualities in men, but in women he preferred a bit of nervous laughter, a tentative element of inquiry, hesitation, and the capacity to blush or jump in alarm. the gestures of low self-esteem, that charming hardship, that sexy chink.

Bound by Antonya Nelson sounds intriguing - it's going on my wishlist. Thanks.

The Lost Child by Julie Myerson tells the story of a mother whose son stops going to school, who becomes a different person. It takes the parents months to realize that more is going on than just teenagerhood, that their previously happy, well-adjusted son has become a drug addict. Then there's the longer stretch where they discover that love and support aren't going to help him, and finally the point, after he's stolen and lied and intimidated and hit her, that he has to leave for the sake of the remaining family members. Then they let him return, because they miss him, because the thought of him sleeping in a doorway or going hungry is intolerable. This story is raw and honest and powerful. It's well worth reading, whether or not you have children, just to understand a little of what so many people go through.

This is, however, a relatively small part of the book. The larger portion is where Myerson researches the life of a nineteenth century family, and especially the second youngest child, who dies young. They were an ordinary upper class family, and the details are sometimes sketchy. One gets the feeling that Myerson is using this research as a way of retreating from her son's story; it's certainly how this is used in the book. As the situation at home intensifies, she pulls the reader away to the slow process of research, dusty documents and bemused decedents. It's interesting, but in a slower, subdued way. It doesn't mesh with the wrenching drama of the modern segments.

The book ends when it ends, without resolution. Myerson's son is still out there, denying his problem. Myerson includes several of her son's poems and they are exactly what one would expect from a self-pitying teenager.

This book is flawed, but it's important, being an honest and raw account of how a parent feels and adapts to losing a beloved child to addiction. It's not a misery memoir or a how-to guidebook. It doesn't preach or whine, but simply lays out a good parent's anguish at discovering that one can provide all the love and security in the world and still be unable to protect the very person one loves the most.

Bound sounds great, also onto my wishlist it goes. Your thread always gets me into trouble.

Michael Cunningham's newest book comes out about five years too late. By Nightfall concerns Peter Harris, a SoHo loft-dwelling art dealer married to Rebecca, an arts magazine editor. Their lives are just how they want them to be, allowing them to look on everyone richer, poorer or not living in the right parts of Manhattan with a sort of amused contempt. They do have problems; a moderately estranged child who didn't finish college, but dropped out to bartend, Peter's a little tired of the art scene and Rebecca's little brother has come to visit and may be doing drugs again.

The rich can have problems, there's no question of that, but wealth can smooth the edges and consequences in a way that does make it harder to sympathize. When Rebecca's brother, Mizzy, who has dropped out of Exeter and Yale several times, complains that his family doesn't have the money to put him into the comfortable kind of rehab that might tempt him to stay, it's hard to find much sympathy. And when Rebecca and Peter laugh mockingly about the possibility of any sort of art existing in Billings, Montana, they lost the small amount of sympathy they'd built up with me. Not because I have any particular fondness for Billings; I've never even been there. It's just hard to pity characters who are charmless snobs.

The story itself is slight. Mizzy comes to stay with Rebecca and Peter and Peter, tired of his job, becomes involved in Mizzy's life in an unwise way. The characters are, as mentioned above, unlikeable in the way that Anna Wintour is unlikeable; not through their own personal afflictions, but because they are so contemptuous of those they perceive as beneath them. But the writing is lovely. There's a passage where Peter explores Manhattan at night that is perfectly written and even the more ordinary chapters are beautiful.

They were in what the Taylors called the junk room, because it was the only room except Cyrus and Beverly's that had a double bed. It had once been a guest room but, the Taylors having more use for junk than they did for guests, had long been devoted to storage, with the understanding that the occasional guest could always be installed there, with apologies.

Some--many--would have found this room disheartening, would in fact have been unnerved by the Taylors' entire lives. Peter was enchanted. Here he was among people too busy (with students, with patients, with books) to keep it all in perfect running order; people who'd rather have lawn parties and game nights than clean the tile grout with a toothbrush (although the Taylors' grout could, undeniably, have used at least minor attention).

>50 RidgewayGirl: Great review! Although the excerpt is indeed lovely, I'm not putting the book at the top of my wishlist.

