Rebeccanyc Reads in 2011, Part 3

I am starting a new thread here, and will list the books discussed in this thread in this post. The posts below list my other reads so far this year. An asterisk at the end of the line means it was a favorite read.

97. God's Bits of Wood by Sembène Ousmane*
96. Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono*
95. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman*
94. The Leviathan by Joseph Roth*
93. Three Novellas by Joseph Roth
92. Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
91. Mr. Fortune's Maggot and The Salutation by Sylvia Townsend Warner
90. Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura
89. In Red by Magdalena Tulli*
88. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by M. R. James
87. The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy*
86. Red Shift by Alan Garner*
85. Parzival and Titurel by Wolfram von Eschenbach
84. Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o*
83. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
82. Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes*

Books discussed in my second 2011 Club Read thread.

81. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann* (reread)
80. Yalta: The Price of Peace by S. M. Plokhy
79. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons* (reread)
78. I Was an Elephant Salesman: Adventures between Dakar, Paris, and Milan by Pap Khouma
77. What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes*
76. The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay*
75. Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin*
74. The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes from a Climate-Challenged Planet by Heidi Cullen
73. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson*
72. The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge
71. They Were Divided by Miklós Bánffy*
70. They Were Found Wanting by Miklós Bánffy*
69. The Factory of Facts by Luc Sante*
68. The Bride from Odessa by Edgardo Cozarinsky
67. The Mangan Inheritance by Brian Moore
66. They Were Counted by Miklós Bánffy*
65. Classic Crimes by William Roughead*
64. An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel
63. A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel*
62. Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics edited by Lawrence Block
61. The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns*
60. The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky*
59. The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum
58. Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes*
57. Manhattan Noir edited by Lawrence Block
56. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante*
55. We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
54. Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns*
53. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto by Mario Vargas Llosa
52. In Praise of the Stepmother by Mario Vargas Llosa
51. The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns*
50. The Prospector by J.M.G. Le Clézio*
49. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole*
48. Once upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell*
47. A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o*
46. The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov*
45. Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories: Selected by the Authorby Arthur Conan Doyle*
44. Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo
43. Five Bells by Gail Jones
42. The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer*
41. Gulag by Anne Applebaum*

This is the list of books discussed in my first Club Read 2011 thread.

40. Faith by Jennifer Haigh
39. Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette
38. The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak
37. A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block
36. The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt
35. Life and a Half by Sony Labou Tansi
34. Ice Road by Gillian Slovo
33. The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago*
32. The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
31. A Murder of Quality by John le Carré
30. Call for the Dead by John le Carré
29. Soul and Other Stories by Andrey Platonov*
28. Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser
27. The Fierce and Beautiful World by Andrei Platonov
26. Nineteen Eighty-Three by David Peace*
25. Nineteen Eighty by David Peace*
24. Nineteen Seventy-Seven by David Peace*
23. Nineteen Seventy-Fourby David Peace*
22. Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm
21. Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane
20. Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich
19. Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
18. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns*
17. The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns*
16. Open City by Teju Cole
15. The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier*
14. Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon
13. Matagiri by Ngugi wa Thiong'o*
12. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns*
11. Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem*
10. Conquered City by Victor Serge*
9. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak*
8. Just Kids by Patti Smith*
7. She Drove without Stopping by Jaimy Gordon*
6. The Maias by José Maria Eça de Queirós
5. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
4. Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel*
3. Every Day Is Mother's Day by Hilary Mantel
2. Tun-huang by Yasushi Inoue
1. Bait: Four Stories by Mahasweta Devi

82. Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes

I was inspired to read this book after reading baswood/Barry's excellent review because I had been interested in reading Parzival since reading Matterhorn and this seemed like a good introduction, as it includes one of the earliest versions of the Parzival story. Barry summarized each of the five stories in the collection, so I won't repeat that here.

I hadn't read any medieval literature since high school, so I had to get used to being thrust back into the world of courtly love and knightly tournaments. I mostly really enjoyed this book once I got into the swing of things, although I did tend to find the descriptions of knightly battles a tad repetitive. One thing that surprised me was how much freedom women had; although they needed knights to defend their honor, they went riding off on their own through unfamiliar lands and received men in their bedrooms. Another thing that struck me was the social system/economics of the time: all of these knights and kings were in essence being supported by the work of people we never see in these tales. Of course, this is not unexpected since the stories were written with support from royal and noble patrons.

All of the stories are well paced, with many twists and turns as the heroes and heroines face a variety of trials. The tale I enjoyed the most was "The Knight and the Lion (Yvain)" which I felt had the most well-developed psychological insight as well as the most enjoyable use of magic and the wonderful character of the lion. Other stories introduce familiar Arthurian characters, including Lancelot and Gawain, as well as Guinevere and Arthur. The story of Parzival is unfinished, and I'm looking forward to reading the von Eschenbach version in an upcoming Club Read group read and to reading more medieval literature over the coming year.

First! Love your review, and thanks for the link to the Parzival group read. I'm going to try and read along if I can get through some review books. Van Gogh slowed my progress considerably.

Starred and noted that I really should brush off my Arthurian knowledge.
And re. your comment on the freedom of women during the middle-ages, women's freedom and rights didn't gradually increase over the centuries. In fact, the rights and position of women decreased after the middle-ages.

JustJoey, that's very interesting about the freedom of women. I was struck by how modern some of these tales seemed, in terms of human behavior, that is; obviously, the setting is both medieval and mythic.

