QUESTIONS FOR THE AVID READER, Part 3

QUESTION 24: ROMANCE/LOVE STORIES (begins msg#2)
QUESTION 25: READ OR STILL UNREAD (begins msg#36)
QUESTION 26: FIVE BOOKS: AN ACTIVITY (begins msg#79)
QUESTION 27: BOOKS THAT GET UNDER OUR SKIN (begins msg#118)
QUESTION 28: BULLSH*T BOOKS: ACTIVITY (begins msg#162)
QUESTION 29 PUBLISHERS, SMALL PRESSES AND THEIR IMPRINTS (begins msg #187)

I find Persuasion and Jane Eyre still enjoyable in my old age, maybe because the heroines learn things about themselves, i.e., what they are NOT willing to do for love, in the course of the romances.

They also have some adventures (or at least intrigues) of a non-romantic nature.

Both heroines are also saddled with just awful relatives, which is a plus.

A search in my catalogue for "romance" comes back with 203 hits. I'm obviously going to have to think about this one a little bit...

I don’t mind romance in my reading.

I like your open-ended question. Two books come to mind, and your examples bring up Shakespeare and his variations - especially the very romantic Romeo and Juliet and its bitter contrasts in Antony and Cleopatra or mockery in Troilus and Cressida, or ...well, what to make of A Winter’s Tale? But the two that come to mind are the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante (one of my absolute favorite reading experiences) and a book I listened to recently, the quirky The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy’s novel on the erotic bisexual cluelessness of a man who essentially saw nothing.

I think my favourite kind of reading for relaxation is a well-made, ironic, romantic comedy. Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Thirkell, P G Wodehouse, Armistead Maupin and of course Jane Austen (and lots of others I cant think of right now...)

Big serious romances, the Anna Kareninas and Madame Bovarys are nice too, but they don’t appeal quite so much. I think I’m more likely to watch them on stage or screen than read them in novels. Jules et Jim is one of my favourite films, but it’s not a novel I’m ever likely to re-read, and similarly for the opera La Traviata and the book La dame aux camélias...

I used to devour the monthly romances (Harlequin etc), but eventually got sick of the formulas. However, some of the authors I read in those days were far above the rest, and I still read (and reread) theirs - Justine Davis, in particular. Kay Hooper's romances are mixed with paranormal horror, which sounds weird but works. Suzanne Brockmann is another monthly author who's moved on (and up) - and managed to get a mainstream romance published with a M/M relationship (between established characters, who have been in the background of several of her previous novels). Jean Johnson (not to be confused with Jean Johnston, or Joan Johnson, or half a dozen others) started with very good fantasy romance (fantasy as in magic), and has branched out to excellent SF (amusingly, with a protagonist who is actively unwilling to consider romance, for in-story reasons). Oh, Justine also writes excellent SF - the first few were (merely) her usual good romances in an SF setting, but as the series has gone on the romance became the (major) subplot and the war between planets became the main story.

I don't object to romance, per se, in stories - but an awful lot of otherwise well-written stories will stop dead to focus on The Romance for a scene or three. This is really annoying when the rest of the book is all about hurry, hurry, we have to Save the Universe (or whatever). Justine and Jean know how to integrate the romance, so it's not a separate story. So do Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, who together write the Liaden Universe stories. Most of them have a strong romance subplot, some are almost primarily romances, but they're also really good stories each of which advance the various arcs within the series(es). Mercedes Lackey is another who writes really good stories with strong romance angles - her Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms and Elemental Masters series are almost complete romances with a lot of story around the skeleton; Valdemar is a strong story(s - multiple series within the overarching one) with, in many of them, a romance angle.

I've read some (not many) of the classic romances - Jane Eyre, relatively recently, for one. I found it mildly interesting but I still don't see why it's such a classic. It was less unpleasant than most of the classics, for me - they mostly didn't make seriously bad decisions, or at least they learned from their bad decisions and didn't make them _again_. This is high praise, from me.

One out of three series touchstones worked. I'll go see if I can fix the other two...ah, in both cases it was that LT didn't recognize my versions of the names. Nice!

Looking back through my recent reads I must be drawn to the tragic sort of romance: Evidence of Things Unseen, Radioactive, Audition, and The One Hundred Nights of Hero.

I think I'd personally prefer to talk about love stories, rather than romance—that latter term seems to come with that optimism baggage. I have only ever read one book that was sold in the "romance" section of the bookstore and it was a book I bought in the late 80s as a joke for a friend's birthday. I forgot to give it to her and it was hanging around so I read it. It was low on story, but had plenty of sex (as the cover suggested it would). I did buy my daughter one Christmas as many of the Georgette Heyer regency romances as I could find still in print.

But outside of genre romance (as defined by wikipedia in message #2), I do love a good novel that has a well done love story; it's part of life, isn't it? I'm also fond of tragedy and the two often go hand in hand.

Favorite classics of mine that have love stories:
Doctor Zhivago, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, North and South, Little Women, The Count of Monte Cristo...and so on.
All of Austen, but perhaps Persuasion is the fave (I'm also fond of re-tellings of P&P) (I had some others noted but the cut & paste ate the text...sigh)

To be quite honest, the late 60s and 70s decade are a bit of a blur. I so wish I had written down what I was reading in those early decades. The only one that comes to mind is Segal's Love Story.

However, contemporary love stories I have enjoyed (at least what comes to mind at this moment).
The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville. The coming together of two unlike-lies: Harley Savage and Douglas Cheeseman.
Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding. It was funny even before the movie came out. It captures an insecurity many can relate to.
Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates. A bit of both a riff and a homage to Little Women and the Alcott family. Very entertainingFive(!) young, eligible sisters and a hot air balloon abduction begins the story.
History of Love by Nicole Kraus.
Possession by A. S. Byatt
The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles.
Waiting by Ha Jin. A couple waits 18 years to be together
Jamila by Chingtiz Aitmatov Love story told by a young teen driving a wagon to the station. Has the feel of a folktale.
Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst. A lovely short tale about enduring love.
Leon & Louise by Alex Capus A grandson retells the tale (or folktale) of his grandparents. Wry humorous.
Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page. Chronicle of a long marriage that shows how we might change with the years
I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck. Wife sits by husband's bedside just after his death and relates their relationship. She's an artist, he was a mathematician. How much of love is chance?

Elizabeth von Arnim wrote some good love stories. Love and The Enchanted April come to mind.

Ada Leverson's The Little Ottleys is kind of a series of anti-love stories, though it is very engaging.

>9 avaland: I think I'd personally prefer to talk about love stories, rather than romance—that latter term seems to come with that optimism baggage. I have only ever read one book that was sold in the "romance" section of the bookstore and it was a book I bought in the late 80s as a joke for a friend's birthday. I forgot to give it to her and it was hanging around so I read it. It was low on story, but had plenty of sex (as the cover suggested it would). I did buy my daughter one Christmas as many of the Georgette Heyer regency romances as I could find still in print. But outside of genre romance (as defined by wikipedia in message #2), I do love a good novel that has a well done love story; it's part of life, isn't it? I'm also fond of tragedy and the two often go hand in hand.

Totally agree!I remember some of us in HS buying some of the romances as a joke and cracked up as we read them out loud, yeah just not into that. However, Love Stories? Oh my goodness yes Far pavillions ive read a hundred times. Interesting that many of my favorite historical fiction writers started out romance: Elizabeth Chadwick is a good example. Her focus is on England during the middle ages (esp around the Plantagenet era) her first books were very hi on the romance, with some respectible HF story. As her writing continued her HF over came the romance, but she still managed to have lots of steamy sex in the love story part.

You mention love and tragedy, esp in Mythology and Shakespeare but don't forget love and comedy - much ado about nothing, and as you like it are my absolute faves, along with Midsummers Nights Dream

Note: The person who asked for a question around the topics, was/is looking for recommendations for a diverting read. What about contemporary reads?

For a light read, I'd recommend Ayesha At Last by Canadian author Uzma Jalaluddin, a modern Pride & Prejudice set in the Muslim community.

>11 cindydavid4: Yes, a hefty copy Far Pavilions sits on my shelf, also. She was a great storyteller.

>7 jjmcgaffey: I used to read the Harlequin romances during the summer when I was a full-time onsite middle school teacher. I would devour them by the bag full, sometimes reading several in one day. I do not read many of those now, unless they are in the Love Inspired line which I often review for NetGalley. As has been discussed, I don't like it when an otherwise enjoyable book stops everything for an inserted sex or love scene that really does not need to be there. When I think of romance, I usually think of the genre, so prefer the term "love story."

I like Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, as well as some of the authors who write Amish fiction which usually has a love element: Wanda Brunstetter, Amy Clipston, Vanetta Chapman, Charlotte Hubbard, Patricia Davids. The love angle is not usually the main theme of the story however. I recently enjoyed The Other Bennet Sister and The Jane Austen Society, both of which contained a love element.

>13 LadyoftheLodge: that Bennet Sister one is also called Mary B I found it really interesting,but some in my book club thought it outrageous what happens toJane. I Love P and P but this is an intersting take on the story

I think my idea of a love story differs from other people's. Some of the books mentioned here I don't think are romantic -- Possession, Age of Innocence, Jane Eyre, Enchanted April, Anna Karenina, anything I've read so far by Elizabeth Taylor-- when I read them they were all about something else, with perhaps a tiny bit of a love story squeezed in. But I guess I'm in the minority there. Funny, some of those are my favourites, but I read them for something else.

I think my favourite love story is probably Bridget Jones's Diary, which like Lois, I read before the film. Pride and Prejudice is my favourite book, and when I'm in the mood, P&P variations can be fun. Two others that I loved were Like Water For Chocolate (maybe my 2nd favourite book) and Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. I'd love to be able to find more books like these.

Segal's Love Story made me cry buckets, but I was 13 so maybe that explains it. And at the time I read it, I enjoyed The Bridges of Madison County, although almost immediately afterwards I regretted it. I think both these books are quite manipulative, which is a big turn off.

>9 avaland:
I do love a good novel that has a well done love story; it's part of life, isn't it? I'm also fond of tragedy and the two often go hand in hand. -- Exactly!

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst. A lovely short tale about enduring love.
Leon & Louise by Alex Capus A grandson retells the tale (or folktale) of his grandparents. Wry humorous.
Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page. Chronicle of a long marriage that shows how we might change with the years

These 3 look particularly good

>5 dchaikin:
the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante Is there a love story in the later books? I quit reading those after the first one, which was just about the two little girls.

Science fiction and fantasy stories often have a romance subplot. Will the world be saved, and will he and she get together? In recent years, this tendency has changed in some ways - he and he, or she and she stories, obviously, but I think it's also becoming more common to dispense with the romance supbplot entirely. Online, I see more people identify as asexual or aromantic, and that's turned up in a few of the stories I've read. Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, for example, has a lead character who states at one point that she's asexual, and nothing more is said. I presume there are stories with aromantic characters, but don't know of any.

Other stories with non-traditional romance subplots that come to mind include A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson (he and he), and Distress by Greg Egan (a man and a neutral-sex person).

As for stories where the relationship is foregrounded, two recent time-travel stories come to mind: Time Was by Ian McDonald, about two male lovers separated by incidents of involuntary time-travel, and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, wherein women agents of rival powers exchange messages and create a secret love even as their sides war against each other. Why time travel? Don't know.

I do occasionally read novels that aren't science fiction. I liked Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin, in which absolutely nothing happens except that various people find their partners. The near absence of conflict should make for a very boring story, but somehow it doesn't. Rough Strife by Lynne Sharon Schwartz charts the course of a marriage. In a nice twist on Lois's I Married You for Happiness reference above, the woman is the mathematician here, a topologist specializing in knots (get it?). Both these memories date to the 1970s, so take care.

>16 dukedom_enough: He (dukedom) really is a incurable romantic. He read P&P and thought it a story of survival (which of course it is).

24. Love stories and romances are different things for me -- as someone (a few someones?) said above, a romance implies the happy ending; love stories don't.

When I was mid-teens, they started translating and publishing the Harlequins for the first time in Bulgarian. Think of the most formulaic, "same story, different names" kinda novels. They had zero literary merit but they were a transition between the adventure children and YA literature and the actually adult one in a way. I devoured hundreds of them - both from the library and at home (and I know it was hundreds because I still have a couple hundred of them at my Mom's). At the same time though, I picked up some of the heavy hitters of the genre - mainly Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel where the formula was there only as an outline but the story was different and there was something beyond the "they met. She gasped. He smiled. She fainted/blushed. Her brother/father/whatever splits them. They end up in bed (via a church or not on the way)".

So when I outgrew the formulaic ones, I still like Steel and Roberts (until I went into my "Romance novels are for idiots and old ladies" phase -- but we will ignore that for now).

At the same time, I started reading the classics and discovered how many of the classics are actually love stories - from Ana Karenina to the Brontes - they all had that "love" as a base of the story.

Then a decade or so later I discovered the paranormal romance genre and things got complicated. Add the "I want to write a romance set in the 17th century but my heroine cannot be a normal 17th century lady so... I know - time travel" and the reverse "I want the 17th century guy but I do not want to write a historical romance... ah, time travel and/or curse solves that" and... things got even complicated. :) I had to admit that romances are not really just for idiots and old ladies and that formulaic does not always means stupid.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes... :)

These days I learned to appreciate the story and the style more than the label. The line between urban fantasy and paranormal romance can be very thin (and shifting inside of the same series sometimes) so is the line between a well-written romance novel and a contemporary one. One of my favorite series (In Death) is a futuristic police-procedural romance. A lot of the fantasy authors use the romance tropes liberally (even when not working on the paranormal romance space).

What about real-life love stories? I've really enjoyed reading the letters of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and Robert Browning and the various poems that spun off from their relationship, also Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann, and probably a few other famous couples I've forgotten about...

In a slightly different register, there are also lots of one-sided accounts of great passions, like the Anne Lister diaries.

Or Petrarch's canzoniere and their many imitators, which always claim to be accounts of real love affairs, even if (e.g. with Shakespeare) there's no real evidence that the love-object ever existed outside the poet's imagination.

saddest true love story I know is Heloise and Abelard

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1986935779/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&b...

also a movie

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/28/movies/review-film-doomed-passion-of-abelard-...

>14 cindydavid4: Mary B is actually a different book by a different author.

>15 Nickelini: The Neapolitan Quartet is not a romance, but it evolves into romance elements as the girls develop relationships and infatuations. I think it might be most prominent in book 2. It’s the aspect I remember most of the whole quartet. (Not sure what that says of me and my reading)

>21 LadyoftheLodge: oh, so it is. Didn't think there could be two books and didn't look at the author name Will have to check that out thanks for the heads up

>23 cindydavid4: I have not read Mary B, although I imagine the books are similar. I was rather incensed at how Mary allowed herself to be treated in early parts of The Other Bennet Sister but she got better later on in the book. I almost gave up on this book halfway through, but I was glad I did not.

>9 avaland: Have to agree with you on Jane Eyre (probably my earliest favourite), The Count of Monte Cristo and definitely Dr Zhivago. I would add to this Wuthering Heights which I'm surprised doesn't appear anywhere above, A Tale of Two Cities, Tess of the D'urbervilles, Anna Karenina and Gone with the Wind.

From more recent writers:
February
So I am Glad
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands
Lust, Caution (if it was love).

Stopping now as I realize that most of these are none too cheerful

I would agree with >19 thorold: about The Lady of the Camellias and that real life love stories should also count.

Going back to Q21 Short stories from a couple of weeks ago, I was just looking at George Orwell's "Bookshop memories" (1936) and came across this:

... And another {thing} – the publishers get into a stew about this every two or three years – is the unpopularity of short stories. The kind of person who asks the librarian to choose a book for him nearly always starts by saying ‘I don’t want short stories’, or ‘I do not desire little stories’, as a German customer of ours used to put it. If you ask them why, they sometimes explain that it is too much fag to get used to a new set of characters with every story; they like to ‘get into’ a novel which demands no further thought after the first chapter. I believe, though, that the writers are more to blame here than the readers. Most modern short stories, English and American, are utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels. The short stories which are stories are popular enough, vide D. H. Lawrence, whose short stories are as popular as his novels.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-w...

On romance: I wonder why it is that such a high proportion (around two-thirds, I would guess) of the request in the "Name that book" group are for romances of one kind or another (historical-fantasy-science-fiction-vampire-young-adult romance seems to be the most common type).

Do you suppose reading romance rots the brain and makes us unable to remember titles? or is it that romance readers hope to be able to recapture the lovely mood they associate with the moment when they read that particular book? Or something else?

>27 thorold: There are probably as many answers as there are Name That Book users, but I think there's a sizeable proportion of Harlequin/Mills & Boons readers who read one or several books a day, which ups the probability that they will forget titles...

And even the less formulaic romances usually follow one or more standard tropes (with or without a twist). Which can make them hard to distinguish from other books following the same trope(s) (in my experience). Though yeah, sheer mass of reading probably contributes as well.

Re: romances . . . When I owned a used bookstore I had a very robust Romance section, with a dedicated customer base for those books. I was sometimes tempted to try reading a few, just to see what they were like, but I never did. I dearly loved almost all the the customers who read them regularly, though, and I mean as people rather than just as frequent customers.

Otherwise, I like romance that's well written into the books I'm reading as much as I like any other plot development. Good writing's good writing. I guess that's not very helpful. Off the top my head, I can only think of one book that I really remember because of the element of romance (and by that I mean romantic love rather than, say the romance of a particular time or place). That book is The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac. I know that Kerouac is a love him/hate him author and/or considered the kind of author you have to read at a certain time of life. In my teens and early 20s I was a huge devotee, and can say with a straight face that On the Road changed my life. The books don't necessarily hold up later in life. Now I'm more or less of the opinion of one writer (I forget who) who said that Kerouac never wrote a great book but that all of his books have great sections. Anyway, The Subterraneans for me is the closest thing to a great book Kerouac wrote, the most consistent from start to finish. It is the story of a man who is desperately in love with his lover. Desperately and jealously in love. He is fully aware that his jealousy is ruining her love for him and will destroy the relationship, but he cannot stop himself, cannot talk himself down from the behavior. A very sad but every strong story.

Kind of sad that that's all that comes to mind for me on this topic. I did love the Hunchback of Notre Dame. I'm sure other books will come to mind over the next few days.

