wandering_star's 2015 reading, part 2

66. Natural Histories by Guadalupe Nettel

This is the first book I read for the Oct-Dec Reading Globally theme read on women who didn't write in English.

Nettel is a contemporary Mexican writer, and this book consists of five short stories in which the protagonist's life becomes entangled in strange ways with an animal (or in one case, a fungus) in such a way that the animal's experience throws a sidelight on their own.

Similarly, the stories have little echoes of each other which make you reconsider what you have read.

So, for example, the first story is about a marriage breaking up, emblemized by the behaviour of the couple's two Siamese fighting fish. The last story features a man who has had an affair, which he regrets - he deliberately buys one snake from a pair which he studies as a sort of meditation on loneliness. The book both starts and ends with images of people staring into the tank of a captive animal.

Unusual stories, which I enjoyed reading and thinking about.

I’ve been a biology professor at the Universidad de Valle de Mexico for over ten years. I specialise in insects. Some people in my field of research have pointed out to me that when I’m in the laboratory or lecture hall I almost always keep to the corners of a room. It’s like when I’m walking along a street; I feel safer if I’m near a wall.

67. The Tea Lords by Hella S Haasse

For the same theme. Hella S Haasse is a Dutch novelist but was born and lived a few years in what is now Indonesia. In this book she tells the story of a Dutch clan of colonial planters, and in particular one son of the clan, the reserved and priggish Rudolf. Rudolf is inspired by family history and wants to make his mark as a successful colonialist, returning to the Netherlands with a large family, wealth and influence. But things are not so simple, especially for a socially awkward young man who is not able to create good relationships with important people.

The story, which was inspired by a real set of papers from a family similar to the one in the novel, is dense and detailed and covers the time from 1869 to 1907 (with a coda in 1918). The thing that I found most interesting was the descriptions of Dutch colonial life at this period - it's a society which is staid and censorious but where some individuals still manage to step outside these constraints and adapt the customs of their new home. However, the downside is that the book covers a tremendous amount of ground in frustratingly little detail - fascinating characters appear for one scene and are never seen again, and more seriously the main characters don't really step off the page. For example, after one of Rudolf's sisters dies in childbirth, his other sister temporarily adopts her children. We are told this in a paragraph:

Rudolf went to fetch his mother from Batavia, where she was visiting Cateau, who had taken Bertha's children under her wing. Carrying the baby in her arms and with the two toddlers playing at her feet, his sister displayed a new, cheerful energy, notwithstanding all the extra work involved. Rudolf had already guessed that Cateau longed to have children of her own, and that the extraordinary interest she showed in fashion and frivolities, so unlike the Cateau of old, was simply a means of masking the emptiness at the core of her marital life. And now, thanks to her new responsibilities, she seemed to have come into her own.

And that's it - in the next paragraph Rudolf returns to the plantation, and we find out no more about Cateau's emotions or reactions.

Overall I found this a slightly frustrating read, as I never felt that I had a handle on what the book was really about.

68. Clash of Civilisations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous

I pulled this novella off my bookshelves to accompany me on a weekend trip in Rome. It appears to be a murder mystery, narrated by various people living in or near one apartment building in Rome - but the real mystery is about the person the police are seeking for the murder, a man known as Amedeo. What is his background? The police are describing him as an immigrant, but many of the people who know him refuse to believe this.

This book is about immigration - we meet immigrants from Iran, Bangladesh and Peru, a Dutch student, the building's Neapolitan concierge and a Milanese professor who sees Rome as part of Italy's backward south, as well as Amedeo himself. It's about misunderstandings - the concierge thinks that the Iranian is Albanian, the Peruvian a Filipina, and the Bangladeshi from Pakistan (and she is suspicious of him because he denies being from Pakistan). The Iranian and the Neapolitan each mistakenly believe that the other is swearing at them. And it's also about the other forms of tribalism - one of the reasons that no-one knows Amedeo's real background is that they are more concerned to reassure themselves that he is not one of the tribes they dislike (a Roma fan, for example, or an environmentalist).

As we hear the different stories gradually the truth about Amedeo comes to light. It seems that the reason that he has been all things to all men is that unlike almost everyone else, he takes the time to see people as people, rather than as symbols.

These things don't happen in the north. I'm from Milan and I'm not used to this chaos. In Milan keeping an appointment is sacred - no-one would dare say to you, "Let's meet between five and six", which in Rome happens frequently.

>3 wandering_star: Putting that on my wish list! Interesting.

>3 wandering_star: In Milan keeping an appointment is sacred - no-one would dare say to you, "Let's meet between five and six"

That is a different Milan from the one my sister lives in then... :) Interesting notes - I need to find that novella :)

" Hella S Haasse is a Dutch novelist but was born and lived a few years in what is now Indonesia."

"Born and lived a few years" sounds a bit casual. Haasse was born there, and lived there during three periods of her early life, from 1918-1920, from 1921-1924, and from 1928-1938, this last last decade spent as a high school student. Thus, she lived there effectively the first 20 years of her life.

However, this must be understood in the context of the Dutch colonial and post-colonial period, during which Dutch people who were born in the colony developed and maintained a very strong, and deep cultural identity. Back in the motherland, the cultural identity remained strong and was sustained by long family traditions, and 300-year long historical ties between the Netherlands and Indonesia. After decolonalization, a large, contingent of Eurasian people from the Dutch Indies fostered a nostalgic "tempo-doeloe" (i.e. "old times") sentiment.

Among these people are many artists and writers, Hella S. Haasse perhaps the most popular contemporary, among many others of her generation.

I have read many of Haasse's book, but Heren van de thee (Engl. The Tea Lords ) is still on my TBR pile. Earlier this year, in September, I read excerpts from five volumes of Haasse's autobiographical writings, compiled in the 400+ page volume Het dieptelood van de herinnering (not yet reviewed).

I can understand your frustration of not quite grasping all the sensitivities of the Dutch colonial experience.

>6 edwinbcn: Hi Edwin I was hoping to get your input on this book! Thanks for the bio, I was going by what it said on my copy of the book. I didn't mean that I didn't understand the details about the Dutch colonial experience - I was very interested by how different it seemed to be from the British colonial experience in SE Asia, as it's portrayed in the books I have read. What I couldn't get a handle on was the focus and purpose of the book - it was like a densely detailed photograph in which everything is in focus so nothing stands out.

