Avaland's 2013 Literary Exploratorium: End of 2013

I thought I might be able to make it to the end of the year on that last thread but it was becoming unwieldy.

2013 READING:

NOW READING:



Color: A Natural History of the Palette (or, my UK version is: Colour: Travels through the Paintbox) by Victoria Finlay (2002, UK, art/travel/essays)
Evil Eye Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong by Joyce Carol Oates (2013)

NOVELS/NOVELLAS



Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila (2004, Nigerian)
Before the Poison by Peter Robinson (2011)
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (2013, Canadian, dystopian satire)
One Who Disappeared by David Herter (novel, 2011, US)
The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-Everett (2011, US)
Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer by Adam Roberts (2013, UK)
A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta (2013, Nigeria/US)
Fuse by Julianna Baggott (2013, US, science fiction)
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah (1992, Zanzibar/Tanzania)
Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto (2009, T 2012 Mozambique)
The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams (2011, US)
Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh (2012, Lebanon, Translated from the Arabic)
The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg (Danish, 2006, Translated 2007)

SHORT FICTION



Yellowcake: Stories by Margo Lanagan (2013, Australian)
Hitting Trees with Sticks by Jane Rogers (short stories, 2012, picking away)
News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories by Jennifer Haigh (2013, US)
All My Friends by Marie Ndiaye (2013, France, translated, short fiction)

POETRY



Under the Keel: Poems by Michael Crummey (2013, Canadian)
Selected Poetry of Amy Lowell (2002, US, early 20th century)
Selections from Collected Poems: Jane Kenyon (2007, US)
An Ordinary Day by Di Xue (Translated from the Chinese, 2002)
Selections from The Zoo in Winter by Polina Barskova (poetry, translated from the Russian, 2011)

NONFICTION



I Still Believe Anita Hill (2013, nonfiction, essays)
My Heart is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Mother, edited by Eva LaPlante (2013)
Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home; Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh, editors (2012)

CRIME NOVELS (it's been a stressful year)

The Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill (UK)
Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason (2009, T 2012, Iceland)
-----
All the Colors of Darkness by Peter Robinson (crime novel)
Bad Boy by Peter Robinson (crime novel)
Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson (crime novel)
Piece of My Heart by Peter Robinson
Aftermath by Peter Robinson
Strange Affair by Peter Robinson
Past Reason Hated by Peter Robinson
Gallows View by Peter Robinson
The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson
A Necessary End by Peter Robinson (1989, Canadian)
Close to Home by Peter Robinson
Final Account by Peter Robinson
Cold is the Grave by Peter Robinson (1990, Canadian, crime novel)
In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson (1999, Canadian, crime novel)
-----
The Vanishing Point by Val McDermid (2013)
A Darker Domain by Val McDermid (2008, UK, crime novel)
Room Number 10 by Ake Edwardson (T. 2013, Swedish, crime novel)
Moonlight Downs by Adrian Hylund (2002, Australia, crime novel)
The Risk of Darkness by Susan Hill (crime novel, UK)
The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill (2005, UK, crime novel)
Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin (2013, UK, crime novel)
Blessed are They that Thirst by Anne Holt
The Blind Goddess by Anne Holt (1993, Norwegian, reprinted 2013, crime novel)

MISCELLANEOUS ODDS & ENDS

Dial H, Vol. 1 by China Miéville (2013, comics)
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (2013)(Abandoned)
We are All Equally Far From Love by Adania Shibli (2012, Palestine)(Abandoned)
That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott (2010, Australian, ON HOLD)

WHAT BOOKS THE HUBBY IS READING (or has recently read):

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
A Writer's Life by Eric Brown (2001, novella, SF)
Therapy by David Lodge (1995, novel, UK).
Adam Robots: Short Stories by Adam Roberts (2013, SF, UK)

I think I am only behind writing on 5 books now, so I may actually catch up before the end of the year. Of course, three of these are short story collections, always a bit more difficult to comment on. I've started to drift back into the books I usually read (instead of a steady diet of crime novels), a trend I expect will continue through most of the winter until early spring when the house goes on the market.

I too was hoping to make it to the end of the year on my old thread, but will have to set up a new one instead. Usually I enjoy that sort of housekeeping, but right now it just seems like a chore. Are you going to be moving away, Lois, or resizing?

Nice to see your new thread, Lois, and ditto, or I guess it's thritto. I'm probably going to have to set up a new thread after I finish my next book (whenever that is; it's kind of slow going right now).