I can be terribly hard to please when it comes to romance in fiction, because so much of the time it just doesn't feel real to me. Like, I have no idea what the characters actually see in each other, or maybe I kind of see what they might see in each other, but it doesn't develop in a way I find convincing. Too often, when there's a romance subplot, it feels to me like it's only in there because the author felt you're supposed to have one, or, worse, so the hero can "get the girl" in the end, presumably as his prize for being the hero. Or I'm just in general hyperaware of the thought that these two people are really only getting together because the author is telling them to. This is a big sticking point for me in reading anything actually in the romance genre, too, the few times that I've tried it. Even if I like the characters, even if I see what they see in each other, even if the writing is actually fine, I'm so very conscious of the formula that they follow that I can't stop myself from thinking about how the characters are behaving as they are because this is the point in the story where they're supposed to behave that way in order to get to the inevitable happy ending. I think I'm just especially sensitive to this for some reason, because I can certainly enjoy other formulaic works without having this kind of problem.

On the other hand, when I can 100% buy a love story, when I can genuinely see why the characters might not only be attracted to each other but genuinely like each other, too, when they seem truly compatible, and when their relationship develops in a believable, organic way, it's so refreshing that it makes me really happy.

>31 bragan: Or I'm just in general hyperaware of the thought that these two people are really only getting together because the author is telling them to.

Ha! really. You might enjoy reading Intrusions by Ursula Hegi. Narrator is a writer, who discovers that her two main characters have minds of their own.

>30 rocketjk: your thoughts on the people your romance readers were might get me to try some, the world needs more romance and happiness - i mean more of the sort of person that inspires that sort of reaction

thinking that way i can think of a couple of films right now - il postino - full of romance as well as romance romance, how they depict Neruda's relationship at the time doesn't seem to be how it turns out for all poets i now see --- another film with nice romance as well as romance romance, and a book too, the legend of Bagger Vance

edit - I think this could be read wrongly, and may still have potential for that despite the addition 'i mean . . . ' - it's just meant to say that it dawned on me what good characteristics they were showing, and how in not considering romance maybe i was closing myself off from them and really they are what i value, I think i get romance in poetry and in other ways without reading the genre - but suddenly visions of Jack N in 'As Good as it Gets', or at the start hit me -- so I will experiment with romance now, Georgette Heyer maybe.

>32 cindydavid4: That does sound like it might be fun. Another one for the wishlist!

>25 SassyLassy: Jane Eyre was also one of my earliest favorites. But, in adulthood I can appreciate an ending where their positions of power are reversed :-) I have mixed feelings about Wuthering Heights these days. I love Harding more for his tragedy not his romance. Maybe Under the Greenwood Tree or Far From the Madding Crowd would make my extended list. I haven't read them in quite a while, though. Loved A Tale of Two Cities but wasn't overly fond of Gone with the Wind.

QUESTION 25: READ OR STILL UNREAD

Are there, or have there been, during your lifetime, specific books on your shelves or in your mind that you have wanted very, very much to read or felt you should read? Perhaps you couldn’t seem to find the time for one reason or another...perhaps they are/were well-known books that everyone was reading or… perhaps they are/were books which have meaning only to you? Years (and years) may have gone by—did you finally read the book? Was it everything you hoped it would be? Or not so much? If you haven’t read it yet, what is holding you back? Tell us about some of those books: read or still unread.

(This question is inspired by an idea from CindyDavid4. It’s been broadened a bit, Thx, Cindy).

Q25 READ OR STILL UNREAD — irresistibly made me think of this:

Doing his British best to redeem what was looking to be a draggy dinner, he taught us a game he claims to have invented, called “Humiliation.” {...} The essence of the matter is that each person names a book which he hasn’t read but assumes the others have read, and scores a point for every person who has read it. Get it? Well, Howard Ringbaum didn’t. You know Howard, he has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured, and this game set his two obsessions at war with each other, because he could succeed in the game only by exposing a gap in his culture. At first his psyche just couldn’t absorb the paradox and he named some eighteenth-century book so obscure I can’t even remember the name of it. Of course, he came last in the final score, and sulked. {...} Well, on the third round, Sy was leading the field with Hiawatha, Mr. Swallow being the only other person who hadn’t read it, when suddenly Howard slammed his fist on the table, jutted his jaw about six feet over the table and said:

“Hamlet!”

{...} A piquant incident, you must admit—but wait till I tell you the sequel. Howard Ringbaum unexpectedly flunked his review three days later and it’s generally supposed that this was because the English Department dared not give tenure to a man who publicly admitted to not having read Hamlet.
David Lodge, Changing places (Pt.3, Letter from Désirée to Morris)

(For the record, I have read both Hamlet and Hiawatha !)

I almost always have some monumental classic on the — actual or virtual — TBR, I don't think there's ever been a time in my life when I've not had something that I was putting off, for lack of time or because I wasn't confident enough in that language (yet) to do it justice, or simply because I was a bit scared of it. Sometimes even re-reads: books I didn't think I'd done justice to the first time and wanted to read again with more knowledge and experience behind me.

Most of the time I do get to them within a decade or two of putting them on the list, and it's usually been worthwhile. I had a big go at Milton a few years ago and really enjoyed that, similarly with Wordsworth, and last year I had a blitz on the early part of the curriculum and read Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and the Canterbury Tales.

Major classics I haven't got to yet that are fairly high on the list:

— Les Misérables and Madame Bovary (but also re-reading Proust...). "When I've finished Zola..."
— Big chunks of Goethe and Schiller that I missed because I was never made to read them at school
— Don Quixote in Spanish
— most of the Russian classics

I don't think there's anything on my physical TBR shelf that is that kind of scary milestone at the moment, although there are still a few silly things that have been there for a naggingly long time and that I refuse to be defeated by, like Malena es un nombre de tango, a book I bought when I was first learning Spanish, thinking it would be a light, easy read. It probably is, but it's also 750 pages long, so it's had a bookmark stuck in an early chapter for some years...

>37 thorold: David Lodge is so good at writing cringy incidents!

>36 avaland:
I have hundreds of titles in my wishlist. There's not enough time in the day. Most of them fall into 3 categories:

- Books I simply haven't got round to buying/reading

- Classics I've put off reading until I can muster the time and energy to research them properly: classical literature, seventeenth and eighteenth-century European literature, philosophy. All the books that would benefit from a guided read with a good teacher... High up on this list (and for most of them, on my physical shelves) are Plato's Republic, Montaigne's Essays, Pascal, Racine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Tristram Shandy, Goethe, any "forgotten classics" written by female authors... I'm making (slow) progress on these. I read Bérénice by Racine, La Saint-Simonienne by Joséphine Lebassu d'Helf and Li Qingzhao's poems this year, and enjoyed all of them. I feel I should also read more Shakespeare, including Hamlet, but that's more a "should" than a "want to".

- Books I'd like to read if only I could get my hands on them: out-of-print, untranslated or expensive niche books, mostly from non-European writers: African SF, Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, René Philoctète's Le peuple des terres mêlées (in the original French rather than the English translation)...

>38 thorold: Sometimes even re-reads: books I didn't think I'd done justice to the first time and wanted to read again with more knowledge and experience behind me.
Oh yes, I have a longish list of those...

I have books that have been sitting on the TBR shelves for decades, quietly intimidating me for one reason or another. But I am stubbornly convinced, somewhere in my mind, that I will to read every single one of them, sooner or later.

Well, except maybe for the massive omnibus volume of The Gormenghast Novels, which has been there since 1989 and achieved a sort of legendary status in my mind as the one book I can never seem to actually pick up off the shelf, no matter how much I might want to.

>37 thorold: Loved that book! Think its still one of Lodges best!

Q25 >37 thorold: - I often think of Humiliation and flirt with it, as you may have noticed -- I think its a very important topic - culturally we are fed experts all the time, the impression given is that the world of experts has read everything, there isn't much real humanity in that as everyone has gaps, sometimes embarrassing ones - this may have been a turning point in Howard's life, allowing him to express his humanity, I hope (needless to say I have not read that Lodge, in fact no Lodge, just saw some tv adaptations and always meant to). In our modern world, think of writing a CV, people are often told to hide such things, that in fact are often the real grit in their pearl, imo.

But i think its important to establish the normality of the humiliation, culturally - to be real with each other - I suspect for some that it exists is something that hinders reading out of guilt in a way, or the looming mountain they'll never conquer -- and I think being so wary of what you may expose yourself as having not read also hinders discourse.

One book, not even so very big, that I'd like to have read all of (finally) is Pascal's Pensees - I have an idea about the wager I even once spoke to a philosophy department about researching but it didn't fit with my work schedule - I've had this idea since a first year undergraduate, so really i should get round to it (ahh that word that goes with that guilt - Should!)

Speaking of that time I've also meant to read As I Lay Dying since a most fabulous lecture by the late Frank Cioffi -- maybe that I haven't is to do with how I didn't get to switch to philosophy after his inspiration. I think I'd have read a lot more of what i wished had I done so,.

I've only half read Hamlet - what stops me I think i said earlier is the every other line being recognisable and setting off bells of other places you've seen it quoted. I tried several times in my twenties and then let it go. I have seen it of course, film and theatre.

I think the enormity of the ocean of choice sometimes leaves me wondering where to start - I've not read most of Plato. I don't really want to read Aristotle - but then lots of philosophers I'd like to have read more of/at all. Having grown up in 70's britain we never really did the Bible and I wish i had read a lot more of that. Neither did we do learning poems by heart and there is much I have not read.

I do spend lots of time reading parts of things it seems - and also thinking about reading without starting, which is partly a health issue for me and partly also due to working in a field that is quite draining, last year when away from that a bit I read a lot more once that began. But partly I think its being faced with so much possibility - and letting go of lots to just be with the little bit of finite infinity in whatever it is I do read.

There is just about everything else - most of Dickens, War and Peace, Tristram Shandy, loads of classical stuff (complete with sadness I can't do the Latin and greek).

But I refuse to be humiliated about it - I've not made a bad haul - and its possible to be a good person without having read a single book, it must be possible even to write a good book without having read a book (? is it? was it? -- i need to find examples now).

Is there something in it too that equates reading the book to getting it? Lots of lit graduates don't like some of the things they studied, or a level or o level students. suddenly i see reading them sometimes as like just another notch on a bedstead (eww)/

But in recent years i am enjoying filling my gaps a bit, need to as a would be poet, frustrated I can't do it more, a lot of which is just down to me really -- but also increasingly liberated to do so again. Learning in different situations hwo to move through that phase of thinking about books to reading them more fluently in lots of different situations.

>37 thorold: My husband is a David Lodge fan and thought of that also!

Yes, I'm something of a David Lodge fan too, I've read most of them several times.

>42 tonikat: I don't think Lodge allowed Howard to redeem himself: after a period in the wilderness in Canada he returns in Small world to get himself into more humiliating situations, and I seem to remember his wife runs off with Morris Zapp. I don't recall if he ever came back after that.

Q24: The Romantic Novel and the Love Story
I'll keep it short, since we're on to the next question already: I don't like romance as a genre, though I fully admit to not having read deeply into it and know that the term covers a lot of ground. But the ones I have peeked at were not well written, and in general the idea of Happily Ever After, which I know is the genre's big tenet, sets off my Yeah, right alarm. I like a little ambiguity and darkness in my fiction. Which is not to say I don't really enjoy a good love story built into the narrative, but it has to be believable on some level, cf. ambiguity and darkness above.

I did a quick search of my books with the word "romance" and very few of them were very romantic, in my opinion... Revolutionary Road? Haha, jeez. But it did turn up Mothering Sunday: A Romance, which was a lovely little book that overlaid romance and the British class system in the early 20th century, which I liked very much. Also Frances and Bernard, which was a great epistolary love trajectory that did not end well, but that was very romantic as it unfolded. My favorite happy ending, in a book that was anything but an actual romance, was in the last page and a half of Madeline Miller's Circe. I still pull it off the shelf every so often to read those final pages when I need a little burst of warmth.

>44 thorold: I look forward to reading of it all . . . one day . . . I enjoyed the tv series in the mid 80's a lot, remember Morris Zapp's name . . . maybe redemption was not for that sort of novel . . . its all so true

I also think there is something of the game of Humiliation that is of privilege - privilege of time to read, both in childhood and in study as an adult, not just economic but all sorts of life circumstances may impact it?

Looks like we have the makings of a David Lodge Appreciation Society here...

Q25: Read/Still Unread
Too many to enumerate. I have been a very aspirational book acquirer in my time (and, OK, still am). The one that's weighed on me longest/hardest is the tattered hardcover copy of Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution sitting on my nightstand. Once upon a time I had the idea that I would read a chapter every Sunday night before bed, but that didn't play out. But it's a book I really, really want to read—and, unfortunately, the need for that historical background would seem to be getting more and more pressing.

I also very much want to read Anna Karenina, just because, and I even have the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation sitting on my shelf (given to me by another aspirational reader who abandoned it).

But really, too many to list. It's a good problem to have, as far as I'm concerned... it's not like I feel guilty about what I'm not reading, god forbid. Just... anticipatory.

>45 lisapeet: My favorite happy ending, in a book that was anything but an actual romance, was in the last page and a half of Madeline Miller's Circe

Yes to this!!!!

Much of my reading for the past dozen years has been devoted to aspirational reading. It started when I was mostly reading current fiction and plowing through dozens of mysteries. I was 200+ pages into one and came across a unique, memorable scene. I realized I had read it before and not too long ago. So, being a person who loves checking off lists, I found the library's books-about-books section and started compiling lists (The Lifetime Reading Plan, Great Books, Books of the Century, and others). Then one day I found on the internet the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. At least half of my reading has been from that list ever since.

As for specific books, I missed "infinite summer" and still have an unread cop of Infinite Jest. I am also intimidated by 2666 -- I love Bolaño's writing, but it never seems to be the right time to read a couple hundred pages about rapes/murders. I love Beckett's plays, but I may prefer to die rather than read his novels.

>46 tonikat: Yes, definitely privilege. You have to have the money to put up a roof over yourself before you can start talking about there being holes in it.

>50 ELiz_M: Bolaño intimidates me as well, I still haven't got beyond the short stories. Although I did watch the opera based on The skating rink last week.
I listened to Beckett's Trilogy as audiobooks a few years ago, maybe that's a compromise that would work for you too?

I've got a bit south of 2,000 books in my house that I haven't read yet! Some of them are classics. In particular, I've never read any Faulkner other than the Snopes trilogy that I read earlier this year. The top of my list (off the top of my head) of classics I haven't gotten to, though, is The Grapes of Wrath. War and Peace would be honorable mention.

I will tell this story on myself. I graduated Boston University with a Bachelor's Degree in Public Communication in 1977. Though I studied mostly journalism and PR writing, that sort of thing, I took as many literature electives as I could cram into my schedule. I declined to attend grad school, choosing instead first to spend some "On the Road" years, then settling down in New Orleans. Fast forward a few years, and I had a fiction writing teacher telling me that my stories weren't half bad and that I might think about aiming a little higher. So, grad school it finally would be for me, 9 years after I'd finished up at BU. I got into the San Francisco State MA program for English Literature/Creative Writing. A week before I was due to pack up and head west, it suddenly occurred to me that I had never read Crime and Punishment! I was already worried enough about appearing a fraud in that program, but this was the last straw. It would come out, I just knew it would, that I had never read Crime and Punishment and I would be exposed, laid bare! So, basically, the last thing I did before leaving New Orleans was to sit myself down and, in a frenzy, read Crime and Punishment. Happily for me, I found it fascinating. Of course you've all guessed the punch line by now: I got through three years of grad school without anybody mentioning Crime and Punishment to me once! Anyway, I've read the book two more times since then. But I'll never forget that moment of panic and clarity in my tiny little New Orleans apartment.

I would like to read more Italo Calvino, but a few passages in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler seemed awfully opaque, so I may not be smart enough for that.

I would like to get around to that Elena Ferrante trilogy.

My husband is always bugging me to read Dostoyevsky's big novels, but I don't want to, because then we will have to have big talks about religion, which I find tiresome. I did enjoy some Dostoyevsky novellas this year, and we had brief talks about the religious themes in those, and that was OK.

David Lodge is great. I recommend Deaf Sentence.

If its confessions you are after then as a lover of Shakespeare I have still not read or see a performance of Hamlet or King Lear - I am slowly working my way towards them (please don't give away the endings)

I have had Infinite Jest on my bookshelves for sometime and am thinking that one may well remain unread.

Milestones that I have read recently were The Fairie Queen Edmund Spenser (The first three books) which I enjoyed more than I thought I would having given up on at least two previous occasions. This time I did some background reading and felt more in tune with the period in which Spenser was writing, that helped a great deal.

I also enjoyed Montaigne the complete essays, but read them in English.

>52 rocketjk: oh what a great story!!!

In another book forum in a galaxy far far away, we used to post about Ulysses at the begiining of the summer, how we are planning to not read Ulysses, and then other similar comments. At the end of the summer we would proudly say we still have not read Ulysses.....I have have honestly tried but could not get far. However I saw this quote- and its turned into my favorite love story

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

for a very long time that last seven words were my tag line. And since our 30th anniversary is coming up next month, I might just have to try again to read it

Ha, I just realize that Bloomsday is this Tuesday! Perhaps I'll start then...

>52 rocketjk: Great story!

#25

I have a few authors on my "I really need to read more of them". Zola (I read Money when I was in my teens, loved it but did not have any others handy and never followed up), Balzac (La Peau de chagrin was in my Mom's library and I bounced hard twice before I finished in my late teens and loved it), Hugo, Verne, Dumas (whom I read a lot of through my teens). Looking at the list, they all seem to be the French writers of a bygone era - and that made me thinking.

I can also add a few of the English-speaking ones (Thomas Hardy (who I could have read back to back but try not to... and as a result rarely pick up), Anthony Trollope (ditto), Henry James and Walter Scott and the much more modern James Michener and Edward Rutherfurd. They are not on the other list simply because I had to read some of theirs in high school (or later for the two later storytellers) and they were a handy "go to" any time we had to read a book from a "classical author who is not one of the ones in the textbook -- Dickens, the Brontes, Austen and Shakespeare were studies almost to death and I managed to read most of theirs before I left school).

But it is the French that I never got back to - partially because I spent most of the decade post high school reading mostly genre books and when I started reading classics and contemporary novels again, I had enough non-standard texts to read and partially because I am chasing the "complete edition" so I can read them all in order. Except... most of the complete editions are the older translations so I had been thinking that I should just pick them up again and read them in any order I find.

Which does not mean that I do not have a lot of other authors and books which I really want to get to but never seem to. I am a completing at heart so when I read a book, I want to read all by the author -- which sometimes means a LOT of books (George Simenon for example (hah, French again) - I have most of his Maigret books in the new translations so I need to get to them)). The problem of course is that I cannot resist a new author either so... things pipe up.

