Favourite Reads 2018 Q2

Sailing into summer and here it is, two days into Q3, so two extra days to have thought about favourite reads in Q2.

What particularly struck you about your Q2 reading? Do you see yourself changing direction in this quarter?

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Image from Kaulbach House, Lunenburg NS

This quarter I read 12 books and enjoyed reading them but in terms of standouts, only one really stood out and that was:

Kenzaburo Oe : A Personal Matter

In terms of this next quarter my only real goal is to keep on reading. I'm not reading currently due to watching the World Cup but I'll be on vacation for two weeks starting next Wednesday and usually going to France means lots of reading so perhaps that will indeed be the spark to reignite the reading habit.

Happy third quarter everyone!

A bit less reading this last quarter than the previous one. My reading in June clogged up and it's only in the last week I've been able to finish things.

Hands down, the top fiction read for Q2 was:

Small Country: A Novel Gael Faye (2016, T 2018 from the French)

Followed by just some fun fiction:

Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel (2018, novel)

With regards to nonfiction, the top book read is unquestionably:

Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston (2018, nonfiction)

Also very good were these very small books:

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions by Rebecca Solnit (2017, essays)
Who Are You, Really?: The Surprising Puzzle of Personality by Brian R. Little (2018, nonfiction)

I had a really good reading quarter, heavy on the nonfiction. Favorites in that category include:

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr
What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City by Mona Hanna-Attisha
The Library Book by Susan Orlean

and memoir:

Mean by Myriam Gurba
Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Painter

Best fiction of the spring was definitely

Invitation to a Bonfire by Adrienne Celt

This quarter was definitely a washout in terms of reading. Most of what I read was just to keep a book in my hands, sort of like maintaining muscle memory. However, in June I went to my first meeting of a local book club and their selection finally got me back on the real reading track. The book that stood out was non fiction, and really got me engaged once more:

Age of Anger byPankaj Mishra

I did read one quirky fiction book, a South American classic, which I will have to think about some more:

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

So far, the third quarter looks promising.

I didn't read as many books as I would have liked, but there were several outstanding reads:

With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Dr Kathryn Mannix: A superb book by a British palliative care physician, who describes several notable patients she cared for at the end of their lives and the lessons she learned from them. These insights were beneficial to me as a hospital based physician, but more so as the son of elderly parents who are approaching the end of their lives.

The Impostor by Javier Cercas: The Spanish author's latest novel to be translated into English, which is a biographical novel about a notorious Catalan named Enric Marco, who gained fame when he claimed to be a survivor of a German concentration camp, but fell into disgrace once his ruse was uncovered. Cercas used original research and personal interviews to uncover Marco's life and motives, and he compares him to both a modern day Don Quixote, and a Spanish Everyman, whose life is built on lies and mistruths.

City of Ulysses by Teolinda Gersão: This novel by a celebrated Portuguese author is narrated by an internationally recognized artist from Lisbon, who has been asked by the city's major modern art museum to have his work displayed as a tribute to the Portuguese capital. He realizes that his proposed name and theme for the project is intricately linked to a fellow artist and former lover, and he describes their life together, while paying tribute to his beloved city. Gersão isn't well known in the English speaking world, but if this book is reflective of her work then she deserves far greater recognition than she has received.

The Portuguese: A Modern History by Barry Hatton: I read this insightful and well written book during and after my visit to Portugal last month, and found it to be extremely helpful in helping me understand this beautiful country and its wonderful people. It's an objective read by an expatriate who is married to a Portuguese woman and has lived in the country for decades, who provides a knowledgeable outsider's view of his homeland.

My favourite read for the second quarter was La pieza del fondo by Argentinian author Eugenia Almeida. I read it in its French translation titled La pièce du fond. I really hope it gets translated into English soon.

>5 SassyLassy: ...Most of what I read was just to keep a book in my hands, sort of like maintaining muscle memory.... Well said! I think we've all been there.

A bit belatedly, my top-rated reads for the quarter (everything I rated 4.5 or 5 stars):

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips

Huh. That seems like a surprisingly small list

I got into the Cozy Corgi mysteries on my Kindle. Just mind candy, not so scholarly as others have posted here. I also was reading for the Category Challenges, so I try to vary my reading to fit the categories. I read 32 books this quarter, and was surprised to see the variety of titles I ended up with, even though there are still quite a few mysteries.

Q2 for me was dominated by the RG Japan/Korea theme (but I never got to the Korea part...) - I really enjoyed getting to grips with Japanese modern classics. The sound of the mountain was the outstanding one of those I finished during Q2 (but eclipsed by The Makioka sisters that I didn't quite finish in time to count it here).

A nice spin-off from that was the travel book The roads to Sata by Alan Booth, who walked from one end of the Japanese islands to the other in the 1970s and writes about it with a lot of humour and affection.

Outstanding in the "I knew I would like them but kept putting them off" category were Le ventre de Paris and Christa Wolf's Kassandra.

In the "overlooked books I was encouraged to read through CR" category, two relatively obscure British authors stood out: J.L. Carr's A month in the country and Jessie Kesson's The white bird passes.

My out and out favourite was The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. A great epic of a book which can be quite complicated at the beginning due to the sheer number of characters and intertwined families, but the historical detail was superb, and I thought it brilliant.

Runner up was Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel - very weird, very controversial, but I appreciated its uniqueness and found it to be thought-provoking.

I'm also rediscovering Esther Freud at the moment, and The Wild was an enjoyable read. Freud is a great scene setter - I very quickly get a sense of place in her books, which tend to be a little bohemian in theme with protagonists who have a sense of longing for another place or type of lifestyle.

The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg was a great alternative WII social history read, told from the perspective of a socialite Brit who lived in Berlin with her German husband.