Hi Lois, nice to see your thread again. I look forward to getting your opinion on We are All Equally Far From Love by Adania Shibli.

On new threads - am I committing a big LT faux pas by letting mine go to 300 posts? I think I'm missing something here...

>3 labfs39: Both moving and hoping to resize, but we love our books, and I love my artsy/crafty stash, so we'll see what happens. Yes, I think we were both out of circulation this year.

>4 rebeccanyc: Thank you. You must be on thread 4 or 5 by now, aren't you? :-)

>5 Polaris-: Thanks, will post some comments when I finish. It's interesting. I wanted to go back and look at her previous book to compare the prose but I think I sent it off to someone.

re: 300+ posts. Somewhere in the relatively early days of the LT forum, someone came up with the number 200 as a guideline—back in the days when some still had dial-up. I think with the ability to skip to the unread posts now, it makes that number somewhat obsolete. That said, when own my thread fells cumbersome to me, it's time for me to start another!

I'm in the 190s on thread 5 now; it's the most threads I've ever had in Club Read. I'm probably going to drop my 75 Books thread next year, because I'm down to two threads over there (people used to be more chatty on my thread there than here, but times change I guess).

I think it might be easier to skim back and look for specific comments if the thread stays at no more than 200. I am ready to start a new thread if I ever finish a book. The past two weeks have been slow. And although I am enjoying Blonde by JCO, it is big and slow going. Maybe next year I will try to figure out how to add pictures of the books to my thread. Your thread looks so nice.

It's not too hard to add images, Colleen. Simple copy the URL of the picture you want to copy (in MS you right click on the image and click "copy image URL"), then type a less than sign followed by img src="insertyourcopiedURLhere" and a greather than sign at the end. Img stands for image and src for source. So if I want to copy the image for the book My Heart is Boundless that Lois has above I would type

img src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1476702802.01._SX140_SY224_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg"

with the little angle brackets at the beginning and end.

Edited because I accidentally made the image show instead of the line of text!

Thank you, Lisa. I'll try it next time I create my post for review. :)

I'm interested in what you make of Mia Couto. I saw a play based on his works at the Edinburgh Festival and while the production had flaws I was impressed by the stories. (Unfortunately I have made an agreement with Marie that I can only buy books in a one-in one-out policy. This was a bad deal, I should only have agreed to it if she agreed to a similar deal regarding boots. I have a couple of books on order at the library but they are in the reserve collection which, judging by the length of time it tales to deliver them, resides in the Ukraine).

#9, 10 Adding on to what Lisa said in #9, if you add height=200 after the second quote mark and then put the close angle bracket, you can control the size of the image. (Of course, you can vary that number to vary the size, but that seems to be a workable one for the threads.)

Here's what it would look like:

img src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1476702802.01._SX140_SY224_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg"height=200

I remember how excited I was last year when I figured out to add the book covers! XD

Thanks for the tip rebecca, I didn't know we could do that.

MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (2013)

MaddAddam is the third installment in Atwood's dystopian satire that began with Oryx and Crake (2003) and then The Year of the Flood (2009). This third book continues the story of the characters who remain and ends the trilogy well.

Atwood includes short synopses of both previous books at the beginning of this one, which I thought was a terrific idea as it has been years since I read both books. I will not include a synopsis of this book here because if you haven't read the first two books, you wouldn't understand what I am talking about; and if you have read the first two, you will want to read it for yourself.

This is a very entertaining, witty and thoughtful story of humankind struggling to survive in the aftermath of a disaster (more like a multitude of disasters) of their own making. There are plenty of grim post-apocalypse stories out there, but Atwood prefers a lighter approach using the exaggeration of satire. It's like taking your medicine with a spoonful of sugar. And differing from most SF stories who encounter aliens out there, she's created aliens right here in our midst, and of our own making, extrapolating genetic manipulation into absurdity. One cannot help think that Maggie had a lot of fun writing this. Still, you cannot fail to understand what her concerns are over the possible abuses of our science and our failures as a society...and how delicate the balance can be.

In case you're interested: Other dystopian satires would be Gulliver's Travels and the film "Brazil" by Terry Gilliam. A few relatively recent ones I've read over the last few years are: Our American King by David Lozell Martin, Thinner Than Thou by Kit Reed, and Meeks by Julia Holmes.

