QUESTIONS FOR THE AVID READER, Part 7

QUESTION 41: READING THE DARK STUFF (discussion begins msg#2)
QUESTION 42: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. LITERARY TRAVELING. (begins at #35)
QUESTION 43: PANDEMIC READING UPDATE. (begins at msg#83)
QUESTION 44: 20 QUESTIONS (A BIT O' FUN) (begins at msg #121)

QUESTION 43: READING THE DARK STUFF

The Gothic, Horror, dystopias, dark fantasy & fairy tales, the dark side of magical realism, the New Weird, Grimdark…and generally.... fiction that is dark.

For the purpose of this discussion we will call it all"the dark stuff". Many of these books have an element of the fantastic in them, but not all.

Some of the authors who have consistently or famously written dark stuff are, for example:
Lovecraft, Poe, Le Fanu, Shelley, Stoker, Peake, the Bronte Sisters, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Joyce Carol Oates, Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, George RR Martin… But many other authors have written dark books but not necessarily make a habit of it …. Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Katherine Dunn, Iain Banks, Jose Saramago, Joseph Conrad....

Do you read and enjoy dark stuff? Do you read it regularly or occasionally? Are there times you can't read it? What does the dark stuff offer you?

Please share some of your more interesting or favorite dark reads! Or perhaps tell us about your addiction/fondness for a specific author.

QUESTION 43: READING THE DARK STUFF

I'm a huge fan of the darker stuff, in the broadest of definitions. A story is just more compelling to me if it is exploring the dark side of humanity. Nothing gets me to turn pages better than the element of horror. I find it harder to stay interested in a novel that lacks that kind of suspense. I find I get through lighter novels slower and find them harder to pick up regularly. The dark stuff just draws me in. Exploring the things we all want to keep hidden is a big attraction.

For me a good horror/dark story will force me to feel something: horror, chills, disgust, even bemused amusement. it's inescapable, whereas other reads sometimes can just wash over me without a lasting impact. And bad horror can just be funny.

I am obsessed with the likes of Poe and Shirley Jackson. Some of the only works a re-read on a regular basis are by those authors. Never liked Lovecraft or those that skew loftcraftian. John Connolly writes some truly dark stuff that disturbs even me from time to time, he also writes some just plain good books. Joe Hill is better than his father. Steph Graham Jones is a great modern master of the horror genre. Ryū Murakami is dark as hell. Pretty much my entire list of favorite authors and books fits a broad definition of dark with the exceptions of Douglas Adams and Terry Prachett. I could probably spend all day listing all my favorite works of darker fiction, and would struggle to come up with 10 that don't fit that fit that definition.

I enjoy dark stuff that's kind of over-the-top and campy with some psychological revelation. If it gets too serious or real, like We Need to Talk about Kevin, I get truly disturbed.

I‘m thinking it’s hard to create drama without going dark. So certainly I think it’s a typical part of fiction, and that almost all the best authors go there. I’m glad you highlighted Toni Morrison, Shirley Jackson and Cormac McCarthy. I could add Gabriel Garciá Márquez (and his love story with Cholera!), David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Shakespeare. Dante begins in hell, the bible is relentless. And so on.

For me personally, i hate the current trend in literary books going into graphic detail of gore (animals included), physical yuck processes, ugly sex scenes and rape scenes and just grossness in general. I think it’s something along the lines of bearing witness and not looking away, but I struggle to push through these things - and they are hard in audio too. Given, I don’t do well with a little blood in real life. But lately, going through the Booker long lists, it seems authors really like to draw all this out. Cormac McCarthy never made me cringe as much as some these medical-like descriptions of cuts and wounds and throwing up while drunk or whatever.

Q 43:

Does Northanger Abbey count? :-)

“The dark stuff” is another of those areas of literature that I’ve never really found particularly interesting. Like science-fiction, I can see that it has its place and it allows good writers(*) to do some interesting things they couldn’t do in social-realist novels, but it’s not something I would go out and look for. Especially not writers who expect me to take vampires and ghosts and ghoulies seriously.

—-
(*) my iPad insists that I meant to type “food writers” — I was tempted to let it have its way...

Heh, just finished A Night in the Lonesome October for a book group and had a great discussion last night. Im not a big fan of talking animals, but this worked as they were all familars of the human characters. Plot centers around The Game. Oct 31 in a full moon opens up a dream world with monsters and creatures, that others try to keep closed. We did talk about the monsters on the human side as well. Lots of fun

I can't handle really scary stuff - Watching outer limits as a kid gave me nightmares, and even as an adult such stories unsettle me. And I don't like blood and gore. But there are plenty of authors whose stories are just the right blend of mystery, otherworldly, and mind bending for me Loved Twilight Zone, and love reading Poe, Jackson, Gaiman, other similar.

>4 stretch: you mentioned John Connolly only book Ive read by him is book of lost things which starts out as a spin on fairy tales then gets really dark really fast. I liked it, but don't always recommend it for some of the subject matter.

Adams and Pratchett get dark, but both are humorish enough that I read them with enjoyment (DEATH is such a great character in Disc World!) Gaimans Coraline was good but the movie was really unsettling! (still liked it)

I also like psycological thrillers Ruth Rendell and Patrick McGrath are good examples of that 'just right' dark for me.

>5 nohrt4me2: This doesn't not explain your longtime interest in dystopias!

>6 dchaikin: I did think of you while I was typing McCarthy's name!

>7 thorold: Sure, Gothic parody works;-)

If romantic suspense counts, that is as far towards the dark side as I can go. I used to be a great fan of gothic novels when I was in high school, and also watched every episode of Dark Shadows on TV. (That ages me, right?)

At this point, I agree with >6 dchaikin: and >8 cindydavid4:--I just cannot handle the really descriptive stuff and they provoke nightmares for me. We do not even watch TV any more because I had nightmares from some crime shows.

>11 LadyoftheLodge: Dark Shadows? My best friend and I would rush home after school to turn it on, we were hooked by it (she went a little more overboard than I did tho - a very early goth!)So I was excited to hear they were making a movie of it. So disappointed, did these writers even watch the show? But I have seen reruns, and yeah its not the same. Addams family? Im right there! (funny, never a fan of Twilight, tho loved Nosferatu, and Frankenstein, text and movies.

I like some dark stuff, but horror is a genre I don't deliberately read in. I'm not sure how to describe what works for me and what doesn't. One of my work colleagues says I like horror lite.

Yet having said this, on (I think) rideway girl's recommendation, I put The only good Indians on my request list at the library.

I like realistic fiction that explores the dark sides of humanity. Examples include Marlon James, The last painting of Sara de Vos, Hope and other dangerous pursuits, Travelers by Helon Habila, Fruit of the drunken tree, Home fire by Kamila Shamsie)

Science fiction: (Tade Thompson, Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan,
Fantasy: Red as blood by Tanith Lee, The dreamblood duology by N. K. Jemisin
Procedural detective fiction: Tana French, Denise Mina

>6 dchaikin: I don't like graphic detail either, unless it's somehow necessry. Particularly I don't like fiction that features violence against women - this often seems gratutious to me, a way to sell a book, rather than a necesssary feature of a story. And yet, I do read it if it seems integral to the story - say in The fruit of the drunken tree.

Q43. Grim, grimmer, grimmest.

Hmm, before thinking about this I would've casually claimed that I avoid grim stuff... but then I looked at my last ten reads listed in "Your books" and they include:

- Marc Chagall's 1922 autobiography in which the first two dozen pages confront both human death and animal slaughter.
- Ancestor Stones, a novel set in Sierra Leone from 1926-1999 describing everyday lives that include everything from female genital mutilation to acts of genocide.
- Living Alone, a First World War comic novel including critiques of "charity", witches in potentially lethal aerial combat, and the dead rising from their graves, although the later is played for laughs.
- Iain Sinclair attempting grimness via the medium of non-fiction essays about the Pembrokeshire coast.
- Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, a dry comedy travelogue set in a collapsing post-communist oligarchy. Also Belfast, and Israel, neither of which are renowned for their peace or stability.
- Poetry by an Estonian who lost relatives to both Hitler and Stalin.
- This is the End, a satirical First World War novel including maternal grief, and a fatal lack of health and safety for women working as sweated labourers.
- Poetry by a Georgian poet who has received both political and religious death threats.

So I guess I just read about relatively normal human life, which is often subject to actions by that leviathan amongst legal firms: Nasty, Brutish, and Short.

>10 avaland: It's funny, but I don't think of dystopian novels as necessarily dark. Many critics have written about the fact that we write and read dystopian novels as warnings rather than as inevitable predictions, as wake-up calls like Scrooge's ghosts. Often dystopias help us identify the "enemy" (often our baser desires and instincts) and define the problems that must be solved.

Some dystopian novels--thinking especially of Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy--*do* go beyond warning and seem to hold up a future that seems inevitable and hopeless. I was certainly left with a sense of doom at the end of that.

TC Boyle's A Friend of the Earth was another dark one. I think these dystopias leave regular people feeling like nothing they do, the system is rigged in favor of the privileged, the oligarchs, and the kleptocrats. There is less call to action than "ain't it awful?"

>9 cindydavid4: Book of Lost Things is his tamer work. His Charlie Parker detective series is so much darker.

>13 markon: I like realistic fiction that explores the dark sides of humanity.

Ive never read any of those authors, but since that describes me, guess I better get to them! I have however become a huge fan of NK Jemisin, so will have to read that duology. (just finished her short stories, How Long till Black Future Month several of which will fit this category)

>7 thorold: ditto, esp. Northanger Abbey.

I don't like horror - but I have a odd angle on it (don't know if it's the same as >13 markon:'s). Horror to me is helplessness. So I can take a lot of blood and gore (though like many here, I don't enjoy explicit descriptions), or psychological terror, or lots of stuff - as long as the protagonists are moving forward, not collapsing. I don't read much of what's marketed as horror because a lot of it seems to be "running towards the inevitable end". Nina Kiriki Hoffman does some stuff that's right on the edge - but her protagonists accept what they see and keep moving, thinking, taking action so it's not horror to me. Ursula Vernon gets closer, but I read The Twisted Ones and mostly enjoyed it, and I've just gotten her The Hollow Places and expect much the same. I don't read Seanan McGuire's darker stuff, though - I don't read what she writes as Mira Grant - because it's too grim for me.

In another category, "grimdark" stories - from noir detectives to a lot of superhero stories to whatever the latest craze is - not only don't I like them, I find them boring. Yeah, yeah, you're depressed because your life is awful and everything goes wrong all the time and society is messed up - do you have an actual story to tell me, or do you just want to grumble (for chapters and chapters while the story takes a step back)? Not for me, thanks.

Q41(?): Dark Stuff

>19 jjmcgaffey: That's a really good distinction, about helplessness. Which is probably why my cutoff for dark stuff is animal cruelty—I just can't go there at all. Children in peril may or may not be a hard no... and yeah, at least part of that is about the victims having some kind of agency. ("DON'T GO IN THE BASEMENT!!")

I don't read a lot of outright labeled horror, though I do sometimes enjoy some of the newer crop of human-scale horror—Brian Evenson, Dan Chaon (Ill Will and Await Your Replywere both chilling and terrific), Benjamin Percy, Maryse Meijer, Jac Jemc. A look through my books also shows that I like my more supernatural horror set in cold places—I really enjoyed both Dan Simmons's The Terror and Michelle Paver's Dark Matter. As a lifelong Northeasterner, I guess that horror of being hemmed in by weather isn't so far from my mind.