Lisa, I got way behind on the other reading I wanted to do because of Real Life and also rereading The Magic Mountain to go along with the Salon read, so I'm a little torn about starting Parzival now, but it seems like the best opportunity for me to get the most out of it.

Another really interesting angle into the position of women in courtly life/romance is The Lais of Marie de France -- short, pithy and beautiful.

Thanks, Jane. Several other people mentioned it, so I'm going to look for it.

83. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi

In English folklore, "Mr. Fox" is a variant of the Bluebeard story in which the man who kills his wives is outwitted by Lady Mary, a courageous and smart woman whose tale of a "dream" traps him into acknowledging his evil ways. In Helen Oyeymi's novel, St. John Fox, a writer who routinely kills off the women in his books, is visited by his imaginary "muse," Mary Foxe, who takes him to task for this violence and challenges him to change. And then Oyeyemi takes the reader on a magical journey through time and space as the stories written by by both Fox and Foxe explore love, violence against women and women's strength, cunning, and courage, creativity and imagination, European and African folklore, and the power of storytelling, while at the same time the the imaginary Mary becomes more real and the "real" Mr. Fox confronts his wife Daphne's jealousy of the imaginary, or not so imaginary, Mary.

I found this book confusing at the beginning, but I was drawn into it by the power of Oyeyemi's writing and my curiosity about what was going on (just as the women in another variant of the Bluebeard story are drawn by curiosity to open the door of the room they're forbidden to enter). Some of the stories the Fox(e)s write are better than others, but all are though-provoking. I did have a little problem with the time-shifting, in which the "real" protagonists live in the 1930s but some of their stories take place in the contemporary world, but I understand I'm not supposed to take the "reality" of this novel so literally.

Oyeyemi, age 26, is a much heralded British writer of Yoruban heritage, famous for publishing her first novel while still a teenage student at Cambridge. I was very impressed with this book, and Oyeyemi's ability not only to write beautifully but also to take such an imaginative idea and see where it leads and to create such varied and interesting characters, even the ones who only appear briefly. I probably would benefit by reading the novel again more slowly.

Sounds like a fascinating book, Rebecca.

84. Devil on the Cross by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ was imprisoned by the post-independence government of Kenya when he wrote this satirical and allegorical indictment of the rulers of that government and the business leaders in cahoots with them and US and European corporations. (He wrote it on the only medium available to him, toilet paper.) He also explores the exploitation of women by men. A young woman, Warĩĩnga, who had dreamed of a career as an engineer but has fallen on hard times, thanks to that exploitation, is preparing to journey to her family home when she receives a mysterious card from a mysterious man, advertising a Devil's Feast and competition to select the seven cleverest thieves and robbers -- and it will be held the next day in the very town she is headed for. Along the way she meets several other people, and the bulk of the novel concerns them and their interactions with the thieves and robbers, who turn out to be businessmen competing to steal the most from the people and enter the good graces of the foreign corporations. After a dramatic ending, we see Warĩĩnga creating a new life for herself.

This is an angry novel, illustrating the bitterness and frustration of the Kenyan people who saw their hopes of independence dashed as the new leaders of the country concentrated on getting rich and collaborating with foreign corporations to exploit the people. The story is mixed with African poetry and songs, and with a lot of Christian symbolism that I couldn't completely understand. In places, it is perhaps a little didactic, but overall it is impassioned, brave, and important.

Good review of Devil on the Cross. It sounds like its worth reading and a bit allegorical.

An interesting review of Devil on the Cross. If I can squeeze it in, I'm hoping to read Petals of Blood before the end of the year, which Ngugi wrote about three years earlier and appears to be a more conventional treatment of some of the same themes.

Petals of Blood was one of the works that got him thrown in prison. I thought it was excellent.

Congratulations on having the #1 "hot review" for Devil on the Cross!

Thanks, Steven. I missed seeing it as #1, so I'm glad you had the eagle eye to spot it and to let me know.

#85 Parzival and Titurel by Wolfram von Eschenbach

I'm glad I read this book for several reasons. First, I had wanted to read Parzival since learning that it had influenced the wonderful novel Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes which I read earlier this year. Second, I had the advantage of reading it as part of a group read, and I benefited from the comments, insights, and encouragement of my fellow readers. And finally, I had recently finished Chrétien de Troyes's version in Arthurian Romances and was interested in comparing them.

And there's the rub. I much preferred Chrétien's version, even though it was unfinished, possibly because I really loved all of his tales. Chrétien is a considerably livelier writer, and has deeper psychological insight -- maybe he just seems more modern. Wolfram's writing is, dare I say it, Germanic -- heavy, convoluted, and occasionally confusing (the book's introduction and translator both address the difficulty of Wolfram's style). But even more than that, which I got used to, he is obsessed with the names and provenance of dozens and dozens and dozens of characters. Even with a list of people and places that runs to 16 pages in the edition I read (as well as a somewhat unreadable family tree), it was impossible to keep track of who everyone was or where they came from. I wonder whether all this information was meaningful to medieval readers or whether it was just something that Wolfram loved. And, as in Chrétien, the jousts can come to seem endless and interchangeable.