Atwood includes short synopses of both previous books at the beginning of this one, which I thought was a terrific idea as it has been years since I read both books

That's great news, and I did not know that. I really wanted to reread the other books before moving on to this one, but I don't think that's going to happen. And I'm still looking for a used copy of the hardcover of Year of the Flood, and then I can have a set.

>15 Nickelini: I should also not that in a review on her blog, nohrt4me2 notes that there is a bit too much review of what's come before done through a couple of the characters talking to each other. She found it annoying, but I didn't really notice. Perhaps I was grateful for the reminders. I would recommend skipping the rereads and just read it.

If you would like to listen to her read those short synopses of the two previous books, she reads them at the beginning of this interview on my local PBS station. Tom Ashebrook was not greatest interviewer for Atwood and this book, but Maggie can hold the thing up on her own.

Nice review of the Atwood, Lois. I've yet to get to Year of the Flood, but I'm also looking forward to this one. I've been in a rather dystopian state of mind recently with the concatenation of horrific storms and after reading this morning that : "Greenhouse gases are making the world's oceans hot, sour and breathless, and the way those changes work together is creating a grimmer outlook for global waters, according to a new report Wednesday from 540 international scientists."

News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories by Jennifer Haigh (2013, US)

Haigh's second book, Baker Towers (2005), told the story of one family who lived in a post WWII, coal-mining town in Pennsylvania.

News from Heaven is a series of linked stories which return the reader to the world of Baker Towers, and in their own way continue that story. It is the town that fundamentally links the stories, but there are also links between the characters which not always obvious---more or less like going to a very large family reunion and figuring out how the unfamiliar woman with the carrot and pineapple Jello-O salad is related to you.

Because I had read Baker Towers ages ago (pre-publication, so likely 2004), I found myself desperately trying to make connections between these stories and what little I could remember of the novel. At some point, I gave up and just enjoyed the stories.

And this is what the author meant, I think, for the stories to stand on their own. And so they do. Her characters are wonderfully realized, and the stories engaging. There is a yearning that links these stories—a longing that I almost took for melancholy; it's a terribly human condition, one that tugs at your heart—but Haigh deftly keeps them from being sentimental. An easy read, comfortable and engrossing, this is a nice collection to settle in with.

Thanks to the LTer who sent it to me earlier this year!

I've only read one book by Jennifer Haigh (Mrs Kimble), and while it wasn't perfect, Ms Haigh can certainly write well.

MaddAddam What a good idea to start with a synopsis of the previous books in the series.

>19 RidgewayGirl: I read Mrs. Kimble also. I thought it quite good for a first novel. She writes about the lives of women in all of her books.

>20 baswood: Yes, indeed. Probably isn't practical for some, but it worked nicely for this threesome.

Yellowcake: Stories by Margo Lanagan (2013 US edition, Australian)

This is the 4th collection of short fiction by Lanagan, after Black Juice, White Time and Red Spikes. And it is the 4th I've read. Here in the states her work is marketed as YA, perhaps because the viewpoint is often that of an adolescent or a child and the prose uncongested. If one were trying to categorize her stories, one might say some were magical realism, science fiction, fairy tale or fantasy (or some combination of these), but one would only bother to do so in order to inform another.

Margo Lanagan has a remarkable imagination. The reader never knows what where they are going in one of her stories. They always start on solid, familiar ground, but soon the ground drops out from under you and well, you're on your own after that. Take my favorite story in this collection of 10 stories. "An Honest Day's Work" begins with a work crew having lunch, the banter all very familiar, but the names are not. The viewpoint is from a young person, a newbie on the team, who is somewhat handicapped. A call comes in to the leader's walkie talkie and soon there's a scrambling because a 'big one' is incoming. Here is where the solid ground drops out, and Lanagan's story is detailed, and mesmerizing; she's a bit of a tease with the clues. Whatever the 'incoming' is, it's desperately needed food and the crews are going to dismantle it.

At first, all we could see was the backlit bulk of the thing, with a few bright rags of aura streaming in the wind, thinning as it came closer. The light from the sun, which as yet was below the horizon, made the thick shroud glow, and the body shape was a dark blur within in. I thought I could see a head, against a bigger torso. But you can't be sure with these things; they're never the same twice in their build and features, in their arrangement of limbs.

At about the time when you figure out what's going on, and all seems to be going well for the crew, the unexpected happens.

For this story, Lanagan was inspired by a film she saw on ship-breaking. Honestly, who watches a film on ship-breaking and imagines something like "An Honest Day's Work"? Well, Lanagan does. I find her work, the way it unsettles me, rather stimulating.