I've only been to Billings once, briefly, but Great Falls -- home of Charlie Russell -- is a mecca for western artists. I've continually been impressed with the amount of art produced, displayed and for sale in all parts of Montana, some of it critically acclaimed (and very expensive).

In 1985, Jan Morris visited the imaginary Mediterranean country of Hav and stayed several months delving into the geography, culture and history of this tiny, and somewhat isolated, country. It's an odd mix of cultures as Hav was deemed of symbolic strategic importance now and then, so there's a mix of Arab, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, French, British and German influences. It's all a bit tatty and run-down, but not without a great deal of charm.

Morris returns to Hav twenty years later, after the military takeover known as the Intervention, to find a new Hav, commercial and tightly controlled, built over the rubble of the country she'd known.

This was a slow read for me; since Hav is imaginary I felt free to build my own mental image of it as she described things. I grew fond of the decaying peninsula with its sea urchin soup and out-dated idioms. Morris is an excellent travel writer of the old school; she's not seeking spiritual enlightenment from the natives, nor is she seeking to change them in any way. She goes to observe and to get to know the people and the place and then she writes gorgeously about it. I think she had a great time inventing her own country, with it's legendary roof-race and mythical snow raspberries.

Sounds like a good one. I have Morris' O Canada on my shelf that I hope to get to before the end of the year.

I'll have to read that one too.

In the meantime, here's a quote from Hav that I forgot to add to my review:

"We are intellectuals, you see," Mahmoud bawled in my ear. "There is no subject that we cannot discuss, and all subjects make us angry."

I added an Armchair Travel category for 11 in 11 and Morris is definitely on the list. The only one I've read, so far, is O Canada.

Most likely, for me, is the Jan Morris book, Coast to Coast: A Journey Across 1950s America but who knows what I'll end up with.

I had a terrible cold over the week-end and so indulged in purely escapist reading.

The first was an oral history of the recent World War Z, compiled by Max Brooks. I know that some say it's just too soon to revisit those events, but I was interested to read so many eyewitness accounts, gathered from all over the world, by everyone from our former vice-president to everyday survivors. I found the account of the Battle of Yonkers and why it went so badly wrong especially interesting, as was the explanation as to why Iceland remains so badly infested.

I enjoyed Mirror Mirror by Gregory Maguire less than I have his other books, maybe I was just not in the right mood to be charmed. Here he combines the story of Snow White with that of the Borgia siblings, Cesare and Lucrezia, in early sixteenth century Italy. Maguire is clever in the way he uses the basic elements of the story; the mirror, the apple, the dwarves, in unexpected ways.

I shall definitely read World War Z next year!

56 Great how you stick with it, even in your review! I hope to polish up my own knowledge on those horrid events already this year.

There's so much effort in World War Z, to construct this entire world that it's impossible after reading it, not to have absorbed that mindset. I loved that it was global in scope. And if you can read this book without mentally drawing up your own defense plans, I'll come over and call you on it.

Sorry to hear about the cold. Hope you are feeling better!

You can't say I wasn't warned because right there on the front cover of No Door, No Windows were the words Joe Schreiber, author of Star Wars: Death Troopers. But I picked it up anyway and read the first few pages, which portrayed a tender scene of a boy and his uncle playing catch. It was nicely written and felt real and I thought, hmmm, this looks like it could be good.

Well, it wasn't. Not because it wasn't scary or atmospheric, but because there was no internal cohesion holding the story together. A novel creates a world and, no matter how fantasy-based that world it, it needs to obey a set of rules, laid down by the author. A far-fetched idea like the one behind World War Z works so well because the author took the time to inhabit the world, to think of the details and to stick to them for the entire book. In 8637780::No Doors, No Windows, Schreiber throws out all his rules in favor of making it scary. It would have been a great deal scarier if he hadn't had all the characters behaving randomly at the end, so that I kept pausing to wonder if I'd gotten someone mixed up with someone else. And while the main character is well developed (although he will behave as randomly as the others at the dramatic conclusion), the secondary characters are two dimensional scraps of stereotype. If any backstory is assigned to them, they will shed it as soon as it becomes easier for the author.