I do like psychological horror, if I'm in the right mood—sometimes when I'm feeling dark, people being very bad is just the right thing. One that sticks in my mind is A.L. Kennedy's novel Paradise, a really disturbing and very chilling portrait of a woman succumbing to alcoholism, which I read mostly in the waiting room of the Animal Medical Center in NYC—a deeply sad place full of crying people—while my little dog Milo was terminally ill in the early aughts. I was so miserable, and it was somehow... I won't say comforting, but maybe familiar, to read about people who were miserable in an entirely different way.

I didn't address 40: Reading Who You Are, come to think of it. Along the lines of what JBuyer124 discussed, my cultural identity as a Jew is stronger than my ethnic identity (Russian, Polish, Austrian, Romanian) or religious identity, since I was raised without any practicing religion. And literarily this also holds true.

Though as I mentioned in response to question #38 I like reading about religious searchers and questioners (and I realize I left Chaim Potok's The Chosen off my list), I also enjoy that sense of familiarity of reading about families that sound like the ones I came from. There are lots of good literary New York Jewish families, and it's fun to plot the trajectory of the immigrant/assimilation/thriving experience through them—my family did the straight arc from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Neil Simon (with some Woody Allen aspirations thrown in). But I've always loved most reading E.L. Doctorow's tales of growing up in the Bronx because he his time and place coincided so neatly with my mom's. His World's Fair remains a lifelong favorite because in my head it's overlaid with home movies of my 11-year-old mom and her cousins at the 1939 World's Fair. She grew up in the same neighborhood he describes, and I love triangulating his stories, so well written and evocative, with her accounts. (He also went to the same high school my son did, which is more of a coincidence than a fact of geography, since we were living in Hoboken, NJ when my kid enrolled—though we later moved up to the Bronx, ten minutes away, in a neat little bit of generational circumnavigation).

>21 lisapeet: here are lots of good literary New York Jewish families, and it's fun to plot the trajectory of the immigrant/assimilation/thriving experience through them—my family did the straight arc from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Neil Simon (with some Woody Allen aspirations thrown in). E.L. Doctorow's tales of growing up in the Bronx because he his time and place coincided so neatly with my mom's.

oh I forgot him!!!! yes definitely. And your experience was much like mine. I think reading these accounts of our familes and their struggles pushed me to read the struggles and successes of other immigrant families, so different but so much alike.

I apologize in advance for my lengthy post, I couldn't help myself. I have kept my response limited to modern fiction though.

I very much like dark stories in their many forms, but generally not horror. I have never read Stephen King, for example; and while I revere Joyce Carol Oates, I don’t read her work that is explicitly labeled horror.

I ask myself why I am drawn to the dark stuff. History is dark, is it not? Perhaps we are defined more against the darkness than the light? Perhaps humanity’s default is dark and the struggle is to the light? Do we live in bubbles where we can pretend the darkness doesn't touch us, that someone else is responsible for it? I don’t have a good answer. I do know, no matter how much light there seems to be, darkness is always hovering at its edges.

I agree with Dan re the trend towards the dark, ugly and explicit in current fiction. I’ll note here that the crime fiction genre has generally darkened in this way, imo. Crime is dark, but there seems to be competition as to who can come up with the most sadistic crimes and then render them in eye-watering, stomach-churning detail. Much of it is obviously gratuitous. I have abandoned quite a few crime novels over the last couple of years because of this.

————

Some of my very favorite authors are purveyors of the dark. Handmaids Tale was my first Margaret Atwood, way back in the 80s. And, ironically, I picked up a Joyce Carol Oates paperback in a library display around 1981, my oldest daughter a toddler in an umbrella stroller, and declared it too dark to read (funny how I remember that). I started reading her 20 years or so ago, and have been seriously addicted. She writes about the darkness, taboo, vulnerability, and things that weren’t/aren't talked about. And there is something about Angela Carter’s women-centered, twisted fairy tales that was also addictive.

Here are some of my recommendations:

Joyce Carol Oates: Not all of her work is dark, dark, dark, but depending how you define dark, quite a bit might be considered so.Oates’s friend the novelist John Gardner once suggested that she try writing a story “in which things go well, for a change.” That hasn’t happened yet.* Ironically, some of my favorite books of hers are her “American Gothics” which are tales set in the past with all the elements of the Gothic. My favorite of the quintet is a A Bloodsmoor Romance which is a Gothic and amusing send-up of Little Women—does the humor cancel out the dark content? Yes)
Mysteries of Winterthurn, A Bloodsmoor Romance. Her short stories are excellent so… Dear Husband, Sourland, Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway, The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, Hungry Ghosts: 7 Allusive Comedies. I could go on but I’ll leave it there.

Angela Carter: Start with The Bloody Chamber, The Magic Toyshop. Carter restores the original dark to fairly tales, often with dark humor.

Margo Lanagan,Tender Morsels. Retelling of Snow White/Rose. Her early short story collections like Black Juice are excellent.
China Mieville; Perdido Street Station, this was his first novel, soon DARK but oh so imaginative.
Jeff VanderMeer’s 2003 Veniss Underground. A slim book with touches of Dante's Inferno; and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
Graham Joyce, The Tooth Fairy. Holy moly, not the Tooth Fairy of your childhood.
Atwood, Handmaids Tale…is the first to come to mind…but any of her dystopias.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Bluest Eye
Edna O’Brien’s Girl
Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter (Gothic)
Susan Hill’s Woman in Black (Gothic)

TWO dark books that I disliked a lot…
African Psycho by Alain Mabanckou
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (sorry, Dan)

*The Unruly Genius of Joyce Carol Oates, by Leo Robson, The New Yorker, June 29, 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-unruly-genius-of-joyce-carol-o...

>15 nohrt4me2: After some thought, I agree with you. They do come under the "awful warning novel" category ;-) And we have discussed the idea before that dystopias are really about hope. But there are definitely some very dark settings....

>12 cindydavid4: Re. Dark Shadows--My friends and I also raced home after school to watch it. I own some of the paperback books that started the show; Victoria Winters was the first book. Others The Mystery of Collinwood and Strangers at Collins House The later books seem to be more focused on the TV show though, rather than as gothic novels,and featured the cast members on the covers.

One of my friends and I used to write each other story notes with illustrations that featured our take on what might happen next on the show, or our own storylines. We exchanged the notes during passing time of our high school classes. We even wrote long fan letters to the cast members of the show and researched the cast members in the theater periodicals at the public library. The guy who played Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) was actually a Shakespearean actor! Definitely hooked!

Loved your research, never got that far with it, but I think I did send fan letters. Do you remember the music? There was a peice called Quentines theme that played on the radio, gave me chills everytime I heard it

>21 lisapeet: I've been away from these Avid Reader threads for a while. Things just got busy around here with one thing and another. Anyway this is me, too . . . "Along the lines of what JBuyer124 discussed, my cultural identity as a Jew is stronger than my ethnic identity (Russian, Polish, Austrian, Romanian) or religious identity, since I was raised without any practicing religion." Although I was raised with religion to a certain extent (went to Hebrew School, got bar mitzvahed, etc.) even the religious aspects were seen by my parents as part of my cultural identity rather than as a religious education per se.

At any rate, the "line from Singer to Simon" mentioned by a few folks here fits me, too, although as I lived for the first 11 years of my life in the Weequahic neighborhood in Newark, NJ, that line for me led directly through Philip Roth, who went to the same grammar school I did (my second grade teacher is mentioned by name in Operation Shylock) and the same high school my father did (we moved to the suburb the next town over when I was in 6th grade). I understand why some people don't like him. But for me, his sentence-level style is enthralling and his character building (often with plenty of blemishes) is equally admirable. That doesn't mean the characters are always admirable, of course. :) I first fell in love with Roth via The Ghost Writer and after that devoured the subsequent Zuckerman novels. The Counterlife is a real tour de force, in my, you should excuse the expression, book.

Singer is another Jewish writer who speaks to me especially directly. His sensibilities and wit remind me of people I grew up around. Also Elie Wiesel.

Moving on to Reading the Dark Stuff, I think the darkest novel I ever read was Geek Love. Also on the short list for me are The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's "Novel as History" (or is it the other way around?) about Gary Gilmore, and Under the Volcano, a really depressing book about alcoholism. So I guess what I'm saying is that I find depressing books and books about evil to be "darker" than books about the supernatural. Don't get me wrong: I like a good spooky haunting. The Ghosts of Belfast. Wow, that is a spooky tale that deals with Irish history and really sent a chill up my spine as well. But I don't make a point of seeking out the supernatural in my reading. What seems closest to me to the darkness to be found in real life is the more affecting. I don't really go looking for that, either. Of course, there's plenty of darkness to be found in histories and other non-fiction. Of course, speaking of Wiesel: Night. I recently finished Been in the Storm So Long by Leon Litwack about the American South and slavery and the continued determined, ferocious oppression of Blacks in the years immediately following the Civil War. Talk about dark.

>23 avaland: not that I would push Cormac McCarthy on you (or anyone else), but after reading all his novels, The Road comes across as a really flimsy insignificant memory with a great start and a few good lines. It is very accessible.

>28 rocketjk: I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by I B Singer. I should get back to his unread books around here.

>28 rocketjk: In Cold Blood was a great book, but one I cannot bring myself to re-read. I didn't read Mailer's book about Gary Gilmore for that reason. One of the "dark stuff" books that falls into the "too real" camp for me.

>30 nohrt4me2: Ah, yes. In Cold Blood. I agree entirely with your assessment. I won't be reading it again, either.

btw, another extremely dark and very powerful novel I thought of after putting up my post last night is Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Falluda. It's a book about life in Berlin during the Nazi regime, written by a man who lived through that time and place.

Q43 Gothic, Horror, dystopias, dark fantasy & fairy tales, the dark side of magical realism, the New Weird, Grimdark…and generally.... fiction that is dark.

For the purpose of this discussion we will call it all"the dark stuff". Many of these books have an element of the fantastic in them, but not all.

I love Gothic novels and creepy books. I don't believe in anything supernatural in real life, but I love it in books. Some of my favourites:

Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Coraline, Neil Gaimon
Reasons She Goes to the Woods, Deborah Kay Davies
Small Hand, Susan Hill
Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss
Witching Hour, Ann Rice
The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
The Black Spider, Jeremias Gotthelf
and pretty much anything by John Wyndham

>28 rocketjk: But I don't make a point of seeking out the supernatural in my reading. What seems closest to me to the darkness to be found in real life is the more affecting. I don't really go looking for that, either. Of course, there's plenty of darkness to be found in histories and other non-fiction. Of course, speaking of Wiesel: Night. I recently finished Been in the Storm So Long by Leon Litwack about the American South and slavery and the continued determined, ferocious oppression of Blacks in the years immediately following the Civil War. Talk about dark.

Yes, indeed.

>29 dchaikin: Yes, it was accessible.

QUESTION 42: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION. LITERARY TRAVELING.