#18 Glad you liked News from Heaven.

#19, RG The first book I read by Haigh was The Condition (thanks, Lois, for introducing me to it), and then I went back and read Mrs. Kimble and Baker Towers and I could see that while I enjoyed them, Haigh is definitely a writer who started out good but got better. (I wasn't a fan of Faith, though.)

Before the Poison by Peter Robinson (2012)

This is a standalone crime novel by the author of the long-running Detective Alan Banks series. Chris Lowndes, an ex-pat Brit, decides to return to the land of his youth after the death of his beloved wife. He buys a remote old country estate in Yorkshire through intermediaries, not knowing that a murder had occurred there in the early 1950s. The beautiful wife was hung for poisoning her doctor husband during one snowy weekend.

Lowndes, who writes the music for Hollywood movies, becomes fascinated with Grace Fox (who reminds him a little of his deceased wife) and the crime, and for all intents and purposes, begins to investigate it in the ways which are available to him.

There's a touch of ghost story and a fleeting whiff of the Gothic but these are more or less subtle spice in this engrossing crime story stew. And while this relatively low key story, which alternates with a written narrative of the case and Grace's war diaries, isn't written with the usual suspense-eliciting hanging chapter endings, I still found myself anxious and curious right alongside Mr. Lowndes, turning page after page to uncover the answers. And I was very pleased where the author took us both.

I've only read Atwood's Handmaiden. I'll have to get back to her.

11 - Perhaps if your book is coming from Ukraine, you might want them to send Death and the Penguin in the same pakage ;)

Hitting Trees with Sticks by Jane Rogers (2012, short stories) - shortlisted for the Edgehill Prize*.

I've been a fan of Jane Rogers since her novel Mr. Wroe's Virgins was published in the US back in 2000 (I think) and subsequently chased down her three previous books, and have tried to stay reasonably current with what she has written since then. You might remember her as the author of the more recent The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Arthur C. Clarke award. I saw this collection being offered by the UK's Comma Press—a press I have bought several collections from—I, of course, had to have it.

This is a delicious collection of twenty, previously published short stories. It is a broad collection, and as Hilary Mantel says, Rogers has the skill to "inhabit many different voices and different worlds....Her observation of our species is tender, precise, illuminating." The very first story in the collection, "Red Enters the Eye," is one of the best in the collection, a tale of a talented textile artist, who moves to Nigeria to make a difference at a woman's refuge. And the last story in the collection, "Hitting Trees with Sticks" is a story of dementia from the viewpoint of the victim. There's a ghost story, a story of Turing, and the creepy "Ped-o-matique." There's a sort of African folk tale, and a tale of one young man through the viewpoint of several people connected in some way to him...and many more stories, different settings, different voices, all told by very human narrators.

http://www.janerogers.org/

*The £5,000 Edge Hill Prize is awarded annually by Edge Hill University in the UK for excellence in a published single author short story collection.

PS: If my comments seem a bit flat, it's because I finished this collection before the previous two I commented on, saving the more difficult to comment for later. Ha! I should know better!

I Still Believe Anita Hill: Three Generations Discuss the Legacies of Speaking Truth to Power, edited by Amy Richards and Cynthia Greenberg (2013, nonfiction)

The testimony of Anita Hill at the Clarence Thomas Senate confirmation hearing in 1991 was a world-changing event, and I cannot express here how it affected me personally. A bit of anger still stirs when I think of how she was grilled and humiliated by the all-white male judiciary committee. The opportunity to look back at this event through this book was something I could not pass by. It has taken me months to get through it, and I'm glad for that, because it is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book, certainly not something to be rushed through.

The book is a collection of roughly 30 pieces, some recollections, some essays, other pieces creative. After an editor's note and a few introductory pieces, including excerpts from the hearing, it's divided into sections.

Part 1: What happened?
Most of these pieces are review and recollection from journalists, her lawyers, other legal experts, congresswomen, activists, leaders of related non-profits, and one playwright. These pieces provide valuable societal context, much more than most of us who were adults during 1991 understood at the time. Contributors include Pat Schroeder, Judith Resnik, Charles Ogletree, Maureen Dowd and more.

