*** What are you reading? DECEMBER 2011

Posting one day early, so I don't forget...

I have completed The Magic Mountain! I also finished: The Rise and Fall of the Bible by Timothy Beal, Good Book by David Plotz & Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou and others. All recommended, if your interests run that way. Beal's book was surprisingly fascinating.

At some point this month I will start Moby Dick and on Jan 1 I will start Robert Alter's version of the first five books of the Bible, both for le Salon group reads. (and the Bible read is literary, not religious, so you know).

In the mean time, I've just started two books:
- Blossom by Donigan Merritt. Merrit is a favorite, but unknown, author. I just discovered this new release.
- How to Read the Bible by James L. Kugel. I will mostly read this along with the OT.

And I have several other books started, but not finished. The only other one I'm actively reading is The People Look Like Flowers at Last by Charles Bukowski

I have just come to the end of three novels which I will review soon:

1) The bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder - excellent
2) The City and the City by China Mieville - goodish
3)Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach - fascinating

And so the books I am about to start are:
1) The Book of Margery Kemp translated by Lynn Staley and a Norton Critical edition
2) Parzival and the Stone from Heaven: A Grail romance retold for our time by Lindsay Clarke
3) Frieda and Min by Pamela Jooste

Just noticed that my next reads are all female writers.

Last night I lined up my shelf for December reading. Some of these are already in progess. There is no way I will get to all of them, much less finish them by the end of the month, but they're in the queue in roughly this sequence:

Rickshaw by Lao She
Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Fortunata and Jacinta by Benito Pérez Galdós
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Outlaws of the Marsh by Shi Nai'An
Matigari by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris

plus two Early Reviewer books that haven't arrived yet:

No More Mister Nice Guy by Howard Jacobson (a September win and still a no show)
The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

Oh, you are all so organized about what you plan to read!

Well, I'm not remotely organized!

I'm just about to start Going Bovine by Libba Bray, and am also dipping in and out of a book called Bet You Didn't Know: Hundreds of Intriguing Facts about Living in the USA.

Completed Richard Fortey's Earth: An Intimate History, very conflicted and mixed feelings about this one. Not sure if I'll be able to come up with anything concrete.

More than likely the last book I'll get to this year, decided to take hiatus to see where a few plans shake out before I start another book.

I'm reading Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel, The Marriage Plot. I also need to read Suite Francaise for my RL Book Club, but I can't seem to force myself to pick it up, even though I've heard great things about it.

Cait - look forward to your thoughts on The Marriage Plot.

Continuing my medieval mini-theme, and as part of a Club Read group read, I've finished and reviewed the somewhat ponderous Parzival and Titurel by Wolfram von Eschenbach, one of the earliest versions of the grail legend.

I've just started Other Lives, the latest novel by André Brink.

I'm happily reading A Place of Greater Safety. That Hilary Mantel is some kind of author. I'm having trouble getting things done.

Loved A Place of Greater Safety even more than Wolf Hall. I know what you mean!

I finished Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood a few days ago, which was a lot of fun, and I am now about a 100 pages into Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote. Brilliant, as always.

I always have a lot of reading going on at the same time, alongside one or two door stoppers, which are hard to carry around. As my work is very busy, the final six weeks of term (another 3 weeks to go), I am still reading Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole, but also started and have now nearly finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.

In German, I hope to finish Günter Grass' Mein Jahrhundert (My Century), and in French I have been reading another historical novel, set in Egypt, n.l. La fille du Nil by Gilbert Sinoué (I don't think there's an English translation for it).

In October I bought all major works by Susan Sontag in Penguin Modern Classics, and currently I am reading some of the essays, starting with Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.

I have started reading Le mausolée des amants. Journal 1976 - 1991 by Hervé Guibert; Some smaller books I will most certainly finish reading are: an oddly little-read American classic: Young Lonigan by James T. Farrell, a largely forgotten British author, n.l Irene Handl's The gold tip pfitzer and a golden oldie, John Wyndham's Trouble with lichen, and in German Flamme, die sich verzehrt by Gregor von Rezzori, of which, at least on LT, I am the sole owner (My copy is the 1939 first edition, printed in 1941, which oddly spells the author's name Rezzori, subsequently only spelled as Rezori.

I've finished and reviewed two recent New York Review Books editions, the strange and haunting Red Shift by Alan Garner and the mysterious and melancholy Adventures of Sindbad by Gyula Krúdy

And now I've finished and reviewed In Red by Magdalena Tulli, a gem of a novella that mixes the real and the unreal in flowing prose.

I am about to start three books:

Honorary Consul by Graham Greene
A Distant Mirror: The calamitous 14th century by Barbara W. Tuchman
The Lais of Marie de France

I have recently finished and will review soon:

Frieda and Min Pamela Jooste
The book of Margery Kempe
Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C S Lewis

Finished the lastest, delicious Ian Rankin crime novel. Prior to that I finished The Blue Fox by Sjón. Now trying to read another Sjón: From the Mouth of the Whale. I've really had a difficult time reading complete books this fall, too much has been going on in RL. Hope things settle down when the New Year starts.

ETA, apologies to everyone as I am behind in reading everyone's threads. Way behind. I'm behind in my own thread too!

Having just finished A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel (review forthcoming!), I've now started Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay.

Barry, I am thinking of rereading A Distant Mirror sometime next year. It must be 30 years since I read it, and I remember not a thing. And I love Barbara Tuchman.

I'm halfway through The Leper Compound by Paula Nangle, which I'm enjoying so far. I'll finish it today, and write a review for the upcoming issue of Belletrista.

rebecca, I am looking forward to reading A Distant Mirror. The guys over at the medieval group can be quite scathing about her relevance as a historian, but if she writes well it will be good enough for me.

I've just read and reviewed the haunting and beautifully written Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura, set in an isolated medieval village on the rocky coast of Japan.

I'm reading Bound by Antonya Nelson and The London Train by Tessa Hadley

I've just finished and reviewed Mr. Fortune's Maggot and The Salutation by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Weep Not, Child, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, both thought-provoking.

I have just finished A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman and just might be able to squeeze in another couple of books before the end of the year:

Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer
Norstrilla by Cordwainer Smith.

Just finished a dreadful historical novel, The Last Rendezvous by Anne Plantagenet.

I started Volcano by Shusaku Endo this afternoon, on the flight from Philadelphia to Atlanta, in preparation for lilisin's Author Theme Reads group in 2012 (Endo is next year's major author).

I'm reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville on my new Kindle Fire and have just finished Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo.

am half way through Wolf Hall and reading my Norton Critical edition of Keats' poems and prose, other bits of potery here and there and thinking at havign a bash at finishing soem shorter things I have o hold for the end of year.

Last night I finished The Housekeeper and the Professor and an audiobook version of The London Train. I started The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit and will begin a new audiobook, Death in Winter, later on today (if I make it to the gym).

I just finished The Help, which I enjoyed and reviewed. I am now reading Hotel Angeline. I don't know what to think of that yet. Krazy!!

I've just reviewed my four most recent reads: Three Novellas and The Leviathan by Joseph Roth, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono.

I am still slogging through Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. I've finally finished the first section and have moved on to the second, which seems much more interesting. My RL book club is discussing this next week, otherwise I would have given up on it long ago!

I'm currently reading The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe by Theodore Gray, which will either be my last book of 2011 or my first one for 2012, depending on how much time I spend with it today. Either way, it'll be a nice note to go out/come in on, because it's a surprisingly fun and interesting read.