Do you love to travel by book? Are you attracted to travelogues? Or do you prefer to do your literary traveling by way of fiction for that “sense of place”? Do you prefer those places to be in the present, the past or the future? Do you gravitate to specific areas; are you hung up on one place more than others? Perhaps you prefer to explore a particular place in different era or from multiple viewpoints….

Tell us about the interesting travelogues you have read, or tell us about some of your favorite literary locations and the books that transported you there (virtually or literally).

I spent most of my adolescence reading Victorian English novels. When I went there in 1978 at age 24, alas, it was nothing like the books. :-)

I like to read about the experiences people have in their travels, as in travel narratives or diaries or letters. I am especially interested in the UK and Canada, and I guess that has been an interest from childhood. I also like to read fiction set in the UK or Canada, past or present. If I plan to travel somewhere, then I like to read about where I am going--usually an Eyewitness guidebook. Sometimes I pick up a few books when I travel; they serve as souvenirs and also take me back to the places I visited once I get back home in the USA. (They do make for a weighty carry-on though!)

>37 LadyoftheLodge: "travel narratives or diaries or letters"

A really good book along these lines is Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey. Gritty, harrowing, sad from a variety of viewpoints. And that's not even counting the effort to keep from getting pregnant on the trail, which presents a whole other set of challenges.

>37 LadyoftheLodge: Examples of books you read?

I read a lot of travel books - some about places I've been (or lived - that's even more fun), some about places I'd like to go, some where the travelers are more interesting than where they're traveling. Oh, and some about places that I'd much rather read about than actually visit! (Alaska is fascinating, I don't do well in cold places...) Fiction is most interesting when the physical/cultural background is accurate; I'm happier with narrative non-fiction (Gerald Durrell does some lovely place and people descriptions in his bring-them-back-alive animal books).

Re: inaccurate places - my parents tell a story of a movie being shot while they were living in Afghanistan. They visited the sets and talked to people, and really wanted to see the movie (Caravans). But when they actually watched it - one scene they mention every time had Our Hero walking through a hotel in (city over here), walking out onto the balcony and leaping off to land in (desert a hundred-plus miles away). It distracted them from the story. Knowing the lay of the land can be a minus for fiction.

>39 avaland: Any Bill Bryson or Peter Mayle, also Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans, Lost on Planet China, Imagined London, An Embarrassment of Mangoes.

Q 42

I answered the last question with a simple "no" — I feel almost like answering this one with an unadorned "yes"!

A big chunk of my reading — especially this year! — is enhanced by being about places that interest me but that for one reason or another I'm not able to travel to at the moment. I spent most of the summer reading about Southern Africa for the RG theme read, for instance, learnt a lot and loved it. Mostly fiction, but also some travel, memoirs and history.

Less obviously justifiable is my long-running interest in writing from the former DDR, a country I can't visit any more and didn't especially want to visit in the days when it did exist.

Otherwise Spain, Italy, France, South America, Japan, and numerous other places have all popped up in my reading fairly recently.

I enjoy old travel-writing, though I'm not very systematic about seeking it out. Recently I've been reading Henry Havard's books about his travels in the Netherlands in the 1870s, for instance. And I've been treating myself to Boswell's travel diaries at the rate of one every couple of years or so. Favourites from longer ago include the indefatigable Elizabethan, Thomas Coryat, and the medieval globe-trotter Ibn Battutah.

>40 jjmcgaffey: I wonder how prevalent that sort of geographic cheating is in books? Films and TV do it all the time, because of the complexities of location work (I always enjoyed spotting the moments in Morse where they go in through the gate of one Oxford college only to find themselves in the front quad of a quite different one). One place where I spotted cheating recently was in Schiller's Maria Stuart, where characters go rapidly back and forth between London and Fotheringhay Castle as though it's only a short ride away (100 miles in reality). Of course, that's a stage play, not a novel. I've spotted geographical mistakes in novels occasionally, when the author obviously didn't have the time or the opportunity to check something at first hand, but I don't remember any obvious cases of moving real places around for the convenience of the story.

QUESTION 42 LOCATION

It would be too lengthy to write my whole reading journey, so let me just say that I have always enjoyed traveling around the world by book. I started Reading Globally back in Dec 2006 within two months of joining LT. 'nuff said.

I do enjoy reading about a place from many viewpoints and through different kinds of fiction (never underestimate the crime novel), and my "places" tend to be landscapes rather than, say, cities. I had a thing for Africa for years and while I do still read African lit, I also seem to have a thing for cold places. Greenland, Northern Canada, Iceland, Scandinavian countries, Antarctica, Russia/Siberia, Lapland areas.... so, here, off the top of my head, are some of my "cold" reads in which the landscape serves the story in some way.

Four Soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli (Russia, WWII)
Compartment No 6, Rosa Liksom (Russia, no romanticizing the landscape in her book!)
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Russia)
One Day the Ice will Reveal All Its Dead by Clare Dudman (Greenland)
The Cold Earth by Sarah Moss (Greenland)
Arnaldur Indridason* and Ragnar Jonasson's crime novels (Iceland; I've read others but these are my faves)
Icefields by Thomas Wharton (Arctic Canada: Arcturus glacier, Alberta)
White Heat by Melanie McGrath (Arctic Canada: Ellesmere Island)
The Boy in the Snow by M. J. McGrath (Alaska, mediocre book but nice sense of place)
The Lamentations of Zeno: A Novel by Ilija Trojanow (Antarctica)
Austral by Paul McAuley (Antarctica, science fiction)
The Colonel's Wife by Rosa Liksom (Finland, Lapland - the cold landscape sneaks in there)
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (Norway)
Jorn Lier Horst's crime novels (Norway)
Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers, Kerstin Ekman Under the Snow both crime novels (Sweden)
This list could go on for a long time...

Of all of these, it's the Clare Dudman novel that haunts me the most.

Yes, yes, yes! I'm hugely drawn to location in my book choices, and the further away from my own island the better in terms of my interest.

At a non-fiction level, I get very inspired by travelogues of all kinds, from golden oldies (like PLF's A Time of Gifts or Byron's The Road to Oxiana) to more recent adventurers (I enjoyed The Snow Geese by William Fiennes earlier this year). I also love books where the journey involves a physical challenge or test of endurance (epic walking or running adventures in particular, such as Rosie Swale-Pope's A Little Run Around the World Cheryl Strayed's Wild or Christoper McDougall's Born to Run.

For fictional books, I'm really drawn to books set in the US, and >43 avaland: I too love books set in cold climates. I don't know what it is, but I just love a windswept Newfoundland setting or a dark Scandinavian backdrop. Surprising, really, when we spend much of the year in NI complaining about the miserable weather. And of course I couldn't be such a Hardy fan if I didn't enjoy tramping through the furze of England of yesteryear.

An example of fictional books that really spoke to me in terms of location would be:

The Snow Child
The Shipping News
Hotel du Lac
The Miniaturist
Knausgaard's My Struggle series
Hot Milk
The Summer Book
The Enchanted April
The Woodlanders
The Orchardist
Bastard out of Carolina

Plus many, many more.

>44 AlisonY: For some reason I don't consider Newfoundland and the other maritime provinces as cold places, perhaps that is because I'm originally from Maine. Complaining about the weather is part of the Northern New England culture. I certainly enjoy reading about Newfoundland though, through author/poets like Michael Crummey and others.

Q 42

I think time and place go together and I definitely read taking these in. I read a bunch of 1920’s - 1930’s novels this year (Willa Cather and early Nabokov) and the technology of the time really stands out along with the place. So many trains!

But the first thing I think about with this question is how disappointing it is when a book fails to capture that place. Authors are so darned human (and this reader too...)

Strong impressions - probably mostly wrong. : ) - were left by these:

The Covenant - James Michener - South Africa through time
Desert Solitaire - Edward Abby
The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin, Australia
a book I read on Burma and it’s history - something about footsteps. I’ll have to look it up later

The book on Burma is The River of Lost Footsteps : Histories of Burma by Thant Myint-U

My review has this line:

“At one point, in the 15th century, with Mughals in India next door, the Arakan coast in southwest Burma formed its own coastal empire where the capital included “a mix of Arakanese, Bengalis, Afghans, Burmese, Dutch, Portuguese, Abyssinians, Persians, even Japanese Christians from Nagasaki escaping the persecution of the dictator Hideyoshi Toyotomi.” That’s a mixture worth a moment of reflection.“

>42 thorold: I've seen afterwords that mention "btw, I borrowed bits from three different villages/colleges/whatevers and put them together in a fourth place to make my setting - please don't go looking for X pub or Y street...". I think I've noticed impossibilities in books now and then, but not hugely to the detriment of the story. That is, for books where the story is the point. In a travel book, about a place I was familiar with (Kabul, Afghanistan) the author stated something...something about the mountains, or the road through the mountains, that I knew was entirely wrong. It made me wonder about the author's credentials. I've now forgotten both the book and the problem, which was probably the best solution to it anyway.

I'm not a huge travelogue fan. I don't go in search of them. A couple I can recall that I've enjoyed particularly are As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee and McCarthy's Bar by Pete McCarthy. I'm sure there are others. I'm more interested, as others have said here, in novels that take me to a particular time and place.

I can't say that I'm drawn to books about different places--I tend to read books set in England more than anywhere else. But one author who consistently gives an unforgettable sense of place in her fiction is Willa Cather. I particularly remember the feel and smell and look of the Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop and the Midwest in O Pioneers!, My Antonia and One of Ours.

>50 kac522: I thoroughly enjoyed being in Nebraska with Cather (while staying in Michigan) one whole summer. Sarah Orne Jewett was equally compelling in The Country of the Pointed Firs.

If novels count as travelogues, The Last Cruise of the Jeanette, about an arctic expedition, was a favorite as a kid.

>50 kac522: love Cather. I’m reading through all her works and somewhat near complete now. She certainly embraces place.

>44 AlisonY:
. . . further away from my own island the better in terms of my interest. . . I just love a windswept Newfoundland setting

LOL. Is Newfoundland really so different than Ireland? BTW- have you read February by Lisa Moore? It's probably my favourite Newfoundland book.

>53 Nickelini: "LOL. Is Newfoundland really so different than Ireland?"

I found them to be quite different. Newfoundland isn't anywhere near as lushly green. Lots of forest, but no rolling green fields and hillsides. Love them both, by the way.

>54 rocketjk: Newfoundland isn't anywhere near as lushly green True, that.

>40 jjmcgaffey: Re: inaccurate places - my parents tell a story of a movie being shot while they were living in Afghanistan. ... It distracted them from the story. Knowing the lay of the land can be a minus for fiction.

Yes, indeed. Sometimes I can ignore it, other times it's very irritating.

I live in Vancouver, where zillions of movies and TV shows are filmed, and almost none are set here (Vancouver never plays itself). My favourite incongruity was from 2007 "Shooter" where Mark Wahlberg drives down a street close to me at top speed and vaults into the Fraser River, but then surfaces in Philadelphia. The quickest driving distance from here to Philadelphia is 43 hours.

>53 Nickelini: >54 rocketjk: Is Newfoundland really so different than Ireland? I'd say that while the people share a lot, the topography is quite different. As noted above, "no rolling green fields", but lots of really dramatic, harsh scenery; to quote one book title, This Marvellous Terrible Place. Newfoundlanders would use 'terrible' that way more in the old sense of 'awful' - inspiring awe.