On the other hand, the first half of the novel was going somewhere interesting and appropriately creepy. Scott Mast returns home when his father dies and finds that his father had left behind a half-finished manuscript about a haunted house. When Scott finds the house described in his father's book, he decides to rent it and finish his father's story. Things do not go well.

That does sound like a promising story, and would be a great vehicle for a scary book. Sorry it didn't work out that way! Looks like I'll be avoiding NDNW - thanks for the reverse-recommend!

56, 58, & 59: Yeah! Lol! She made me look! I had to go read all the reviews to figure out what she was talking about.

Oh, just found your bonus round thread. Wow! I'm impressed

(I can't even get through my original challenge, LOL!)

This is Chick-Lit was compiled as a reaction to another book, This is Not Chick-Lit, a book of short stories from women writers. It's unfortunate that that book chose to define itself by what it wasn't, rather than reflecting its strengths, just as it's unfortunate that the writers of light, fluffy, romantic fiction chose to be offended. There's a lot of that going around lately, with bestselling authors jealous as Iago over the awards and reviews given to their lesser selling peers, and the authors of "literary" novels holding their noses at the very idea of popular fiction. This gets a little more charged and unpleasant when the writers going at each other are women. Aren't we supposed to support and encourage each other?

What's also unfortunate are the stories chosen to refute the claim that the chick-lit genre is worthless. The story by Karen Siplin was good, another few weren't bad, but they were mostly lazily written. This is something that happens in every genre--an author writes that break out book, where something genuine in said in a new way, but instead of continuing to stretch and explore, the author writes more of the same, often in a series. And their books do very well, because we like the comfortable, but it's not what makes literature. So this book kinda makes the case for the other side. There is chick-lit out there worth reading, although there is more of it that isn't very good.

I'm reading This is Not Chick Lit now.

I love reading your reviews.

I think that's all I have to say.

Thank you!

@65 Very nicely put. 17 lines extremely well spent.

So now I've read the book that spurred the creation of This is Chick Lit, This is Not Chick Lit. This was a very good collection of short stories that were ill served by the title and marketing of the book, which ensures that most guys won't pick up a copy and many women won't either. The person who would be drawn to the title would be drawn to any book of well-written short stories by women. I was reluctant to carry it around, what with its angry, shouty hot pink title.

The content was, however, fantastic. There's a mixture of established authors (Mary Gordon, Francine Prose), up and coming stars (Curtis Sittenfeld, Jennifer Egan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and unknown, but promising new writers (Dika Lam, Holiday Reinhorn). The stories were varied and gorgeous, with a few that were astonishing. My favorite was The Seventy-Two-Ounce Steak Challenge by Dika Lam, a writer who, five years after the publication of this book, still hasn't had her book published.

My other niggling complaint about this collection is that the best stories are all up front, with the lackluster stories grouped at the end of the book. I had to remind myself how the excellent outweighed the mediocre at the end. Still, a collection well worth reading, if you're interested in short stories or in finding new and interesting authors to explore.

I have to compliment you on your review of World War Z. I recently read it and found it hard to come back from that mind-set. I passed it on to my brother and, of course, we spent the last few days of my visit planning our own defense plans!

I am so not a fan of anything reeking of the paranormal, or elves, or anything like that, but World War Z was so completely imagined and perfectly executed that I have to say that it's one of the best books I've read this year. I'd recommend it to people who would not normally read anything like that.

And it's impossible not to think about defense plans afterward!

Old City Hall by Robert Rotenberg was a pitch perfect police procedural. Set in a busy and multicultural Toronto, it begins with Kevin Brace, the beloved national radio talk show host, meeting his newspaper delivery person early one morning with bloody hands, telling him that he killed her. And with that, the story is off and running.

There's a huge cast of characters and, to Rotenberg's credit, they are all complex and easy to tell apart. The central crime was well thought through from the beginning and the setting atmospheric. There's a lot to be said for a crime novel that provides a roller coaster plot without descending into unbelievability. Toronto is vividly described, the story taking place while the Maple Leafs look like they finally have a shot at the Stanley Cup. I'll be looking for this author's next book.

>72 RidgewayGirl: I enjoyed it, too. I don't read many police procedurals / legal thrillers, but I liked this one. I hope he continues the series -- I'd like to know more about the many, many characters!