QUESTION 25: READ OR STILL UNREAD

If I thought about it, I'd probably come up with many examples. The one that stands out though is Catch 22. I wanted to read this since the early 80s and bought a copy in the mid-80s. I got about 1/3 of the way through and put it aside and have never picked it up again. My husband tried it and got about half way through. (Both of our book marks are still in the book). But then I started following the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and Catch 22 was on the list, so I thought I'd hold on to it for the right day. But then a while later I thought "I've never had any interest in anything military, and I've seen most of the film and I don't remember any women in the book, so I don't think this is going to be a book for me, 1001 list or not."

But then my sister-in-law, who has good taste in books, said she loved it. She said it took her a while to get into it, but then it was great. So there it sits, in my shelves. I can't imagine ever reading it, but maybe . . . . ?

>59 Nickelini: I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere along the lines of “You have to be crazy not to have read it, but if you’re already crazy....”

>60 thorold:

Oomph! Yes, of course! LOL!

I used to turn up my nose at "romances", but then I discovered that I like good ones, and funny ones quite a bit. I'm embarrassed by my closed-mindedness.

I hated Anna Karenina, and didn't really like Jane Eyre. I thought Wuthering Heights was simply dumb. The characters were soppy and I don't see how anyone could love them.

I didn't like Love Story, and I thought The Bridges of Madison County was almost ureadable. I don't like Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts.

I love Dickens, and Trollope, and Dumas. Favorite romances were Scottish Chiefs, and The Scarlet Pimpernel, and I truly adored Georgette Heyer. I am bothered by the intolerance of and the awfulness of the "funny" characters in Jane Austen, although I read all her stuff. Despite not liking Nora Roberts I did like the series she writes under J. D. Robb.

I realized that the sexiest organ is the brain, and that there is nothing so sexy as a man who is in love with his wife.

A tremendous number of the books you all are mentioning were not published when I was a teen. I read most of them when they were published. Oh, I did read Shakespeare, and found some of his delightful. I wasn't exposed to Zola or Hugo (except Les Miserable or others who wrote in foreign languages. When I was a child African and Asian cultures were completely ignored. On my own I read The Bhagavad Gita and Beowulf and similar others. I liked The French Lieutenant's Woman a lot, reading it when it was published, I think. It is only barely a romance, though. I think of it as quite in a different category than that. I read Bulfinch's Mythology obsessively. King Arthur is a tragic Love Story. So was Heloise and Abelard's story. I did like the Russians--like Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, and Pasternak, and Turgenev, and Checkoff. Oh, I was fond of Father Brown, and Sherlock Holmes, and Verne's work, especially Around the World in Eighty Days which has an important love story.

I think my biggest problem is that I had no one to guide my reading. I regret that greatly. I'm sure I did have some books assigned, although I remember none of them. I think I had read them all long before high school. I liked Moby Dick and some Hawthorne--not much romance in there. I like some Thackeray. I really like Sir Walter Scott for pleasure reading, and there is a lot of romance in his work.

I concentrated on Science Fiction once I found it, and I don't remember much romance in it. A favorite in my adult times was The Quantum Rose, an awesome book, and very much a love story. I'm fond of Wodehouse.

I think we are here to love each other, no matter how badly I sometimes perform. Romance is the stuff of life.

I haven't read any Faulkner, no Balzac or Zola. I hate Umberto Eco, so I read The Name of the Rose, which I actually liked, and Foucalt's Pendulum, which seemed to me to be a paranoid fancy, and highly unlikely. I hated it.

As a matter of fact, I thought Catch-22 was brilliant, and really worth reading. Fun, too.

There's a lot of Philip K. Dick I haven't read. I don't like and haven't read much Hemingway. I can't think of any book that is so thick it bothers me. The more the merrier, I say. Oh, I have read very little Salman Rushdie, since I hated Midnight's Children. I haven't read Ulysses. The only reason I would read that would be to say that I did. No Petrarch. I seldom read plays or poetry, in fact. No Proust. See how much I needed a literary mentor?

I am never going to read Lolita, anything by Jeffrey Eugenides, or Ulysses. I would like to read more Colson Whitehead. Never been disappointed with anything by him.

Q25

I‘m simply overwhelmed and try not to think about it too much. I take Umberto Eco to heart when he wrote, “The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.” I didn’t know this quote when I started following a list of books, a path, but it matches how I handle my TBR and all those books I want to read, or want to have read and they far outnumber what I have read or can read this lifetime. So, essentially, they are infinite. So I make lists. ...and then buy more books 🤦🏻‍♂️

But, to get back to the question, my biggest hole is the 19th-century. I kind of missed it. And then a bit older and a bit younger than that also gape at me in hurt neglect. Also I have a lot on the shelves and I think a lot about the history books there (Spense in China, two biographies of Darwin, a book on big history, Citizens, one on central asia, on Francis Bacon, on some other European personalities) and many curiosities and classics (Faulkner, some Hardy) and semi-classics.

Last year I finally read a Willa Cather. I had four on the shelf. Now I’m working through all her books. She was a magnificent discovery for me. But that’s the problem with TBR books. You’re not just reading this one book, but subjecting yourself to wanting to read many other books because of that one book.

>65 dchaikin: But that’s the problem with TBR books. You’re not just reading this one book, but subjecting yourself to wanting to read many other books because of that one book.

Hee, story of my reading life: I'll go from a novel to a non fiction about the topic to more books by that author to authors of similar books that take me far afield of where I started! A little ADHD but leads me to all sorts of discoveries!

>66 cindydavid4:

That's my "read through history from the beginning" project from a few years ago. I started just fine with a book about the early humans and the emergence of history and then somehow went back to the big bang instead of going into history. Still not sure how I managed to turn around that corner... :)

>65 dchaikin:

I am consoling myself with thought that every book has its time... and one day I will get to these books - if they are on my shelves, I was planning to read them at some point...

>37 thorold: Too funny

>36 avaland: Still Unread Moby Dick Every year I declare this is the year for it. I actually have two copies: one for taking away and one for reading at home with notes, bibliography and other such useful things. The travel copy has been to innumerable places, always returning home with me, but never read. I considered reading it at every season of the year, in all weathers, and all moods, but just never do it. I have no reason why. Perhaps this public confession will spur me to action.

I read a fair amount of nineteenth century literature, so yet another reason to contemplate the whale, but aside from him, I have a large Trollope gap. There is a Trollope Street in the city where I used to live. As a child I wondered why the street had that name. The city is a large seaport and home to a goodly part of Canada's navy. As I was exposed to more Victorian literature, I realized it was named after the author and not the trollops who were to be found in certain parts of the city not far from this street. I was telling a good friend this recently. She grew up next door to me, and confessed that as a child she had had the same question, and later had the same revelation. It was not a question we asked our parents.

The more contemporary book I feel most badly about not having read is 2666. Again, I have two copies, my initial purchase and one bought in a panic when I thought I had lost the first one in a move.

Apart from these, there are all the other could/ should read books, but none that really nag at me. I have a completely irrational belief that I will get to them all someday.

>68 SassyLassy: Trollope Street — just think how much more confused you would have been if they'd named it after Anthony's mother. :-)

Losing a copy of 2666 can't be easy.

I have slightly under 4000 books in Your Library but not in Read - which is not entirely accurate, I keep finding books not marked Read that I read long ago, long before LibraryThing. But still.

I have quite a few "classics" around that I intend to read someday - most of Austen and the Brontes (I read Jane Eyre recently; thought it was rather eh), Moby Dick (which I may have read, at least an abridged version of...or not). The Name of the Wind, An Instance of the Fingerpost...but honestly, so few times I've finally led myself to read one of the classics and been happy to have done so. Aside from checking something off the list (I don't have an actual list, but that foggy list of "what everyone should have read"); that's at least a minor pleasure, if the book wasn't too awful. Some of them turn out uninteresting at every level, some are repulsive (I have at least finally convinced myself that I _may_ stop reading if something's really awful. I usually flip to the end and unless the last scene is wonderful consider it done), a very few have been mildly interesting. I don't think I've ever read one of these famous classics and felt, afterward, as happy and enriched as I have with some minor, more modern works. Which makes it less likely that I will pick up the next classic.

Between that and my instinctive refusal to read what I'm told to read, it is quite likely that a good many of those famous works will go unread by me to the end (unless I get desperate...). I'm _trying_ to read through my load of unread books - I want the space under my (loft) bed back! But it goes slowly. And I tend to pick the small, short, light books in order to up my count of BOMBs, rather than the big dense ones.

I do have a bunch of, mostly science and science history books - nonfiction, very dense, but I believe worth reading. I read those in small doses - a chapter at a time, usually at the table, and then go read something lighter. Depending on the book, it may take me months to read, or I may get caught up in it and take it from table to sofa and finish it off. The next one I want to read is Mauve - it sounds fascinating, but I have lost it (in my house...somewhere) three or four times. And found it again, while I was reading something else, and put it in some place where I could find it easily again...and I don't remember where that was (a different place each time). Very frustrating. Can't find it as an ebook, either (at least, not at a price I'm willing to pay).

Anyway - those I'm looking forward to reading. I've found some that were awful (though I think I finished all of them), some that were badly written but had enough interesting information to be worth reading, and a good many that were fascinating both as stories and as providers of information. I'm much happier to read those than the "classics".

>65 dchaikin: ". . . all those books I want to read, or want to have read and they far outnumber what I have read or can read this lifetime. So, essentially, they are infinite. So I make lists. ...and then buy more books."

Or to put it another way, due to the fact that I enjoy occasionally reading obscure books, sometimes I'll have a friend as me, "Why are you reading that book?" And I'll say, "Because it's on the list." "What list?" "Well, I'm trying to read every interesting book ever written."

>66 cindydavid4: "But that’s the problem with TBR books. You’re not just reading this one book, but subjecting yourself to wanting to read many other books because of that one book."

Or, to look at it in a way that we (or anyway most of us, including me) all choose not to, you're not just reading a book, but designating some other book to the "Will never get to" list.

Nevertheless, it is important to continue to buy books, because it's not just about what I'll have time to read, but what my library will tell my biographers. It's not about compulsion, it's about posterity! Shoot, buying books is just fun, is all!

25: Read or Unread

Short answer: both read and unread. I'm less a goal-oriented reader and more an organic one. Occasionally, the word "should" whispers in my ear, but I like what someone once said to me, "why should all over yourself?" I collect books that sound interesting to me (with the intention of reading them, of course), surround myself with them and see where it goes (and it's always interesting). I seem to be immune from wanting to reading what "everyone else" is reading (I've never read a Stephen King novel...and I'm from Maine! I've no desire to read Ulysses or Catch-22 and thankfully, I've never desired to read every Joyce Carol Oates novel. There are authors I still wish to read but at this point in my life maybe I'll get to them, maybe I won't.

I definitely have a mental list of books I'll get to eventually. I read enough that I could have read one book by most of the 'classic' authors, but there are othe factors to my reading, like reading from a lot of different countries every year and the fact that I need to keep a high ratio of non-fiction in order to be a happy reader. Eventually I'll get to War and Peace, an Anthony Trollope, a Wilkie Collins, etc... (maybe when I've run out of George Eliot novels). I don't plan out my reading, so it's easy to get to the end of the year and realize I haven't read by a book by XYZ author.

My book buying habits lean toward buying books I love and want to have available to re-read rather than new-to-me books, so my own shelves don't scream at me too much in this regard.

>72 avaland: Thank you. I finally see someone like myself here. I don't really have a list of "what I should read." I have tons of TBR books and tend to read them organically also. The shelves do not scream at me, they just whisper enticingly whenever I go into my home library/ book room or anywhere else they are located my house.

>72 avaland: >74 LadyoftheLodge: ditto cubed.

The books that I 'should have read' by now Ive tried and not like (see my post above about ulysseus) I am willing to expand my reading to new books, new authors, new ideas, but their is no should in my reading world.

I will say that there are several of my fave books that at one point were on my TBR stack that I had tried a couple of times. Someone tho tells me to try again, and something clicks! A few examples Birds Without Wings cloud atlas life of pi the girl with the dragon tatoo Don't know why these didn't interest me at first; probably just my mood, or being distracted by another shiny cover. It is the reason why I let books stay on my TBR shelves for far longer than necessary - always willing to be convinced to give it one more try.

>75 cindydavid4: I let books stay on my TBR shelves for far longer than necessary - always willing to be convinced to give it one more try.

That's me. And the reason I do it is that once in a while I try something a 3rd time and it turns out to be wonderful book. Right book, right time, and all. I try to hang on to books because you never know. But I feel another purge of my TBR shelves coming up (and I think Catch 22 will probably be out the door this round)

Anna Karenina has been on my shelf for about 5 years. I know I'll love it, I know I'm not put off by chunky books, yet for the life of me I can't think why I keep going past it.

The Grapes of Wrath is another one that's been on my shelf for much, much longer. I want to read it. I feel I should read it. Yet.... To be honest, on that one I've heard a number of people describing it as rather dull, so I think that's putting me off. But one day. Soon. Definitely maybe.

There are lots I have had on shelves for years though only a handful that I feel guilty about. The Modern Library 100 Best Novels list came out the year I graduated from high school, and my present from my father and grandmother was a used copy of almost all the books on the list to start my own library with. It was an amazing present and I used to work my way through a few a year but have lost some momentum in recent years.

Other things - I have a few backlog of Katrina related books that I haven’t gotten to yet, and never even bought any of the ones I wanted to read about the BP oil spill. I know very little of the Bible and would love to tackle it some day. The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin I just got a few years ago but has been in my head to get to since grad school. The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spencer seems wonderful but like something I would need to do a lot of supplementary ready with so has always intimidated.

QUESTION 26: FIVE BOOKS: AN ACTIVITY

Go to a bookshelf or a book pile in your residence, and note five books which are adjacent to each other on or in the aforementioned shelf or pile. 1. tell us what the five books are. (feel free to post a photo, if you like) 2. Tell us your history with each of these five books (Read or unread? How did they end up in your library? If read, did you like it, would you recommend? Should you have gotten rid of it years ago...etc)

Try to do this somewhat randomly without preconceived selection. For an extra challenge pick a neglected her perhaps even — gasp — dusty bookshelf or pile you haven’t perused for a while. :-)

Note: If you only have digital books: sort your digital books on your device by something (title, date acquired...whatever), then close your eyes and scroll blindly with your forefinger for a second or two (or more if you have a lot of books). Take the five from the list presented. Or from AnnieMod: "Or after they are sorted go on page 13 (or 52... or 7) and grab the first 5 titles :)"

Can't do it w/ a Kindle.

I'll make a go of this with a shelf selection:



First, let me say that I give away a lot of the books I read (but not all), so many of the books on the shelves might be TBRs or books I haven't given away yet, or something I intend to die with.

1. April Witch by Maigull Axelsson (1997 Award-winning Swedish novel, published in HC in the US , 2002) One of the perks of working in the specific bookstore I worked in for some long was that every month we could chose a free book from the shelves costing no more than $25. I'm fairly certain this is how I picked up this book. More translations of contemporary fiction of all kinds was being published and I became very interested in reading some of it. I remember being mesmerized by this book, and I remember the basics of the story but no longer the details. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend this novel. Here's a short review from PW: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-375-50517-1

2. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call by Anita Rau Badami (hardcover, 2006) Badami is a Canadian of South Asian descent. This book is her third. I enjoyed her first book The Hero's Walk and somewhat less enjoyed her second. I acquired this in 2008 and it seems to me it was a Canadian LTer who mentioned to me there was a third book, perhaps Nickelini? I believe I have read this book...but I'm a bit iffy about it (soooooo many books ago...)

3. Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders by Julianna Baggott. I love Julianna Baggott. Her fiction is interesting and entertaining; her poetry is excellent; and the YA SF trilogy I read was very good* but this book kind of disappointed me. I didn't write a review, so I can't say more. Obviously, not a recommendation.

4. The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge (UK, 1996 copy). No idea how I got this copy. Perhaps a used bookstore. It's about dressmaker; I can relate to that. Did I read it? I think so....

5. Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker (US, 1990) This is one of Baker's stream-of-conscious-slow-time-down-to-a-crawl stories. My favorites are his Vox and The Fermata. I think he can be very clever and entertaining. Why I have this one book, I don't know.

*I'm not a fan of YA novels, generally. But I will check out a favorite author's contribution to the genre on occasion.

NOTE: Since I know you are looking.... To the left of the selected five is the end of the Austen collection, ending with Charlotte, and to the right a JG Ballard collection and a large number of Iain Banks (as opposed to his Iain M Banks books which are elsewhere). Both Ballard & Banks are officially the hubby's.

>80 nohrt4me2: Photo are optional. Are you saying you have no physical books at all? (gasp)

OK, sort your digital books on your device by something (title, date acquired...whatever), then close your eyes and scroll blindly for a second or two (or more if you have a lot of books). Take the five from the list presented. How's that?

Q26: five books: I never thought I'd say this, but my books are too organised for this. Whatever shelf I pick, I'm likely to get a stack of books that are all on the same subject, or by the same author, or (on the TBR shelf) bought around the same time. Difficult to make it random.

To show willing, I picked a book arbitrarily from the middle of my "your books" list, sorted in the most neutral way I could think of (by ISBN), and then looked where that was on the shelf and included two books to the left of it and two books to the right of it. I ended up with:

1. Dublinesca by Enrique Vila-Matas
- Spanish paperback, bought in November 2014 after reading Bartleby & Co by the same author, but stayed on the TBR shelf until April this year. Recovering alcoholic and friends go to Dublin for Bloomsday. Good fun, but very meta.

2. The life and extraordinary adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin by Vladimir Voinovich
- Late-seventies Penguin, in my library since before I joined LT. Guessing from the pencilled price inside the back cover, I think I must have bought it secondhand from De Slegte in pre-euro days, sometime in the nineties probably. I'm pretty sure I've read it, and it's clearly a Svejk-ish satirical novel set in Stalinist Russia, but I don't remember much about it.

3. Candide by Voltaire (starting book)
- English translation, slightly battered Penguin Classics edition, bought new in December 1979 (almost certainly from Sherratt & Hughes in Manchester), when I was rather younger than I am now and still writing my name in the front of books. Read several times since then, I've also read it in French, and I've seen Bernstein's musical version a few times too. But I've never taken much account of Voltaire's advice to cultivate my garden. Perhaps I read it pour encourager les autres.

4. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Nasty American mass-market paperback with blurry print, looks as though it was bought new from the American Book Centre (either The Hague or Amsterdam) some time between 2001 and 2007. I'm sure I'd read it before as a library book, so I must have needed a copy to refer to for some reason. I think of it as one of those books you need to have read, but not one I enjoyed particularly.