>53 Nickelini: February - still one of my favourites, along with >44 AlisonY:'s The Shipping News.

>45 avaland: Slightly picky here, but Newfoundland is not actually considered a Maritime province. The Maritime provinces are Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. When Newfoundland joined Confederation, the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland together became the Atlantic Provinces. Generations of school children have foundered on this distinction!

>35 avaland:
Q 42 Location Do you love to travel by book? Are you attracted to travelogues? Or do you prefer to do your literary traveling by way of fiction for that “sense of place”? Do you prefer those places to be in the present, the past or the future? Do you gravitate to specific areas; are you hung up on one place more than others? Perhaps you prefer to explore a particular place in different era or from multiple viewpoints….

Tell us about the interesting travelogues you have read, or tell us about some of your favorite literary locations and the books that transported you there (virtually or literally).

A huge chunk of my reading is all about location.

I don’t think about the term “travelogue” and in fact had to look at the tag for some examples. A recent favourite was The Alps by Stephen O’Shea, and years ago I enjoyed the European books by Bill Bryson and of course the Peter Mayle Provence books. For non-fiction, I prefer deep dives such as Swiss Watching, Dark Heart of Italy, Italian Neighbours.

I love fiction, both set in the past and present, particularly when it’s set:

On islands in general
Sri Lanka – Anil’s Ghost, Funny Boy, Wave, Reef, and the early novels of Roma Tearne
France
British Isles, especially England – too many examples to begin to list
Montreal – Heather O’Neill
Nordic areas
Netherlands
South Pacific and Australia – Women in Black
Japan
Portugal - 300 Days of Sun
Chile – Isabel Allende (I’m not actually an Allende fan, but when I read her descriptions of Chile, I get the urge to book a trip)

Of particular interest right now are Switzerland and Italy, and the Alps in general:

Switzerland – Black Spider, Heidi, Hausfrau, Back of Beyond
The Alps – When the Night
Italy –funnily enough, when I want a feeling of being in Italy, I prefer books by outsiders. Most of the Italian fiction I read feels like it can be set anywhere. Those with a sense of place include Breaking of a Wave and Hollow Heart. Evocative books by outsiders that I’ve enjoyed include: The Clash of the Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, Death in Venice, Up the Villa,The Summer Villa, Portofino, Battle of the Villa Fiorita, Cooking With Fernet Branca, The Enchanted April, novels by Mark Frutkin.

Conversely, I find that outsiders aren’t usually successful at capturing Vancouver and Coastal British Columbia. Here are some that get it right: Jim Lynch Border Songs; Girlfriend in a Coma, Hey, Nostradamus, and Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland; A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and Jen Sookfong Lee.

I could go on and on with this topic. It’s a favourite for sure.

(touchstones seem to be down -- I'll try to remember to come back and see if they set)

>53 Nickelini: LOL. Is Newfoundland really so different than Ireland?

Oh yes, they're quite different. I never had Newfoundland on my bucket list, but I was in an emergency plane landing many years ago and spent an unexpected 3 days there. It felt more desolate than Ireland. There was a strong sense from local people that they don't get anything much exciting happening there too often (case in point, our unexpected plane arrival was headline news).

I've not heard of Lisa Moore before - will check that out.

>45 avaland: In my head Newfoundland's a cold place. I saw icebergs off the coast there, and we stepped off the plane in shorts in July into snow (with no luggage). Surely that must count as cold, no? My first 3 impressions of Newfoundland were: snow, airport walls covered in missing children photos and a very weird time zone, with it being a half hour out as well as so many hours. I think it's intrigued me ever since. I should return some time in a more relaxed state of mind, not after just landing in crash position. Perhaps it wasn't the most auspicious introduction to the island.

>57 SassyLassy: My bad. Worse yet, that as a Mainer by birth, I should have known better. I'm a Michael Crummey fan, too.

>59 AlisonY: From your description, it would qualify. It intrigues me, too and I hope to travel there in the future. https://www.newfoundlandlabrador.com/trip-ideas/travel-stories/four-unesco-sites I should like to see the Tablelands....

>35 avaland: Oh my - I have 8 bookshelves that are nothing but travelogues/narratives/memoirs, I can't even begin to to list them all. I started reading these years ago when I got hooked on Paul Therouxs Kingdom by the Sea during my first trip to Great Britain. (later soured on him when his unique style turned into judgemental cynicism that I just couldn't abide any more. Tho I had a good run of his books) Moved on to Laurie lee Cider with Rosie and others, then John Hilaby journey through Britain and others in that series. Bill Bryson his early books (he has been like Theroux his last few travel books or so) And thats just England......Have a bunch more will be back soon with the rest....

oh whats the name of the book about a NYer writer who has a penpal relationship with a bookstore owner in London post WWII? Really good movie adaptation.

>61 cindydavid4: I loved the bit in Jonathan Raban’s Coasting where he bumps into Paul Theroux, going round the island the opposite way, and they are both very cagey about what they’re up to.

>61 cindydavid4: Hee, really, Theroux runs into everyone it seems; I like his relationship with Jan Morris; cant remember which book it was but they have a respect for each other that I love to see

Well my Newfoundland - Ireland comparison was said for a laugh because when I think of Newfoundland, I think of "ocean waves crashing against rocks: and when I think of Ireland I think of "ocean waves crashing against rocks." But after all the "heavens no!" comments here, I went to google images and looked up "Ireland coast" and "Newfoundland coast." Yeah, lots of those pictures are interchangeable. So my original comment really wasn't so outrageous after all.

>61 cindydavid4: You are thinking of 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. Excellent! I have read it many times, and still love it.

>65 LadyoftheLodge: thats it!!!!!! Gosh haven't read that in forever. Remembering there was something about the movie Shop Around the Corner, coz my fiance at the time, when I was telling him about this book, showed the movie to me. Might just be conflating things, wouldn't surprise me

>42 thorold: I enjoy old travel-writing, though I'm not very systematic about seeking it out.

Oh my yes - I think my first experience was through Freya Starkvalley of the assassins learned about her browsing at a bookstore, got fascinated and got hooked. Another example is Emily Hahn, a journalist for the NYer from the 30s to her death in 1997. Her books about her time in Hong Kong during the war was an eye opener, I really never had a sense of that city, but wow you do with this (in HF reminded me of Old Filth But her 1920s books about her travel with a friend driving from Ill to New Mexico was just wow No hurry to get Home is her memoir. I love how books like hers take me to another time and place. John Lloyd Stephenswrote about his travels around the world in the 1800s in his incidents of travel series through South America and the Middle East. Definitely issues with colonialism here, but well worth reading for his accounts. Another similar was Richard Halliburtonan adventurer in the 30s fascinating stuff, tho again definitely cringe worthy issues here (interestingly tho, he had great respect for several woman pilots and adventurers). He did 1939, during his journey in a chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Fransisco.

Guess I should answer the above question! Obviously I love to travel by book through travelogues, letters, memoirs as well as in fiction. I enjoy books from any time period (see Travels of a Tangerine or marco polo I used to prefer great britain then I learned to expand my horizons and Ive read books about everywhere in the world. Spent many airline flights reading Best America Travel Writing and Traveler Tales series, books that opened up the world to me through stories from different writers abotu different places.

More fav authors: Pico Iyer Jan Morris Eric Newby stanley stewart Colin Thurbon Jason Elliot I realize this list is very white and male; something that Club Read, Travel Through Time and Travel Globally has already started to fix!

Thoughts about James Clavell or Pearl S. Buck and their sense of time/place?

I remember enjoying both Shogun and several of Buck's novels 30 years ago or more. I recently read Peony, and was fascinated by the story of the Jews in Kaifeng.

Both authors are white. Clavell writes largely from the POV of a westerner. Buck, having grown up in China as the child of Christian missionaries, writes from inside the culture.

Does that make a difference?

I am no longer as plugged into the sensibilities of The Academy as I once was, but I hear grumblings about these two writers (and many other white authors) along the lines of cultural appropriation and stereotyping.

Are travel writers off the hook when it comes to this kind of scrutiny, since they are just recording their personal observations? I am not a huge fan of Jan Morris having read an essay she wrote some years ago about India almost as if she were a memsahib of the Raj.

>70 nohrt4me2: I read the good earth in jr hi and reread it many times over again . It did take me till college to realize the main character was an asshole but still learned alot about the culture of the time. Read some of her other books; never knew there was a problem untl recently. I always had the sense of her as writing within the culture, but I could be wrong.

>64 Nickelini: Well, sure, the coasts. You can throw Northern California (where I live) in too, then. :)

>71 cindydavid4: I didn't think the main character was an a-hole, just a man who came to some hard truths at the end of his life about where he had gone horribly wrong. Maybe that wrap-up came in one of the sequel novels to The Good Earth.

I think authors like Buck, writing many decades ago in the "Western cultural vernacular," to coin a phrase (you heard it here first!), might have inspired a lot of us to learn more about other cultures, thus contributing to an enlargement of one's POV.

Like any small light, these books cast shadows, and the illumination can be distorting. But they still show the way forward.

If the authors did the best they could and it wasn't good enough, that is more a problem with larger cultural chauvinism that pervaded the times--which we can address and should address--than with any individual writer, though it always seems like the individual is blamed as if they somehow were not a product of their times and places.

Sorry for being tangential to the topic ...

>74 nohrt4me2: I agree with you totally, I was just commenting on the comments of others.

Right now, the only time I look for books from a particular location is when I'm reading something with the MENA (Middle East North Africa) group on Goodreads.

In March 2021 we'll be reading Flight against time by Emily Nasrallah. It's set in Canada by way of Lebanon. We haven't picked our January read yet, but the ones I'm interested in include

• Touba and the meaning of night by Shahrnush Parsipur (Iran)


• The bridges of Constantine/Memory of the flesh by Ahlem Mosteghanemi (Algeria) first in a trilogy


• Grenada: a novel by Radwa Ashour (author is Egyptian, set in the Iberian penninsula while the Christians are ousting the Muslims and Jews, focusing on a family of Muslim bookbinders; first in a trilogy, but I think this volume is the only one translated into English)

>70 nohrt4me2: Read both authors back in the day. Probably early 70s for Buck and a bit later for the Clavell. I loved Shogun at the time. They would be tough reads now, me thinks. Everything seemed so far away (and out of reach) back then.

Posting question: I've misplaced my directions for linking to a specific post in my thread; can anyone help me remember how to find the post #?

Many thanks.

>79 markon: Click on the “more” link under the post, and then copy the link under the “link” link.

>80 thorold: Thank you! I knew it was something simple, but I couldn't find updated directions.

>80 thorold: >81 markon: Just as an fyi, you can also hover your cursor over the link number and right click, then select "Copy Link Location."

QUESTION 43: PANDEMIC READING UPDATE.

Has the pandemic changed your reading this year in any way? For example, are you now working from home and/or supervising your children's remote learning so that your reading time has been absorbed by other things, or are you just too stressed or preoccupied to settle into a book? If you have been able to read, did you find some types of books harder to read, while others were more palatable? Have you read more or less books over these last eight months than you normally do? Has your reading plans or goals been effected, or are you able to carry on as usual? Are you reading any pandemic-related literature? (either directly or indirectly related, or having some relevance in your mind).