That sounds good-I'd like to find more books set in Toronto so I'll look for it. Thanks for the rec!

I've been reading books lately that I would not ordinarily have chosen and it's been great. Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez was recommended by someone here and I found it an astonishing read.

Both of Cole's parents died in the flu pandemic that caused havoc all over the world, but especially in the US. He recovers and is rescued from an orphanage by a childless minister and his wife and taken to live in the small town of Salvation City. The book moves between Cole learning to live in this new environment and his memories of life with his atheistic parents.

What makes this book so interesting is less the new, dystopic world Nunez creates, but in her examination of religious belief. She manages to look critically at both fundamentalist belief and liberal atheism without making either out as good or bad. It's a nuanced performance and very honest. The story itself is fairly simple and while the ideas are complex, they're ones that anyone who has seriously considered their religious beliefs (or lack of same) has already considered. The book does read like a YA novel in language and presentation. The story itself is very easy to read, even as it made me think and think and think.

My one criticism of this book is that, at the end, Nunez drastically changed the behaviors of a few of her main characters, giving Cole an easy out to the dilemma he faced. It just didn't fit and felt like she was trying to get the book somewhere it didn't want to go. Despite that, Salvation City is a book well worth reading, and enjoyable too.

72 Sound like something my wife would like. Great recommendation, now that christmas is coming!

I have a cold. A very minor cold that is on its way out, but which got me up a few nights ago to drink Theraflu. It was 1:30 and I forgot to grab my book on the way out of the bedroom. Rather than clop back through the bedroom, potentially waking dogs or husbands, I grabbed the first book I found that seemed "light" off of the living room shelves. I'm pretty sure that Sleeping Arrangements by Madeline Wickham was fluffy and that it concerned two families who are unwittingly double-booked for a week in a Spanish villa. Hijinks ensue! Also, epiphanies. I stayed up and finished it, so it wasn't boring, but the details are hazy. Mainly, I learned that our greyhound is unhappy when his people are not in their assigned sleeping areas at night. He'd frequently come over and stare at me soulfully, yet vacantly, before returning to his bed.

I had low expectations for The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister, but I needed a book for my ill-conceived food category. And then it turned out to be a wonderful book.

Lillian had been four years old when her father left them, and her mother, stunned, had slid into books like a seal into water. Lillian had watched her mother submerge and disappear, sensing instinctively even at her young age the impersonal nature of a choice made simply for survival, and adapting to the niche she would now inhabit, as a watcher from the shore of her mother's ocean.

And so Lillian turns to cooking, learning through experimentation, since she prefers not to read. She opens a restaurant and holds a cooking class that meets once a month. The book follows the people taking the classes, and each section follows the life of one of the students. There aren't any recipes included, which suits Lillian's aversion to the written word, but each lesson is thoroughly described and somewhat inspirational. There isn't really a plot here, although several of the characters do reach conclusions or find comfort along the way. Mainly, Bauermeister creates an atmosphere and writes beautifully about the ability of well-prepared food to comfort and enrich more than our physical bodies.

I read Essential Ingredients earlier this year and enjoyed it quite a bit. Terrible time of year to even be felled a little by a cold. Feel better soon.

BTW - #77 "waking dogs or husbands" husbands plural? what fun for you!

79- I thought the same thing. I didn't know RidgewayGirl was polyandrous. Go RG!!

Heh. No, one is plenty. Two dogs, though that is somewhat less shocking.

If you know who Tim Gunn is, then telling you that Gunn's Golden Rules is like sitting down to a cup of coffee with Mr Gunn and listening to him talk will give you a very clear idea of what this book is about. In chapters loosely organized around various "rules", Gunn tells us about his life, dishes a bit about the excesses of the rich and famous (especially those who work for Conde Nast) and shares his approach to life, which can be summed up by take the high road, good manners never hurt anyone and, of course, make it work.

Gunn comes across as a man comfortable in his own skin, but having had to struggle to reach that. He reveals details about his own life that could fuel a pretty good misery memoir, but he's good-hearted and optimistic and doesn't dwell on any of it, but moves directly on to fun stories about the fashion industry or a bit of gently delivered advice. This was altogether an enjoyable and happy read.