5. Het Bureau 1: Meneer Beerta by J J Voskuil
- Dutch paperback, bought new from BOL. Like Dublinesca, this is one that landed on my TBR pile in 2014 and got read in the recent blitz on unread books, but it's one I've been meaning to read since it came out in 1996 — a friend of mine is a big Voskuil fan and was raving about the fun of 5000 pages of typewriter ribbons and paperclips... I did enjoy reading this first part, and mean to continue once the TBR is a bit more under control. I hesitate to recommend it, as it's only available in Dutch or German, but it is an impressively different kind of reading experience.

>82 avaland:

Or after they are sorted go on page 13 (or 52... or 7) and grab the first 5 titles :)

>82 avaland: I understand re organization;we have the same problem (which is why I added 'piles' which seem to be less organized). Some will need to be creative ....

Very interesting V's!

>84 AnnieMod: If that works, go for it!

>83 thorold: ...Non-fiction edition. I tried again until I got a non-fiction book, and discovered some unexpected randomness in my shelving after all:

1. Hugo Greek phrase book (pocket size)
- Bought 1990 before a sailing trip in the Ionian islands. Wasn't very useful, for one thing there wasn't enough nautical stuff in it, and for another every waiter and harbourmaster we met seemed to be able to speak German. I still mean to have a proper go at learning modern Greek...

2. Sans frontières 2 by Michèle and Michel Verdelhan (I'm not making that up!)
- Text-book for one of the French courses I took at work in the late eighties. Either the book or the teacher had what it takes, my French improved dramatically.

3. Introduction to Dutch by William Z Shetter (starting book)
- This was one I bought for self-study before moving to the Netherlands. I can remember buying it during a short visit to Glasgow in 1987, I suppose that must have been the first opportunity I had to visit a big bookshop after hearing that I had got a job on the other side of the North Sea.

4. Holländisch in einem Monat by W Rijkee
- This little book, a Dutch phrasebook for German visitors, was given to me by one of my uncles when I first came to live here, more as a joke than because he thought it would be useful. It isn't dated, but I think it must be from about 1936, when my aunt came from Germany to work in Holland.

5. Making rugs for pleasure and profit by Marion Koenig and Gill Speirs
- Your guess is as good as mine! This was published in 1980, and it looks like one of those books which are only sold in big piles in discount shops. No price label or date. I think I did once have a rug-knotting kit, but gave up because the fibres were making me sneeze; I'm pretty sure there was neither pleasure nor profit. I think it must be in the language section because there isn't a rug-making section.

Most of my books are organized well, so I had to find a more random pile. Obviously this was a non-fiction section of my shelves. Here they are:

1. Do Over by Robin Hemley--A guy returns to past life events to try doing them over. I bought it online perhaps.

2. Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss, Illustrated edition--Beautifully bound in red cloth. I bought it at a Books-a-Million bookstore on Clark Street in downtown Chicago in 2009, when I was there with my sister for an academic conference at which I was presenting a session. The sales receipt is still inside! "Chicago" is spelled incorrectly on the receipt!

3. Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey--Plain black and white cover with Her Majesty's photo on it. Not sure where I got it, probably bought it online, after I read a few historical novels about her.

4. The Chevalier de Saint-George: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow by Gabriel Banat--Part of the Lives in Music Series, published in 2006. I had to special order it. Chevalier de Saint-Georges (Joseph Bologne) was also known as the Black Mozart. A few years ago, I read everything I could get my hands on about him (which is not much, mostly scholarly works or self-pub), and collected all the recordings of his music that I could find. He apparently was quite popular with the ladies and very talented in many ways. I am not sure how I came to know about him, maybe a recommendation from a fellow musician.

5. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear. Acquired in 2007 according to the sales slip inside. Big fat book with nice illustrations and photos.

>80 nohrt4me2: Maybe just take a random letter and pick five titles in a row?

These are from a shelf of books acquired before 1974, i.e. the books of my youth. Each a paperback bought new off the shelf, probably from the Fayette Cigar Store in downtown Lexington, Kentucky - that being the best store for SFF books that I knew about in my teens.

Going purely on memory (no rereads):

1. A Plague of Demons by Keith Laumer (Berkley Medallion, $0.50, 1965) Laumer wrote tons of science fiction adventure stories that I liked, and this might be the best of them. A secret agent of some sort gets injured, and lands in a secret facility run by some agency (not his) that traces itself back to Benjamin Franklin. He's rebuilt into a superman, armor under his skin etc., and discovers he can see monstrous creatures walking among us, invisible to ordinary people. Despite his new abilities the creatures capure him, and he awakes into his final form, as a canned brain operating a giant tank fighting wars on a distant planet. The giant tanks were a motif for Laumer; Charles Platt's interview with him suggests that he may have had some anger-management problems that he worked out through these stories.

2. Catastrophe Planet by Keith Laumer (Berkley Medallion, $0.50, 1966). Earth is in trouble, with volcanoes sprouting everywhere. Don't remember much about this one; the back cover names the protagonist "Mal Irish" and mentions "...the girl who spoke the language of another world, the city under the ocean floor, and the deadly little men who followed him." How could I forget all that?

3. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Ace, $0.95, 1969). Le Guin's classic novel of a planet where people can be either sex, but are neither most of the time. Much the best book of these five. Note what inflation was doing to book prices.

4. Gather, Darkness by Fritz Leiber (Berkley Medallion, $0.50, no publication date for this edition). Darkness again. Here, the darkness of an age opposed to science, and a band of people who are reintroducing science under the guise of witchcraft. Rated highly by most Leiber fans, but not by me.

5. The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (Ballantine Books, $0.75, 1964). A rogue planet suddenly appears in the sky of near-future Earth, and rips the moon apart with tidal forces. A large cast of characters fight to survive, and the new planet turns out to be under the direction of aliens rebelling against the oppressive conformity of interstellar civilization. This and the Le Guin are probably the only titles that would hold up for a modern reader. Note the higher price; at a time where 60,000 words was the standard size for SFF novels, The Wanderer was 70,000, and its great length was remarked on by reviewers. Today, lengths under 100,000 are rare.

#26 From one of my kitchen sink shelves (some of my books are properly ordered but the rest are put on the "oh, space - let me put it there, I will sort them later" shelves and then I never do. So from the one across from my desk

1. Five Stories High: One House, Five Hauntings, Five Chilling Stories - an anthology of 5 stories which I do not remember buying but Amazon tells me I bought it on December 23, 2016 together with a bunch of other genre books, most of which I do remember. it is a 2016 book so I suspect I saw it while ordering the other books (or in a list somewhere?) and got it. It also has a Nina Allan story and I loved her novel an year earlier so I may have gotten it for that.

2. 70% Acrylic 30% Wool by Viola Di Grado - Europa Editions, Translated book, the topic sounded interesting. Apparently bought on January 31, 2013. I remember getting this one. This puts it before I changed apartments so it went into a box and out of it and still never got sorted. :)

3. The Chimney Murder by E. M. Channon - Absolutely no idea what this book is or how it ended up here. It is from a UK publisher (Greyladies) so it may have been around the time I discovered Persephone Books - I like finding new small publishers so I would just go and look for them now and again. Looking at their site now, that makes it very plausible - they are up my alley and the edition looks nice.

4. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon - May 16, 2018 - Bought together with another book - Amazon offered it as a "Frequently bought together" for Stone Mad: A Karen Memory Adventure (which I had not gotten to yet either...) I suspect or I saw it in there while getting it. I remember buying this one, I just really don't remember how it crossed my path initially - the Amazon automatic recommendations are a very likely source due to how I tend to find books usually.

5. McSweeney's 48 (which comes in two paperbooks - one with the issue itself and one with Sorry to Bother You - a screenplay by Boots Riley). It is a miracle that these two were never separated considering how these shelves work. A 2014 issue, bought March 19, 2015 (which is before the move so... even stranger that they are still together but I do try not to split these). I like McSweeney's, I buy them regularly but I seem to rarely read the issues -- and I had not gotten to that one yet.

That was a fun exercise. May be something I want to do every few weeks/months... :)

And I guess these just went high on my "to read" list. And I apparently do have a problem... I keep finding books for which I don't just fail to remember buying but even hearing of :) And I really really need to work through all the books and get them sorted and listed.

>83 thorold: "I never thought I'd say this, but my books are too organised for this. Whatever shelf I pick, I'm likely to get a stack of books that are all on the same subject, or by the same author, or (on the TBR shelf) bought around the same time. Difficult to make it random.

To show willing, I picked a book arbitrarily from the middle of my "your books" list, sorted in the most neutral way I could think of (by ISBN), and then looked where that was on the shelf and included two books to the left of it and two books to the right of it. I ended up with:"

I'm in the same boat, organization-wise, so I executed a similar exercise, but picked my starting book via the "Random Book of Yours" trigger under Folly/LibraryThing Roulette function:

This turned up TVA: Democracy on the March by David E. Lilienthal



I find that book on my History/World War 2 - era shelf, stacked with some other small paperbacks, which, moving to my desk for a clearer photo, shows us this:



The other four books are:

My Bantam edition copy of Up Front by Bill Mauldin, writings and drawings by one of the most famous American correspondents of World War Two.

I Saw It Happen: Eye-Witness Accounts of the War edited by Lewis Gannett

The Pocket History of the Second World War edited by Henry Steele Commager

Werewolf: The Story of The Nazi Resistance Movement 1944 - 1945 by Charles Whiting

I haven't read any of them yet (maybe a bit of the Mauldin). I have them because I'm fascinated by a) WW2 history b) used books and c) old paperbacks. Werewolf is the only recently published book in the stack.

Ironically (maybe, kinda, sorta), the original book turned up by my random spin is about the Tennessee Valley Authority and not about the war, but due to its vintage is sits on the shelf with the WW2 books.

This was fun. Great idea!

OK did the random Kindle thing suggested above. I got:

Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Vampire + Stephen King = Complete escapism. I usually read this type of thing around Christmas.

Till the Well Runs Dry by Lauren Frances Sharma
Did not read, forgot I had it, not sure why I bought it, but I think it might be set in the Carib, and I like books about that part of the world.

11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King
More Christmas reading. Definitely remember this one. Among King's best. The miniseries was pretty good.

1919 by John Dos Passos
I enjoyed the first book in the America series in grad school, but petered out on this one. The writerly pyrotechnics kind of obscure the story. Plus hard to keep The characters straight. You need notecards.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
Based on the story of one of Brigham Young's wives. I recall very little about the plot or the actual memoir of the wife on which the novel was based, which the novel inspired me to read. I think we had just finished watching Big Love on DVD. I remember the cover of the book, which was in b/w on Kindle was of a woman's back. She was wearing a chemise and had an impossibly thick blonde braid. Salacious come on.

My physical library is also too organized for this one - 2 shelves of all architecture books, mostly bought for school; 3 shelves of music books mostly from Oxford U Press via boyfriend; several shelves of fiction bought who knows when or where because I wanted to read i - yawn! So I went with the bottom of the first page of my LT library organized by date entered. These were all from Amazon in 2018. The ones I’ve read needed reviews so this little exercise knocked that off the list!

You're Never Weird on the Internet (almost) by Felicia Day - I have a huge crush on Felicia Day from her web series The Guild. Day was a child prodigy violinist and math wiz, was home schooled by quirky parents, and started college at 16. So somewhat predictably grew up fairly awkward and like many of us found refuge on the internet. She makes the decision to become an actress, and the last half of the book details that journey as well as her process. I’m not a huge memoir person because honestly most people just aren’t that interesting but this one pulled me along well enough. Nothing too memorable here but she was just as likable on the page as on the screen.

You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine A. Harmon - I’m about halfway through this one after putting it down for about a year. A really nice catalog of artist mapmakers. Many interesting ideas about what a map is and should tell. Need to get back to this one.

The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader - Pretty sure I came across this because of a CR review. A short-ish novel about a woman who anchoress to become the anchoress of an abbey. In the middle ages the practice of walling up a woman gave prestige and extra bonus holiness to the church. I’m extremely fascinated and a little repulsed by the practice, but books about characters who chose these constrained lifestyles interest me greatly. What I liked about the book was it’s quietness. We are with Sarah through her very human struggles with the physical and emotional tolls of such a life, and though there are dramatic parts, it still feels sort of subdued.

The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh - A children’s book that always stuck in my mind so I wanted to revisit it. A group of people are colonizing a planet where all the plant life is glass, including the crops they have brought.

High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing by Audrey Petty - I’ll get to this one soon. This is part of the Voices of Witness series which is really well done. This I got as part of reading up on public housing I’ve been doing while working with the National Public Housing Museum.

double post

>93 janemarieprice: I have You Are Here! a present from a fellow reader who loves maps as much as I do! I also read the Anchoress. I was repulsed as well but fascinated how she was able to make it works somewhat.

I have a simiar problem to yours; my fiction is shelved alphabetically hardback from paper; non fiction by art books, biographies, history, travel, essays.....Since travel is my fav subject i'll pick from that secton

and well look at that - I have 5 travel narratives in a row by one of my favorite writers Tony Horowitz. Started out as a journalist in the middle east (where he met his wife author Geraldine books) He passed away a few months back, very young. Amazing historian, traveler and journalist, made some very dry subjects really interewsting.

anyway here they are in the order i read them

Blue Latitudes, following in Captain Cooks footprints so to speak

A Voyage Long and Strange Rediscovering the new world Brushes away the myth of plymoth rock and the first explorers from Europe.

Bagdhad Without a Map book about his time as a journalist in particular in Iraq and Iran during the revolution

Devil May Care short studies of 50 American explorers

Confederates in the Attic Dispatches from the Unfinished Cilvil War Starts out being about Civil War reinactors, and spreads out from there into the history of the south

How I came to read them: Bagdad without a Map I picked up in a little bookstore in Salt Lake City and got hooked. Read Confederates next, and just kept looking on the net for his next book. Darn it....

Also read his wifes book, I like her non fiction better . But she is well known for people of the book year of wonder and March

triple post!!! sorry

Pardon the glare, the picture is from my extensive tbr shelves in my office. The five books I tried to capture were

Paradise Lost - the only one I have read parts of. This book came when my mother sold her townhouse in 2007.

City of Glass : The Graphic Novel by Paul Auster -
A used book I bought in 2011 from a half-price bookstore

Indian Country by Peter Mathiessen - purchased used in 2012. I listed it as from “Bookworm Yard Sale“. Maybe the bookstore closing? I don’t remember what I meant.

Indian Wars of the Great Plains by Stephen Longstreet - acquired used along with the book above

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole - oops. It’s not in my LT catalogue. An off the record book

I meant to edit the rest of the books out of picture, but they look so nice to me in their randomness, I left them in. The photo bombers are Empires of the Indus : The Story of a River by Alice Albinia, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Middlemarch, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Gathering by Anne Enright, and, glared out, The empire of the steppes; a history of central Asia by René Grousset

LT's book randomizer choose the middle book which is on my theater shelf. A little background: in college I got sucked into the theater community and then went on to grad school for production management and now work for a performing arts organization.

Arcadia might have been my introduction to Tom Stoppard. A friend directed a college performance and I helped build the scenery. I loved the geekiness of it (a play about math!) and the multiple story lines.

I did the lighting design for a college production of Miss Julie. It takes place over midsummer night and so the sun never quite sets and the night-time scenes have a twilight feel. I was using blues and purples and accidentally made one of the costumes, a red skirt, glow. They ended up having to re-fit it for a different character that the director wanted to be the focus of the pantomime.

The Heidi Chronicles was one of the plays put on by my college's summer-stock company. We all lived in the same house, had day-jobs on campus, and shared housework/cooking. For each of the four different productions we each had different roles/jobs -- if you were acting in one, you were the house manager or the sound board operator for another. I was the stage manager for this show, but what I remember about it is that there was a reference to our college in second act and we had to put a sign in the lobby stating something to the effect that we did not add it to the script. Also, the company manager that created the sound design choose awesome songs for in-between the scenes and I still have a cassette tape of his soundtrack.

I saw a production of The Duchess of Malfi in London when in school. I remember the unrelenting horror of the show and, in particular, one gruesome death scene that goes on and on and on and then is interrupted by a scene with the Cardinal after which the character returns in order to continue dying. At this point it was too much and I whispered to a classmate "I'm not quite dead yet" and started three rows tittering. Ooops.

Spring Awakening is a play I enjoyed reading but have not managed to see performed.

>98 ELiz_M: the randomizer chose well for you. Great stories behind those books. (I tied it 3 times, then went with my own sense of (lesser?) randomness)

>87 LadyoftheLodge: We started a knitting group at the bookstore around the time Eat, Knits... came out. We named it: "Eats, Knits and Leaves" (there were always refreshments).

Such interesting books from everyone and it's only Sunday! This is kind of fun. Maybe I'll have a go at a pile before the week is out, or maybe I have a random enough nonfiction selection...

>98 ELiz_M: I loved the August Wilson plays. We saw a series of them at the Indiana Repertory Theater, one each year for several years running. Radio Golf and Gem of the Ocean were my faves.

>100 avaland: This was a great idea and a very fun exercise.

Q26

After about a dozen false starts - I've catalogued a lot of books I don't have on my shelves - the randomizer picked L'Islam imaginaire: la construction médiatique de l'islamophobie en France, 1975-2005 (Imaginary Islam: the media construction of islamophobia in France) by Thomas Deltombe. The subtitle is pretty explanatory. A good, fairly academic book, about a subject close to my heart, by left-wing, militant publisher La Découverte. Because I have separate shelves for fiction and non-fiction, all the books next to it are also non-fiction. They’re also loosely grouped according to subject matter.



To the left of it, I have:
- Painting & Drawing, a Pocket Encyclopedia, given to us by my in-laws before they moved house. Does what it says on the tin.
- La plus belle histoire des femmes (The greatest women's history/story), a collection of essays by feminist historians Françoise Héritier, Michelle Perrot, Sylviane Agacinski, Nicole Bacharan, bought second-hand at Gibert, a bookshop chain with a sizeable academic section. I don't remember much about its content, but I do remember finding it a bit lightweight and uneven.
- Déclaration des droits de la femme : Femme, réveille-toi ! (The Declaration of the Rights of Women and other writings) by eighteenth-century women's suffrage advocate Olympe de Gouges. Of historical interest, but she was a women of her time: classist and racist.
To the right:
- Islamophobie : Comment les élites françaises fabriquent le "problème musulman" (Islamophobia: how the French élites create a "Muslim problem") by Abdellali Hajjat and Marwan Mohammed. Thought-provoking, also from La Découverte and bought in Gibert.
- Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. I bought it in 2018, after it kept popping up on online media. It's interesting and definitely worth a read as a primer on race issues, which is why it's back on the bestseller list now, given current events. I don't regret buying it because it's good to support new voices, but it wasn't a book I *needed* to read. A lot of the content was already available on Eddo-Lodge's website. Also, I was expecting - and wanted to read - (my fault - I should have done more research) a cathartic book by and for racialised people about how racism wears you down (and what to do about it). This was a book called Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race that talked to White people about race for 250 pages.