>5 AnnieMod: hah! Perhaps that's a comment on how people always idealise the place they left behind...

Enjoyed these reviews!

Edwin - any recommendations on what Haasse to read to get a sense of the Dutch in Indonesia? Or another author to read? (Not sure I want to read The Tea Lords after Wandering_Star's review. )

>8 dchaikin: To get one sense there is always the great classic, Max Havelaar.

The great Dutch colonial authors of the generation before Haasse were Louis Couperus, whose work The Hidden Force (no, not Star Wars) is the definitive work about the Dutch colonial experience (viz. my review of Angst en schoonheid. Louis Couperus, de mystiek der zichtbare dingen.

The other is Multatuli, whose novel Max Havelaar is a contemporary critique of the Dutch colonial system.

Of course, many of Haasse's other works are about Indonesia, particularly well-known is the short novella Oeroeg.

69. Outline by Rachel Cusk

This unusual novel consists largely of a series of conversations the narrator has while on a short trip to Greece - with the man sitting next to her on the plane, with old friends, with the students attending her writing course. We don't learn a lot about the narrator but the book is not about her - it is about the narratives that human beings tell ourselves in order to explain our decisions and make sense of our lives. I enjoyed the way that Cusk uses people's own narratives to illustrate their posturing and self-justification, but otherwise the book didn't really click for me - partly because as these people talk about love, and family, and major life decisions, they all do it in reported speech which takes on a rather high philosophical tone. This flattens the difference between the voices and dulls the impact of the book for me.

In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love.

>11 wandering_star: I think this is already on my wishlist, but you've reminded me to hunt down a copy. Sounds like a good book club choice.

70. The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura

I've rarely been so immediately gripped by the start of a book. The narrator is a compulsive pickpocket, who has started to find, from time to time, that he has lifted someone's wallet without even really noticing - when he finds the wallet in his pocket he can't remember how it got there. There is a real immediacy and vividness to the story, particularly the tension and excitement as the narrator prepares for a dip. The stakes rise too when the narrator befriends a young shoplifter and tries to help him improve his life. However, halfway through the focus of the story changes with the introduction of a puppet-master villain making arbitrary demands just because he can. I was very disappointed by this - it seems to me it's harder to write a really good gripping thriller than an unrealistic existential/philosophical exercise, so if you can do the first you shouldn't dissipate that energy into the second!

That's what he said, but for me it was his skill that was enchanting. Nipping a wallet with three fingers, passing it back to me, and by the time I took out the money and returned it he'd already have lifted the next one. Then he would lean his arm against the first wallet's owner and without even looking he would put it back in the guy's pocket again. In my eyes his movements were one of life's beauties.

71. Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton

New Hark! A Vagrant comic book! If anything I liked this more than the first one. As usual, an excellent combination of surrealist approaches to pop culture, some righteous feminist anger and plenty of bits of history I hadn't heard of before.

Also,

72. Sherlock Holmes: The Thinking Engine by James Lovegrove

Since a couple of weeks ago I have a new favourite bookshop, Heywood Hill in Mayfair. It's a small bookshop with a very well-curated selection of books - my first brief browse had me scribbling down about a dozen books which I'd not heard of before which looked intriguing. This was one of them - and it seemed such an unlikely book in such company that I wanted to know more.

Well, it turned out I'd made the wrong assumption from the title and cover that this would be a steampunk/fantasy Holmes - it's more or less a straight Holmesian story, and it's well done. Personally though I was disappointed that it wasn't more fantastical, and also the solution to the crime which I thought I'd figured out would actually have made a better story than the actual solution in the book! But I would recommend this writer to someone looking for Holmes-y stories.

“You enjoy it, don’t you?” he said. “Being able to pick a man apart at a glance. It gives you a thrill. Well, you may be a genius, sir, but I am a reporter, and for one of the capital’s most widely circulated weeklies, what’s more. My words are read by tens of thousands. You perceive the truth, Mr Holmes, but I make it. Never forget that.” He poked a finger at Holmes’s chest. “What I write is what is. I too can break people.”

After that description of the bookstore, I was hoping for you that you had a good find. To bad the book disappointed.

Interesting about Outline and The Thief.

I'm sorry you were disappointed by Outline. I feel disappointed too, as it's in my wishlist but from your description I'm starting to doubt whether I would like it.

>16 wandering_star: Have you signed up for Heywood Hill's newsletters? They do a recommended reading list quarterly. They've just issued the latest. I first tracked the store down because I kept reading about it in various biographies. Nancy Mitford worked there for a while, and they had a good relationship with Debbo (the Duchess of Devonshire). If you order from them, they package books very nicely for posting. The service always feels very personal. I've chatted over with them various Christmas present quandaries. I must confess that I would not have put them high on my expectation of stocking steam punk/fantasy.

>15 wandering_star: Love it!

>11 wandering_star: Have you read and enjoyed other Rachel Cusks? I read her first novel, which was very well received, but I it felt very much 'what I did on my holidays' and I haven't tried her since. Perhaps I should, though not, it seems, with Outline.

>19 Oandthegang: I do get the newsletters and I'm toying with the idea of signing up to one of their book subscriptions. Most book subscription services seem to be based in the US and have very expensive postage. This also seems like it would be a bit more personalised, ie not every subscriber gets exactly the same set of books. Your recommendation has made this slightly more likely!

On Rachel Cusk, I have read The Bradshaw Variations (which I thought was brilliant) and Arlington Park (which I was lukewarm about). Both these were close looks at a small community of Brits and the minute dynamics of the social relations between them - very different from Outline.

> I also am sorely tempted by their subscriptions and keep telling myself that if I were to add up my book buying over a year it is not really that expensive, it just looks it as an upfront layout. The difficulty would be stopping buying other books. I had a very nice present of a book a month from Persephone Books with a surprise book being delivered by post, and that stopped me from buying anything myself from Persephone, but even the knowledge that there would be one guaranteed new book a month and the thought of the huge quantity of to be reads did not stop me from buying more.

I like to imagine having Heywood Hill create a library for me, such a luxurious idea, but as my house is too small for the books I have, and I have no room for a dedicated library, it will never come to pass.

Do let us know if you do sign up.

>21 Oandthegang: I came very close to signing up but have decided that for the moment I need to reduce my hoard of books, not add to it. Maybe next year...