Added that one to my Must Read Soon list, as I love Tim Gunn. Your description of reading it being like having a cuppa with him pushed me over the edge. Thanks, and a nice little review you've got there!

When The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte was first published in 1848, it created a scandal and was a runaway bestseller, out selling her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights. Her sister Charlotte condemned it as overly realistic (which makes me wonder about Charlotte who also was critical of Jane Austen's gentler offerings).

To the modern reader, the scene that sparked the scandal might fly past without notice; when the husband of our heroine, Helen, gets drunk and verbally abusive, she goes to her room and locks the door against him. Outrageous, eh? Much more shocking to me was an early scene where Helen and her five-year-old son visit her new neighbors and they offer both of them a nice alcoholic beverage. When Helen refuses on the part of her son she is given a lecture by the mistress of the house on how boys need to learn to drink from an early age.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tells the story of Helen, her disastrous marriage to the dissolute Huntingdon and her subsequent flight to the run down Wildfell Hall, where she lives in a few rooms alone with her son and a single servant, and of how her presence in a quiet, rural area excites the attention and then the gossip of her neighbors. Bronte is a master of characterization, especially in the form of Helen's husband, who enters the story as the witty, Byronic hero (also, he is hot, and then develops into someone very different. Helen's a bit of a damp squib, what with her firm belief in her duty to let everyone around her know when they are falling short, morally speaking and in her determination to revel in her misery, but one can't but admire her fortitude and strength of will. And Gilbert, well, I'll let you draw your own conclusions about Gilbert.

When The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte was first published in 1848, it created a scandal and was a runaway bestseller, out-selling her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights. Her sister Charlotte condemned it as overly realistic (which makes me wonder about Charlotte who was also critical of Jane Austen's gentler offerings).

To the modern reader, the scene that sparked the scandal might fly past without notice; when the husband of our heroine, Helen, gets drunk and verbally abusive, she goes to her room and locks the door against him. Outrageous, eh? Much more shocking to me was an early scene where Helen and her five-year-old son visit her new neighbors and they offer both of them a nice alcoholic beverage. When Helen refuses on the part of her son she is given a lecture by the mistress of the house on how boys need to learn to drink from an early age.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tells the story of Helen, her disastrous marriage to the dissolute Huntingdon and her subsequent flight to the run-down Wildfell Hall, where she lives in a few rooms alone with her son and a single servant, and of how her presence in a quiet, rural area excites the attention and then the gossip of her neighbors. Bronte is a master of characterization, especially in the form of Helen's husband, who enters the story as the witty, Byronic hero (also, he is hot), and then develops into someone very different. Helen's a bit of a damp squib, what with her firm belief in her duty to let everyone around her know when they are falling short, morally speaking and in her determination to revel in her misery, but one can't but admire her fortitude and strength of will. And Gilbert, well, I'll let you draw your own conclusions about Gilbert.

Great review (twice)! I've got holes in my Brontësian savvy you could lead a horse through, as I haven't read Charlotte or Anne at all. Will have to mend that (although in 11 I'll settle for a much anticipated reread of Wuthering heights).

Good reviews, I want to read both. I've only read Agnes Grey from A.B.

I've never seen Tim Gunn on his show because I have a low tolerance for the whole bitchiness/drama of most reality shows, but I like his column in Marie Claire.

All Clear is the second half of the book begun in Connie Willis's Blackout. It's impossible to review it separately from the previous book, just like it would be impossible to review a book by opening it to the middle and reviewing only the second half. I wish Willis had gone the Anathem route and just published one monster book.

Still, the two together form one fantastic book. The year is 2060, and time travel has become something that historians do routinely. Early experiences have led to the conclusion that history protects itself; not only by preventing historians from approaching critical moments, but also by correcting for the inevitable minor alterations caused by the visits.

Three young acquaintances chat briefly in Oxford before their drops; Meriope, who is going on her first drop to observe how evacuated children responded to country life in the early part of WWII; Michael, who is researching heroism, is going to observe the survivors of the Dunkirk evacuation as they arrive on British shores; and Polly, who is just back from observing the V-E day celebrations, is planning to observe Londoners during the Blitz.