My books are arranged in alphabetical order on the bookshelves and so a random sample is quite likely to pick out five books by the same author. However new arrivals do get crammed on the front area portion of the shelves and sit horizontal rather than vertical and I found a collection of five books so arranged:

1. The secret of Sinharat/People of the Talisman This is schlock science fiction from 1951 by Leigh Brackett. It is published by Ace books with a recommendation that when you finish the first novel you turn the book over to read the second novel. I don't think I have ever owned a book printed out in this fashion.

2. Les Enfants Tristes - Roger Nimier A french novel published by Gallimard in 1951. The year of publication was my reason for buying it and so I have no idea what it is about, apart from Sad Children perhaps.

3. Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France I read about this on torontoc's thread (I read everybody's reviews) and the historical aspect intrigues me. My French village was not in Vichy France, but what the mothers and fathers of the local people did during the war seems to be a closed subject. Its probably a bit rude to ask them "what their parents did in the war" (most of the French people in the village have lived here all their lives) and so reading about another village is the next best thing.

4. Autour de la Lune Jules Verne - science fiction before the genre was invented and Verne stands out as a giant in the proto-science fiction genre.

5. L'Astrada Marciac Saison 2019-20. This is a programme for the coming events at my local theatre and is of course a rather sad casualty of Covid -19. I usually book a selection of concerts throughout the year as the more you book in one hit the cheaper the ticket prices. Unfortunately most of the concerts I booked for this year were scheduled for March, April and May and all were cancelled.

>103 baswood: I get that about concerts! We book a series of theater and concert events for the same reason--good ticket prices! Our last two plays were cancelled (the last one was Murder on the Orient Express in March) and also our last two Philharmonic concerts were cancelled. Three dinner theater plays were also cancelled. We just found out that my husband's national Navy veterans reunion is also cancelled for this year. Very sad casualties, alas.

This is kind of a fun exercise! Like a lot of others, I have very organized bookshelves, and was worried I might end up with something very same-y, but fortunately the "Random books from your library" feature picked one in the middle of an interestingly varied stretch of shelf. Although I did fudge it just a tiny bit. I was going to do the selected book and the two on either side, but that would have given me two books in the same series at the end, which didn't seem terribly interesting, so I did three before and one after, instead.

So. From the paperback fiction shelves:

1. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

A very battered copy I'm pretty sure I got at a library sale. I read this one in college, something like a quarter of a century ago, so I don't remember it terribly well. What I do, vaguely, remember is that it was dense enough to make my head hurt a little, and that, while I did find it interesting, I never quite understood the hype about it. Which may have provoked a very tiny amount of shame. Isn't this a book that intelligent people are supposed to love and have lots to say about? I don't think I had lots to say about it immediately after I read it. I certainly don't now.

2. When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

A science fiction novel. I definitely bought this one used, probably at a used bookstore, maybe at a library sale. According to my records, I read it in 2002. Have to say, I don't remember a whole lot about it, either. I couldn't tell you what the plot was. I think I liked it OK, but didn't go gaga over it or anything. I did always vaguely intend to read the sequel, but never got to it. (Well, I haven't yet, anyway. Never say never!) I remember seeing this one recommended or talked about in SF circles, possibly as being an underrated gem, and I have the vague memory that I finally picked up a copy after seeing a friend reading it, although I never actually talked to said friend about it at all.

3. Approaching Oblivion by Harlan Ellison

A short story collection. I also bought this one used somewhere; that's true of a lot of my paperbacks. Apparently I read it in 2007. I'm actually surprised to discover that this was the only Ellison on the shelf (although I do have his Deathbird Stories on the hardback shelves, and a couple of screenplay-related things, as well). It seems like I read a lot of Ellison in my younger days, but I guess I read most of it in anthologies, or in story collections I got from the library. His stuff was pretty weird, but the best of it was brilliant. That having been said, it doesn't seem like any of his most memorable stories are in this one. Maybe that's why it took me until 2007 to read it, I don't know.

4. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A very, very battered copy -- half the back cover is missing -- that I got at a library sale. I read this one in 2015, and felt kind of bad for taking that long to get to it, as it certainly seems like one of those Big Important Books that one really ought to read. This being my most recently read of the five, I remember it a lot better than the others. I remember having complicated thoughts and feelings about it, which involved an appreciation for Ellison's talent and great respect for what he was doing, even while I didn't exactly love it as a novel.

5. Bloodlist by P. N. Elrod

The only one of these five that I bought new! Looks like I read this in 1999. It's the first book in the "Vampire Files" series, featuring an intrepid reporter in, I wanna say, the 1930s, who, in this first book, is unexpectedly turned into a vampire. He then makes use of his undead state to fight mobsters and investigate crime, or something like that. There are twelve books in this series, according to LT, and apparently I made it through eleven of them before losing interest. I remember it as a fun, light, actiony thing, and fairly enjoyable. I am at least 90% certain that the reason I started reading it was because I heard that one of the books a little later in the series had a couple of characters who were based on ones from the TV show Blake's 7, which I may have been slightly obsessed with and am still ridiculously fond of.

>109 cindydavid4: My intro to Elison was on a back pack trip with a boyfriend. By the campfire he read 'I have no mouth yet I must scream' thats all it took to make me a fan, read most of his short stories (boyfriend wasn''t too bad either :)

>103 baswood: the 50s had lots of different experiments with print and narratives IIRC; I think thats when the make your own adventure started. Lots of fun

Autour de la Lune Jules Verne Not the first sci fi; I am reading a fascinating book by Lady Margaret Cavendish, who wrote a book in 1656 while in exile in france during the commonwealth. the blazing world Im just finished the introduction which is a biography of the author. eager to read the actual book; which may actually be the first sci fi, or at the very leastmthe first sci fi written by a woman that was published

>106 cindydavid4: I think "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" was probably my introduction to Ellison, too. It's been seared into my memory ever since.

>106 cindydavid4: Ah ..... if we are talking about the first science fiction book then I have read the following

AD 130 Lucian of Samosata - Trips to the moon

1623 - Tommaso Campanella - The City of the Sun

1627 - Sir Francis Bacon - The New Atlantis

1638 - Francis Goodwin - The Man in the Moone

I have also read The Blazing World

Oh, ok then! Looks like I have more to read! (tho i think blazing world is still the firs known woman authored book - Unless you have more?)

>105 bragan: Are you sure the touchstone for your Ellison is correct? I am thinking it is a different book. I have Invisible Man by Ellison on my shelf too.

two authors with the same last name: I was talking about Harlan Ellison, sci fi writer, You are referring to Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible man

....

As with others my bookshelves are very organized, so I've given a fiction and a non-fiction slice.

Cards of Identity by Nigel Dennis - My dad's college copy, which he and his friends were obsessed with. He gave it to me when I was 17, though it didn't grip me the same way.

Poor Cow by Nell Dunn - A book I discovered through an LT thread, and really enjoyed.

Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel - This book checked Samoa off my global reading list, and was a great (if challenging) read.

Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor - My mom actually bought this copy, in the year before she died. I introduced her to the podcast, which she adored, but never got to read the book. I have read it, and recommend it if you like the podcast.

Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell - My favorite Victorian novelist, I couldn't pass up this Penguin Clothbound series edition. I find the humor in this still so relevant (it's not really a novel but related pieces).

Obviously there's a women's history/activism theme in my non-fiction shelves. Any spot I picked would have found at least one.

Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women by Carol Dyhouse - One of my favorite ER wins, though I gave away that copy and replaced it with this edition with the cooler cover.

For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Expert's Advice to Women by Barbara Ehrenreich - A book I still haven't read, but love the idea of.

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War by Peter Englund - WWI is a sometimes special interest and I think this was another LT thread sourced book. It was a good read for me and spectacular read for my dad.

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America by Lillian Faderman - One of those books which has been lingering on my to-read list for too long. A friend in my LGBT ground unloaded a lot lesbian history texts on the rest of us.

Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America by Dana Frank - This book was mentioned on BookRiot, and I could only get a print copy. It's a GREAT read, really interesting and important (though very short).

How is everyone getting their pictures on to this thread? I remember doing that years ago, but it took a lot of steps and moving the picture between devices. I don't remember how I had to do it, but I'm wondering if there is now a quick and easy way to take a pic on my phone and post it to a thread. Thanks

>110 LadyoftheLodge: Whoops, yeah, touchstones got confused with H.G. Wells. Which I probably should have thought to check for, honestly. Fixing it!

1. Take the photo
2. Upload it to your gallery here in LT: http://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/MEMBERNAME
Select the junk drawer for the picture location.
3. Grab the image path and post it here the same way you add a cover to a thread.

PS: you can always add it to a site outside LT as well of course but this is the fastest and cleanest way if you do not have a usual place. :)

I'm going to cheat and have another go, since I forgot to add pictures for the first ones I did. Had to click on the randomiser several times before it found books that were not in the middle of a long run by the same author and also actually present on my shelves...

    

Fiction

— P D James, The lighthouse — UK paperback, bought and read in 2013. Old-fashioned country-house mystery, complete with butler, smuggled into the 21st century somehow.
— P D James, A certain justice — similar to above, but a US edition this time. One of her "I hate successful career-women" murders, probably due for pruning next time I need a space on the "J" shelves
— Willem Jardin, Monografie van de mond — Dutch trade paperback, bought on publication in 2008, signed by the author (husband of someone I was working with at the time). Postmodern novel about butchers, dentistry, and the holocaust in Amsterdam, a kind of Mulisch/Sebald mashup. I liked it, and it got a few good reviews when it came out, but it seems to have sunk without trace, as so many novels do.
— Elfriede Jelinek, Lust — German paperback, bought at Hugendubel in Munich when I was escaping from Glühwein and nutcrackers for a few minutes in December 2014, read a few months later. The home-life of the Austrian bourgeoisie, lovingly described by someone who can't wait to see them all lined up against the wall and shot.
— Herbert Jenkins, Mrs Bindle — 1920s hardback, bought secondhand in pre-LT days, probably some time in the 90s. I knew of Herbert Jenkins (1876-1923) as the London publisher of most of P G Wodehouse's early books, and was curious to see what he was like as a writer. Answer: patronising as anything! Comic stories about a working-class housewife, written by a middle-class man of obviously conservative views. Technically clever, but cringe-making.

Non-Fiction

This time it came out in the History section:

— David Cannadine, History in our time and Class in Britain — both hardbacks, bought secondhand. One has a flyer in it for a lecture by David McCullough in September 2004, so that was probably when I bought it. There are three other books by Cannadine on the same shelf, including his famous Decline and fall of the British aristocracy, but for some reason Christopher Hill and Christopher Clark have sneaked in between the two groups...
— Martin Scott, Medieval Europe — seems to have been bought in the early 90s, I don't remember much about it. I think it was a bit school-textbookish
— Michael Foot, The pen and the sword — 1984 reprint of Foot's classic 1957 book about Jonathan Swift's relationship with his political patrons, looks as though I bought it in the 90s as well
— Roy Porter, Enlightenment — looks as though I must have bought it new around the time it came out in 2001. Don't remember much about it, I think it was a pretty good readable summary of 18th century intellectual life in England and Scotland.

---

>112 mabith: I've been meaning to read Odd girls and twilight lovers since the nineties! I used to subscribe to Lambda literary review, and there seemed to be an advert for it in every issue: that title has obviously got lodged deep in my subconscious. One of these millennia I'll get to it.

(Edited to take up fewer column-inches)

>116 thorold: I have a PD James section also.... Gosh, still have a few hardcover Colin Dexter and Reginald Hill still about but managed to let go of the paperbacks. Why do I keep the HCs around, I don't know (they look good on the shelves?)

>106 cindydavid4: I found The Description of a New World called The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish on gutenberg.org.

thx!

QUESTION 27: BOOKS THAT GET UNDER YOUR SKIN.

Note: this is NOT about ‘disturbing’ books: those which use excessive violence, abuse of various kinds (i.e. Blood Meridian, Wasp Factory, Fight Club, most of Stephen King…etc)…this is a somewhat more nuanced question…. (and bear with me as it’s wordy).

Have you read a book or books that unsettle you in some way. Books that have presented issues which have offended you in some way; your sense of morality, or your idea of how the world should be? Did it offend you enough to make you angry or upset? Perhaps you discussed the book with others who had read it. Perhaps you ranted in your review about what bothered you. Perhaps you attacked the author assuming he/she wrote from some particular bias. Books that fall in this category might be different for different people, what might trigger you might not someone else, but some books that seem to bother a broad swarth of readers include: We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Slap, and various dystopias like Never Let Me Go and The Road.

This question was inspired by a conversation with Nickelini over on my thread around reactions to Peter Stamm’s novel To the Back of Beyond which features a father/husband abandoning his family . But then we drifted into other “unsettling” books and Joyce quoted herself from a post originally on her thread, and I re-post her quote here with permission, as an example of a kind of unsettling books.

I do find it interesting how some readers absolutely freak out about abandonment novels. I have 8 books tagged "disappearing mother" in my collection, and of those that are about a woman who left her family, all have scathing reviews about what the character did (as opposed to how the book is written). In the case of To the Back of Beyond, many complained that his behaviour was never explained, but I've read books where it is explained and then people just say "that's no excuse" or "she should have found a different solution." We all have our trigger issues, but if parent abandonment upsets you, rather than tearing into the author for writing about it, how about read something else instead. Maybe that's just not the book for you.

Do you think it’s the author’s intention is to unsettle the reader? If so, why do you think it was done, and did it work? Can you tell us about a book or books that unsettled you in some way; how you reacted to it at the time, and how you think of now

Hmm, books that offend my intelligence bother me more than books that offend my sense of morality.

I would say that everything I have ever read by Ayn Rand is offensive on both levels. A former colleague was a Rand scholar, and I hope to have years shaved off my time in Purgatory for never having opined at a faculty meeting that "Rand scholar" is an oxymoron.

I was cordial but avoided this person for 12 years as much as possible.

#27

If we read only books that agree with, we will never explore the world and understand what other people think. I understand how people may get triggered based on their own past but when I read fiction, I had learned to disassociate enough so I can read about pretty much anything. And I hate the "trigger" labels that a lot of publishers and authors decide to add to their books. I get it - people need to know what is in the book but... I wish there was a middle ground where you can chose to see or not the labels. If the writer writes badly about an issue, then fine, tear into them. But the inability to separate the character thoughts and actions from the author and blaming the author for what a character does shows a bit if immaturity - I posted somewhere earlier this week that I needed a likeable character when I was 15 but not anymore and that applies here. Plus fiction is a safe way to explore some of the darker sides of a human psyche and this is important.

Some authors write with the idea to shock the reader. When it is part of the story and well connected, that is their right and I don't get offended. But when the shocking factor is added just for the sake of a shock (and they are not writing horror) or when they use it as a shortcut of actually writing a proper scene, I have a bit of an issue with them. A lot of the understanding of shocking and disturbing things is cultural and personal - different things are acceptable in different cultures. Throwing them into a novel without connecting and exploring them (and/or leading into them) won't translate outside of your cultural interpretation. Even things that we consider universal may translate differently across cultures.

Which does not mean I will read anything - a non-fiction book that denies evolution is something I would never read. Or that Earth is flat. But a novel with characters with those views? As long as they are handled properly, why not.

That's really where I draw the line - I am a LOT less tolerant with my non-fiction reading - I do not want everyone to share my opinion but when theirs is extremely prejudiced, I am not going to touch it.

What offends me in fiction is stupidity - especially when used by the author because they wrote themselves into a corner and cannot get out without making an otherwise rational character do something extremely stupid.

>121 nohrt4me2:

Well, you can be a Rand scholar - you can make a career out of explaining the problems in her novels (as a philosophy or as a literature -- they fail on both counts for me)... :)

Q27: Unsettling

There's a difference between "unsettling" and "offensive". Offensive is easy: once you recognise that you don't have any common ground with that writer's views, you put the book aside and forget it. Or, if you're that way inclined, you get up and make a noisy fuss about why people shouldn't be allowed to say such things (prosecution, banning and auto-da-fé optional).

Unsettling is more than that: it's writing that pulls you into engaging with a moral situation outside your comfort zone and doesn't let you easily dismiss it. (Which might well be a definition of what all good writing is supposed to do.) L'étranger is probably the textbook example of that.

When I did a search of my catalogue for the word "unsettling", the two authors who came up most often were Patricia Highsmith and Javier Marías. Very different writers, but they are both skilled at taking you to places where you'd rather not be. But I also used it of Mating birds, which I read a few days ago — that's unsettling in much the same sort of way Camus is.

>121 nohrt4me2: I thought RAND scholars were the people working out how the USA could win nuclear wars...

>122 AnnieMod: and >123 thorold: Coprolite research is also valid scholarship. Possibly Ayn Rand studies fall into that slot.

It just so happens that this weekends NYT book review has a feature called Psychological Thrillers that will mess with your head: in these four deeply unsettling novels, nothing is as it seems

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/books/review/psychological-thrillers-new-this...

When I read a book that stops me, whether its subject matter, agenda, or upsetting theme, I consider whether there are reasons to continue reading - the writing, character, plot. If its too much for me, or if the author is hammering the agenda too much (one very popular woman author does that constantlly, cannot read her), I stop reading it. It doesn't upset me, or offends me, just don't want to waste my time with books I don't care for. So just what is 'unsettling' Reading question led me to immediately think of psych thrillers that I generally love. so thats how I will answer; need to take a look at my shelves for the ones that have stuck with me.

I have been unsettled by some books, creeped out might be more like it. I love fairy folk tales that are rewritten So it was without a second thought that I picked up Book of Lost Things For much of the book it gave me what I expected, but there is a scene towards the end that really shook me up, startled me, and made me wonder why the author wrote it like that. Still enjoyed the book but am careful about who I recommend it to

OK, I'm going to have to think about this for a minute. In the meantime, I finally got around to answering the last question (I do this every time, don't I?)

FIVE BOOKS
Well, unlike most of you my books are NOT well organized. There are some thematic runs (art books, oversized coffee table books, NYC books, NYRBs), but those also break down a bit into what fits where, and then there are many many shelves that have more to do with when I got their contents than anything alphabetical or subject-based. In search of the most random of the random, here are five books that currently live on my bedside table:



(l.-r.) An old copy of May Sarton's The Fur Person, one of the sweetest books about cats around. I bought it on the street for a dollar or so—this is the cover:


Citizens, Simon Schama's history of the French Revolution. Once upon a time I decided I was going to read a chapter of this every Sunday night before bed, a plan that went belly-up pretty quickly. But it stays there because... because SOMEDAY I WILL! Really.