73. The Simpsons Futurama Crossover Crisis

As the title suggests, a cartoon in which the characters from Futurama turn up in the world of The Simpsons and vice versa. I love both shows so I enjoyed this - and was struck by a sequence which brought out the character types in common between the two, Lisa and Leela hanging out while at the same time...

74. Our Lady Of The Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga

Our Lady of the Nile is a school high in the mountains for the daughters of the Rwandan elite. In a series of episodes we get to know the girls of one class: there are the daughters of politicians, army officers, bankers and businessmen, and (as in each class of 20 girls) there are two Tutsis, because that's the quota.

There's also one girl who's half Hutu and half Tutsi, and because of this she sticks extra close to the 'mean girl' of the class, the politician's daughter who shares her father's rabble-rousing tendencies. At first this seems like little more than ordinary schoolgirl bullying, albeit with an edge. But nothing is ordinary in the relationships in Rwanda and so things take a shocking turn.

This was a very interesting novel - set well before the genocide in Rwanda but both foreshadowing it and explaining some of the historical context. It's well-translated and a smooth read. The choice to make the young women's attitudes so closely follow the role of their parents meant that they seemed symbolic types, rather than complex personalities, so this was a bit more a fable than a story of real people. But maybe that also highlighted the way that attitudes and conflicts are passed down from generation to generation.

So suitcases became well-stocked pantries filled by doting mothers: beans and cassava paste, with a special sauce, in little enameled containers decorated with large flowers and wrapped in a piece of cloth; bananas slowly baked overnight; ibisheke, sugarcane you chew and chew until the pure fibrous marrow fills your mouth with its sweet juice; red gahungezi sweet potatoes; corncobs; peanuts; and even, for the city girls, doughnuts of every color under the sun - a secret Swahili recipe - avocados you can only buy at Kigali markets, and extra-salty, red-roasted peanuts.

>24 wandering_star: hmm. Noting this book.

75. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua

This webcomic apparently came about because the author, Sydney Padua, drew a one-off comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage for Ada Lovelace Day. It was very popular, so much so that fans kept asking her for more. But what more stories could be told given that Babbage's computer was never actually built, and Lovelace died young? There can only be one solution: enter an alternative universe in which Lovelace and Babbage built the Analytical Engine and used it to Fight Crime and Have Adventures!

The result is wonderful. Padua has clearly gone down a real rabbithole of research into her characters - although the scenarios are invented, much of the dialogue comes from letters, journals and writing by or about our two protagonists. Babbage was clearly a larger-than-life personality and one which Padua has great fun with - he had a titanic ego to go along with his mathematical brilliance, but she treats him affectionately. Less is known about Lovelace but there is ample evidence from their letters to each other of their close friendship and the way that they worked together. History and fantasy are woven together very cleverly - one story, for example, builds on the fact of a meeting between Babbage and the young Lewis Carroll (Cambridge and Oxford mathematicians respectively) to imagine a story in which the quixotic Babbage appears as Carroll's White Knight.

One of the other LT reviews says it's hard to imagine anyone not being charmed by this book. I agree.

Love the cartoon!

>26 wandering_star: I bought this a few months ago on a whim without having heard of it before, but still haven't got round to reading it. Sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun. I think you've just brought it forward to this months reading.

>28 valkyrdeath: ooh yes you must!

Three good books, but read so long ago that I will only be able to post short reviews. These don't do them justice - they are all recommended.

76. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

Part memoir, part exposé and part plea for modern Western humans to become re-acquainted with death (and mourning) rather than hiding them away under a blanket of sanitised terms and impersonality. Doughty saw a disturbing and deadly accident when she was a young girl, which affected her for a long time and made the adult Doughty want to work in the field to change our perceptions of death. I really enjoyed reading this, despite the gloomy subject and occasionally gruesome content (although it was nothing like as bad as Stiff, which I couldn't finish).

A corpse doesn't need you to remember it. In fact, it doesn't need anything any more - it's more than happy to lie there and rot away. It is you who needs the corpse. Looking at the body you understand the person is gone, no longer an active player in the game of life. Looking at the body you see yourself, and you know that you, too, will die. The visual is a call to self-awareness. It is the beginning of wisdom.

77. A Monstrous Regiment of Women by Laurie R King

Second in the series of detective novels featuring an older Sherlock Holmes and his young protégé Mary Russell. I enjoyed the first, which covers the meeting between the two and a number of inventions as Mary grows up, and develops her detective skills working with Holmes. This one was even better and I will certainly keep reading this series. The plot here is about a charismatic young woman, a social worker and preacher who runs an organisation which helps poor women and gives wealthy ones a useful outlet for their energies. There have been a number of mysterious deaths among the latter who have ended up leaving large sums of money to the organisation, and Mary must get close to Margery to find out what has been going on.

One thing I particularly enjoyed (maybe not the right word) was that most of the chapter epigraphs were remarkably misogynistic quotations, such as this from Tennyson: "Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine, are as moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine", or this from John Chrysostom: "This is an aspect of the divine providence and wisdom, that the one who can conduct great affairs is inadequate or inept in small things, so that the function of woman becomes necessary. For if he had made men able to fulfill both functions, the feminine sex would have been contemptible. And if he had entrusted the important questions to women, he would have filled women with mad pride."

>30 wandering_star: . Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory sounds really interesting. Lots of things about how our culture deals with death bother me. Maybe I need this one.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes sounds quite interesting. It bugs me a lot how people try to sanitize anything supposedly "distasteful" and keep it all hidden away, it's nuts and there's no reason for it!

>30 wandering_star: I read Smoke Gets In Your Eyes as an ALA (Vegas) advance reader copy. Loved the book. The author has a blog and website The Order of the Good Death. There are various people that are somehow related to death and/or dying on the site, including Jae Rhim Lee that did a TED Talk in her mushroom death suit.

>31 Nickelini:, >32 .Monkey.: I would definitely recommend this, especially if you already have a bit of interest in the subject.

78. The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

This novel is set in Canada in the seventeenth century, during the early stages of encounters between the native Canadians and Europeans. There are three narrators - Bird, a warrior of the Wendat tribe, Snow Falls, a young Haudenosaunee woman, and a French Jesuit priest called Christophe (known by the Wendat as 'the Crow' for his black robes). As the novel opens, Bird has captured Snow Falls and Christophe during an attack on a group of Haudenosaunee, a revenge attack for the killing of his own wife and family. "Orenda" means a numinous power, and all three of our narrators have that power in their own way - Bird is influential among the Wendat for his fighting prowess and statesmanlike wisdom, Snow Falls has the potential to become a healer and seer, and Christophe (while being the least rounded character) also has power from his own religious faith and his belief in his duty to bring the gospel to what he sees as dark, benighted people.