There were things I liked about this book. Wolfram has a sly habit of injecting himself into the story, mostly in a deprecating way, but it was fun when he did. His writing, occasionally, is poetic, and thanks are due to the translator (in my edition, Cyril Edwards) for this because I've seen corresponding sections from other translators and they are different. For example, at the very beginning, Edwards's translation rhymes "There is both scorning and adorning" and uses alliteration in "The flying image is far too fleet for fools." I again enjoyed seeing the relative personal and sexual freedom of upper class medieval women. And finally, I was glad to have the tale finished, and to understand this early version of the grail legend.

My edition also include excerpts from Titurel; that is, my edition is Parzival and Titurel. I confess I skimmed through this, essentially a "prequel" to Parzival, in that it deals with the childhood of his mother and some of her relatives.

I appreciate your honest review. I wish I could have joined the group read, but I am absolutely swamped and haven't had any time to read lately. Thankfully Kolyma Tales can be read in snatches as each story is fairly short, sometimes only a few pages.

Very interesting review of Parzival. I'm catching up, so I also just read your most of your other reviews here. Intrigued by Mr. Fox.

Thanks for stopping by, Dan.

It's interesting that you found Wolfram less lively than Chrétien, when I would have said the opposite. That's probably because we read different translations in both cases. Hatto's translation of Parzival lacks the poetic qualities of Edwards'. Instead of "The flying image is far too fleet for fools," he writes "This winged comparison is too swift for unripe wits."

>22 StevenTX: - I'm not sure that Hatto does lack the poetic qualities. In the sentence you quote Edwards goes for simple rhyming, using f, while Hatto is more subtle, using wi & ri.

86. Red Shift by Alan Garner

In this strange and haunting novel, Alan Garner weaves together three stories, far apart in time, yet linked by place and themes. Near Mow Cop, a rocky outcrop in Cheshire, England, topped by a ruined castle, a troubled if not mentally ill teenager confronts the reality of his girlfriend's moving to London to study and his appalling parents. Mixed in with their story, told almost entirely in dialogue (as is the whole book), are the stories of a young man, encouraged and stimulated to kill, who is part of a small group of deserters from the Roman army occupying the same area in the 2nd century, a band fighting to stay alive among warring tribes, and another young man, troubled, struggling with his own demons as the Royalists attack his village of Parliament supporters during the 17th century civil war. In addition to being linked by place, all the interwoven tales involve a mysterious stone axe head that assumes importance for all three young men.

Initially, it was difficult to understand what was going on, and I might have been more lost without Garner's introduction to the edition I read. But I was swept up by the lives and struggles of the characters as they face love and destruction, trust and betrayal, madness and reality, as well as by Garner's amazing ability, through dialogue and allusion and imagery, to find the heart and soul of characters who may appear crazy or damaged to the outside world. He is also interested in exploring the power of place and the connections over time among people under the influence of that place and its history.

Alan Garner is often considered a young adult or fantasy writer, genres I don't generally read, but this novel, reissued by New York Review Books, was rich and complex and real enough for me.

87. The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy

As Sindbad, an inveterate seducer and lover of women, travels (largely as a ghost), searching for his lost loves, and loving and erotically recalls their appearances and personalities, Krúdy is really exploring the loss of a centuries-old culture. It is the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and change is accelerating and inevitable, but the ancestors whose portraits hang on the walls of ancient homes and the dead in their graves are almost as real as the living.

As in his fascinating and mysterious Sunflower, Krúdy brilliantly evokes the beauty of the Hungarian countryside, the almost soporific quality of life in small villages, the bustling activity in Budapest (or, Buda and Pest) and, in this work, the characters of a huge number of women. As with Sunflower, very little is straightforward. At various times, Sindbad is alive and 300 years old, buried in a grave, traveling as a ghost in a carriage, and even transformed into a sprig of mistletoe. The boundary between life and death is porous, connected by love and longing.

Above all, there is a feeling of melancholy and loss. The stories abound with autumn leaves, dark nights illuminated by the moon, misty landscapes, rivers begging to be jumped into, men and women who have killed themselves for love. Musing about one of his loves, Sindbad recalls that she called him not "to the enjoyments of a quiet life, but rather to death, decay and annihilation, to the dance to exhaustion at the ball of life where the masked guests are encouraged to lie, cheat and steal, to push old people aside, to mislead the inexperienced young, and always to lie and weep alone . ."

Both these books sound fascinating -- think I'll pop them on my wish list.

Red Shift has been on the fringes of my wishlist for a while but The Adventures of Sindbad, which I'd never heard of before, is going right to the top. I love reading anything to do with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Interesting pair of books. (I'm Curious where you found these titles)

Both of them are recent NYRB publications, and I found them in my favorite NYC bookstore, Crawford-Doyle, on its new release table. I was somewhat embarrassed to discover that I already had a previous edition of The Adventures of Sindbad, which I had bought after reading and loving Sunflower.

88. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories by M. R. James

Although I'm not a connoisseur of ghost stories, I decided to get this book after I read and really enjoyed an M. R. James story online after learning about it on this thread. M. R. James was a scholar of church history, medieval manuscripts, cathedrals, and more, writing ghost stories for amusement, and these scholarly subjects find their way into his stories. Some of these stories are quite creepy, although ultimately predictable. I didn't dislike the stories, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had dipped into the book off and on, instead of reading one story after another. As with any collection, some stories are better than others, and I think I still like "Casting the Runes," the story that was posted online, the best.

Some interesting reads rebecca. Red shift seems worth a punt.