What There Is to Say We Have Said, the correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. I'm a letter writer and I love to read other people's correspondence. This one is fun to dip in and out of. They talk about their roses a lot, and as a newly devout rose person, I can totally get behind that. But even more so, now that I'm writing a LOT of letters during this confinement, I see why people talk about things like their gardens so much—unless you make carbon copies of your outgoing letters, the best assurance you have of not repeating yourself is to only write about what's immediately on your mind. I have a terribly memory for what I've said to whom, so yeah—I talk about gardening a lot more than I used to.

1,000 Journals Project—I love journals and sketchbooks, and again, this one is fun to dip in and out of. Maybe I have more interesting dreams when I look at it, I don't know.

The Exultant Ark: A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure by Jonathan Peter Balcombe. It's about play and joy in the animal world, and was a gift from my husband, so it's a nice book to keep close.

The other pile of books to the side includes: Doggerel: Poems About Dogs, The Mammoth Book of Dogs, Love Can Be: A Literary Collection About Our Animals, Invitation to a Beheading, The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, The Phantom Museum: And Henry Wellcome's Collection of Medical Curiosities, and an issue of Cabinet. Also: a notebook with notes, a weird brass fish with legs thing from a flea market somewhere in my distant past, and my dear departed very much beloved dog's collar and tags.

QUESTION 27: BOOKS THAT GET UNDER YOUR SKIN

I'm cited in the question, but I have more! .... I read all these a while ago, so my memories are starting to fade, but here I go: Books that others love that got under my skin

The Orenda, by Joseph Boyden -- Winner of Canada Reads.
This historical novel covers the 17th century clash of the Huron, Iroquois and French Catholics. Highly praised, but I found it to be "torture porn". Also, the author set out to make all three sides equally bad and good, but I still found him sneaking in what I call the "magical indigenous person" trope.
Avg LT score of 4.5 stars, I gave it 2.5 stars, which probably was a bit tough in retrospect. The book has some important stories to tell.

The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa -- often called the best novel ever written in Italian, this 1958 novel annoyed me. Sure, women didn't have any level of equality in the 19th century Sicily where the book is set, but the anti-women comments seemed more than just a view from the times.

Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes, and books of this ilk. Brit or American moves to Italy or France, drops out of the rat race, and discovers the joys of life among the simple people. You buy a villa for a song, and the neighbours show up with bottles of olive oil and wine. This trope doesn't annoy me as much when it's a novel, but when they try to pass this off as a memoir, I get rather peeved. Nothing works like this in this incredibly bureaucratic country (speaking of Italy here). These stories are fantasy. I once spent 8 hours buying a train ticket in Italy (and my husband speaks fluent Italian, and his aunt who lives there was helping). I can't imagine trying to renovate a house (well, actually I can because I know people who did it--and spoke fluent Italian--and it was hell!). Don't fall for their lies. You will be sad.

Blindness, by Jose Saramago -- the rape scene. Just no. Sure, in that situation, this event is not difficult to imagine. But had it been written by a woman, there's no way it would have read like this. The author made it clear the rapists actually were bad guys, but there was an underlying vibe to it that was REALLY awful and not in the author's favour. It suggests that Saramago has a nasty side. Unfortunately I own other books by the author and I don't feel like giving him another chance. Perhaps I should.
Avg LT rating is 4 stars, I gave it 1.5

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett -- First, I'm always bothered by the scatology of scenes like the chocolate pie scene. One-thousand percent the recipient deserved it, but I still don't like it. Also, the whole thing just felt like white saviour swooping in to save the day.

...and a non-fiction book that was very popular: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I thought the author exploited the family, while talking about how this poor family was victimized and exploited. She played up the criminality and lack of education of a few individuals in the family. She "fought" the family to write the book, and didn't appear to listen to them at all. Like The Help, she posed as the white saviour. There are other ways she could have told the story without being so disrespectful.
Avg rating is 4 stars, I gave it 2

QUESTION 27: BOOKS THAT GET UNDER YOUR SKIN

>122 AnnieMod:, >123 thorold: So well said!

With regards to the original Peter Stamm book that inspired the question, the behavior of the character is never explained. And failing to come up with an explanation of one's own, the reader is left to think about those others who were affected in any way by this behavior. The book, after that initial WTF, leaves one unsettled but thinking....

And if I told you of all the conversations had over We Need to Talk About Kevin while working in the bookstore.... Even while making small talk with an author who was early for her signing, she leaned over and said, "We need to talk about Kevin." So many buttons pushed there for so many women.

I read a lot of Joyce Carol Oates, but seldom her horror. However, I have read several of her books about serial killers. And while her book Zombie reads like horror novel and is about so much more (race in America, for example), there was a scene where he goes to his grandmother's to mow her lawn. He clearly loves her. That bit of humanity revealed was particularly unsettling because we certainly don't want to see the humanity in a monster, do we? I think JCO often uses 'unsettling' as a kind of technique to stir the brain pot, so to speak. (which reminds me of some of the discussion in the nonfiction book recently read, Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side).

>122 AnnieMod: I agree generally about immaturity being at the root of such reviews.

Unsettled: "Not yet resolved" (in at least one dictionary)

>127 Nickelini: I highly recommend trying another Saramago. Blindness is decidedly an outlier in terms of the violence.

I was having trouble thinking of things that unsettle me so I went with books I've reviewed poorly and thought about why. I think generally I'm more offended by poor writing than specific plot points but here's a few I hated.

The Road - Holy shit, the guy loves his kid. What a remarkable edgy concept. Seriously if the idea that a father would do anything in his power to protect his son is surprising to you, go out and meet some different men.

Mean snarky things - a la RIP Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook which felt insulting. Also goes for repetitiveness in general - don't beat me over the head with your concept. If it's good I'll get it.

Grumpy old person turns out to have heart of gold - Water for Elephants and every new Clint Eastwood movie.

>123 thorold: There's a difference between "unsettling" and "offensive". Offensive is easy: once you recognise that you don't have any common ground with that writer's views, you put the book aside and forget it. Or, if you're that way inclined, you get up and make a noisy fuss about why people shouldn't be allowed to say such things (prosecution, banning and auto-da-fé optional).

Unsettling is more than that: it's writing that pulls you into engaging with a moral situation outside your comfort zone and doesn't let you easily dismiss it. (Which might well be a definition of what all good writing is supposed to do.) L'étranger is probably the textbook example of that.

When I did a search of my catalogue for the word "unsettling", the two authors who came up most often were Patricia Highsmith and Javier Marías. Very different writers, but they are both skilled at taking you to places where you'd rather not be. But I also used it of Mating birds, which I read a few days ago — that's unsettling in much the same sort of way Camus is

THIS!!! you said it much better than I could. Agree about Highsmith, others both Hungarian Magda Szabo and Sandor Marai Unsettling and unforgettable

>127 Nickelini: I agree with you about The Leopard (actually couldn't finish it) and The Help. Saramago is one of my favs, I read Blindness years ago and don't remember problems like that should reread it. You really must try one hundred years of solitude for another side of him

I found Henrietta Lachs fascinating - just for the science parts of it alone, but the story itself, how she lived and what her family went through was heart breaking. I actually found the author very respectful to the family, and very generous later. I know she has received some criticism, but I learned much from it. Interesting, she hasn't written another; not sure if the criticism got to be too much

>123 thorold: >130 cindydavid4: "Unsettling is more than that: it's writing that pulls you into engaging with a moral situation outside your comfort zone and doesn't let you easily dismiss it. (Which might well be a definition of what all good writing is supposed to do.) L'étranger is probably the textbook example of that."

Yes, an excellent definition. Going by this description, what comes to mind first for me is Geek Love, not because the main character is so purely and irredeemably evil, but because of the narrator's enduring fascination with and love for that character.

Also, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry for its theme of unremitting despair and The Executioner's Song for its deep dive into depressing circumstances, both individual and societal.

The stories of Uwem Akpan's collection, Say You're One of Them, especially the cold horror of the title story.

I just read, I'm ashamed to say, my first James Baldwin work (not counting essays and interviews), the play Blues for Mr. Charlie, and I was unsettled by the stark fact that the conditions of prejudice and hatred Baldwin described in 1965 have changed very, very little in the U.S. I'm going to take a wild guess that all of his novels and collections will have a similar effect on me. In a similar vein I'd include Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

>130 cindydavid4: >132 rocketjk: Yes, agree completely about Baldwin, Szabo and Marai (as far as I’ve read them).

Just looking quickly round my shelves, Iris Murdoch is another obvious one, especially The black prince and The sea, the sea . In crime fiction, I’d add Fred Vargas and Ian Rankin. But there are lots more.

"Geek Love" (only heard about, have not read) reminds me of the photographs of Diane Arbus. Many of those are unsettling because she seems deliberately attempting to rub the viewer's nose in something. There is a kind of contempt for the viewer, as in, "here's one, you sick sod."

Trying to think of a book that made me feel unsettled in that same way, as if I were being played or exposed or at least involved in a rigged game of "truth or dare."

I don't recall making it through The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski.

UNDER THE SKIN BOOKS
The first book that comes to mind that made me feel intensely played was Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. I read it all the way through, and I have to say I was absorbed the whole time, but when it was over I felt really manipulated by the whole thing. For those who haven't read it, the through line is one of long-term, unrelenting child sexual abuse—but it wasn't just that that made me uncomfortable, but that I felt like the author was using it to kneecap the reader, and I disliked that.

If her goal was to set it up as a modern good-evil parable, I feel like she missed—the evil was just too evil, and the good too good (morally, physically, financially, and in the four main characters' possession of fabulous first names—not a John or a Bob among them). The psychological exploration of how life damages a soul was well done, but for all the expounding on the dynamics of long friendships, they didn't always jell for me—maybe because two of the four friends fell out of focus about halfway through and that synergy never quite came back (as it will in life, granted, but this was maybe too important a part of the plot to give over to realism). I'm not sure I bought the whole setup, for all its emotional pounding. The book was well written, but the longer I sat afterward the more I felt manipulated by the story, and I think I like it less on reflection than when I finished.

Since it has come up already, I'll say We Need to Talk About Kevin annoyed me on a different level. I didn't buy the mother as a mother at all—there was something about her emotions, as written, and her reactions that felt pasted on to me. I was also a lot younger when I read it—though my son was in high school at the time—so maybe having lived a bit longer and enlarged my worldview I would be more inclined to accept the mother's character as written. But at the time, she just felt off to me, and again—I felt manipulated by the whole setup.

As far as work that got under my skin and disturbed me that I think is really good, and that I feel accomplished exactly what it set out to do, I'll offer up Mark Sloukas's short story "The Dog," in his collection All That Is Left Is All That Matters. It absolutely gutted me, to the point where even thinking about it can make me weep—literally, it's like that scene in Dumbo, it's so triggering for me—but not because it was written to be manipulative or push buttons. The opposite, actually. It's a very simple story about a man's dog that starts to sprout razor blades, with nothing overtly horrific or violent or abuse-oriented to it. But it shot right to my most vulnerable soft spot, or a combination of them. It was a very good story (and a great collection, recommended) but it absolutely wounded me, and I don't think I can read it again for many years, if ever. I don't think many other people will have the same reaction I did, but I did—which is wonderful about fiction, yeah? It has that power, and that power can sometimes be really random.

>135 lisapeet: . I'm not sure I bought the whole setup, for all its emotional pounding. The book was well written, but the longer I sat afterward the more I felt manipulated by the story, and I think I like it less on reflection than when I finished.

felt that way about fall on your knees managed to finish it but oh my god I felt like I needed a shower....and really resented the manipulation (interesting another similar that was very well done The Color Purple .Great movie and Would love some day to see the new production of it on Broadway with one of my fave singers Cynthia Erivo playing the lead (first heard of her in the movie Bad Times at the Royal)

Oh just thought of another - short story by Ken Liu The Man who Ended History: a documentary The story is written as a documentary so its different views of different people, focusing on the Japanese atrocities that took place in Unit 731 in Manchuria. Oh my god, Id always heard about the atrocities, but had no idea. They took more than a few pages from Hitler. The end tho, the moral ethical conflict about memory and its loss to history, just sent shivers down my spine. Interesting recently read The Poppy War, a historical fantasy dealing with the same, another book that was unsettling to say the least

Ok one more and I'll stop: Never Let Me Go I loved Remains of the Day but this one was so unspeakably unsettling that I couldn't shake it from my head for a long time. Which I guess is the sign of a good writer. But man.....this is dystopia squared, almost wanted a prequel to explain and answer many questions I had. But then again, maybe that wouldn't be a good idea.

>129 janemarieprice: The Road bothered me in more than one way, but it pissed me off at the beginning with the wife's suicide. In this case I did indeed question the author's attitude towards women. Of course he is known to be a "man's writer" and well, women are not the focus but he dispensed with this one rather quickly. I went back to check my review and realized i had read it in 2007 before we were doing reviews here, but I wrote about it somewhere because I remember noting its use of icons like the gun, shopping cart and Pepsi can (or was it Coke?).

>133 thorold: Wait! Could you explain how Ian Rankin is 'unsettling'? Because Rebus crosses the line from time to time? (I read two Vargas books and found them not my thing).

The Road was difficult to read, but the mother's suicide made sense to me without riling me up. It wasn't as if the author was making a statement about motherhood.

Never Let Me Go was one of the better dystopians, imo. A future in which an exploited group is given "humane" treatment to assuage the conscience of the exploiters seems pretty true-to-life to me. Wasn't that what slave owners argued? "They're happy here. We take of them."

What unsettles me about conversations like this is that they seem awfully ripe for book shaming those who are not deemed sufficiently "woke."

>129 janemarieprice: Grumpy old person turns out to have heart of gold - Water for Elephants and every new Clint Eastwood movie. -- LOL can't disagree with that

>131 cindydavid4: Saramago is one of my favs, I read Blindness years ago and don't remember problems like that should reread it. You really must try one hundred years of solitude for another side of him

I have read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it's by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ;-) My next Saramago will be The History of the Siege of Lisbon because I own it. I might even tackle it later this summer

>133 thorold: Just looking quickly round my shelves, Iris Murdoch is another obvious one, especially The black prince and The sea, the sea - Oh, good to know. I've never read Murdoch even though I own several of her books, including both of those. I'll bump her up the TBR list.

>141 nohrt4me2: um, no. These questions are put up for a fun activity. I never get a sense of judgement here. Disagreement or different pt of view but I see no book shaming here. In fact I've learned a about many books I didn't know and came to see disliked books in a different view- such as Never Let Me Go
I definitly got the 'theyre happy here we'll take care of them' vibe. It unsettled me in the same way other atrocities do, esp when yu realize there is/was no escape or hope. And saying this now after having not read it for a few decades, I think there is some fear of where we are at and where we might be heading

Looking at my shelves I find a few more unsettling works Knowledge of Angels, Stone's Fall The Portrait

>141 nohrt4me2: ack!!!! duh ok I know I have read other saramago stay tuned (slinks away in embarrassment) ok, this one. Gospel According to Jesus Christ

>140 avaland: Rankin — Hmmm. Hard to say precisely what I was thinking. Probably the way Rebus is someone with a very strong moral sense who keeps on doing the job despite the fact that he has absolutely no belief that anything he does will make the world any less bad. The Marseille crime writer Jean-Claude Izzo was another one, even more pessimistic than Rankin.

>145 thorold: I'd agree with that.

Could "unsettling" mean a book that pushes you out of your own milieu? "Unsettling" need not mean "upsetting." Some books are unsettling in a good way.

I have always found Christopher Buckley's books politically or theologically unsettling, but not upsetting.

Buckley's The Relic Master was offensive to a lot of Catholics, but I think we all have to face the more unsavory aspects of our respective heritages. And parts of it made me laugh in spite of myself.

Toibin's The Testament of Mary is one I really liked, but, again, parts of it are unsettling to Catholic sensibilities.

(Then, again, I think if a lot of Catholics really read Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena, they would be unsettled.)

Sorry if comment in >141 nohrt4me2: offended. Years of wrangling with lit curriculum committees and their purity tests still rankle. Perhaps I was projecting.

>120 avaland: BOOKS THAT GET UNDER YOUR SKIN

Non fiction - Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin

The subtitle here The Politics of Domesticated Females says it all. I read this some time ago. It has always been in the back of my mind when discussions of such subject matter arose, but given the last US presidential election outcome, it came back to me in all its hard hitting glory. Yes, Dworkin meant to disturb, that was what she did, but it was for the best of all possible reasons: to move the reader out of a comfort zone and make him/her really think about what she was saying. Unfortunately, the copy I read was from a library and I have never gotten a copy for myself. I should remedy that.

Fiction - The Door by Magda Szabó

This is a book I just finished this month and haven't reviewed as yet. Others have mentioned Szabó above as someone whose work is unsettling. This book, dealing with how we see the world around us to mold it to what we would like it to be, was shattering in many ways. Then I read an article in The New Yorker about Shulamith Firestone's end and it all seemed so awful, the way those in need of support are dismissed by those around them, in fact and fiction.

>148 SassyLassy: Oh I do agree about The Door. I think that one would be a good reread right around now, at least for me.

I like thinking about what was unsettling in a positive way... is it the subject matter, or that the writer did such an adept job of making the reader feel what they want you to? Or, I'm guessing, a solid crossover of both. I was thinking about the story I mention above, "The Dog," and decided that it was so disturbing and well done at the same time because he wrote so well about a dog's grief without ever once anthropomorphizing. As one of those hypersensitive-to-animals people, I find anthropomorphization to be a real turnoff sometimes (if that's what a novel is about in the first place, that's another matter)—especially as it often verges into sentimentality. Slouka manages to stay well away from either, and that, I think, is what makes the story so gutting.

>147 nohrt4me2: Understood :)and I agree, unsettling is not the same as upseting

Testament of Mary was one of those short books that packs a punch. I have several of those kind of books, they play along with my enjoyment of tales retold. I know they are offensive to some people and I get that.

>148 SassyLassy: there a book called Under the Skin? Its sci fi, I think, got rave reviews, but once I knew the gist of it, decided it was just not for me

>150 cindydavid4:

More than one. I suspect you mean Michel Faber's Under the Skin? Although it is horror (which is not the same as science fiction) :)

Oh right thats the one. He'd had written another that I really liked, so was disappointed about this one. Horror, sci fi, fantasy, its all a toss up but think your right its more on the horror side of things

“If you have to make a choice; to be feared is much safer than to be loved. For it is a good general rule about men; that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, fearful of danger and greedy for gain.”
A quote from The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. The unsettling thing about this book is that I detect no hint of any irony

Frankenstein Mary Shelley (the 1818 text) the book where the reader is never certain who is the monster - Is it Frankenstein or his creation - a very edgy read.