I found this a fascinating read, knowing very little about the background. What struck me was the way that the host communities debated the wisdom of allowing the Jesuits to come and live among them - with some Wendat mercantilists arguing that they would bring trade benefits, and others dismissing their crazy religions as something which could not possibly harm the deep-seated culture of the tribe. I also liked the way that the book portrayed that individual relationships are not necessary antagonistic even if the relations between different communities and cultures are: Bird adopts Snow Falls as his daughter and eventually, she comes to see him as her family too, and even Christophe in the end respects the culture that perhaps he has started to understand. But of course the Europeans see identity as much more black-and-white, much more delineated, than this - and this is foreshadowed as one of the factors which will enable them to expand their influence, along with the terrible power of smallpox, alcohol and guns.

Light glints off the Crow's necklace, and as he talks to himself I wonder what he's saying, if he's mad or really in conversation with someone I can't see. In this tall, gaunt creature I can see a power I don't want to acknowledge. He's absolutely unafraid of his surroundings, and yes, this is stupidity, but it also suggests what Gosling would say is his understanding that what will become of him will become of him, regardless of the little he can do to try and prevent it. He strides, I see, as if his path is already laid out for him.

>30 wandering_star: I've had Smoke Gets in Your Eyes on my watch list for while hoping my library gets it in. As someone who gets totally over-anxious about funerals and death in general, do you think this would be a good read to try and rationalise those fears?

>34 wandering_star: I've been wondering about this book after reading two others of his, but hadn't gotten around to it. Your review makes me think I should. It sounds very considered. Have you read Brian Moore's Black Robe? It's the same time and place, but the other side of the equation, that of the Jesuits.

>34 wandering_star: Your review of The Orenda was very different from mine, mainly in that you didn't comment on the way the author wrote the incredible ceaseless violence. Despite not liking the Orenda, I do think it is a quality book, I learned something about a period of history I don't think many of us know much abou, and it has certainly stuck with me since I read it.

>35 AlisonY: That's a good question.

Doughty quotes a psychology paper on the reasons that people fear death: my death would cause grief to my relatives and friends; all my plans and projects would come to an end; the process of dying might be painful; I could no longer have any experiences; I would no longer be able to care for my dependents; I am afraid of what might happen to me if there is a life after death; I am afraid of what might happen to my body after death.

For anyone particularly concerned about the last of these, I wouldn't say this book would help - there are a few gruesome bits. But if it's about leaving loved ones behind, then maybe. I was very struck by a description of mourning ceremonies in Java where the families wash the corpses. I had always assumed that cultures with rituals like that did not fear or dislike handling corpses, but apparently that is not so: the ritual disturbs and scares the family members, but it is part of a process of facing that discomfort and being able to move on.

>36 SassyLassy:, would you recommend his other books? Which were they? I haven't read Black Robe but I think there's a copy in my parents' house.

> 37 Yes, the graphic and horrible violence was definitely a major feature of the book and I should probably have said something about that. There are definitely a couple of things which come to mind which I wish I hadn't reminded myself of. I was so interested by the story that I was able to take the violence as part of it, though.

>38 wandering_star: The two that I read were Three Day Road, about two Cree from the Moose Factory area who sign up for WWI, its effects and aftermath, and the role of their aunt Niska back home. I would definitely recommend this book for an view of the war that we don't usually see in writing.

The other one was Through Black Spruce. This follows up on some of the ideas of the loss of cultural identity from the first book in a contemporary context, and has some of the characters involved in the ill effects of that loss. I didn't find this book as successful as the first, although I found the parts in the north well done. Most readers preferred the first book.

Thanks, I will look out for the first one.

Three more quick reviews:

79. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie, the last in the Imperial Radch trilogy, a complex and fascinating space opera about identity and justice and how to do what is right even in the face of a huge implacable empire. I liked this, if possible, even more than the other two in the series, as it brings the story to a perfect conclusion in a way which makes sense and resonates with the overall themes of the trilogy (without wanting to give away spoilers, it makes the reader realise how it's possible that so many of the characters just don't see the inequality their society is based on). It was also more about the relationships than before, and I think funnier - I loved the character of the translator, who has a human body but was raised in an alien society, and is both funny and very unsettling. I know this is the end of the trilogy but I would love to read more stories set in this universe and I do hope that Leckie continues. In the meantime I am very tempted to listen to the whole series again from the beginning.

Entertainments nearly always end with triumph or disaster—happiness achieved, or total, tragic defeat precluding any hope of it. But there is always more after the ending—always the next morning and the next, always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one true ending that none of us can escape. But even that ending is only a small one, large as it looms for us. There is still the next morning for everyone else. For the vast majority of the rest of the universe, that ending might as well not ever have happened. Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.

80. The Field of Blood by Denise Mina

I think it was rebeccanyc's enthusiasm for Denise Mina's Garnethill novels that led me to buy a three-pack from The Book People. It turned out to come with the second and third in the Garnethill series and this, the first book in a different series featuring journalist Paddy Meehan (a woman, who wanted to become a journalist because of a famous miscarriage of justice featuring a man with the same name as her, which broke in the news when she was a small child).

The Field of Blood is about a case similar to the 1993 James Bulger murder in which a small child was killed by two older children. But the difference here is that to Paddy Meehan, much of the story doesn't stack up. There is a gap of eight hours during which no-one saw any of the three children - and why did the older boys take the young child past areas they knew well to leave the body where it was found?

I actually found this quite hard going to start with, until I realised that the book was not about the murder investigation as much as it was about the setting - this was Glasgow at the end of the 1970s and Meehan, as you can tell from her name, is a Catholic. Catholic women didn't go out to work, and Meehan's mother is frantic that by doing so her daughter will prove that she is loose. Women didn't become journalists, and even Meehan's position as 'copyboy' is precarious. One of the smaller running themes is that the local papers consistently point out that the murderers are from Catholic families. And so on. It was a real pleasure to see Meehan growing in self-belief and able to take on the role that she wants to.

81. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

A re-read. I love this play, which is set in a country house in England in two time periods, the early nineteenth century and the late twentieth. In the modern time period, three academics are researching the people of the earlier one, and the main storyline is about how they misinterpret the evidence which remains to them. But Stoppard plays are always about ideas, and here those are art vs science, classical vs romantic, emotion vs reason - delivered with wit and warmth.

It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

>43 wandering_star: Not a fan of reading plays, but this does sound exactly like the kind of thing I'd like.

>44 Nickelini: It is an excellent play and Stoppard reads very well; his works tend to be...wordy. Meaning that they are often focused on the words -- emphasizing dialogues/monologues rather then the unspoken interactions between characters.

I saw this play in New York a couple of years ago. It was fun to watch. I'm sure it must be quite readable.

82. The Serial Garden: the complete Armitage family stories by Joan Aiken

When I was younger, Joan Aiken was one of my favourite authors. I especially loved her historical fantasy series Black Hearts in Battersea, but I borrowed every available book of hers from the local library several times. Many of those books were short stories and I used to look out for ones featuring the Armitage family - I really liked the way that they were set in a world which was very much like ours, but had magical/fantasy elements. A little while ago I found that all the Armitage family stories had been collected into a single volume, with a few unpublished stories too, so I had to get it as a nostalgia re-read.

The first thing I noticed was that it really wasn't that much like the world we live in any more - the stories were written in the 1950s so there are Latin classes, bouts of whooping cough, uncles who return from the colonies. I suppose when I was younger I read lots of things like E. Nesbit and that universe seemed no odder to me than life in a big city, for example. The second thing that I noticed was the true surreality of the stories - magical and strange events are piled on top of each other with dreamlike logic. For example, the story "Harriet's Hairloom" features a magical loom, fighting druid brothers, a six-inch tall tearaway who runs off to Cathay, a magic carpet and an endless tube of toothpaste. It's not all like this - some of the stories are rather beautiful and poignant, such as "The Land of Trees and Heroes" in which an enchanted orchard gives ordinary villagers the chance to encounter ancient heroes.

Unexpectedly, I enjoyed this collection more than just nostalgia would suggest, and I'm not surprised that the blurbs quote praise for Joan Aiken from such fantasy luminaries as Philip Pullman, Garth Nix and Kelly Link.

"Why is there a telephone in the orchard?" Harriet wanted to know. "Ah, there, Miss Harriet, dear. Always asking questions like your father before you. Why should it be there but in case your granny wanted to ring up the orchard, then?" "But there's nobody to answer - only a lot of apple trees." "And if you're going to speak to an apple tree, better ring than walk all that way on foot at her age," said Nursie, which only muddled Harriet more and didn't explain matters in the least.

83. The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman

This historical fiction was inspired by the fact that there were female boxers during Georgian times - sometimes fighting each other, sometimes fighting men or boys. The story is told through three different characters in turn. Ruth is the daughter of a Bristol brothel-keeper, and a proficient fighter with a temper and a strong sense of pride. Charlotte is a lady, whose family is much wealthier than Ruth's but who almost has less power than Ruth does - her drunken brother controls the family money, and the two of them hate each other. George is the youngest son of a large gentry family, supposed to make his own way in the world but preferring to waste away any income he has in gambling. The three are brought together by a Bristol merchant, Granville Dyer, who dreams of being a boxing promoter and finally being accepted into upper-class society.

I liked the ideas behind the story, and I especially liked the way that Ruth in particular talked - larded with period slang, and in a way which made her strong personality (and her love of boxing) very vivid. We began our dance. I threw a few fast pokes, though not much to hurt. When Tom and I played at fighting in the convent yard, to please the misses or the cullies, he'd move his head when I fibbed him, so as to make the force seem more than it was. This cull did nothing of the sort, but rather looked at me with a scornful eye. This riled me a little and I threw my fist in earnest. There, he felt that.

To be honest, I would have liked the book to stay with Ruth and her world. I can understand that the author was tempted by the fact that boxing, in Georgian England, was one of the very few pursuits which was popular and acceptable right across all social classes. But in trying to draw parallels between the situations of the three narrators (all of whom in one way or another are seeking freedom) the story ended up being a bit too melodramatic and drawn-out for me.

84. This Charming Man by Marian Keyes

This Charming Man interweaves the narratives of four women, Lola, Grace, Marnie and Alicia. When the news breaks that handsome, ambitious politician Paddy de Courcy ("half man, half press release") is engaged, Lola is horrified - they had been seeing each other for over a year. Heartbroken, she starts to mess up at work and is sent off on a leave of absence. Grace, a journalist, is trying to track her down to get her story - and Grace has her own history with Paddy as he was her sister Marnie's teenage sweetheart. Meanwhile, Alicia the fiancée gets used to being a figure in the public eye.

Marian Keyes writes novels which look like chicklit but are far from the sex-and-shopping stereotype. They are books which manage to be accessible and light while showing us real women coping with real problems - depression, addiction, divorce, and in this case domestic abuse. Keyes' books are valuable because these are things which the people going through them (and their families) can find it very hard to talk about, and so can feel isolated - and the extent of them can be covered up. In one scene, Grace pitches a story on domestic abuse to her (female) editor, giving statistics about the number of women affected, and the editor refers to these women as 'they'. Grace responds that it should be 'us' and the editor dismisses her - it's not me, it's not you, it's not any of the female journalists in this office. But of course it could be.

I really enjoyed this - especially the engaging Lola, who tells her story in a Bridget Jones-y voice and has an enthusiasm which is charming. Grace's investigation and the story of what really hapened to Marnie are also good reading, and the book kept me absorbed through a five-hour stopover in a small airport - invaluable.

Next morning, thought I'd dreamt it. Hoped I'd dreamt it. But forced self to check phone. No. Had definitely rung him.
Shame. Bad shame.
Which counted as progress. In immediate aftermath of news, shame conspicuous by absence.

85. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

This is a story of a young woman, Eilis, who leaves her town in Ireland to go and wok in Brooklyn. She becomes part of the Irish community there and the theme of the book is all about homesickness and belonging - from the Irish singers and food at community events to the way each community maintains its traditions and customs from home (nicely illustrated by the contrast between Italian-American and Irish-American behaviour on the beach - Eilis says that it's rude to look at other people on the beach and her Italian colleague responds that it would be rude not to look).

All this is good. But Eilis is the most irritatingly passive character I've ever come across. She doesn't make a single decision without being prodeed in the whole book - with the possible exception of deciding to go home and visit her mother. Work, schooling, romance - all these are essentially decided for her by other people. She can't even decide whether to associate with the prim girls or the saucy ones who share her boarding house.