As we move into the next season (whether that be winter or summer, depending on where you live) are you making any kind of literary preparations? (i.e. are you putting you name on book waitlists in the library, stocking your Amazon basket with possibilities, or hitting up the remainder/sale books at the bookstore…?)

I have found this a stressful year in many ways, and it has changed my routines, including my reading windows. I've lost my commute reading time, and at night I'm watching more films and series with my husband, but that's actually been nice together time.

Whilst Rona has affected the quantity I've been reading, it's not really affected what I've been picking up. I'm missing the library and my random purchasing jaunts to the secondhand bookshops, so my reading has been more purposeful and based on Amazon selections. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Pretty much the same as the last time this question was asked - I'm reading a little bit lighter and brighter than normal, not being able to tolerate even as much grim as usual (I don't read much dark anyway). When I was full-time in an office for a couple months, I wasn't reading much - made up for it the next month, when I was reading for stress relief. I've already passed my goal of 200 books for the year.

I'm still getting a lot of ebooks from the library, and buying many; I'm being very disconcerted when I learn that a book I want to read (an older one, usually) isn't available as an ebook. I've got my name on some waiting lists (at the library) for books that will be released soon, and some lists for books that are popular enough that there aren't any available copies at the moment. But that's no different from normal. Maybe the pandemic has slightly accelerated my move towards electronic books - but only slightly.

We have had more stress this fall for various reasons, one being that we supervise our 5 year old grandson's remote learning. I think we prefer to just be the fun Nana and Pop-pop, but needs must. I was having trouble with concentration and started picking up more short stories and poetry; and the switch has been helpful. I've now read a novel and am in the middle of another, so perhaps I'll keep my reading mixed up for a while. Most of the fiction I have been reading has had a sense of empathy or compassion in it. I have not been able to read many crime novels, this may be because I'm caught up on most of my regulars and haven't found that many new crime authors I want to read, or it could be that it's just not a good time. As far as quantity, I can't say definitively, but I think I'm reading slightly less than usual but more variety in kinds of books. I am thankful I do not have any reading goals at this point in my life.

I'm reading somewhat less, I think, but I'm still buying books, new and used, through the bookstore I used to be associated with, Amazon, Abebooks, BookDepository, as necessary. Even having physical books around me is a comfort, so why not? And with the predictions that the pandemic will be bad over the winter, I am indeed stockpiling some, books included (any excuse, eh?) We are introverts so we are fairly content with a comfy chair and a pile of books (or in his case, a tablet) beside it.

Off the top of my head, I don't think I've read anything that brings to mind the pandemic, although, I do work on Ancestry.com so many a previous pandemic comes into play on death records.

Do you think we are getting around in Club Read as much as we usually do? Seems our community traffic with each other is less. I try to get around to most threads because I enjoy seeing what others are reading, whether it's the same stuff I might read or not. But I have somewhat less time online these days....

I think what jjmcgaffey said applies to me as well - lighter & brighter reading. I've also done more rereading this year than usual. I still use the library a lot (paper & ebooks) & buy a few ebooks.

As to avaland's question, I know I slacked off on posting this summer, as I often do. I get round maybe once a week to check out threads.

I have found myself drawn to re-reading old favorites probably because concentrating on a new book takes a lot of energy. James and Wharton seemed to offer maximum immersion and escape. Might make re-reading my new theme for the year.

For me, the American political landscape is more disruptive than the pandemic. I can take my husband being home more, but we frequently need to discuss his yelling at the TV news or freaking out about somebody's memes.

I have suggested he read the newspaper instead. My print news consumption has gone up, TV and radio news way down.

>88 nohrt4me2: For me, the American political landscape is more disruptive than the pandemic.

Yes, and so I am tending to read books that don't touch on those issues, stories that are calming or escapist. Only way to keep me sane. Otherwise I don't tend to be read differently with the seasons or holidays, and the same could be said now.

That being said, my reading has actually increased since so much theatre and art events are closed. Tho now that the weather is finally cooling off, Im going outside more, ans suspect Ill be reading less as a result

Q43:

Not much change since last time for me, either. Since I'm lucky enough not to have work or childcare to worry about, the main effect of COVID has been to discourage me from doing things that would otherwise interrupt my reading — travel, go to concerts, visit museums, spend time with friends, go out for meals, etc. Combined with a spell of very good weather in spring and summer that kept me sitting on my balcony all day, my book-consumption went up alarmingly!

Our book-club has had a few outdoor meetings over the summer, but we're back to video meetings now.

I've not used the library since March — they are open again, with restrictions, but getting there is not quite straightforward. I suppose I could get books sent to my neighbourhood branch library, I haven't done that yet. Reading ebooks and buying online is more tempting. As I've been unable to travel far from home and thus keep doing the same three or four local walks every week, I've also increased my audiobook consumption this year.

I'm trying to support second-hand dealers as far as possible, even though it often means paying far more in postage than the books are worth. I've also done quite a few exchanges with friends locally, and discovered a nearby Little Free Library that often has interesting things in it, not just the usual worn-out children's books and airport novels (my incoming books go on a quarantine shelf for a few days). If the worst comes to the worst, I've got more than three months of reading on the TBR pile.

Q42. The meaning of Life, the Universe, and Location, Location, Location.

Last year I decided to try reading a book from all 28 European Union member states before my country, the UK, foolishly completed its plan to leave in mid-2020. I discovered, interestingly, that the better written books aren't always the ones which best convey a sense of place because well-written books often focus on characters, and human social groups seem to include/exclude much the same set of characters everywhere, while badly written books often pad and plod with factual detail that unintentionally gives a boring but informative insight into everyday minutiae which is where cultural differences are often most apparent.

Having achieved my EU goal I decided to try to extend my locational reading for 2020 to include at least one book each from a set of arbitrarily chosen geographical regions and, having achieved that, I looked at a list of every country in the world to work out which I've read (including many long gone states because I'm old!). There are about 97 I either haven't read or decided I don't remember enough about to count as read. My goal for the remainder of this year is to complete Europe with Kosovo, Liechtenstein, and Monaco. I'll probably also tackle a few more of the 97.

Recommendations from the EU

Poetry:
- Wisława Szymborska's most complete volume in English translation is now Map: Collected and Last Poems but I read View with a Grain of Sand and People on a bridge,
- Blaga Dimitrova's The Last Rock Eagle and Because the Sea is Black,
- Ana Blandiana's My Native Land A4.

Non-fiction, popular:
- Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubenstein (author is USian but subject is European / Hungarian / Romanian). If you read this then you need to update by reading the protagonist's wikipedia page afterwards for further developments.

Fiction:
- The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and set on an island in the Gulf of Finland,
- Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman and set in Sweden,
- Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perišić and set in Croatia.

Further recommendations from this year

Poetry:
- Iep jāltok : poems from a Marshallese daughter by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Marshall Islands and the US including Hawai'i,
- My voice : a decade of poems from the Poetry Translation Centre from everywhere!

Fiction:
- Whole of a Morning Sky by Grace Nichols and set in Guyana,
- Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna and set in Sierra Leone.

Q43. The Pandemic of Doom.

Our local libraries were closed briefly during the first full lockdown but they quickly evolved an online click and collect system, including reducing the usual small book reservation fee to 0 pence. They also renewed all our pre-existing loans indefinitely. Despite this excellent service I've been reading fewer library books because of my own personal circumstances and relative immobility. On the plus side, instead of picking up randomly browsed books I'm choosing my reading more deliberately.

My physical To Read pile is larger than it has been for many years, at over 100+ (haven't counted). I hadn't realised until thinking about this answer that it probably reflects my desire for more choice in a situation which has otherwise limited my personal choices.

Q43:

Absolutely. I, my partners, and most hospital based physicians have spent many many hours reading medical journal articles and threads from colleagues on the management of patients with COVID-19, and what measures we should take to protect ourselves around them, along with newspaper and magazine articles about the pandemic. The pandemic has meant that my vacation plans to visit friends, mostly members of LibraryThing, in Europe this year had to be cancelled, and that, combined with my elderly parents' poor health and my father's severe illness early this year has greatly affected my ability to concentrate on reading for enjoyment, as well as the pleasure of reading in itself.

I was about to claim that I will read less books in 2020 than in any other year since the early 2000s, but I only read 46 books in 2019, versus 42 books so far this year. However, considering that I've worked considerably fewer days this year than last, as I'm now working 60% of full time instead of 80%, I think I can say that this was the worse of the two years. I worked three days in the entire month of August and didn't leave town, yet I only finished three books. I haven't changed the types of books I've been reading this year, but I won't come close to meeting any of my ambitious reading goals for 2020.

I'm too distracted by the worsening pandemic and the upcoming presidential election, along with the races for the two Senate seats in Georgia, to have given any thought to 2021, even though I can't wait for this annus horribilis to end.

I am trying not to wish my life away by continually looking at the news. I am keeping to my reading programme and this year I think I'm on track for reading the most number of books {insect I striated with Libraryyhing} (that should read since I started with library thing), but I like the sentence so much I have not deleted it.

Deep in the countryside of South West France one could imagine that there is no pandemic, but being "vulnerable" because of my age; myself and Lynn are being very careful. We are still eating out in our local restaurant, but 'out' means outside and so I am not sure how long that will last now that winter is coming on. Oops stopping now to catch the 20.00 hour news on TV

>88 nohrt4me2: Yes, familiar authors seem to work also.

Yes, I guess for us in the states the state of the political landscape is pretty much inextricably linked with the virus. I'm the one usually swearing at the television (not often, but there are no other words sometimes). My news consumption via television has also gone down, and I get my news from the Washington Post.

>90 thorold: I have been thinking about creating a little free library and put it on our frontage along the road. I love the idea of it. We don't get a lot of traffic but there are a fair number of walkers. Not sure how people would view it during Covid, and then there is winter weather and snowbanks....

>91 spiralsheep: About 15 years ago, tried to read books, mostly fiction or memoir, from as many African countries that I could find. It wasn't easy. I thought I did fairly well, considering, but it would be easier now as there is even more lit available from the continent.

>94 kidzdoc: Re your last paragraph: we're all with you there! (I'm impressed with the mayor there in Atlanta) Are you really feeling the loss of the usual amount of reading, or have you just been too preoccupied to sense the loss?

Q42: LOCATION
I don't have a lot to add to the great suggestions and comments above. Personally, when I read travel books I tend to lean toward exploration stories more than travelogues—I love the idea of something being new to someone and getting to go along for the ride—I think I was hooked early on by Cherry Apsley-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World (what a great title and a great author name!). I also like books about cold climates... something about the brutality, maybe, I don't know. Did anyone mention David Grann's The White Darkness?

I also like some hot climate exploration, though, and want to put in a word for Redmond O'Hanlon's tales of his journeys in the Amazon, Borneo, and the Congo. He's a character and he spins a good yarn.

A neat series for tastes of other journeys is Chronicle's The Sea Journal: Seafarers' Sketchbooks and Explorers' Sketchbooks: The Art of Discovery & Adventure—big handsome volume and fun to dip in and out of.