The Fault in our Stars by John Green - A frothy, light, teenage love story about terminally ill cancer patients, aimed successfully at the best seller market. This one put me off reading Young Adult fiction for good. What unsettled me was the popularity of this book which made me realise I was not or perhaps had never been a young adult.

"The Greatest President in the History of the United States of America who Made America Great Again" by Donald J Trump an autobiography. This jumped to the top of the best sellers list and remained there for a record number of weeks. (it has not been written yet, but will be after Donalds second successful term)
You have to ask: why is this unsettling?

>153 baswood: I read a thing somewhere that propounded that Machiavelli was known, in his own time and place, as a satire writer. Therefore The Prince should be read that way (and isn't - as if people took A Modest Proposal on its own merits). I have no idea of the credentials of the piece's author (now) but recall being intrigued rather than distrustful. Huh - went and googled a bit, apparently I misremembered - he wasn't a satire writer, but a strong supporter of republicanism, in his works (earlier and later) and in his life.

Anyway, the piece made me pick up a copy of The Prince...though I haven't gotten around to actually reading it.

>154 jjmcgaffey: be careful what you read!

>147 nohrt4me2: Yes, I think you have something there. I read a recent New Yorker piece on JCO that within a discussion of form, touches on the way (s) she often unsettles the reader. I think this is exactly why I like reading JCO.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-unruly-genius-of-joyce-carol-o...

>153 baswood: Some thoughtful offerings there. I'm going to put adults-reading-YA on my list for a future question, thanks.

>156 avaland: I need to read that one. I'm not one of your fervent JCO devotees, but she definitely interests me and I always mean to read more of hers (and lord knows there's always more).

>156 avaland: JCO's Blonde unsettled a lot of people. Lots and lots.

Where do I bring the old and new testaments here? Maybe I better set them aside this time.

I think all good literature is unsettling in some way, so i don’t feel any need to specify any. Actually, usually the problem is they aren’t unsettling enough to get the world to respond and improve itself - an unsettling universal failure of literature that some authors do pick up on.

As far as books that have offended me, well the ones that come to mind are nonfiction. When i was getting all my audiobooks from the library and they were free, I stumbled across all sorts of stuff. A manipulated history of America for religious conservative homeschoolers, a baseless attack on bread and carbohydrates and how it attacks the brain, and the popular Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. But I didn’t get far on any of these, I gave Harari 20 minutes and fired him. What bothered me in such a harmless book like Harari’s? Something there felt wrong, felt manipulated, stretching not very profound information into a language of attempted profoundness. Now, maybe he got better. (I’ve noted quotes from that book here and there and they always bother me - but then I’ve programmed myself to look for problems, so that doesn’t mean much.) Anyway, I guess I’m sensitive to careless play with science.

>159 dchaikin: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. But I didn’t get far on any of these, I gave Harari 20 minutes and fired him. What bothered me in such a harmless book like Harari’s? Something there felt wrong, felt manipulated, stretching not very profound information into a language of attempted profoundness. Now, maybe he got better. (I’ve noted quotes from that book here and there and they always bother me - but then I’ve programmed myself to look for problems, so that doesn’t mean much.) Anyway, I guess I’m sensitive to careless play with science

This, yes, completely my reaction after a few chapters. Disappointed coz I heard so much good things and just couldn't read any more of it.
And yeah, nowadays, being sensitive to careless play with science is a good thing

>159 dchaikin: >160 cindydavid4:

Interesting about Harari. I had been back to my history project and neck deep into prehistory (nope, no "Once upon a time there was a Big Bang" this time around (she said hopefully...)) and this is one of the books I looked at, read a few samples and decided that it is way too... wishful thinking combined with closing your eyes for half the facts that do not fit. I will probably end up reading it anyway at some point - mainly to see what people seem to want to believe these days - but sounds like it was a good call leaving it out from the selection.

QUESTION 28: BULLSH*T BOOKS: ACTIVITY

You may not know, but won't be surprised to learn, that the annual "Running of the Bulls" in Pamplona, Spain has been cancelled for this year. I assume you all are terribly disappointed, so....

Tell us about a book you considered bullshi*t...or, perhaps a book you ran from. Or a book that trampled or pierced your soul. Maybe you'd like to tell us about a book that Mooved you or one you were Steered wrong about....

Use these connections/puns to chose your book, or come up with your own related connections (which we will want to hear, of course). This is a great way to promote a favorite book if you can just make a connection....

Is this a secret experiment to see how long it will be before anyone mentions The ___ also ___s ?

Q28:

Lots of ways to answer this, and I will probably come back a few times. First thought, because most recent in my mind, is the high level of cow-dung-related content in the Southern African books I've been reading throughout Q2. Collecting it as a social activity for women (and in novels an opportunity for female characters to have private conversations); spreading it on the floor of your house; burning it as cooking fuel. And fascinating to discover that in both Xhosa and Zulu culture, the daughter-in-law (who is otherwise responsible for all dirty jobs) isn't allowed to spread dung on her father-in-law's side of the house.

Examples: Poppie Nongena, The Madonna of Excelsior, The black people: and whence they came(*) (and those are just the last three...)

When I was curious about the dung-floor thing, Googling brought up a nice "how-to" page here: https://mykenyaexperience.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/how-to-re-mud-your-mud-hut-10...

Also the best new-product name I've seen for some time, "Merdacotta".

---
(*) Perhaps not the best choice for this topic: Fuze says in his introduction "Members of the tribal assembly of our chief, and all you readers of this book, Abantu Abamnycona: Do not be surprised or disappointed to find that you are reading a book without horns". He's wrong, there are cattle all the way down...

Oh my, well....I don't usually keep or even acknowledge that the book I picked up is bullshit; I just drop it and walk away, So I don't remember titles, but I suspect they will come up!

Perhaps this is a good time to celebrate my two favorite Spanish authors, Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Miguel de Unamuno. Sadly, Zafón died just recently.

...anything by Ernest Hemingway, and especially anything that mentions the Running of the Bulls...

I just finished a book that fits this category. My Life in Thirty Seven Therapies by Kay Hutchison which was published in March.

This book tells about a woman's struggle to deal with midlife crisis, through a variety of different therapies. These range from meditation and neuro-linguistic programming to voodoo, witchcraft, and sonic therapy. Throughout the book, the author tries to connect with her past and seeks to solve present uncertainties through the therapies. In the final chapter, she digresses into feminist rhetoric, which did not seem to fit the rest of the book. And of course, by the end of the book, she is "fixed" and firmly grounded, after dabbling in all these therapies.

This book became extremely tiresome, and seemed self-centered, definitely "all about me." It was not what I expected, and the chronology made it difficult to follow as it seemed to skip around a lot. It sadly missed the mark for me. Don't waste your time.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is novels in which all of the characters come across as cartoon characters. Top o' the list for me, Tom Robbins. Similarly, I tried to read Stone Junction by Jim Dodge earlier this year but had to quit after about 70 pages. I'm good with willing suspension of disbelief, but even within unbelievable situations (warp drive, time travel, alien invasion, what have you), characters need to think and behave like people really think and behave--within reason at least--for me to be able to enjoy the work.

>168 LadyoftheLodge: Haha! I didn't have a midlife crisis, and I keep wondering WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?? I am missing a golden opportunity to write a self-indulgent memoir and make enough money to remodel the screen porch and get some central air in here. Although voodoo sounds like something that might be useful at any age.

>169 rocketjk: My husband had to walk away from the second John Carter on Mars book by Burroughs for the same reason. I was relieved given that he insisted on telling me about it so I could enjoy hating it, too.

>166 nohrt4me2: Oh, I did not hear that Zafon had died....

>170 nohrt4me2: Well, authors like Burroughs I give a pass to, because I know that the genre they were writing in and the times they were writing lent themselves to "comic book" type adventure stories. So I don't hold a grudge against a comic book for being a comic book, so to speak. I read those books for fun once in a while. So I make a distinction between those and authors like Robbins, who present cutsie-pie characters in a wish-it-were-so world. I'm aware that I'm not explaining myself well enough, here.

Anyway, I can certainly understand somebody throwing a Burroughs book across the room!

>168 LadyoftheLodge: sounds like Eat Love Pray I wanted to sympathize with her and cheer her on her journey, but she kept getting more selfish and aggrevating. Then the moments when she made a big deal our ot stopped taking meds and was doing just fine with depression did it for me. There are people whose life depends on those; to make is seem its so simple to just get over it....no. I stopped just when she got to the monastery and decided I couldn't do another page. Haven't read another of hers since

Better late than never, right?

Q26 5 books All are TBR's. Unless a book is a super-special favorite, I give them away after reading. I have a small place and need the room for more books! I also admit to having been reading much more on my kindle than what is on my physical shelves. The kindle is easier to transport, not as tough on my joints (arthritis), and I can change or enlarge the print as needed.

The Road Home by Rose Tremain. I have loved many of Tremain's novels, and this one was an Orange Prize winner.

The Book of Fires by Jane Borodale What can I say except that I am a big historical fiction fan.

The Walking People by Mary Beth Keane Combines two genres I love: Irish stories and immigration stories.

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies My daughter gave me this one for Christmas quite a few years ago. Another work of historical fiction, this time WW2.

Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett I've read other story collections by Barrett and really loved them. I see the Amazon blurb says there are connections to characters in Ship Fever and Voyage of the Narwhal, which I also enjoyed.

Q27 Books that Get Under Your Skin

One that I found particularly unsettling was The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. So many irritatingly flawed characters in one book! I particularly disliked Kathy Nicolo, the woman who was being evicted from her longtime family home for not paying her taxes. Just about everything bad that happens to anyone in the novel goes back to Kathy. A former addict whose husband had left her, Kathy's response is to feel sorry for poor me and drink herself into a stupor. She ignores every warning she gets from the county about the overdue taxes and the threat of eviction because she believes that someone--her ex, I guess--had taken care of it. She's the type of woman who has always been taken care of by other people, and she seems to expect everyone to take care of her and give her what she wants just because . . . well, just because she's special, right? Any normal person would wonder what all those warnings were about and would be down at the county offices trying to remedy the problem. Not Kathy. She waits until she's living in her car, then goes to the new owners, expecting them to hand back the house. When that doesn't work, Kathy teams up with an alcoholic deputy to threaten them. She sends him, in uniform, to harass the Behranis and uses his service pistol to rob a gas station of a can of gasoline, planning to burn down the house with the family in it. At this point, she tries--twice--to kill herself in front of the house. The wife takes her in, feeds her, cleans her up, lets her stay with them for a few days to recover, but when they still won't give back the house, her nifty new (and, by the way, married) BF, Deputy Lester Burdon, breaks into the home and, at gunpoint, locks the family in the bathroom, refusing to let them out until the general agrees to give back the house to Kathy. Ultimately, he acquiesces and accompanies Lester to the courthouse, along with his teenage son, Esmail.

The new owner of the house, an exiled Iranian general, has issues of his own, mainly a string of secrets he is hiding from his wife and son and their friends. They are living above their means on savings, and he hasn't been able to find decent work due to his military background. He sees Kathy's house as an investment and moves the family out of their expensive apartment into the house while it is being renovated for resale. When Kathy finally gets the tax error settled with the county, she expects Gen. Behrani to sell her back the house for the price he paid the county, but he refuses. He has already put a lot of extra money into the house and wants to be paid the current value; after all, this was an investment for his family's future. When his family is threatened by Lester, he agrees to accept the fee he originally paid--but he has no intention of doing so. In the end, his pride and sense of righteousness leads to the violent death of his son. He returns to the house, finds Kathy still there, and strangles her, believing he has killed her, then takes his own life and that of his wife.

What I think disturbed me was that I had absolutely no empathy for Kathy, the main character and impetus of the story. All of the problems and all of the suffering that everyone experienced could have been avoided if she hadn't succumbed to poor-me syndrome and had accepted her adult responsibilities instead of assuming she would be taken care of by someone else, since someone always apparently had in the past. She goes from bad to worse, manipulating Lester, planning arson, and seeking sympathy through suicide attempts. While Behrani, a stubborn, prideful man with too many secrets, was far from guiltless, he was following the law and doing what he felt he must to support his family. As much as I hated Kathy and in fact pretty much hated this book, I still find myself thinking about it years later and getting angry all over again. If that's the effect Dubus intended, he succeeded.

Q28 BULLSH*T Books

OK, I'll take this one by the horns. Bad writing--particularly pretentious writing--makes me see red. Top of the list for pretentious writing would have to be The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Boy, did I hate this one; it was real bullsh*t! I had the audio version on my ipod and deleted it about a third of the way in. Runner-up: Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I didn't make it even that far with this one. Honorary mention: The Dante Club. This one particularly annoyed me because of all the hype, mainly based on the author's youth. Young or old, it was pretentious crap, and I didn't get far in it. It screamed: "Look at me, I'm still in college, and I have read a lot of classic works!" I call bullsh*t!

Another type of bad writing was exemplified by the oh-so-popular Where the Crawdads Sing. First, it was pretty hard to suspend disbelief with this one--the idea that a child could just be left to her own resources in the swamp, yet somehow she manages to educate herself. The father-daughter relationship was stolen right out of a terrific movie, "Beasts of the Southern Wild." Most of the characters were simple stereotypes. The author is a naturalist, so of course she lapses into long disgressions describing the natural world. Some readers found this poetic; I found it annoying and inconsistent in style. It also seemed to me that she couldn't decide if this was a coming of age story or a murder mystery, so she tried to make it both. The most painful writing was the courtroom scene dialogue, which read like the worst episode of Perry Mason ever. How this one got to be so popular is beyond my comprehension. It deserves to be trampled into oblivion.

>174 Cariola: Another Rose Tremain fan - did you read the Music and Silence? I think thats my fav (its a great book to read in the summer because the conditions they were in made me feel cold!)

House of Sand and Fog, the one about the women who didn't read her mail? This was a book group read and most agreed with me wanting to slap some sense into that lady. Never read another book by him

Agree with you about the crawdad book. The writing was poetic and she did have some lovely descriptions. But like you it really was hard for me to suspend disbelief here - I teach young kids, and there is just no way she could have survived out there so young. And the more I read the more it bothered me. Another book group (not the same one) I was the only one who hated it. Ah well. I need more than lovely descripions in a story. I need a story that makes some sense.

I liked Hedgehog probably because I related to the narrator. But the ending, really? Geesh.

>166 nohrt4me2: Yes, only in his mid-50s. Cancer. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/19/carlos-ruiz-zafon-author-of-the-sh...

>174 Cariola:

The House of Sand and Fog all I remember from this is that the woman never read her mail, and I had sympathy for the Iranian man while disliking him at the same time. Completely forgettable. book. But I read it based on the Oprah Book Club show about it, and I remember Oprah going on about the woman not reading her mail, which she found outrageous. I admit, I hate red tape and paper work, and I have sometimes ignored my mail. Not anywhere near that degree --- my credit card bill is paid up every month and all my other bills are paid too. But if I let myself, I can see that trait in me and it's rather frightening. Especially if I were to suffer some trauma. So I take it as a warning. (This may or may not have been the same Oprah episode where she said she ALWAYS signed her cheques herself and never delegated it to staff. It was some conversation about people of great wealth who lost it all and I took note of that too.I'm not an Oprah fan, but she's handed out some good advice.)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog would be high on my BS books too. So pretentious.

My book club's latest was Where the Crawdads Sing and I didn't bother to read it based on LT comments I've read. I sat through their conversation (it was our physically distancing outside barbecue) and after reading the comments here and being reminded why I skipped this book, I'm glad I didn't need to speak up and rip apart a book that they all seemed to like. I've been that person before and it can be fun, but not now.

>162 avaland: Bullsh*t books - I'm not 100% sure what you mean with this question, but based on Cariola's reply, this is what I feels were my BS books:

Meatless Days, by Sara Suleri -- I had to read this at university *twice*. It's a "memoir" by some PhD elite daughter of some Pakistani official (can't remember who and don't care enough to look it up). The most incredibly pretentious thing I've ever read written in cryptic language that the reader was just supposed to know what she meant by her dramatic vague phrases. My favourite thing was that both times I had to read this I borrowed a copy from my local public library and someone had made notes in Pakistani script throughout the book and I can't read it or translate the characters, but they seemed pretty peeved.

She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb -- The cool blue cover and Oprah book club recommendation suggested to my naive self that this would be a good book for my Maui vacation. However, this is when I learned that Oprah book club means "woman has a crappy life, some crappy things happen, then the ending is sort of crappy" (TM)

Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom -- is it me, or was that trite?

Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes -- if you read this as fantasy, it's okay. If you read it as a memoir, it's all lies.

Please Look After Mom, Kyung-sook Shin -- I've never felt so manipulated by a novel, and the author's attempt to guilt the reader was shameful

>178 Nickelini: I started with Bullsh*t books, but then expanded it to any book you can connect via pun to the Running of the Bulls

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After not-so-careful thought, I've decided to mention a book in which, much like the Running event, is essentially pursuit, in this case, one long chase. Although, it's more a running from and running with...but then, when I have seen clips of the Running of the Bulls, it has always looked like a running from than a running with to me.

From my review of the science fiction novel Austral by Paul McAuley

Set in a post-climate change Antartica, Austral is a thoughtful thriller, a long chase scene with much of story along the way. Austral, is also the name of our narrator, our heroine (or perhaps anti-heroine depending on which way you look at it). The book begins:

My birth was a political act. Conceived in a laboratory dish by direct injection of a sperm into an egg, I was customized by a suite of targeted genes, grown inside a smart little chamber to a ball of about a hundred cells, and on the fifth day transferred to my mother’s uterus. I drew my first breath among the snows of the south, spent much of my childhood in exile on a volcanic island and most of the rest working in the farm stacks of a state orphanage. I’ve been a convict, a corrections officer, and consort to a criminal. I committed the so-called kidnapping of the century, but first and foremost I’m a husky. An edited person. Something more than human, according to Mama and the other free copouts. A victim of discrimination and intersectional inequality, according to do-gooders trying to make excuses on my behalf. A remorseless monster driven by greed and an unreasoning lust for revenge, according to the news feeds which sucked my story to the bare marrow….

The story captured me then and there, and more or less never let me go. We follow Austral and her young kidnap victim across an intriguing and vivid Antartic landscape as they attempt to survive pursuit by more than one entity.

(and here I will admit I kept picturing Gwendoline Christie in her role as Brienne of Tarth as Austral....)