This meant that I found everything that happened after that decision to visit her mother intensely irritating, and closed the book grinding my teeth with annoyance rather than appreciating the writing or the story.

86. A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor

After Brooklyn I was so irritated I had to turn to A Trail Through Time as I knew that I would enjoy it. This is the fourth in the St Mary's series about time travelling historians, which are reliably fun even though formulaic - British humour, inarticulate romance (perhaps equally British) and lots and lots of peril and chase sequences in a variety of historical locations, which are really the highlight of the books.

I’m an historian. Well, I used to be. I’m trained to make decisions. It’s easy. In a crisis – deal with the now. Sort out the future later.

The only problem is that, as with TV series, if the 'big bad' has to be scarier each season/book, everything becomes increasingly outlandish. I hope that Taylor brings things back down a bit in the next book - after all, once you've blown up St Mary's with a flour bomb, how much further is there you can go?

87. Subtly Worded and other stories by Teffi

Teffi (real name Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya) was born into a wealthy St Petersberg family in the late 19th century, and lived through many upheavals, ending up as an emigrée in Paris.

She was feted for her short stories, but most of the ones in this collection are not really to my taste - a lot of them are squibs with the same kind of ironic twist, which is very easy to predict - in "The Hat" for example, a woman is delighted by her new hat. Waiting for her young man to call, she stands in front of the mirror comparing how much better she looks in it than in her old hat. He rings the bell, she runs down to meet him, and spends the whole day being witty and seductive, charming him completely, because she knows she looks good in the new hat. Then she gets home and sees - as I'm sure you've already guessed - that it was in fact the old hat she'd been wearing when the bell rang.

But I am still pleased I read this collection because of a few stories which convey something of the life of Teffi and her contemporaries - in "Petrograd Monologue" a starving woman attempts to talk high-mindedly about art but keeps being distracted by thoughts of food. "Que Faire" is a very funny satire about the intriguing between Russian emigrés:

We—les russes, as they call us—live the strangest of lives here, nothing like other people’s. We stick together, for example, not like planets, by mutual attraction, but by a force quite contrary to the laws of physics—mutual repulsion. Every lesrusse hates all the others—hates them just as fervently as the others hate him. This general antipathy has given rise to several neologisms. Hence, for example, a new grammatical particle, “that-crook”, placed before the name of every lesrusse anyone mentions: “that-crook Akimenko”, “that-crook Petrov”, “that-crook Savelyev”. This particle lost its original meaning long ago and now equates to something between the French le, indicating the gender of the person named, and the Spanish honorific don: “don Diego”, “don José”. You’ll hear conversations like this: “Some of us got together at that-crook Velsky’s yesterday for a game of bridge. There was that-crook Ivanov, that-crook Gusin, that-crook Popov. Nice crowd."

"Subtly Worded" is about how those still in the Soviet Union need to censor their letters until they make almost no sense: We went round to your apartment. There’s a lot of air there now…

There's also an extraordinary piece in which Teffi writes about her (real) encounters with Rasputin and the effect he had on Russian society.

“Have you ever met him?” I asked. “Who? Him? You mean—Rasputin?” And suddenly she was all fidgety and flustered. She was gasping. Red blotches appeared on her thin, pale cheeks. “Rasputin? Yes… a very little… a few times. He feels he absolutely has to get to know me. They say it’s very interesting, very interesting indeed. Do you know, when he stares at me, my heart begins to pound in the most alarming way… It’s astonishing. I’ve seen him three times, I think, at friends’. The last time he suddenly came right up close and said: ‘What is it, you little waif? You be sure to come and see me—yes, mind you do!’ I was completely at a loss. I said I didn’t know, that I couldn’t… And then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You shall come. Understand? Yes, you absolutely shall!’ And the way he said ‘shall’ so commandingly, with such authority, it was as if this had already been decided on high and Rasputin was in the know. Do you understand what I mean? It was as if, to him, my fate were an open book. He sees it, he knows it. I’m sure you understand I would never call on him, but the lady whose house I met him at said I really must, that plenty of women of our station call on him, and that there’s nothing in the least untoward about it. But still… I… I shan’t…” This “I shan’t” she almost squealed. She looked as if she were about to give a hysterical shriek and start weeping.

Hmm. I've been meaning to read that collection by Teffi but now . . .

Do you own a copy? If so it may be worth having a look through - skip the first section though!

Yes, I snapped it up when I saw it on the display table at my former favorite bookstore. (I still like it, just have one closer to my apartment now.) And thanks for the warning!

88. The Bees by Laline Paull

This is a remarkable work of imagination. The simplest way to describe it is to say that it is set in a beehive, and tells the story of Flora, a simple sanitation worker and therefore the lowest of the low in the bee hierarchy, and yet a bee with intelligence and ambition. But that doesn't quite convey the feeling of reading it. Instead, I would say that in the same way that some science fiction alternate universes are built around things which really happened somewhere in human history, this is a science fiction story inspired by bees - their complex societies with the many differentiated roles within the hive, the way that they communicate through scents and dancing, and their strange reproductive habits. Funny, gripping and eye-opening (I am sure that bees don't do everything which Paull imagines, but I definitely want to learn more about what they do do).

As she followed, the vibrations in the comb floor became more insistent, stronger and stronger, as if it were a living thing beneath her, energy running in all directions. With a buzzing sensation through all her six feet, a torrent of information rushed up into her body and her brain. Overwhelmed, Flora stopped in the middle of a large lobby. Under her feet spread a vast mosaic of hexagonal floor tiles, the patterns scrolling across the lobby and down the corridors. Endless streams of bees crisscrossed all around them, and the air was thick with scent broadcasting.

89. The Axeman's Jazz by Ray Celestin

A thriller, based on a real series of murders which took place in New Orleans between 1918 and 1919, which have never been solved. In fact the book starts with a real letter which was sent to (and published by) a New Orleans newspaper, purporting to be from the Axeman and ordering anyone who does not want to be killed on a certain night to play jazz!

