Q1 FAVOURITE READS

We're a week and a bit into Q2. The books from Q1 have percolated away in our minds. What stood out particularly for you?

Out of the 30 books I read in Q1, the ones that stood out the most for me were Being Mortal, Sense and Sensibility, Foreigner, and Lonesome Dove.

Being Mortal and Sense and Sensibility were both selections for my IRL book group (January and March, respectively), and we had a lot of excellent discussion for them at our meetings.

Foreigner was a reread, and I quite enjoyed the audio. I had also forgotten a lot of what happened, since I first read it eleven years ago.

And Lonesome Dove was part of the group read here. I think it is currently in the lead for best book I read in 2019, though it is early days yet and I usually don't bother trying to pick just one book.

>2 shadrach_anki: My wife and I read and discussed Being Mortal a couple of years ago--it was a great process.

My 1Q19 faves were The Orphan Master's Son, White Fragility, Sing, Unburied, Sing, and The Poisonwood Bible, with Things Fall Apart and Lincoln in the Bardo close behind. A good quarter for quality.

I read the following 12 books in quarter 1 and my favorite is easily Lonesome Dove which will most likely become my favorite book of the year as it has also entered my favorite books of all time list. Such a perfect book. Out of the other books The Book of Essie and Nothing but Dust also stood out as my most preferred reads but mostly all the books I read have been entertaining but not necessarily the best ever. As for least favorite it's most certainly, without any competition, The Blue Girl by Laurie Foos.

1) Yoko Tawada : The Last Children of Tokyo (aka The Emissary)
2) Philip K. Dick : Ubik
3) Ling Ma : Severance: A Novel
4) Meghan MacLean Weir : The Book of Essie
5) Margaret Atwood : Alias Grace
6) Michel Faber : The Book of Strange New Things
7) Naomi Alderman : The Power
8) Tarjei Vesaas : The Ice Palace
9) Sandrine Collette : Nothing but Dust
10) Laurie Foos : The Blue Girl
11) Larry McMurtry : Lonesome Dove
12) Tara Westover : Educated: A Memoir

Q1 was a good reading quarter for me, both in terms of quantity and quality. Almost half of the books I read were non-fiction reads which is a departure from my usual 90/10 fiction / non-fiction.

Top fiction reads were:

- Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood - will be looking out for more from this author
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
- Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

There were plenty of other great fiction reads as well. I'd note The Blue Flower, The Great Lover, We Were the Mulvaneys and The Sparsholt Affair especially.

Top non-fiction read was:
- Unnatural Causes: The Life and Many Deaths of Britain's Top Forensic Pathologist

I had a pretty good first quarter, and read 14 books.

By far, the best of the lot was Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. I read it, but I hear the audiobook is amazing.

Among the rest, I enjoyed:

Adele, Leila Slimani
Sweet Days of Discipline, Fleur Jaeggy
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night Heather O'Neill
Educated, Tara Westover
The Royal Physician's Visit, Per Olov Enquist
The Bulgari Connection, Fay Weldon

The first three months have been good for me, both in terms of quantity and quality. I read some 43 items (novels, novellas, individually published shorts), only a few of which I thought were really poor.

(For reference, here is a link to my Club Read thread.)

Best reads (in no particular order):

• The gate of angels by Penelope Fitzgerald: piles on the small absurdities until it climaxes into a full-blown comedy.
  
• Ten days in a mad-house by Nellie Bly: Riveting investigative journalism in an 1880 asylum.
  
• The bluest eye by Toni Morrison: expertly done; really makes you feel what generations of repression does to a subculture.
  
• De wereld een dansfeest or The world a dance party by Arthur van Schendel: perfectly balancing a sweet romance with distancing narration
  
• Convenience store woman by Sayaka Murata: letting an autistic main character shine

Authors I'm unlikely to read again (again, no particular order):

• James Joyce: too self-indulgent; calls too much attention to his own writing
  
• Hedwig Courths-Mahler: saccharine fairy-tale level upper-class romance
  
• Fredrik Backman: feel-good stuff. (Not my cup of tea)
  
• Robert McCammon: by-the-numbers 1980s action.
  
• Philip K. Dick: Unplanned plots that feel like first drafts, only he takes himself so seriously. Like A. E. Van Vogt, but without the zany fun that makes that sort of thing palatable.

I read 21 books in the first quarter and had many great ones!

Lonesome Dove is a stand out. I also loved two new books - The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai and Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield.

I also read some great nonfiction:
Michelle Obama's Becoming - listen to the audio book!
SPQR by Mary Beard
Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

I also started reading Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson and I'm really enjoying it. I'll read the 13 volumes over the course of the year.

There were plenty of lucky finds this quarter. My favourite books were La Tour de guet by Ana María Matute, From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus, Masculins singuliers by Éric Holder, Nagori : La nostalgie de la saison qui vient de nous quitter by Ryoko Sekiguchi and Ma mère et moi by Brahim Metiba

My highest-rated (4.5 star) reads for Q1:

Arrival by Ted Chiang
The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading by Phyllis Rose
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Lots of good stuff in Q1, really. It’s not easy to pick out a few. But maybe these:

Recent books
- Berta Isla by Javier Marías
- The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
- Memories of the future by Siri Hustvedt

Back catalogue
- The Canterbury Tales - I finally got around to reading them all the way through
- Christine Brooke-Rose - a writer I finally found out about very late in the day. Really enjoyed Between and Textermination, and I’ve got more of her books coming.

Happiness by Aminatta Forna
My Struggle: Book Three by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Survive FBT: Skills Manual for Parents Undertaking Family Based Treatment (FBT) for Child and Adolescent Anorexia Nervosa by Maria Ganci
Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery by Arnold Thomas Fanning

It seems my choices all have something to do with "the past"

*My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates (1998, one of her "American Gothics”and the only one I hadn't read. It's a spectacular historical historical fiction about an "all-American" con man and his family). Amusing with an uncomfortable eye on the present.

*The Wolf and the Watchman, by Niklas Natt och Dag (2019, Magnificent, dark, historical crime novel set in late 18th century Stockholm)

*Ghost Wall) by Sarah Moss (2018, UK) My third novel by Moss. Haunting story that I cannot summarize in one or two sentences.

*Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah (2018, UK) Splendid coming of age novel, about how the past informs the future. If new to Gurnah, I recommend you start read one or two of his early books first.

Couldn't decide which nonfiction was the favorite, the one on empathy or the one on why we dream, but I enjoyed both.

I'd say the stand out for me was A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead.

I always find it hard to do favorites when I’ve enjoyed a good many books. My stab at it is..

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney
Becoming by Michelle Obama (audio)
Tombland by C. J. Sansom (audio)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (audio)