Part II: Responders: What Does Anita Hill Mean to You?
The three pieces here that answer that question. The largest piece is a conversation of sorts conducted by Pat Mitchell with several women including Melissa Harris-Perry and Ai-Jen Poo. I watch Harris-Perry sometimes on MSNBC and it was very interesting to hear what effect Anita Hill's act of courage had on her, as she was a college student at the time. Poo is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Part III: I Still Believe Anita Hill
The four pieces in this section were very interesting, though I didn't respond that much to the first piece, a long poem by Kevin Powell. There is a terrific creative piece by Edwidge Danticat where Sojourner Truth phones Anita Hill. And there is a piece by Hill herself titled "Give Your Child Your Luggage, not Your Baggage." The 4th piece was a thoughtful piece that leads with thoughts about being judged by what you wear, titled "What Does Credibility Look Like" by Columbia professor and The Nation columnist Pat Williams. Remember the red dress?

Part IV. What Have We Learned in Twenty Years and What Comes Next?
Contributors to this section include Gloria Steinhem and Julie Zeilinger. I mention these two because they represent very different generations, Steinhem is an icon now, of course; but Zeilinger maintains a blog for teenage feminists called the FBomb.

There is a terrific appendix also, with discussion questions, factual information about sexual harassment, resources and further excerpts from Hill's testimony.

It's amazing that this book is only around 250 pages because of what is crammed into it. Through it I, not only revisited an event that so affected me and allowed me to reflect on my own experience of it and how it affected my life, but I learned a lot of new things about what was going on at the time (I was a very busy young, working mother of three in 1991), and explored and contemplated the sometimes very different experiences of others, which always enlarges my soul.

The Anita Hill book sounds fascinating.

Agreeing with Rebecca. It does sound fascinating.

It is a pity I have never come across books of the author Jane Rogers in a bookshop so far. Your review has certainly raised my awareness. Th short story is not my favourite genre, so I am not sure whether I might like Hitting Trees with Sticks, although the title sounds intriguing and your review makes one curious.

Thanks for putting in the author's web page. The fact that some of her work is published by Faber & Faber Publishers, confirms my impression that Jane Rogers is an author I will likely be interested in, and the fact that some of her work is published by major publishers (Abacus) and has been short-listed for the Man Booker, means we will probably hear more from this author before long.

>28 rebeccanyc:, 29 Thanks. It is very interesting, indeed.

>30 edwinbcn: I checked her bibliography when I was preparing to write my comments and I see that I have missed at least one of her more recent books. I think she has been an underappreciated author and I was pleased to see her work make the Booker longlist, although The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a dystopian work, a bit YA, and likely not what "some people" would consider "Booker material." I guess where see where she goes from there.

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indridason (2009, T 2012, crime novel, Iceland)

This installment in Indridason's detective series gives the focus over to one of Erlendur's sidekicks, DI Sigurdur Óli, and follows two story lines. In the first, Oli does a favor for a friend around tale of blackmail from a wife-swapping party that may lead him into much more complex waters. In the second, a somewhat familiar derelict wanders into the station looking for Erlunder (who, by the way, is still out east visiting his childhood home, no doubt trying to exorcise his demons --- but no one has heard from him), but settles for Óli. He seems to want to tell him something, but doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Hard to take the smelly alcoholic seriously.

This was a good, but not great mystery. Óli is not a very sympathetic character. He's arrogant, self-centered and obnoxious (most of the time), and lacking in the empathy department. Granted, Erlendur is no prize either, but we've all come to understand his pathway to being a loser...and he, at least, is self-aware. Indridason has tried to make Sigurdur Oli interesting, but it didn't work for me--although we are left with a little hope that a bit change might be brewing. I also thought the translation this time a bit awkward (Indridason's writing is spare and clipped, so the translation is also), but that may be an illusion because I wasn't all that enthralled with the story.

So, just so-so this time.

Enjoyed your review of Hitting Trees With Sticks and have wishlisted it. I've already got her Promised Lands on the list too - is that one of hers that you've read? I've never heard of her outside of LT.

Vive La LibraryThing!

Your review of I still Believe Anita Hill had me checking on Wiki to see who Anita Hill is as the controversy had no registered with me living in England at the time. The most interesting part of the book for me would be "What have we learned in the last twenty years and what comes next."

Great review of the Anita Hill book -- I remember being at a conference and watching some of the hearings on a hotel TV. We were all horrified at the attacks being made on her on our "honorable" congressmen.

Boy, I remember when the Anita Hill hearing was going on because all of a sudden we were getting memos and having meetings about sexual harrassment at work. There was also a debate on how to properly pronounce "harrassment."

Great review.

The Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill.