New Orleans certainly seems to attract writers of crime fiction - I'm pretty sure I've read at least one other NO-set crime novel this year - but this has plenty to offer, with atmospheric descriptions of the city and a collection of interesting sleuths - an ex-cop in the pocket of the Mafia; the cop who brought him down and has been ostracised by his colleagues ever since; a young assistant at Pinkerton's who wants to become a real detective - but as a black woman, she thinks the only way she'll impress her boss enough for him to promote her is to solve this high-profile crime, which she hopes to do with the assistance of her from her childhood friend ‘Lil’ Louey (Louis Armstrong).

Their varied stories show us different sides of the city, and intermesh well, but unfortunately Celestin is over-ambitious in his resolution, trying to find a set of perpetrators who can bring the work of all these different detectives together, and so as the story went on it became increasingly confusing and implausible. Even so, it's an enjoyable read for people who like thrillers with an interesting setting.

90. After The Divorce by Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, one of 14 women ever to have done so - despite this, only four of her books appear to have been translated into English.

After The Divorce is set in a Sardinian village, and based around the fact that early in the twentieth century a law was passed which allowed women whose husbands were found guilty of crimes and sentenced to a significant period of imprisonment to divorce them. But popular culture has not caught up with the law, particularly in rural areas, and so a woman who exercises this right may be ostracised. Deledda brings this to life in the tale of Giovanna, whose husband Constantino has been sentenced to jail for murder. A wealthy neighbour, Brontu, has always wanted Giovanna and renews his suit. The encouragement and support of Giovanna's mother (who always wanted her daughter to choose him rather than pursuing a love match), and Giovanna's own wish not to be alone, eventually get him what he wants. But then, on his deathbed, another villager confesses to the murder which Constantino has been sentenced for, and so he returns to the village, despite knowing everything that has taken place.

This is more than anything else a portrait of the village society, and the narrow emotional space allowed to individuals - frustrated passions and dreams run as undercurrents to the daily events. Beautiful descriptions of the Sardinian scenery, too.

Nice reviews of The Bees and The Axeman's Jazz, Margaret. I haven't read the first book, and although I seem to have enjoyed the second one more than you did, I agree with your criticism of it.

Ray Celestin is supposed to be working on a sequel to The Axeman's Jazz, in which the two young 'detectives' travel together to Chicago, and supposedly solve a mystery or two there. Have you heard anything about it?

>59 kidzdoc: thanks - I actually did enjoy The Axeman's Jazz but gradually lost hold of the story as it went along. I haven't heard about a sequel but I would be interested in reading it!

91. The Magicians by Lev Grossman

I don't normally much like describing a book as {bestseller 1} crossed with {bestseller 2} but in this case, a cross between The Secret History and Harry Potter seems pretty apt. A close-knit group of friends, precocious, clever and arrogant teenagers, at a prep school in upstate New York which just happens to be one of the world's premier establishments for educating magicians. The only question is whether the demons which will need fighting will be mundane human ones or will come from worlds outside this one.

As it turns out of course, the answer is both, but before that comes along we have a lot of scene-setting - we see the relationships within the group developing, and we see their magical education. I loved the latter - the crazy multi-stage entrance exam (translating a passage from the Tempest into a language you have made up, then translating it back, "paying particular attention to any resulting distortions in grammar, word choice and meaning"), the transformations into animals, and the idea that studying magic is like learning a language - which resonated with me as I am in the early stages of learning a new language myself - although fortunately I don't have to learn to conjugate differently depending on my longitude and latitude or the current phase of the moon!

But once you have mastered the spells and become a proficient magician, once the school has nothing left to teach you, what are your options? This group head off to Manhattan and live a hedonistic lifestyle, but it's empty - "At Brakebills every square inch of the House, every brick, every bush, every tree, had been marinated in magic for centuries. Here, out in the world, raw unmodified physics reigned, and mundanity was epidemic. It was like a coral reef with the living vital meaning bleached out of it, leaving nothing but an empty coloured rock behind." They bicker and drink and begin to fall apart, and so when the possibility of a magical adventure arises they clutch at it. But will it be enough to take them out of themselves?

For me the magical fighting scenes were the weakest part of the book - they didn't seem to have the stakes that the mundane interpersonal stuff did, oddly. Perhaps because we didn't get enough information on the magical world for its fate to matter to the reader. I already own the second in the series, I hope that this will not have too much of the magical fighting.

>61 wandering_star: I just finished the series over the holiday break. I don't clearly remember how much fighting was in the first one, but it wasn't a huge part of the next two books. They're not earth-shattering or anything, but I found them fun reads. The last two books you start to get the other character's perspectives too which was nice.

>62 janemarieprice: Thanks, that's good to know.

92. The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant

Subtitled "The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter", this is a collection of essays by Linda Grant about clothes and fashion. As the child of immigrants, Grant was brought up to understand the importance of getting your clothes right - look like a native, not a foreigner, and dress for the way you want to be perceived, better off and more established than you really are. "Only the rich can afford cheap clothes".

Most of the essays in this book stand alone, but there are several, spread through the book, which tell the story of a woman who, after escaping Auschwitz, ends up running a boutique in Canada and introducing many top European designers to that market. She ascribed her success to understanding the importance of human vanity as part of the human spirit, and told Grant the story that in Auschwitz, self-conscious of her shaved head, she tore a strip off her dress to make a ribbon which she tied in a bow around her head, covering her ears.

I really wanted to like this book - I like Grant's novels very much, I like the way she uses fashion in them (see When I Lived In Modern Times, whose glamorous London heroine moves to Tel Aviv as Israel is being created, and reinvents herself there), and I agree that dismissing clothes and fashion as frivolous and not worthy of thought has misogynistic undercurrents (compare the acceptability of talking about sport in the workplace with talking about fashion). A couple of months ago I went to see Grant at the Victoria and Albert where she expanded on this idea, showed how writers like Proust, Henry James and George Eliot wrote about clothes, and told some of the stories from The Thoughtful Dresser.

But I struggled to get through the book. I think perhaps because our attitudes to how we look are so personal, and Grant has a very certain style which would be energising if I agreed with it, but was a bit alienating as I didn't. Perhaps too, because this is a collection of essays which I assume have appeared elsewhere, some of the themes get run over again and again. I think in the end the most interesting things were Grant's own reminiscences about what clothes had meant to her at different times in her life.

When I was a teenager, in the sixties, not to be interested in clothes was farcical, for to follow fashion was to know that you were alive in that decade of revolution and newness. Clothes were more than what you put on: they were the means by which you situated yourself in the present tense and, perhaps more important at the time, the way you could be guaranteed to annoy or even horrify your parents. For we understood that we were the generation that had been born young and would stay young for ever; growing old, as one's parents did, was a bizarre, mysterious lifestyle choice they had once fatally made - that it was their intention to have wrinkled skin and grey hair and spreading flesh, undiscussed illnesses and old-people's Crimplene skirts.