For all three, things go surprisingly and disastrously wrong, when they can't return to their present at the end of their field trips. There is an added sense of urgency because Polly has a deadline; she must leave the past before her earlier self arrives there. And as they search frantically for a way out, they become involved it the lives of the people around them.

La-la-la-la-la. ;-) Skimming past the previous post with fingers in ears, as I like Connie Willis's SF and will probably read those titles. I read just enough of your excellent review of Tenant of Windfell Hall to know that I want to add it to my iPad.

*dittos bonniebooks 10x over*

Hey! There were no spoilers at all in that review--I made sure not to give anything away for either book.

I know, but I'm one of those people who want to know as little as possible about a book. I never read the blurbs on a book anymore, for example.

I finished Tenant Hall, too. I thought it was so funny that we both decided to read it at the same time. It's a relatively obscure book. "Oh, I didn't know there was third sister," is the response I usually get.

I, too, had mixed feelings on Helen. I admired her strength and protection of her son, but she gave so many lessons in duty, moderation, and correct thinking that I feel as if I've become a better person against my will just by reading the book. You didn't say much about Gilbert. What did you think of him? And

SPOILER

Did you buy that Helen had fallen passionately in love with him, or were you, like me, a bit surprised when she expressed herself? Did it not seem a bit inconsistent with the woman she had become subsequent to her marriage?

I think she fell for Gilbert despite herself. She fell quickly in love with Huntingdon, after all. And Gilbert gave her a book she wanted. Don't underestimate the power of the thoughtful gift. And he waited. Gilbert was a vain, thoughtless village stud at the beginning of the book, but he was so willing to reexamine his beliefs and I think Helen was willing to take a chance with a guy who was eager to bend to her will.

The Victorian moral code is different, isn't it? (I know ToWH is early for Victorian, but it really is.) Black Beauty spends a fair amount of time preaching against the evils of drink and on the importance of keeping the sabbath holy.

ToWH sticks in my mind, which is more than I can say for Still Missing by Chevy Stevens. The premise is interesting; each chapter is a woman's session with her therapist as she seeks to come to terms with having been kidnapped and held in a mountain cabin for nearly a year. The story itself, however, is pure mass-market thriller, which is not to say that it's bad (after all, I read it quickly and never wanted to abandon it) but it might have been a more memorable book had it added a bit of nuance and lost a bit of the lady-in-danger thing.

Thanks, on both counts.

You may be right about Gilbert and the book. My husband gave me a copy of The Vagina Monologues soon after we began dating. Looking back, I should have seen it for the shameless ploy to appeal to my feminist sensibilities that it was. To be fair, he had actually read it. But still.

I was wondering if Still Missing was something I should read. I may still consider it, but when I'm in the mood for escapism (which is often enough).

I was in the mood for light and fun and found it with Pride and Prejudice and Jasmin Field by Melissa Nathan, in which a British journalist gets a part in a stage version of Pride and Prejudice and finds her life, as well as the lives of her friends and family, closely shadowing the Austen classic. This is a fun book; there are a few too many parallels, but both Jasmin (Lizzie Bennet) and Harry (Darcy) are believable and Jasmin is pleasantly active in her own life and free of self-pity.

I'm on vacation, on the beach, which is lovely because there is pretty much no one else around and we could easily get a house big enough for nine people. There's also no internet, which is nice in another way. I'm in the local bookstore and "internet cafe" which is really a small area where you can use their wi-fi if you bring your own computer. I thought I'd catch up on what I've read before the lure of the 1111 gets me.

Passing for Thin is Frances Kuffel's story of how she lost 178 pounds and how it changed her life. She doesn't tell a rosy story of the kind you might find in a woman's magazine, but tells of how friends and family were not entirely prepared to accept this new version of her and how she was not entirely comfortable with it either.

My children are now old enough to be choosing their own books and it is my unfortunate responsibility to read what they're reading. So I read The Diary of a Wimpy Kid The Last Straw and The Dork Diaries. The Wimpy Kid is a tremendously popular series of books that combine cartoons with big printing and appeal to boys who don't usually pick up a book. It wasn't bad, and the main character was a typical slacker guy, who spends much of his time avoiding things. It was better than I thought, which was a surprise. The Dork Diaries is the female counterpoint, and features quite a bit more substance. It was a nice story of the new scholarship girl at a private day school and how she made a few friends, developed a crush and faced off against the queen bee.