How about books that make you... ruminate? For that I'll offer Sasha Abramsky's The House of Twenty Thousand Books, which combined an overview of Jewish/socialist physical and cultural history, family lore, and musings on the power of the written word—not so much a tour through a library as a series of Venn diagrams highlighting the macro and micro worlds of Abramsky's grandfather through his enormous book collection.

What really got me thinking was the thread throughout the book of using the collection to reckon with his (then-deceased) grandfather's history, which was meaningful to me because I read it a few months after having packed up my mom's co-op when she went into a nursing home, and dealing with her pretty extensive library. I actually used the book as an anchor I wrote for an essay on that. But there was a lot packed into a few hundred pages—family, aspiration, the places books hold in people's lives, and also Jewishness, which is not something I think about a lot in terms of my own heritage but it's definitely there... they don't call us People of the Book for nothin'.

>179 avaland: Just snapped up Austral cheap on Kindle.

>180 lisapeet: Rumination books! I like that! Nuala O'Faolin's My Dream of You is a rumination about the Irish famine years, mass (often forced) immigration to the U.S., and explains a lot about the cultural disruption and family dysfunction in the diaspora. I have always distanced myself from my mother's Irish-ness, but I came to understand it better.

>162 avaland: totally agree with you on Shes Come Undone. In fact generally if Oprah recommends it, I don't read it (I have read some but not based on her rec) Tuesdays with Morrie was trite, overly saccarine and really just bs. Agree with you about the other two also.

>180 lisapeet: My dream of you was wonderful (think I found it on readerville), It always is connected somehow with another Irish novel the world I made for her a dying nyc policeman falls in love with his nurse.

Ah, as long as we're talking bullshit, I'll throw in anything written by the McCourt brothers. A friend in NYC knew the real Angela from Angela's Ashes, and that lugubrious memoir was all made up.

Memoir, I think, can lend itself to all sorts of sins.

>173 cindydavid4: Agree on Eat Pray Love. I could not finish it, even the audiobook.

>184 nohrt4me2: I totally get that. I tried to read Angela's Ashes and stopped.

>182 cindydavid4: Glad I am not the only one who avoids Oprah reads.

I think people can tweak things, or selectively remember/write about, for memoirs.

I am liking this discussion. I seem to be in good company here.

I avoided memoirs, esp as they started turning into confessionals or oh poor me tracts. I have found some I enjoyed Becoming is one of my favs.

.

There are a handful of small/independent presses that I enjoy. The first one I remember looking for is Graywolf Press. We read some short stories from one of their anthologies in class (The Graywolf Annual Six: Stories from the Rest of the World) and I loved the whole collection. So I bought some of the others:
The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-cultural Literacy
The Graywolf Annual Seven: Stories from the American Mosaic
The Graywolf Annual Nine: Stories from the New Europe

It wasn't until a decade decades later, after moving to Brooklyn that I became aware of various other small presses. One introduction was Community Bookstore that has a shelf unit where books are displayed by publisher. The other introduction was the Brooklyn Book Festival and wandering through all the publisher's and bookstore's booths.

At some point I started collecting Soho Crime and Europa World Noir, both because I wanted to read more mystery novels set in unusual locations and because I love the way the spines look on a bookshelf. Which segued into nyrb books (they are ubiquitous in the NYC used bookstores; it was impossible to NOT start a collection).

I also love New Directions for their fantastic translations of the sometimes more experimental literature (The Book of Disquiet, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Labyrinths, The Passion According to G.H., Exercises in Style), TCG for plays, Archipelago for The Birds, Eline Vere, and My Struggle, Melville House for novellas, and there are others that I am not remembering right now.

I never understood what inprint means - and honestly I have more trouble remembering authors than reading abut publishers. So I'll just wait for others to chime in before responding

I collect Modern Library books if they have good dust jackets but only if they're reasonably priced. Other than that, I enjoy Europa Editions and NYRB books, too. I try to support independent presses when I'm buying new books when I can. I tend to steer away from self-published books because quality is always a question. The Soho Crime series seems to be pretty well curated, but I don't make a special point of buying them.

>189 cindydavid4: Don't feel bad as many people would not have a good sense of what imprints are. From scribewriting.com “An imprint of a publisher is a trade name under which it publishes a work. A single publishing company may have multiple imprints, often using the different names as brands to market works to various demographic consumer segments."

As an example here is the list (using logos) of all the imprints under the publishing company, Penguin Random House Worldwide (which I'd guess is the largest publisher). They note it is just under 275 imprints.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/imprints and here is a list with a description of each one of the Random House side of that. http://www.randomhousebooks.com/imprints/ For example, their Del Rey imprint only publishes science fiction and fantasy. The Clarkson Potter imprint is "Clarkson Potter is the only dedicated lifestyle group within Penguin Random House. Founded in 1959, we are home to a community of award-winning and bestselling chefs, cooks, designers, artists, and writers—visionaries who seek to entertain, engage, and teach." Each imprint, if large enough, will have their own catalog or will be combined in a catalog with others.

Which is all to say that, because imprints are aimed at certain "demographic consumer segments" a.k.a. 'certain readers,' you might also like more than one of their offerings.

I think, it's not so different than what independent small presses offer, but the presses often take chances the big guys aren't always willing to do. Olga Tokarczuk, who recently won the Nobel, her first English translation, House of Day House of Night, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2014, and Valerie Luiselli's first translation, Faces in the Crowd, was published by Coffee House Press also in 2014. Which is a long-winded way of saying that if you are looking for a bit of adventure or perhaps some more regional writing, maybe a small press would intrigue you (as they sometimes do me).

Q29

I've got a lot of clusters of books from particular imprints, but hardly any of them are deliberate, it's mostly simply that those are the people who publish books on those particular topics that I'm interested in, e.g. Fabers, Carcanet and Bloodaxe for poetry; David & Charles, Ian Allan, and Oakwood Press for railway books; Suhrkamp who publish several of the German writers I'm most interested in, and so on. Seeing those familiar names/designs in a bookshop makes me look harder at what the books are, but I don't actively collect any of them.

I think I mentioned earlier in this thread somewhere that I recently bought a stack of paperbacks from the fifties and sixties published under the "Seven Seas Books" imprint in East Berlin — that started off as a chance find, but it's turned into something a little bit like collecting. Only about twenty books so far, though.

>191 avaland: Random House Worldwide ... 275 imprints.

That's a good reason not to pay too much attention to imprints: in the old days, you knew that a publisher was run by an individual with their own quirky tastes and standards (typically a great-grandchild of the person whose name was on the spine). These days there's a 95% chance that it's just a brand-name that's been bought, with its back-catalogue, by a vast conglomerate. More than likely the people who work on it don't have any kind of long-term association with that imprint. For the smaller imprints, they may well be working on three or four different ones at the same time.

Independent small presses are quite different. But they don't tend to outlast their founders any more.

I would love to collect good works from small independent and university presses. The problem is two-fold: (1) there are a lot and I have no way of keeping track. I couldn’t even list the good ones. And (2) I don’t know how to decipher books I would like vs ones I wouldn’t without independent reviews that I can relate to. Anyone have any help on those two accounts?

Q29

I like small presses - I have a few, mostly speculative fiction ones, where I get every book they publish - I know what they are printing and I trust their taste. And there are some where I will get almost everything or a specific line of their books. I always buy directly from the publishers from this list -- it is usually a bit more expensive than Amazon and other venues but they need the support and not having an extra coffee somewhere won't kill me. Some of the ones I supported through the years had disappeared -- it is not such an easy business to be in. So I support the ones surviving as much as I can.

My personal problem are the others - the ones that either publish too many books for that to be feasible or that have way too many different types of books. If I had unlimited funds and space, I would not be bothered by that. As it is, I just pick and chose from these.... until they migrate into the first group.

I love discovering new presses that had just started in the last couple of years - they tend to do interesting things early on. I used to look for them - a lot of them link to each other so you can jump from one to another. :)

Imprints can be trickier. Some may be worth following and checking but they rarely stay what they started as. And sometimes the line between a publisher series and an imprint can be very very thin. When I find one of them that works for me, I will usually follow it - although if it is a major publisher, I will usually buy from Amazon/other retailer as opposed to buying from the publisher directly.

I will post about my favorite ones later when I have a bit more time.

I look at Belt Publishing, occasionally, which publishes works from Midwest writers. It's more focused on urban Rust Belt experiences than rural, where I live.

One of their books was about Midwest speech patterns, which I shared with my students. Most of us don't think we have "an accent" discernible to other Americans.

Persephone picked up some of Dorothy Whipple's novels. Virago has a couple titles by Celia Fremlin.

My husband also has several dozen Library of America volumes he bought on subscription years ago. He is very attached to them. But not enough to dust them.

oh ok. I have some penguin, Library of america, Virago, Persephone.... But its not the imprint that gets me intereste,Its the covers!!!!!! another idea for a topic btw

>192 thorold: I agree that's true at least for Penguin & Random House.

>195 nohrt4me2: I had not heard of Belt Publishing, so off I went to investigate. Turns out they are new-ish, 2013. I'd probably be more interested in the rural over the city also. Thanks for the tip!

>196 cindydavid4: I'll put it on the list....

I suppose my relationship with imprints and small presses might be different than some because of my many years at the bookstore.

If I had to pick my favorite small press right now—it would be tough—but it would probably be Graywolf Press out of Minnesota. They have been a reliable publisher of great fiction and poetry. But ask me tomorrow and it might be someone else.

I’ve acquired and read 4 or 5 good short story collections published by Comma Press, and 4 or 5 Alex Capus novels from Haus Publishing, both publishers in the UK. I’ve enjoyed some of the Oxford University “Short Introduction” series of small books (and yes, I’ve gone and looked at the entire list of them), and I read most of Oxford’s paperbacks publications of “Early American Women Authors” (which reminds me I have one left to read).

I have read (and still occasionally read) several books that might be called eclectic, creative, fantastic or SF from Small Beer press (we know Gavin & Kelly, who started the press, so….) And I have in the past read quite a few crime novels from Soho Crime (most notably Australia’s Garry Disher).

Other small presses I have read from at various times in my reading life:
Europa Editions (in their early years)
Bellevue Literary Press
Coffee House press

When I checked my shelves (out of curiosity), Dalkey Archive kept showing up, but that’s just coincidence. I have probably picked those novels up shopping via the Publisher Weekly reviews.

During my years at the bookstore I read and enjoyed quite a few novels from Algonquin Books in North Carolina (an imprint of Workman). I'm pretty sure that's where I acquired my Julianna Baggott thing and where I first met Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’ve moved away from the publisher, but they are a good example of ‘if you like this book they published, you might also like another….’

There are local university presses that I check from time to time for regional books, and I continue to mourn the loss of the University of New England Press which closed down in 2018. And because we all like to look at books....



AWK! My AbeBooks shopping cart has increased during this exercise as I was reminded of certain authors and had to check….

I mostly don't focus on the publisher, rather on the author(s). But for a lot of my books, they're one and the same - I do read self-published books, quite a lot. I also do book Kickstarters, which are pretty much the same thing only more so.

Large press - I used to read just about anything Baen put out; they're (or they were) a very small-press sort of traditional publisher. More recently (since Jim Baen's death - another way they were very small-press) they've gone in directions I don't love, so while I still buy quite a few of their books it's because authors I love are published by them rather than "oh, it's a Baen, it must be good". I have the opposite feeling about Ace (yes, I'm an SF fanatic, why do you ask?) - I dislike most of what they publish but some good authors publish through them so I slightly reluctantly buy Ace books. Actually it's less about what they publish and more about how they've treated some of those favorite authors, in the category of rights.

Small press...I guess Zombies Need Brains is one; they're serial Kickstarters, putting out a set of three anthologies every...year? More frequently? I'm not sure, I get notified and I sign up. Some favorite authors have published in said anthologies, which is probably how I heard of them in the first place, but I generally like what they put out (neat subjects, good writing, well-edited and cover art and so on. I get the ebooks, so can't speak for the production quality of the physical books they also put out (for a higher pledge)). They do sell the anthologies to the public afterward, but I enjoy Kickstarting it. I truly don't know if I get a discount or pay a slightly higher price in so doing - I've never looked at the books on...Amazon, I guess, and other places. I have them already, why would I?

Very small press - several of my very very favorite authors publish their own works. Diane Duane and Peter Morwood have an imprint, so do Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (both husband-and-wife pairs). They both also publish traditionally; their own imprints put out either older books that they've gotten the rights back or shorter works that their trad publishers can't or won't handle (or do, as second publishers). M.C.A. Hogarth self-publishes, and has begun to Kickstart her books - which tends to make the books somewhat larger than otherwise! Her campaigns (which may in fact be on Indiegogo, I can't keep those two separate) are very much crowd-sourcing - she asks what subjects (within her universes) people would like to hear about, puts rough drafts up for backers to edit/comment on/ooh and aah over (and all of the above happen), and in one recent case ended up writing a second book for one campaign, because what her backers wanted to hear and she wanted to write got too big for one. Heartskein is that second book.

One thing I have not done (which is the next logical step in the progression) is join anyone's Patreon (or equivalent). Somehow giving money every month, even when I get stuff for it, feels different than buying something, even if the something doesn't exist until after I've bought it.

>199 jjmcgaffey: thats where I am. the only time I need the publishers name is when I am catologing my collectin

If memory serves (it often doesn't) Hachette was feuding with Evil Amazon Almighty over prices of e-books some years back. Seems like some Hachette titles that I wanted to read were unavailable until that deal got straightened out.

I am sometimes sorry that I went the Amazon-Kindle-Fire route. But given that I have chronic conditions galore and may never be able to leave the house again due to covid19, having access to books without the clutter of boxes and physical books to store is a godsend.

I'm currently reading Jonathan Coe's biography of B S Johnson, Like a fiery elephant — he makes the interesting comment that a lot of the trouble Johnson had in his career as a writer came from his insistence that his books, weird and eccentric though they were in form and content, were intended for mainstream readers, not just a knowing literary elite, and therefore they had to be published by big-name publishing houses. If he'd been content to go with small-press publication — like his guru, Beckett — he'd have had far fewer fights to get his work out there, and much more control over what it looked like. (But, presumably, he'd have had to keep the day-job.)

Of course, that was before Kickstarters and the rest, and the only way you would ever have seen a small-press book would be by haunting the right sort of bookshop or reading the right sort of weeklies.

Speaking of small presses, etc., does anyone here have knowledge of Interlink Books out of Northampton, MA? I recently bought a copy of City of Soldiers: A Year of Life, Death, and Survival in Afghanistan by Kate Fearon. I stuck it on my shelf, and then this week pulled it off the shelf to read. The book has the look of a self-published book, or maybe a print-on-demand, but the company does have a website (https://www.interlinkbooks.com/) that indicates they are a more conventional (if that would even be the right word these days) publishing house. I'm really just curious, as I already own the book and the first few pages are already quite interesting.

Q29

As stated in the question, I like to check out the Europe Editions catalogue. Funny thing though -- I rather disliked their two biggest sellers Elegance of the Hedgehog and My Brilliant Friend. Still, I find more hits than misses with them, and they've been a source of writers I would never have read otherwise. The other catalogue I've been looking at lately is Dalkey Press, because they publish contemporary Swiss authors.

I also like Virago, NYRB, and Persephone for something different. And finally, there are also imprints of the big publishers and small publishing houses that put out some nice editions of classics that are out of copyright.

Edited to add: Anvil Books for Canadian contemporary books.

>203 rocketjk: Oh my gosh, I forgot to mention Interlink! I have read more than a few books from them, haven't shopped them for a couple of years (note to self...). I read two books by Palestinian author Adania Shibli, a collection of multiple authors in Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, two books by Nigerian author Sefi Atta, a poetry collection of Arab women's poetry and a Middle Eastern cookbook. Their catalogs always have an array of new voices to explore.

>205 avaland: Cool. Thanks!

When I find myself in a bookstore, my scanning is always done by publisher on the spine. When I see one of my favourites, I am likely to look at the book. We know where that leads.

My favourites for larger publishers are NYRB and Oxford World's Classics.

For smaller imprints, I go for
- Oxford in Asia (hard to find)

- Hamish Hamilton which is now a Penguin imprint https://www.penguin.co.uk/company/publishers/penguin-general/hamish-hamilton.htm...



- Broadview Press which has some of the more difficult to find 19thC classics with wonderful supplementary material: https://broadviewpress.com



- Canongate which is good for books from Scotland, as well as others: https://canongate.co.uk



I also have a subscription to And Other Stories for six books a year. Their goal is to publish contemporary writing from around the world, often in translation into English. They have introduced me to authors such as Elvira Dones, S J Naudé, Oleg Pavlov, Ivan Vladislavic, as well as many others like these:

https://www.andotherstories.org/authors/

Europa used to be another favourite, but I have become disenchanted with their more recent works.

All of the above have consistent covers and sizes within the imprint if that is important to you.

Just though of Book Riot's thumbnails of five black-owned publishing companies. It's a couple years old now. https://bookriot.com/black-owned-publishers/

Ha! I just noticed I didn't change the name of this continuation of the group to Part 4! Pah. The next continuation might come Friday and don't be surprised if it is labelled #5 :-)

Tangential to convo: #PublishingPaidMe is looking at advance disparities between black and white authors.

Argh, I'm always late on these. I'll chime in on the last question, if anyone's looking at this thread still.

Being tangentially in the review business, I pay a LOT of attention to publishers—from their offerings in print and as galleys to walking around conferences, stopping at the different publishers' tables and chatting with the folks there, and letting them push books into my hands because they know I'll like them. As the new book season unspools I find myself missing missing that personal connection, and the physical fact of new books piled on tables for me to check out, just terribly.

Some smaller publishers whose books I'll always at least pick up and read the blurbs for:

Catapult
New Vessel
Counterpoint
Tin House
Europa Editions (though they seem to be getting a bit bloated trying to find something for everyone)
Akashic
Melville House
Graywolf
Two Dollar Radio
Soft Skull
Seven Stories
Bellevue Literary Press
Coach House
Coffeehouse
Yale University Press
Paul Dry Books
New Directions
The Feminist Press
OR Books
Ig Publishing
Drawn + Quarterly (graphic novels)
Dzanc
NYRB, of course

And the second I hit "post message" I will have thought of ten more. But those are some favorites, anyway.

>211 lisapeet: Drawn + Quarterly (graphic novels)

Check Fantagraphics Books - I often find the two publishers almost complementary.

Aha, see? I did forget one, because I love Fantagraphics. Thanks!

>211 lisapeet: I used to buy more from Feminist Press and and one or two from Two Dollar Press, in addition to those previously mentioned but I've gotten away shopping via catalogs.