89. In Red by Magdalena Tulli

I nearly missed my subway stop two days in a row because I was so caught up in the unreal world Magdalena Tulli creates in this gem of a novella that is nonetheless very hard to describe. At the start, the Polish town of Stitchings is always cold and snowy and almost always dark, and it is suspended in an unclear time. Gradually, some of the people of the town come into focus, and the time resolves to around the time of the first world war (although Stitichings is part of a mythical fourth partition of Poland, ruled by the Swedes who are said to be better than the Germans and the Russians). People die but stay alive, businesses thrive and then fall apart, grudges are held for a long time, circus monkeys pass out counterfeit bills, what seems at first to be a small town apparently grows to include many more people of varying kinds, time passes and times get hard and then better and then hard again, the weather changes and it is hot and sunny all day and all night, a bustling port appears but then disappears . . . and so on. Overall, the tone is gloomy, and much that happens is grim, as many characters die, but fun and mysterious things happen too.

What makes this book so remarkable is Tulli's writing. She meshes crystal clear descriptions of people, their actions, and their environment with illusion and allusion, in prose that flows so naturally that even completely unnatural events seem perfectly believable. People can seem real and ephemeral at the same time, even as people who die don't necessarily stay dead. Music plays an important role in the book too, with the sounds of different instruments adding insight into what is going on with different characters. Tulli creates a story that seems grounded in some ways in Poland in the first half of the 20th century but then takes off from there into an into an alternate world of imagination. Having finished this book, I could easily start it all over again, and I'll be looking for other works by Tulli.

In Red sounds fascinating. I've never heard of the author. Thanks for the review.

I got it through my Archipelago subscription. I'm way behind on them, but this one was short!

Nice review of In Red, Rebecca; I'll see if I can read it before the year is out.

BTW, did you see that NYRB has created a 6-month ($85 for 6 books) and 12-month ($150 for 12 books) subscription plan?

Excellent and enthusiastic review of In Red rebecca

Great review. Certainly a book I'll keep in mind.

Thanks, all. It was quite an unusual and fascinating book. Darryl, thanks for the info about NYRB. I can buy NYRB books so easily in NYC bookstores and, difficult as this may be to believe, I am not always intrigued by their publications, so I will pass on the subscription. With Archipelago (and Open Letter), it is so much more difficult to find their books that even if I don't like all of them (or take a long time to getting around to reading them), it's worth it to me to subscribe.

Do you subscribe to Open Letter in addition to Archipelago, Rebecca? If so, which of the two do you prefer?

Have you found out when this year's Archipelago subscription ends? I think it was a year long, 10 book subscription, but I'm all but certain that we haven't received 10 books yet. I'll be much more willing to renew my subscription if we receive 10 books over >12 rebeccanyc: months, rather than Forthcoming Titles, and only 7 books are scheduled to be released next year. Only two of these books strongly appeal to me so far, As Though She Were Sleeping by Elias Khoury (which I'll buy, regardless) and Harlequin's Millions by Bohumil Hrabal. I haven't received any information about renewing my subscription, so I would assume (and hope) that our current subscription is valid until we receive 10 books.

I have roughly 20 unread Archipelago titles, so I probably won't renew my subscription next year.

As far as I can tell, the Archipelago subscription lasts for as long as it takes to receive 10 books based on when you originally subscribed. They more or less told me this when I e-mailed them earlier this year because I hadn't received any books in a while and I thought my subscription might have expired since it was a year since I had subscribed. They attribute the variation to printer schedules, which I can believe, since I doubt they're at the top of the list for their printer. In fact, I just got my renewal letter.

I do also subscribe to Open Letter, but I have to confess I haven't read any of the titles I've received yet, so I can't compare them. Unlike Archipelago books, they come with a letter that tells a little about the book and the translation. It's true that some of the Archipelago titles don't appeal to me, but I'm hopeful that I'll try them anyway and maybe be surprised. I look at both these subscriptions as a way of being introduced to unfamiliar authors and finding books that don't generally show up in bookstores.

Thanks for the information about Archipelago, Rebecca. I do appreciate both publishers, and I plan to buy books from them, and similar presses including NYRB Books, on a semi-regular basis in the future. However (and at the risk of sounding like a broken record), I have so many unread books on my shelves that I'm eager to get to that I can't justify my excessive book buying habits any more.

90. Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura

This is a beautifully written, haunting book, and yet I didn't love it as much as I hoped to based on lilisin's glowing recommendation. Through the story of a nine-year-old boy, Isaku, whose father, like many others in the village, has sold himself into bondage for three years to provide grain for his family, Yoshimura paints a picture of a small medieval village, perched on the rocky coast of an island off the coast of Japan, isolated from the nearest town by mountains that can only be traversed on foot. His descriptions of the natural world, both its beauty and its harshness, and the villager's dependence on it and the drudgery of their lives, are delicate and illuminating. From early in this slim novel, a sense of danger and even horror intrudes, as the reader learns of a man whose family stopped feeding him because he was dying; in this village, there is a fine line between finding enough food, largely from the sea, and starving to death.

Part of the novel is the beginning of a coming-of-age story. Isaku struggles with going out fishing by himself to provide food for his mother and younger siblings, takes pride in being invited into the company of the adults of the village, misses his father, has complicated feelings about his mother, and starts to notice the attractions of a girl. But the other part of the novel deals with the village's secret way of providing more for itself, by plundering ships that are wrecked on the rocks in stormy winter weather. More than that, they work to attract these ships to danger, and carry out rituals to ensure that they will do so. In the end, this brings unanticipated danger and sorrow to the village.