My family all loves Lee Child's Jack Reacher books and it's convenient how there's always a new one out in time for family vacations. If you've read any of them, well Worth Dying For was exactly like the rest of 'em. Here Reacher insists on driving a drunk doctor out to see a battered woman and involves himself in shady dealings set in a remote corner of Nebraska.

Then I read Starvation Lake by Brian Gruley, a mystery set in the back country of Michigan, where the towns are small and not doing so well and hockey is everything. Gus Carpenter blew the big game as a teen-ager when he let an easy shot into the net and he left determined to find success as a journalist and return in triumph. Life in Detroit didn't go as planned and he's back in Starvation Lake working as the editor of the tiny local paper. Then the skidoo of his former coach is found in a different lake than the one he was reported drowned in and Gus begins to unravel what really happened, which makes pretty much everyone unhappy.

Starvation Lake was excellent and I'm going to be reading Gruley's other books.

Ahh, you got me - Starvation Lake is going on my wish list!

Isn't vacation best when there's time to read?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth was a gift and funny and fascinating picture book of human history, although it's probably not for the easily offended. Religion and politics are predictably given the least amount of slack.

The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor was an excellent historical mystery set in the late eighteenth century at a college in Cambridge, England. A student there is put into an insane asylum after encountering a ghost. The story is intricate, full of historic detail and holds together well. I especially appreciated that the characters were interesting and likable without being modern people dressed up for the occasion.

Missing is an uncharacteristically hopeful book by Karin Alvtegen. Despite having a homeless woman who was raised by a truly horrible woman and then subsequently hunted by the police as a serial killer as the protagonist, this book was much less depressing than Alvtegen's other books, although still far from being a cozy.

Ohhh...... The Anatomy of Ghosts sounds fascinating! On the TBR pile it goes.

As for vacation time and reading - yes, they do go hand in hand! ;-)

Not a big reader of crime/mystery as you know, but the rural setting and gloom of Starvation lake actually does sound very appealing. Making note of it!

Starvation Lake really captures the hockey obsession that I'm familiar with from the Canadian side of the border. And that small town thing where you never get to live anything down, ever.

I've been in that bookstore - the owner will talk your ear off! Did you make nice with Emily the cat?

The cat watched me carefully, Robert De Niro-style.

After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell is not only one of my last books of the year; it's also one of the best in a year of exceptionally good reading. There was so much raw emotion in this novel that I have felt for much of the past two days that the world of this novel is more real than my own.

Alice is hit by a car and lies in a coma in a London hospital. Her story, told from various points of view, is told in flashbacks and segments and eventually leads to why she may have purposefully stepped in front of that moving car.

I read that one too - was it this year? I think it was in January - and I found it very absorbing. It was like unraveling a puzzle. Lots of pain expressed in the book.

Looks like you have had a great run lately! and two days left to go!

So, I should have loved Mayhem by J. Robert Janes. It has so many elements that make it attractive to me; Paris, WWII, police procedural, unusual writing style, etc...yet I finally have given up on it, with less than fifty pages to go. It wasn't a bad book (somehow, I have no problem completing a truly bad book -- maybe because I enjoy anticipating writing the review), but I spent December forcing myself to read another twenty pages or so, before diving into another book.

My last book of the year was The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and it was easily the most thought-provoking and frustrating read of the year. The story begins with a garden party in which a man slaps a child who is not his, setting off a series of events. The book is divided into segments which follow various people who were at the party. The Slap is a vivid picture of cultures rubbing up against each other in Australia and that was, by far, the most interesting thing about this book. The frustrating thing about the book were the men. There were three of them, and each was arrogant, immature and held misogynistic views that I thought were only held by a very few idiots (either living in caves in Afghanistan or enjoying successful careers in talk radio). Not only were they reprehensible, but their wives faithfully protected them, did all the housework and denied their own desires to accommodate their husbands' passing whims. I waited the entire book for one of the women to realize that they had to leave, but that never happened, leaving me disheartened.

That said, I couldn't put this book down. Tsiolkas made each character, no matter how vile, into a living, breathing person. There are also two teen-agers in the story and they showed signs of not being as messed up and delusional as their adult counterparts.