Q43: COVID READING REDUX
No big change for me since my last answer to this. My reading time's down a bit overall because I've lost the two-hour-a-day commute, though I may be factoring in more time at the end of the day, so perhaps it's gone up a bit. No change in material or format from my pre-COVID reading—I'm still looking for immersion over comfort, and my concentration hasn't been affected, so I'll read just about anything if it captures my fancy. I just came off of a cycle of judging short story collections for work and halfway through the pile had to begin stopping about 2/3 of the way through each book just to hit my deadline—NOT my favorite way to read—but I'll probably be going back and finishing up most of those.

I'm posting the same as I was before, and keeping up my low-traffic thread because it's a good record for me to refer back to.

>90 thorold: we have two or three little free libraries that we frequent on walks. Would love to have one of my own but we are at the top of a cul de sac and so don't get many people walking by. I have been supporting my local indie by purchasing their 'book care packages' They put together boxes of themed books for adults, teens and kids, which made for some great bday presents during the lock down. And as I am constantly clearing out my shelves of books I don't want to keep, Ive been supporting my used bookstore using trade credit.

>95 baswood: "insect I striated with Libraryyhing"

Lol! I also like to leave the best typos standing.

>96 avaland: It's definitely becoming easier to read more widely around the world, especially as the internet spreads and brings more opportunities to more people for (monetised) self-publishing.

Being an anglophone Brit I've obviously found it easiest to read books from English-speaking Commonwealth countries, but reading around the world systematically would involve making many arbitrary rules. For example, I tend only to count books by contemporary local people, because while I love history I want my recreational reading to be about the world as it is now and preferably from insider perspectives. But this leads to bizarre anomalies such as the fact I've read a lot of classic Bangla literature but, according to my own rules, haven't read a book that "counts" from English-speaking Bangladesh, the world's 8th most populous sovereign state. And why sovereign states anyway? Cultural divisions tend to be more meaningful than political sovereignty. Should I aim to read books from Nauru and Tuvalu, island cultures with comparatively small populations in the thousands, but not Hong Kong (China) or Puerto Rico (US) with millions of people each? Clearly the solution is to hunt for the best books and bend one's rules to accommodate them to ensure one includes books such as Iep Jaltok that I mentioned above, but then I still feel mildly uncomfortable that without trying I've read more books from Jamaica, for example, than the whole of francophone Africa altogether!

It's difficult for me to make reading goals a joy and inspiration rather than a hard taskmaster but I do try.

>99 spiralsheep: It's difficult for me to make reading goals a joy and inspiration rather than a hard taskmaster but I do try.
Is that COVID-related, do you think, or is that how you feel about reading goals in general?

>100 lisapeet: Interesting question!

I think anyone struggling with necessities is less likely to enjoy arbitrary additional restrictions, so it might be true that many people whose lives have been restricted by the pandemic don't want to play rules-based games as much in their leisure time. OTOH there are probably also people who feel generally down or depressed who might benefit from making arbitrary goals to motivate themselves. Humans tend to cover a full spectrum of reactions in most situations.

My own situation is that my life since March has been restricted far more by my own personal circumstances (unexpected serious illness - not covid) than by wider social events. Feeling restricted has definitely made me increase my To Read pile without guilt, lol, and probably made me want to travel and meet new people more by reading because I can't do that in person. The main inspiration for my location based reading this year was originally Brexit and the UK leaving the European Union though.

>100 lisapeet: It's difficult for me to make reading goals a joy and inspiration rather than a hard taskmaster but I do try.

Hee, see, this is why I don't make goals - Love the joy and inspriation I get from stumbling onto a book or a theme all by my lonesome. But I am like you - one book leads to another until I am far away from where I started but enjoying the ride :)

>96 avaland: Are you really feeling the loss of the usual amount of reading, or have you just been too preoccupied to sense the loss?

Good question. I'm mostly too preoccupied to sense the loss of reading, and if it wasn't for my failed goal to read the Booker Prize shortlist before the award ceremony early next month and using my LT thread to count the number of books I've read this year I would hardly notice it at all. Then again, I do have thousands of unread books at home in every room, and they continue to call out to me and ask when I'm going to get to them.

>103 kidzdoc: I like your last line! I also have thousands of books all over my home, and seem bent on acquiring more. They also call out to me in plaintive little voices and beg to be noticed and read.

>103 kidzdoc: Then again, I do have thousands of unread books at home in every room, and they continue to call out to me and ask when I'm going to get to them.

>103 kidzdoc: I like to think the unread in the house is only in the 100s but yes, they do call, as also do new titles (thus there is little chance of making actual progress, LOL).

You'll get to more those TBRs. Hang in there, life does get in the way sometimes.

I have plenty of books and plenty of time and inclination to read, but I sure do miss bookstores.

>106 rocketjk: Yes, I miss book stores, knitting shops, mass attendance, farmer/flea markets, and cafes.

Otoh, I am going great guns on writing up the family history stuff I have gathered for the last 30 years.

... and I just realized that list makes me sound like some type of overstuffed bourgeois geezer.

>102 cindydavid4: "Love the joy and inspriation I get from stumbling onto a book or a theme all by my lonesome. But I am like you - one book leads to another until I am far away from where I started but enjoying the ride :)"

{sings I was Born Under a Wandering Star but not in Lee Marvin's wonderful bass}

>105 avaland: I like to think the unread in the house is only in the 100s

That's probably a bit of self-deception we all share!

>107 nohrt4me2: I guess we belong to the same geezer club. I miss bookstores and second-hand book sales, as well as theater and music events and just interacting with people.

>109 thorold: Shhhh! (but now you have me curious about how many TBRs are truly in this house...and do I count HIS downloads?)

>111 avaland: I use LT for that - My Library is physical books in the house, not counting things like library books or ebooks. Using the cross-collection tells me that of the 5600+ books in My Library, I have read 1700 (exactly, amusingly) of them. Um. But then I have books that I'd read before I was on LT, some but not all of which are in Read...And of course that ignores ebooks. Of my 5000+ ebooks, I've read 1500+; and 743 of them are also in My Library (that is, I own a paper and an e-copy). I suspect all of those are Read, but maybe not...hmm, no, probably missing some classics (I think I have a bunch of Jane Austen and Brontes, for instance, in both paper and e-version, that I haven't read. The ones I have read, I just have the e-version and have gotten rid of the paper...).

And not all of those are TBRs - quite a few of those 5600+ books are cookbooks, atlases, other reference books that I never count as "read" even if I've dipped into them many times.

Sigh. There's never enough data.

>111 avaland: I counted my two shelves of unread books and I currently have 119, which allowing for whims and library loans is less than two years supply and could be read in one (I'm on my 143rd book of 2020).

But now I'm curious, not about how many TBR books people have, but how we feel about our TBRs. I suppose this has already been a Question for Avid Readers. I'd feel oppressed by more TBRs than I could tackle in a couple of years so I regularly weed mine and donate a few to the charity shop (thrift store). But how do people with more TBRs feel? Are the books a comfort blanket? A collection to be displayed? A library to be loaned? An uncontrollable impulse, and if so then to buy or to hoard?

>113 spiralsheep: I just don't sweat it. I go through my TBR shelves now and again and trade or give away anything that just has not grabbed me. I know the books are there, and the number is small enough that I can take a glance and see if any move me to try before reading something new. I do think they act as a comfort blanket, nowing I will never be out of books to read. In theory anyway

>112 jjmcgaffey: Me thinks you are far more into the data than I. Our libraries were once fairly accurate but when we moved 6 1/2 years ago we gave away or donated around 1000 books and I'm not sure I got all of them notated in the library. I'm good at logging books in but less good at deleting books (books we haven't read but have let them go anyways) or notating others (books read but we have let go of the physical book).

>113 spiralsheep: That's great. 116 books is a very doable number of TBR books. I prefer to surround myself not only with old "friends" but also wonderful, numerous and varied possibilities, which is how I see TBRs. Numbers don't count.

I have a very limited collection of physical books, which are comfort artifacts. My mom's copy of "Jane Eyre" discarded from her high school library--the very book she read as a teenager--is one of them. I also have a copy of "The Once and Future King," which I sometimes open at random to read. It's been around for decades. I'm 66, and I still smells faintly of the perfume I wore in college when I bought it (replacing an earlier version). I also have my great-grandfather's copy of "Emma" and a couple books by Jules Verne my grandmother had.

>116 avaland: Numbers don't count.


Like they say, it's not hoarding if it's books

>118 Nickelini: this!!!!

Oh man, I have many hundreds of unread print books here, and another hundred or more in e, but my workplace is in the book review business so there were always lots of giveaway shelves to pick from. There's one part of my reading life that the pandemic has put the brakes on, come to think of it. I don't mind having so many unread books, though—I tend to give away a lot of what I have read, so even if I didn't have so many, the proportions of unread to read would still be huge. They're my abundance, my bounty... I like having 'em around.

>115 cindydavid4: I understand the comfort blanket aspect of a TBR store. As I admitted earlier in this thread, mine has about doubled since the pandemic began.

>116 avaland: Books are definitely possibilities: "wonderful", "varied", affirming, challenging, educational, comforting.... :-)

>117 nohrt4me2: I wish I'd inherited books! I didn't even have the opportunity to keep my childhood copy of Alice Through the Looking Glass given to me by my grandmother.

>118 Nickelini: "Like they say, it's not hoarding if it's books"

Ha! Also, technically, one could construct a survival shelter out of TBRs if one had enough.... so they could be classed as necessities?

>120 lisapeet: I live very close to a free "phone box" library, which is always well-stocked with desirable books, so I understand about the freebie shelves of temptation. And I also give away any book I'm not likely to re-read.

"They're my abundance, my bounty... I like having 'em around."

An excellent reason and a good feeling.

QUESTION 44: TWENTY QUESTIONS: JUST A BIT O' FUN.

Not the game you remember exactly but a light interlude. From this list of 25 questions you must answer at least 20. A few questions have sub-questions. (it might be easiest to copy and paste the list of questions into a new message box and then add your answers in a way that distinguishes them from the question) Have fun!

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
19. Who was the dead author you read most recently? And what year did they die?
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)

QUESTION 44: TWENTY QUESTIONS: JUST A BIT O' FUN.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
The art of electronics (a.k.a. "Horowitz and Hill"). Or More tales of the city. Take your pick!
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
I managed to clear quite a few this year, but Birds without wings is still hanging in there stubbornly as the second longest resident on the TBR.
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
There are literally millions of books I haven't finished. Most of them I haven't even heard of, impossible to say which is the most recent.
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
Define "bejeebers"
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Well, I've read several non-fiction books about Dutch politics, which usually takes place here in The Hague; other than that, probably this year's Boekenweek gift, Leon & Juliette, which is set partly in Charleston and partly in Monster, less than 25km away.
7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Russian thinkers (in Russian thinkers) and village life in Botswana (Serowe)
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
If we're going by number of copies on LT, that would have to be The bell jar (23k). If we're going by how much people like it, The Moor's last stand, which I read in March, has a clean sweep of five-star ratings, although that's only because I forgot to rate it when I reviewed it.
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
And a threefold Cord by Alex La Guma, in May this year.
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Schiller's Wilhelm Tell and P G Wodehouse William Tell told again. Can't remember what the connection was, though.
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Tricky. Bessie Head, perhaps — I'd known her for many years but it was strictly platonic until recently.
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
Lake Geneva and Manchester
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Julian Barnes's Cross Channel, which I finished rereading a couple of days ago: Different stories mentioned World War I, World War II, and the Napoleonic wars.
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
Hangsaman, baswood (Thanks!)
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Cf. 13 — there's a story set some 20 years in the future, ca. 2009
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Rue des Voleurs, Strait of Gibraltar
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Serowe, Bessie Head. (But there are also many other southern Africans, Argentinians, and Australians in my recent reading)
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
— another sad victim of the great Penguin ink-shortage
19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Paul Van Ostaijen, read last week, died 1926; Elsa Joubert, read in July, died a few weeks before that.
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
William Tell told again
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Professor Hilary Tamar
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Shortest physical book: probably a Boekenweek gift (they are standard 96 pages): I've read three this year, Leon & Juliette was the most recent.
Shortest text may have been Schiller's unfinished play Demetrius, but I read that as part of a Complete Works.
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
The Quincunx. Gravity, and the elasticity of paper.
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Little black book of stories
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
The photographer at sixteen

Fun! I'm impressed that I managed to answer 23/25, albeit with a bit of recycling here and there.