Blew through another Susan Hill mystery yesterday (#5 in the series). More angst for the Serrailler family, of course, but not Simon this time. Didn't care for her pulling a killer out of her literary a%$, so to speak, at the very end. Reading her crime novels allows me to understand why I read crime novels in the first place. I like her character stories in these books for the most part, and I'm a Susan Hill fan generally, but I must remind myself before I begin that I'm not going to get my police procedural jollies from it.

>33 Polaris-: Polaris, I'm pretty sure I read that, but I noticed recently that at some point in the past I put that book in the bookshelf next to my bed, so I suspect I thought I should reread it because I can't remember it that well.

>34 baswood: Barry, I briefly thought about a brief Anita Hill primer, but that's what the internet is for :-) The one perspective the book didn't offer was that of the white male patriarchy, but then it was pretty clear from the hearings. I would be interested to hear what Joe Biden, the current Vice President, thinks now about his behavior back then (we like to think that people grow and change...).

>35 janeajones:, 36 We all remember, don't we? I remember that it gave us an opportunity to openly talk about sexual harassment. And the "year of the woman" followed...

We are all Equally Far from Love by Adania Shibli (2012, T 2012, Palestine)

I've decided to abandon this book with roughly a third of the pages yet to go. Life is too short. I really wanted to like this book, but I often was confused about the story and who was speaking, and kept checking the synopsis on the back of the book to see if that would help me. It didn't. The book started out well enough, but...well...let's just say I was disappointed.

Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila (2002, Nigeria)

Written as a collection of linked short stories within the novel form, Waiting for an Angel is a completely engrossing story of Nigeria in its tumultuous 1990s—danger, chaos, violence, despair...and yet, it is ultimately an amazingly uplifting book. It is certainly one of my best reads this year.

The story's link is Lomba, a promising young journalist writing for a local Lagos newspaper. In the first story we find hm in prison as a political prisoner when the warden taps Lomba to help him write love poetry to a woman he is interested in. And then, like in a dot-to-dot exercise, the author introduces us to other characters— students, neighbors, and local characters—all with some connection to Lomba, all living lives as normal as they can in the chaos and uncertainly of the rapidly changing political atmosphere of the time. The author eventually brings the story back to Lomba, of course. The format of the novel is inextricably linked to the story, both in connecting Lomba to others (making him kind of an everyman) and for illustrating the fragmentation of their world (not sure that latter bit conveys accurately what I want to say).

Though a very different story and cast of characters, this book reminds me a bit of Tahar Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light in that it illustrates the resilience of the human spirit in the bleakest of times—a powerful message of hope.

I'd sure like to know what you learned about what was going on at the time of Anita Hill that you didn't know then. It sure all made me sick at the time. Would what you now know make me feel better or worse?

39 Kudos for crummy book abandonment!

Life is too short. And it sounds like you had a good one waiting in the wings.

>41 mkboylan: mk, I don't think it would make you feel better or worse, but certainly thoughtful. As I noted, I was pretty distracted at the time, and got most of my information via the media, and what I saw and heard made me very angry. Both Hill's memoir and this book has taken a bit of the personal out of that 1991 experience and given it historical perspective. No icky secrets or anything.

>42 labfs39: Well, actually, I read Waiting for an Angel before I threw in the towel on the Shibli (maybe that's why). I try to give translations more benefit of the doubt because I think we tend to judge everything against the English forms, and I think there is a lot of different cultural legacies and language variations that can come into play in someone's written work (not to mention the personal factors—like mood and attention span—that I bring to the reading of it). I really liked her previous work Touch, but this one didn't do it for me.

Thanks for the review of the Helon Habila; I am definitely planning on reading more by him.

43 - ah thanks for the clarification.

I still believe Anita Hill certainly sounds interesting. And I'm putting Waiting for an angel on my list as well, since I enjoyed his novel Oil on water.

>46 markon: I think it's his best novel of the three I've read. Or, perhaps I should say that's it's my favorite of his three (Measuring Time being the one we haven't mentioned)

Well, I can't imagine I will be finishing any more books by the end of the year, so I'm moving on to 2014.

Please come visit me on "Avaland's 2014 Literary Wonderland" http://www.librarything.com/topic/162134

...where I have listed, not only my 2013 favorites, but my favorite fiction reads from the five years I've been on Club Read (I could go back further, but that would just make me crazy). Although tedious to compile, it was an otherwise delightful opportunity to revel in some really great reading.