There are two reasons why I'm not wholeheartedly enthusiastic about this book, one having to do with the novel itself and one with the translation. First, even given the fact that children grew up faster and had to take on adult responsibilities earlier in medieval times, I had a difficult time picturing a nine-year-old doing everything Isaku did, although I could envision more of it as he grew older over the approximately three-year span of the book. Secondly, sometimes the translation used contemporary expressions that I found jarring in the context of both the medieval time period and the Japanese location (as has been noted by other reviewers): for example, he uses the terms "tying the knot" and "breadwinner". Additionally, the book uses traditional ways to describe time, for example, the Hour of the Horse; at one point in the middle of the book, the translator parenthetically inserts approximately what time that corresponds to, and it seemed strange to do it in one place but not elsewhere (and I would have preferred it not to be done at all).

Despite these caveats, I really enjoyed this book; I just wish I liked it more.

91. Mr. Fortune's Maggot and The Salutation by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The novel, "Mr. Fortune's Maggot," grew on me as I read it and began to appreciate the subtly different levels at which Sylvia Townsend Warner was writing. It tells the tale of Timothy Fortune, a bank clerk who becomes a minister and, after spending a decade in a missionary community on a South Sea island, feels compelled to travel to Fanua, an island that has no experience with western settlement and "civilizations" and whose denizens lead a life of leisure and pleasure since the climate is benign and food is readily at hand, to try his hand at converting these happy people to Christianity. Naive and psychologically somewhat crippled, Mr. Fortune thinks he has made a convert when a young boy, Lueili, comes to observe his religious rites and then stays. As time passes, Mr. Fortune thinks he is teaching him Christianity, having no other way to understand the boy's interest in spending time with him. Then, as more time goes on, Mr. Fortune grows to enjoy his life of relative leisure and his friendship with Lueli, becoming less interested in converting the other Fanuans, until he makes a discovery that shocks him about Lueli, followed immediately by other disasters. Through this process, Mr. Fortune learns a lot about himself, his faith, love, and the pleasure of enjoying life instead of following what is perceived as duty. Subtly, Townsend Warner is also commenting on colonialism and the English approach to people of other countries.

As a reader, I had to suspend disbelief that the Fanuans obviously speak and understand English. And although I found the novel not as wickedly funny as Lolly Willowes, I did enjoy it.

In the novella, "The Salutation," we find Mr. Fortune, tormented by his thoughts and memories, turning up in South America, and finding a measure of comfort.

(Note: This book, published by NYRB, includes both the novel "Mr. Fortune's Maggot" and the novella "The Salutation." NYRB has recently reissued the same combination under the title "Mr. Fortune.")

92. Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

In his first novel, Ngũgĩ tells the story of a village boy, Njoroge, hungry for education, growing up at the time of the fight for independence from the British known by the Kenyans as "the Emergency" and by the British as the "Mau Mau rebellion." Through the different members of his family and their histories (in which some of them were forced to fight for the British during the second world war) and their relationships with a neighboring African who has ingratiated himself with the British rulers and the main British farmer in the area who owns land that used to belong to Njoroge's family, the conflicts of the time emerge, as well as Njoroge's own intellectual and psychological development. This brief novel, although a little schematic at times, and not as complex as Ngũgĩ's later work, nevertheless paints a moving and powerful portrait of a time, a place, and a young person who may in some respects resemble Ngũgĩ himself.

rebecca, Mr Fortune's Maggot sounds an amusing read. Is that 92 books read this year, pretty good going: I am on 83 with a couple more to enter and a couple more to finish before the new year.

Very nice review of Weep Not, Child, Rebecca. I'm glad that you liked it as well.

I need to move Ngũgĩ up my TBR list. I have several of his books on my list, but there they have lingered. Another author for 2012!

Chanukhah Sameach

Shipwrecks is on my 2012 reading plan. I'll be forewarned about the translation. I do find it annoying when translators use modern idioms when it isn't necessary or appropriate.

I haven't read anything by Sylvia Townsend Warner. If I get to her this coming year it will probably be Lolly Willowes

I enjoyed Weep Not, Child as well, and then read The River Between which is similar in style. I'm currently reading Petals of Blood but not enjoying its larger, rambling style quite as much.

Thanks, Barry, Darryl, Lisa, and Steve,!

I definitely recommend Lolly Willowes for an introduction to Sylvia Townsend Warner, although it may have spoiled me for anything else she wrote.

It is interesting, Steven, that you preferred Weep Not, Child and The River Between to Petals of Blood, whereas I felt the opposite way. I think it might have to do with your starting to read Ngugi with Weep Not, Child, whereas I started with the Wizard of the Crow. So my introduction to him was with his multilayered, complex, broad writing, whereas you started with the very place-specific, naturalistic works.

Lisa, which Ngugis do you have on your TBR?

I think it might have to do with your starting to read Ngugi with Weep Not, Child...

Yes, I think you're right. Our first exposure to an author sets expectations and assumptions. When the next work we read by that author is substantially different, we sometimes struggle to squeeze it into a mold it isn't meant to fit.

Enjoying your reviews. Happy holidays.

Thanks to reviews by you and Darryl, I have Grain of Wheat and The River Between already on my list. Is there a Ngugi that you would recommend as a good place to start?