>123 thorold: Nicely done. I wasn't sure most were willing to do all that coding.... I tested these questions on the hubby and I still found a few hard to answer.

>124 avaland: Well, I've got the data for most of those to hand, and it's raining.
The real challenge is getting Touchstones to work after editing a long post.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
The Days Are Just Packed

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Infinite Jest

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
The Stone Sky

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Three Lives was interrupted by bookclub reads and I never got back to it.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
I don’t read scary books. How about various New Yorker articles on politics and climate change?

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
10:04 has scenes in the food co-op of which I am a member and various scenes taking place within a mile or two of where I live

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
antiracism and immigration

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Where the Crawdads Sing

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Ducks, Newburyport, read in Mar/Apr 2020

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Ibram X. Kendi

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
G. took place in Europe.

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
A character in The Overstory was a Vietnam Vet

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
The Eighth Life (for Brilka) was recommended by a couple of people, probably rachbxl?

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
News from Nowhere

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Although it takes place in London, The Living and the Dead is by an Australian author.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Citizen: An American Lyric – it took many puzzled glances before I realized the dripping black blob was supposed to be a black hood ripped from the rest of the hoodie sweatshirt.

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
George Eliot, 1880

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
I'm not sure there is a crime solver in either Speaking of Summer or American Spy.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
The Lifted Veil

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
The Turn of the Screw was nearly inscrutable due to those ridiculously convoluted sentences

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Just Mercy

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Good Talk

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
1973 - The Princess Bride by William Golding
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Wonders of a Godless World by Andrew McGahan. The top 40% was blue.
4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?) Earth Storm by Mons Kallentoft, clearly, not my thing….
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you? Fascism: A Warning by Madeline Albright
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was? A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed:Linked Stories by Jason Brown. Set mid-coast Maine about a two-hour drive from here.
7. What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read? 1. Fascism 2. Robert Frost’s poem "The Road Not Taken"
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Based on # of reviews, Norwegian by Night by Derek Miller
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon, read in July
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Chris McManus’s Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures eventually brought me to Clare Porch’s Laterality: Exploring the Enigma of Left-Handedness (I saw her book had a blurb from McManus, so bought it)
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with Paul Yoon
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year? Northern Sweden
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)? The Colonel’s Wife by Rosa Liksom (the Winter War and WWII)
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say. Acquired Mrs Caliban based on comments by wandering_star and Ridgewaygirl.
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way? The Resisters by Gish Jen. A dystopian future.
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall? Pond by Clare Louise-Bennett has an obvious reference….
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere? The Good Parents by Joan London (Australian)
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover? The Good Parents by Joan London (Australian)
19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die? Andrew McGahan, died 1019 (in his 50s)
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read? Dogman Unleashed by Dav Pilkey. It wasn’t my choice.
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read? Odd Singsaker
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Dwellers in the House of the Lord: Poems by Wesley McNair or another of the poetry volumes I’ve read this year
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?) Verge: Stories by Lidia Yuknavitch. Well written stories but so dark, especially attempting to read it early in the pandemic.
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT? Mitochondrial Night, poetry by Ed Bok Lee
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics) Had to go back to 2019: Around the World in 80 Trees by Jonathan Drori (unless you wanted me to list DogMan again :-)

>123 thorold: re your question "Noun. bejeebers (uncountable) (slang) Mental soundness, wits."
bejeebers - Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org › wiki › bejeebers
and re: your answer for #18: another fine example of covers featuring parts of women. And #23 was quite funny :-)

Let's see if I can get all these touchstones to work....

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long.
It's on my TBR shelves but it's a re-read: Elizabethan Lyrics edited by Norman Ault.

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
The autobiographical Black Apples of Gower by Iain Sinclair but I can't recommend it.

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)?
My only DNF out of 143 books this year was Shadows of the Rain by Raushan Burkitbayeva-Nukenova, which was so badly "translated" (by machine?) and "edited" (by a non-pro English "editor" who couldn't even write a coherent English introduction) that after studying the publisher's other business I concluded was possibly part of an international COUGH "money transfer" COUGH scheme for changing soft currencies (including from certain governments that shall remain nameless) into hard currency.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Marc Chagall's autobiography My Life, and Playing the Moldovans at Tennis which is a bet/dare based comedic travelogue by a well-known British comedian.

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
The most deservedly LT-popular book I've read this year is Pride and Predjudice.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
August's science fiction classic Extra (Ordinary) People by Joanna Russ.

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
A Sensible Life by Mary Wesley is set in Northern France and Southern England.

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
The last book about a war rather than writing around wars was the heartbreaking How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić about the Bosnian War and the surrounding wars resulting from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
My reading in the last few months has been influenced by members of the Reading Globally group and the Virago Modern Classics group but no particular rec stands out in my memory.

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
As in 9, the science fiction classic Extra (Ordinary) People by Joanna Russ.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Belarusian poets, and authors generally, often seem to have a notable interest in forested bogs for both geographical and valid historical reasons: Like Water, Like Fire : an anthology of Byelorussian poetry from 1828 to the present day.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
The excellent Ancestor Stones by justly award-winning author Aminatta Forna.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Selected Poems by Jaan Kaplinski, although I can't claim it's not representative of the contents in many ways (no touchstone that I can find).

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Very All Hallows/Samhain! Elizabeth Cadell, 1903-1989, who wrote the ghost story mentioned in 21!

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
The endlessly fun Lumberjanes comics, which remind me of the girls' own adventure comics I read when I was a child.

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
I don't usually read crime novels (Busman's Honeymoon was written as a play and you won't convince me otherwise!) but the last novel I read, Parson's House featured a ghost who committed assault and almost everyone ended up believing in it.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Probably a poetry chapbook so any of many candidates, but the last 5/5 was Southern Cross : Južni križ, by Tomica Bajsić from Croatia.

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?).
I don't usually struggle with books - I hurl them cheerfully aside - but the aforementioned (3) autobiographical Black Apples of Gower by Iain Sinclair is probably best read by his dedicated fans.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
My Father's Wives by José Eduardo Agualusa about a young woman's search across Southern Africa for her biological parents.

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics).
I'm reading the ongoing Giant Days comics by John Allison about three young women at university.

18. Here's the cover I found uninspiring:

>129 spiralsheep: re your #9 Wow, haven't heard someone mention Joanna Russ's name for quite a while.

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
The Eighth Life. I was going to read it on holiday last August, but there wasn’t enough room for it, so I left it at home. I’m waiting for another work-free couple of weeks to tackle it.

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Cette peau couleur d’ambre, a collection of short stories by Latvian women writers

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Une histoire politique du pantalon by Christine Bard, because I had ordered several doorstop books – including this one - from the library over the last 6 months, and they all became available at the same time. I couldn’t finish it before the due date and I couldn’t renew it because of the new coronavirus rules.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, not in a Hallowe’en-scary way but in a “I-hope-never-to-live-like-them” way.

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Filles de la Terre : Apprentissages au féminin (Anjou 1920-1950) by Frédérique El Amrani-Boisseau. It’s about the life of young girls and women in the first half of the 20th century in Anjou, about 100-200 km from where I live.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Food and immigration with La cuisine de l'exil by Stéphanie Schwartzbrod
Politics, sociology and religion (Islam) with L'Islam est-il hostile à la laïcité ? by Abdou Filali-Ansary

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
In the last 6 months, When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro is my most popular read, with over 4,000 members.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
L’autobus by Eugenia Almeida, read in 2018.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
I want to read more by Alisa Ganieva

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two by Philip Pullman is set in alternate-reality Oxford, as well as various places in Europe and the Near-East. I’m surprised it isn’t the most popular book I’ve read this year!

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
La cuisine de l'exil by Stéphanie Schwartzbrod is about the life and food of immigrants in France, many of them war refugees or descendants of war refugees. The book therefore features many different wars, from the 1917 Russian revolution to the Syrian war.
Tuer, ne pas tuer (To kill, not to kill) by Chingiz Aitmatov is a novella about a young man about to go to war, possibly the second world war, or maybe the Russian-Afghan war, I can’t remember any specific clues in the text.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
Les Ailes (Wings) by Mikhaïl Kuzmin. LolaWalser mentioned the author in the Russians Write the Revolution thread. He also cropped up in Anna Akhmatova’s collection of poetry, so I thought I’d give him a go…

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty. I haven’t finished it yet, and a lot of it is about the history of our economics and political landscape, but there is some projection into possible futures.
On the straight-up science-fiction side, the last book that qualifies is La dictatrice by Diane Ducret about a female dictator in the near-future. I didn’t like it very much.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Les Marrons an 1844 novel about Reunion Island slaves trying to escape from the plantation, written by Louis Timagène Houat a free man of colour. The body of water would be the Indian Ocean, between the Reunion Island and Madagascar and the East-African coast.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
See Q16. Right before that and just on the right side of the Equator, Coeur Tambour by Scholastique Mukasonga, a Rwandan writer.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
It’s not awful, but it’s a bit pointless: It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo


19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
As in “died” most recently? Chinghiz Aitmatov died in 2008.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
Le hollandais sans peine, a chapter book for young children by Marie-Aude Murail.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
See Q20

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Les émotions by Jean-Philippe Toussaint was published last September.

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Bhimayana: Experiences Of Untouchability by Srividya Natarajan, Stephen Anand, and illustrators Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam. Well worth a look. The French version can be downloaded for free from the French publisher’s website here: https://www.editions-memo.fr/bhimayana-un-roman-graphique-sur-linde/

>123 thorold: Q44:1 I remember enjoying More Tales of the City rather a long time ago.

>126 ELiz_M: Q44:5 'What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you? I don’t read scary books. How about various New Yorker articles on politics and climate change?'

EEP!

>127 avaland: Re your Q44:7 'last two nonfiction books you read? 2. Robert Frost’s poem "The Road Not Taken" '
It would never occur to me to think of most poetry as non-fiction, but I suppose many people and cataloguing systems would do so. Interesting.

>131 avaland: Joanna Russ is still widely read amongst SFF genre fans, but not necessarily much more widely understood than when she first published.

>132 Dilara86: Q44:4 Oh, that's unfortunate. A history of the social politics of trousers sounds fascinating.
Q44:25 You recced Bhimayana before, and it still looks good, thank you!

Oh, I like a list....