93. Gossip From The Forest by Sara Maitland

Subtitled "the tangled roots of our forests and fairytales", this is pretty much the polar opposite of the previous book - waxing lyrical about the British countryside instead of the joys of cities, and untangling the deep origins of fairy tales rather than the surface and immediate pleasures of fashion. It is structured around 12 months, starting in March and ending in February, and for each month Maitland tells the story of a visit she made to one of Britain's forests, adds in some history of how Britain's forested areas ended up looking and being managed the way they are, and moves from this into analysis of one particular angle of fairytales - before ending with a rewriting of a traditional fairytale. So, for example, in December she is in a forest and becomes aware that someone is hunting with a rifle elsewhere in the forest. She never meets him, but the almost-encounter leads her into a discussion of robbers in fairytales - and by extension giants, as both these are categories of people who can justifiably be robbed by the heroes of our stories.

This book was intermittently very interesting, and has inspired me to want to visit some new areas of the UK, but unfortunately the main thing that I learnt from it is that I am not as interested in forests or fairytales as I had thought... I think Maitland's arguments about the connection between the history of (Britons') relationships with forest and the tales in (German) folklore are pretty overstated, but this wouldn't have bothered me if I had been more interested in the subject matter.

Magical things just happen; they are everywhere, but unreliable, knotted seamlessly into the mundane world of poverty, work and the mysterious goings-on of the forest. In some stories it is hard to tell what is magic and what is not. There is luck, there is love, there is virtue, there is magic. There is the forest.

94. The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

On holiday in Istanbul, and completely failing with Goodwin's history of the Ottoman Empire, Lords of the Horizons, I turned to this historical detective story in which our detective is a eunuch in 19th-century Constantinople. The story turns on the Sultan's plans to modernise the Empire, in order to be able to compete with the rising European powers - but many people prefer the traditional ways, and yet others think reform is not going fast enough.

I enjoyed the portrait of Constantinople and its diverse population, and it was fun to read a book set in places which I had just been to (especially the Topkapi palace). I particularly enjoyed the description of the way that social changes were taking effect, for example a member of the New Army who wore a modern European-style uniform but still felt faintly uncomfortable sitting on a chair in the middle of a room. I don't feel particularly driven to seek out more in the series, but it was an enjoyable read at the right time.

...westerners, as a rule, had an intensely romantic and imaginative picture of the harem. For them it was a honeyed fleshpot, in which the most beautiful women in the world engaged spontaneously at the whim of a single man in salacious acts of love and passion, a narcotic bacchanal. As though the women had only breasts and thighs, and neither brains nor histories. Let them dream, Yashim thought. The place was a machine, but the women had their lives, their will and their ambition.

And that brings my 2015 reading to an end. It doesn't feel like it was a great reading year, but I can identify a few favourites:

Best reads of the year:

The Ancillary Mercy trilogy by Ann Leckie, all of which I read this year, all of which were excellent in different ways, and which ended very satisfyingly (although I still want to know more about the translators!)
Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh, the last in another trilogy, and with some thematic overlap with Ancillary Mercy - although this is real historic colonialism rather than the space-opera variety
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

The best short story was "Story of Your Life" from Ted Chiang's SF Stories of Your Life and Others - I read it in March and still find myself thinking about it from time to time.

The best graphic novel was Weapons of Mass Diplomacy

Top for enjoyment were
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage by Sydney Padua
The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson

I had less standout non-fiction this year, but the best ones were
How To Speak Money by John Lanchester
Ten Cities That Made an Empire by Tristram Hunt

>93 I started Gossip from the Forest (which is From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales in the US) over a year ago and couldn't get through it. I wanted to try again, but your review makes me question that. I bought the book after enjoying Maitland's A Book of Silence.

My 2016 thread is here.

>65 wandering_star: I think Maitland's arguments about the connection between the history of (Britons') relationships with forest and the tales in (German) folklore are pretty overstated, but this wouldn't have bothered me if I had been more interested in the subject matter.

I think you have a good point. It didn't bother me that much because I'm very interested in both forests and fairytales.

>68 rebeccanyc: (which is From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairy Tales in the US)

Interesting -- I had the UK title. Never know in Canada whether we are going to get the British version or the US version.

>67 wandering_star: I had less standout non-fiction this year, but the best ones were
How To Speak Money by John Lanchester

Putting that on my wish list. I really liked the books by Lanchester that I read earlier this year, and after recently seeing The Big Short (which was excellent), I feel like I should learn a little bit more about money and finance.

>68 rebeccanyc: that's why I bought it too (and I think it was a cheap offer on Amazon). I struggled to keep reading it, so I can sympathise with you.

>71 Nickelini: I found it very accessible and it definitely helped me feel that I understood all of that better. Have you seen the documentary Inside Job? It's a documentary about what caused the 2008 financial crisis. I recently started watching it, realised I'd seen it before but couldn't quite make myself switch over, so I ended up watching it through again.

>65 wandering_star: I feel that there ought to be a good book on these themes, though this clearly wasn't it. Despite what appears to be universal condemnation in the comments here I almost feel tempted to (try to) read it just to give myself a base to go out and find that better book. How annoying to have this one fail so badly.

>73 Oandthegang: - I liked it. In fact, I added it to my list of 2015 favourites.

>64 wandering_star: When I Lived in Modern Times was a great exploration of clothes. I followed that up with her novel The Clothes on their Backs, where once again they play an important role. I think seeing her at the V & A would have been wonderful, and better than reading The Thoughtful Dresser as you describe it, but I will have to be content with reading the book.

>65 wandering_star: >73 Oandthegang: I am still tempted by this book despite its unfavourable reception, just for the reasons others have been attracted to it. Fortunately for my TBR, I have not seen it as yet.

>67 wandering_star: Good to see The Long Ships on your list.

Just thought I'd mention Fashion And Age: Dress, the Body and Later Life by Julia Twigg. It's a sociological study "based on detailed research into the views of older women, journalists and fashion editors, and clothing designers and retailers." It looks at how older women deal with clothing and self image, the cultural expectations and the limited options offered by designers and retailers, and the place of older women in a consumption culture.