Lisa, I started with Wizard of the Crow, which I loved, and which is one of Ngugi's more complex works. Because I started with it, I tend to prefer his later, more complicated books, while people who started with his earlier, more naturalistic books, like The River Between, tend to prefer them. The Author Theme Reads group had Ngugi as a mini-author this quarter, and since I have read a lot of Ngugi I started a thread introducing him that you might find interesting. There are also other threads in the group about specific novels.

Thanks, Rebecca, your introduction and blurbs are very helpful. Just enough to allow me to choose a topic of interest but not enough to "spoil" the book.

ETA: I just received Life and Fate for the last night of Hanukkah. I'm very excited. I had no idea it was such a chunkster!

Thanks, Lisa. I think you will be as impressed by Life and Fate as I was. It is compulsively readable, so don't worry about it being a chunkster!

I am behind on reviews but hope to catch up this weekend and then be able to write about my favorite books of the year.

A rare compliment, but I'm not Lois. It's Lisa. :-)

Last night I tallied up my books for the end of the year review. I haven't posted it yet (waiting for the 30th), but it was fun to create. I read one more book than last year. Unfortunately, I can't find last year's breakdown of fiction/non, female/male authors, etc. Of course, I very well may finish Sea of Poppies before the end of the year, and then I'm have to retally my percentages. Maybe I'll read very slowly!

Oops. Corrected. I do know you're Lisa!

93 Three Novellas by Joseph Roth
94 The Leviathan by Joseph Roth

Of the three novellas, almost long short stories, in this collection, the second, "The Bust of the Emperor," treads the most familiar Joseph Roth territory: the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the change in borders, the rise of "nationalities," and the longing for what is lost. Both of the other venture into less familiar ground: "Fallmereyer the Stationmaster," while providing a vivid portrait of the far reaches of the empire, also shows a man obsessed by and transformed by love, while "The Legend of the Holy Drinker," my favorite of the three, portrays a poverty-stricken drunkard who, enobled by kindness, transforms himself, at least for a while. It is an unusual sign of hope in Roth's work, and was one of the last things he wrote before essentially dying of alcoholism himself.

But it was a stand-alone novella, "The Leviathan," which really grabbed me. In it, Roth makes the world of the protagonist, Nissen Piczenik, a Jewish coral dealer in a small town in eastern Europe, come alive; his descriptions of the corals, and Nissen's thoughts and feelings about them, are stunning, and so is the story of Niseen's temptation by his desire to see the sea, which leads to many other temptations and to his ultimate downfall. The writing is beautiful, and I couldn't put this book down.

95. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This fascinating book by Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, explores how our minds work, especially as we make decisions. He uses a construct of two "systems" of thinking to explain many of his ideas: System 1 is our quick, intuitive, method of thinking, which gets us through the vast majority of our daily activities and choices, although not always in the best way, and System 2 is our more thoughtful, logical, bigger picture way of thinking and making decisions, a system which we unconsciously avoid using a great deal of the time. His research, much with his colleague, the late Amos Tversky, to whom he dedicates the book, identified many of the ways our "System 1" deceives us, and opened up new ways of thinking about decisions to economists (who often resisted), and people in business, marketing, medicine, and many other fields.

So how do our minds keep us from making the best decisions? After noting that our mind is designed for making sense out what we encounter and thus for jumping to conclusions, and that something he calls WYSIATI, for "what you see is all there is, helps us do this, Kahneman describes a whole slew of ways. For example, faced with a complex question like "how happy are you?,' we tend to answer an easier but related question like "how do I feel right now?" We try to make coherent stories out of statistics we hear; to pay more attention to the content of stories than to their reliability; to focus on a number presented to us as an "anchor" for answering questions or making decisions; to be deceived by the availability of information in our minds (for example, if we heard of two plane crashes in the past month, we are likely to overestimate the frequency of plane crashes); to be influenced by details and causes more than statistics; to completely ignore the law of regression to the mean; to overly trust our intuition; to be overconfident about our ability to make predictions as compared to relying on statistical probabilities and formulas; and to be swayed, when making choices, both by risk aversion and risk seeking.

What makes this book so much fun to read, aside from the ideas, is that Kahneman introduces his concepts by posing the kinds of problems he posed to students and sample groups, so that the reader can see how he or she would answer them. Even knowing that there is some "catch," it is difficult not to answer spontaneously. By engaging the reader in this way, Kahneman makes the examples and ideas much more personally interesting.

Towards the end of the book, Kahneman introduces two other ideas: Econs versus Humans and the experiencing mind versus the remembering mind. Econs, as he describes them, are the ideally logical thinkers posited by economic models, people who always answer consistently and in agreement with whatever is the statistically better choice; Humans are real people who are influenced by how their minds work, by their feelings, and by other factors such as those explored earlier in the book. Kahneman discusses how an understanding of how Humans respond can help businesses, government, and others solve problems better than by assuming we can be trained to be like Econs. In the exploration of the experiencing and the remembering minds, he shows that people rely on their memories of events, both painful and pleasant, more than on the actual experience. In one example, people who endured an painful, but short, medical procedure described it as worse than people who had a slightly less painful procedure that went on for much longer, and people whose pain tapered off before its end found it more endurable than people whose pain ended abruptly, even if the pain went on for a longer period of time. He also explores how people can experience greater well-being.

This is a book filled with ideas, and what could be more fascinating than learning about how our minds work?

96. Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono

This short but powerful novel explores the evils of colonialism through the story of a young Cameroonian man, Toundi, who becomes the "houseboy" first for a priest and then for the French "commandant" in the area. He is initially both attracted and repelled by the Europeans he works for, even as we know, because the novel begins with his death by violence, that things will get bad quickly. Oyono depicts the interactions among the Africans in the story, as well as their perceptive observations of life within white households, including all their bad behavior; of course, the whites don't really think the Africans notice what they do, because they don't notice the Africans except when they displease them. And then, the violence, cruelty, and randomness of the colonial power comes into play. Oyono is a terrific writer (parts of this book are quite funny), with a great sense of pacing, and has a keen eye for hypocrisy and racism. I got this book because of an enthusiastic review here on LT, and I'm glad I finally read it.

rebecca looks like you are tidying up your thread for the new year.

Excellent review of Thinking Fast and Slow as it sounds like a book that you have to think hard about to write a reasonable precis of. It sounds fascinating, however I fear it would all go over my head. Thumbed.

Well, I think I may finish one more book tomorrow, but it won't be a favorite, so I can now post my best of 2011 list. In the next post, I'll include that book in my analysis.

These are more or less in reverse order of when I read them.

Best of the Best (fiction)

In Red by Magdalena Tulli
Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
A Change of Climate and Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel
The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
The History of the Siege of Lisbon by José Saramago
The Red Riding Quartet: Nineteen Seventy-Four/Nineteen Seventy-Seven/Nineteen Eighty/Nineteen Eighty-Three by David Peace
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, The Vet's Daughter, and Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
Wandering Stars by Sholem Aleichem
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Best of the Rest (fiction)
God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène
Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono
Once upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Devil on the Cross, A Grain of Wheat, Weep Not, Child, and Matigari by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
They Were Counted/They Were Found Wanting/They Were Divided by Miklós Bánffy
The Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy
Red Shift by Alan Garner
Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky
The Skin Chairs, Sisters by a River, and The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
The Prospector by J.M.G. LeClezio
Soul and Other Stories by Andrey Platonov
Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
She Drove without Stopping by Jaimy Gordon
The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer
Conquered City by Victor Serge

Favorite Non-Fiction
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
Classic Crimes by William Roughead
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt
Gulag by Anne Applebaum
Just Kids by Patti Smith

Now, the analysis.

Out of 97 books read:

84 fiction (87%)/13 nonfiction (13%)
32 female authors (33%)/65 male authors (67%)
42 by authors not from the USA or the UK (43%)

Countries represented (19)

Europe
Russia 6
Hungary 4
Germany 3
France 3
Portugal 2
Austria 2
Eastern Europe (Yiddish) 1
Denmark 1
Poland 1

Africa
Kenya 4
Senegal 2
Cameroon 1
Congo 1

Asia
Japan 2
India 1

Australia 1

South America
Peru 4
Argentina 2
Cuba 1

46 authors were new to me this year (i.e., I had never read anything by them, not that I'd never heard of them) (can't calculate percentage because I didn't add up the number of different authors)

Authors I read multiple books by (13)
Hilary Mantel
Jaimy Gordon
Barbara Comyns
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
David Peace
Andrey Platonov
Luc Sante
Miklós Bánffy
Mario Vargas Llosa
John le Carré
Edgardo Cozarinsky
Karl Marlantes
Joseph Roth

Disappointing Books 4 (see this post for my reasons.

We the Drowned by Carsten Jensen
The Sojurn by Andrew Krivak
Ice Road by Gillian Slovo
And the most irritating book of the year: The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

So, what do I make of all this?

I would have read fewer female authors if I hadn't become enamored of Barbara Comyns and continued my love of Hilary Mantel; I read multiple books by both of them. In 2012, I probably need to make an effort to read more books by women -- Belletrista, here I come!

My global reading was focused mostly on Europe, especially Russia, and the higher numbers from Kenya and Peru reflect individual authors (Ngũgĩ and Vargas Llosa). With the Reading Globally group focusing on China, the Balkans, and the Middle East in 2012, and the Author Theme Reads group concentrating on Japan, I should be able to expand my reach, but would like to make an effort to read more from different parts of Africa.

I am very excited about some of my new discoveries of 2011, especially Barbara Comyns, José Saramago, Alejo Carpentier,and Edgardo Cozarinsky, all of whom I learned about through LT. I hope to read more books by them, but also to discover more new exciting writers through LT.

More thoughts may come later.

I will add my last book of 2011 to this thread if I finish it tomorrow, but as of January 1, you can find me in Club Read 2012. I look forward to seeing all of you there for another wonderful year of reading.

Outstanding review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Rebecca! That sounds like an essential book for me to read, as I can see its applicability to medical practice, and to my role as a teacher of medical students and residents. That goes right to the top of my wish list, and I'll use the B&N gift card I received for Christmas to buy it.

Nice review of Three Novellas, which I liked, along with Job. I haven't read The Radetzky March yet, but I doubt that I'll get to it in 2012.

Houseboy sounds good, but I'll pass on it for now.

I enjoyed your year end summary; I'll get started on mine now.

I succumbed to temptation (imagine that!), and purchased a 12 month subscription to the NYRB Book Club earlier this morning, as I knew I wanted to read nearly all of the forthcoming NYRB Classics. I won't renew my Archipelago Books subscription in 2012, though.

Thank you, Darryl, and speaking of temptation . . . Book Culture is having a 20% off sale for New Year's Day tomorrow. Fortunately, I'm not participating in that nefarious Book Buying Ban you're promulgating.

I've added a section on my most disappointing books of the year to post #63.

Book Culture is having a 20% off sale for New Year's Day tomorrow.

Yes...I've been to Book Culture's New Year's Day sale a couple of times in the past five years or so, although I'm usually visiting my best friends in Madison, Wisconsin at that time (ooh, that reminds me; I need to make reservations to visit them next month).

Fortunately, I'm not participating in that nefarious Book Buying Ban you're promulgating.

In that case, do you want to join me in the NYRB Book Club?

The Sojourn was a forgettable book. It was far from the worst book I read this year, but I'd include amongst the biggest disappointments of 2011 as well.

I decided not to join the NYRB book club because it is so easy for me to buy them in New York, and because there are always ones that don't interest me. Of course, that means I will be buying the ones that do interest me!

When I looked at the forthcoming books page on NYRB's web site, only one or two of the books were only mildly interesting to me; the rest sounded very interesting. I'll receive Walkabout by James Vance Marshall first, and I'll probably read it soon after it arrives.

>56 labfs39:, 57 That's payback. I've been called Lisa (and Laura, Lori, Louise...etc) my entire life. hee hee

>62 rebeccanyc: It's always good to see your list. I have the Campbell and the Gordon in the piles. It's only fair that I recommended American Salvage and you recommended this new one (and read the others too, so I would know...)! And the Gordon, well, it seemed the only one of hers that interests me.

Have you not read any Victor Pelevin? With all of your Russian literature, I'm a little surprised. His work is all satirical and contemporary, as far as I can tell, and it may not be your cup of tea. I have read the early books, dukedom has read the later ones (though not yet the one I gave him for the holidays, The Hall of the Singing Caryatids from New Directions). What era has most of your Russian reading been in?

So glad to find another who is not suffering from the TBR pile guilt :-)

I haven't gotten to Victor Pelevin yet -- there are a lot of Russians to read!

I agree that She Drove without Stopping is the Gordon you are likely to like (although I could imagine that you wouldn't). I liked Lord of Misrule (one of my favorites of last year, and the book that introduced me to Gordon) and Bogeywoman too, and someday I will gird myself for trying to read the extremely experimental Shamp of the City Solo.

And yes, I should thank you for your introduction to Bonnie Jo Campbell. When you read Once upon a River, you will remember a story or two from her earlier collections.

And as for no TBR guilt (although several of my most recent books were from the TBR), I will report tomorrow on my 2012 thread on my expected haul from the Book Culture New Year's Day sale.

This is a list of the authors I read for the first time in 2011. A star means I'll look for additional books by that author.

Ousmane Sembène (will finish today)
Ferdinand Oyono
Magdalena Tulli*
M. R. James
Alan Garner*
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Helen Oyeyemi*
Chrétien de Troyes
S. M. Plokhy
Pap Khouma
Heidi Cullen
Beryl Bainbridge*
Miklós Bánffy (think I read everything translated into English)
Rose Macaulay*
Vladimir Sorokin*
Luc Sante*
Edgardo Cozarinksy*
Brian Moore*
William Roughead*
Barbara Comyns*
Deborah Blum
Karl Marlantes*
Carsten Jensen
J.M.G. Le Clézio*
Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole*
Andrey Platonov*
Santiago Roncagliolo
Gail Jones
Penelope Mortimer*
Anne Applebaum*
Jean-Patrick Manchette
Andrew Krivak
Deborah Lipstadt
Sony Labou Tansi
Gillian Slovo
José Saramago*
Caroline Fraser
David Peace*
Theodor Fontane
Teju Cole
Alejo Carpentier*
Boris Pasternak*
Patti Smith*
José Maria Eça de Queirós
Tom Rachman
Yasushi Inoue
Mashaweta Devi

Fascinating list -- I've enjoyed your reviews over the year -- more lurking, than responding, I'm afraid.

Well done on getting through 97 books

I like the list in #73. What a great way to keep certain authors on the front burner.

Happy New Year!

Thanks, all, and here is my last book of 2011, which I finished last night before the ball dropped.

97. God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène

This book grew on me as I read it: at first it seemed like a relatively straightforward account, with political overtones, of a strike on the Dakar-Niger railway in 1947-1948, in which the African workers demanded higher wages, pensions, and more from the colonial French managers, but gradually I was drawn in by the perceptive portraits of a whole variety of characters and the more subtle interactions among them and by the portrait of changes in the society as the impact of western "civilization" made itself felt on traditional ways of life. As other reviewers have noted, one of the most interesting aspects of the book is the way the women take on new power as the story develops. Ousmane portrays not only the suffering caused by the strike, but also the suffering that made the strike necessary, and the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women who must deal with the consequences of the strike. He also illustrates the complex relationship between the colonizers and the colonized, some of whom take pride in having learned French, and how to read and write, while resenting the fact that they must speak French to the French, who have never taken the time to learn the African languages spoken by the people they control. Although the French characters are not as fully developed as the African ones, they too differ from each other and narrowly escape being stereotypes.

Ousmane immigrated to France where he became a union organizer and a member of the Communist party. At times in this book the political message borders on the obvious, but for the most part this is a story of people struggling to put food and water on the table and live in dignity.

Good review to end the year on rebecca