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. What a fabulous read it is too.

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Anna Karenina

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. DFW's writing was fabulous, but I just wasn't in the mood for reading that kind of book. It was requiring closer attention than I had the capacity to give. I hope to come back to it at some point,

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver. The stock market crashing, people overnight losing their homes, their savings, their possessions... reading this in the middle of COVID it felt like all too real a possibility. Much more frightening for me than a horror read.

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
I'm going to cheat and go back to 2018 with Multitudes by Lucy Caldwell. She names specific streets that are around 4 miles from my house.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Russian mass doping in sport and black lives within British history.

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Suite Française which I'm reading at the moment.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. I read it back in April.

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Bowie's Books has already led me to read a few titles from the list, including The Bird Artist, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace From the Sea and Black and British.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Hmm. Probably Knausgaard. The My Struggle series was just incredible.

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
Maine (Olive Kitteridge)

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Current book - Suite Francaise. WWII.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
The Dutch House. It popped up on a few threads. I think Caroline (from the 75ers) review and Dan's probably encouraged me most. (Don't worry - I shan't hold it against you...!!!!!)

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
The Mandibles - see q.5.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
The God of Small Things. I'm pretty sure it was raining at the beginning of that.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Gosh, I'm such a northerner. I hadn't realised. I had to go way back to 2018 - The Conversations at Curlow Creek by David Malouf (Aussie). Must do something about that.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
My current read - Suite Francaise. It's one of those movie covers and I hate it. My husband asked if I was reading a Mills and Boon.

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Sticking with Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky. She died in Auschwitz in 1942.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
Anne of Green Gables with my daughter. Although we never got right to the end - I think we both got a bit bored with it in the end.

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Pass - not my genre.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Trugs, Dibbers, Trowels and Twine. One of those stocking filler types of books.

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
Black and British - just because what I was reading about filled me with so much horror that (a) it happened at all and (b) it was never taught to me as part of history at school.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Suite Francaise. Nowadays my TBR only makes it onto LT as I pick a book up to read it. The rest are in LT limbo.

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
The Russian Affair: The True Story of the Couple Who Uncovered the Greatest Sporting Scandal

I got stuck on #1, looking only at books both published and read by me when I was 18:

The Happy Hooker
Chimera
The Joy of Sex
Clockwork Orange
The Sheep Look Up
Captains and the Kings
The Terminal Man
The Stepford Wives
Watership Down

There is a list of 200 books on Good Reads here that I used to jog my memory: https://www.goodreads.com/book/popular_by_date/1972

Except for "The Happy Hooker" and "The Joy of Sex," I'd probably gravitate to those same books. Hmmm. Good start at a list for my re-reads project next year!

I also have a memory (apparently false) of reading Breakfast of Champions as a senior in high school.

Grendel was published in 1971, but I remember reading it soon after it came out.

I'm thinking this would have been a good, albeit depressing, year to read The Sheep Look Up. Maybe just as well to skip it, though.

John Brunner, always a laff-riot.

QUESTION 44: TWENTY QUESTIONS: JUST A BIT O' FUN.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:

• Hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams


• Kindred by Octavia Butler


• Spiral Dance (Starhawk)


2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Dante’s Inferno, Hollander translation

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?

Verdict in blood by Gail Bowen

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Whiskers in the dark by Rita Mae Brown - didn’t like the post-revolutionary war storyline.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you? I don't like scary books.

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
That would be either City of lost fortunes by Bryan Camp (New Orleans) or Scarlet Fever by Rita Mae Brown (Albamarlee County Virginia.) Both around 500 miles, give or take. I’m a little surprised I haven’t read anything closer to home! (Atlanta, GA area)

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Sara Paretsky’s writing journey - Writing in age of silence and Dr. François S. Clemmons’ autobiography - Officer Clemmons

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
I nominate The night watchman by Louise Erdrich for the definition of popular: liked, admired, or enjoyed by many people or by a particular person or group.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
This honor went to two science fiction books I read in 2019: Borne and The strange bird by Jeff VanderMeer

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
That would be Jane Crow, a biography of Pauli Murray written by Rosaline Rosenberg, which led me to Pauli Murray’s autobiography, Song in a weary throat.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Maybe Rachel Howzell Hall? But I only liked two of her four mysteries.

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
England in the 1950s (Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d by Alan Bradley)

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Although I ran out of time to finish it, Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is about World War I.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
The last painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith was recommended, I think, by Suzanne/Chatterbox of the 75ers group.

15. What's the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Rachel Caine’s Great Library series, actually an alternate history where the library in Alexandria, Egypt becomes the repository, publisher and guardian of all books. Ink and bone is the first volume of this YA series.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
The most recent one is Blood, salt water by Denise Mina. This year I also read The curve of time (M. Wylie Blanchet, Pacific Northwest off Vancouver Island and British Columbia) and Manhattan: mapping the story of an island (Jennifer Thermes) and The dragonfly sea (Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, coastal Kenya,)

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Dragonfly (Yvonne Owuor, Kenya) Can I count Rosewater Redemption, the third in Tade Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy? Maybe not, he was born in England although he’s of Yoruban (Nigerian) descent.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Verdict in blood (cover has nothing to do with the story.)

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
M. Wylie Blanchet, died in 1961, the same year her book The curve of time was published.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
Rumpelstiltskin’s daughter (Diane Stanley)

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Joanna Kilpatrick (Verdict in blood by Gail Bowen)

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
The night watchman (Louise Erdrich): first read-through was easy, but I wondered, “What’s the big deal?” This one needed a 2nd read, and I didn’t have time to finish.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Looks like it’s The curve of time, which I forgot to add when I read it earlier this year.

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Manhattan: mapping the story of an island - lots of maps & illustrations

ETA: Touchstones don't appear to be working, I'll try again later.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18: cat in the hat (my family called me cindy lou hoo what too many times) 1957

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long: Land Beyond the Sea

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover? don't remember

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?) Lady Clementine historic fiction of Churchills wife, in the first person. Sounds like shes constantly bragging

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
I don't read scary books, but the book that unsettled me quite a bit wasthe poppy war tho I liked the answer someone gave: this weeks New Yorker

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was? Inland within the Arizona border

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
travel, biography

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book? depends on what you mean by popular. In my circle of friends and readers, hamnet

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it? Finding Dorothy last week

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection) Daughter of Time to Sunne and Splendor about the real story of RichardIII

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with. N.K. Jemisin

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?Tudor England

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)? Poppy War Sino Japan 1930s

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say. Night of the Lonesome October oh someone who knows me well but cant remember who. Many of the books recommended to me of late have been from the Reading Globally group esp Spiralsheep, and in fact just purchased Antique Stones that was so highly recommended by her. Cant wait!

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way? You have arrived at your destination Novella by Amor Towells

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall? hitchikers guide to the galaxy its raining when they find the ruler

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere? Luis Alberto Urrea

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die? Tony Horowitz 2020 Just realized you can read this question two ways

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read? Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read? N/A don't read

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?Let Nothing You Dismay

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?) Not sure, if its a struggle because I couldn't get into it Sleeping Beauties If its a struggle because it was difficult The Starless Sea

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT? N/A

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics) Becoming dr seuss

>116 avaland: I stopped deleting got-rid-of books the third time I bought the same book (great blurb, awful writing). Now I have a Discarded collection, so I can keep track of them. But yeah, I do try to keep my LT library accurate, mostly because I get book twinges (I want to read _that_!) and I need to know if I have it... especially the ones that don't exist as ebooks and are unlikely as library books.

>113 spiralsheep: For me...I tend to buy books that look interesting, but I'm much slower about actually reading them. Especially on the third day of the library book sale, when it's $5 a box...mildly interesting stuff gets thrown in, and my average is about 80 books on that day (twice a year - in previous years, obviously). So I have literally thousands of unread books. I would like very much to have fewer of them...but I find myself unable to get rid of a book that I haven't at least tried to read. I've only recently managed to train myself that "nope, don't want to finish this" is acceptable - I can start a book, slog through part of it, check the end and decide I'm done. I don't have a TBR pile as such - I have unread books, some of which are in the mildly interesting group and some of which are "ooh, one of my favorite authors has a new one out!". The latter, obviously, tend to get read first. One of my major goals, this year and the last several, is to read BOMBs - Books Off My Bookshelf, paper books I have owned for at least a year and have never read. Once I've read them, I discard 90% of them - that's rising to 99% recently, as my reaction to a book I actually like is to find a e-version and then discard the paper one. But some of my books don't exist in e, and are unlikely to ever be digitized - so I keep the paper. And that's why I can't get rid of my unread books wholesale - there might be that pearl in there, that doesn't exist any place else (or at least, I'm unlikely to find it again).

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
(calculating...what year would that be...) 1985, ok. Looking at the CK list of OPD 1985 - first one I see that I've read is Nora Roberts' The MacGregors - Alan ~ Grant (though that's an omnibus). The first book I see that I've read is Dick Francis's Break In.
2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Insofar as I have a TBR pile (see previous post)...Well, two I definitely intend to read (sometime) are Edward Rutherfurd's London and Sarum.
3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Well, Grant Snider's What Color is Night is half-blue (and half black) - . Most of the covers I read are pretty mixed in color - I like realistic images.
4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Mary Roberts Rinehart's This Strange Adventure - turgid, boring, and extremely depressing. Slogged through...three chapters? Maybe 5, it wasn't getting any better. Read the end, it was more of the same, quit.
5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
I...don't think I've ever been truly scared by a book. I do avoid most horror.
6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Heh. Well, if you count urban fantasy - the latest Toby Daye (Seanan McGuire's A Killing Frost) takes place all over the Bay Area. I don't think she ever goes onto my island (Alameda), but she's in and out of San Francisco, Oakland, Muir Woods...the whole story (aside from the parts that aren't on this earth) is probably within 30-50 miles of my home.
7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Knitting, and archaeology (mostly about North America, the American southwest and Mexico - actually about the concepts of archaeology and whether we should be digging this stuff up). Before that - animals in Russia, the Civil War, archaeology again (this one was North Atlantic - northern England, Iceland, Greenland, and Nova Scotia), quilting, a biography of Hedy Lamarr focusing (theoretically) on her inventions, a biography of Elizebeth Friedman and how she and her husband developed modern codebreaking... These are all this year.
8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Wow. Um. Howl's Moving Castle? That has 8000+ owners on LT. Or The Velveteen Rabbit, that has over 10,000. I really don't do popular books..."It's a best-seller!" is usually a major turnoff (for fiction, at least).
9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Fathers' Honor by MCA Hogarth, read this August 20th.
10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Wow. I guess I don't do that as much as I think I do - reading one book will often make me _think_ of reading another, but I don't actually go read it. Aside from series, of course - there are several times this year where I read one book of a series and then went through the rest as well. I read Diana Wynne Jones' Reflections, which made me want to read Eight Days of Luke (and the rest of her books as well...); I finally read Luke a month later.
11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Well...I'm enjoying RJ Blain (very interesting take on werewolves), but infatuated with I'd have to say MCA Hogarth. I'll read _anything_ she writes, because it's highly likely to be extremely worth reading.
12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
It's...well, a very different world, with humans and elves and angels and demons, and lots of magic. MCA Hogarth's An Heir to Thorns and Steel.
13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
I just now finished The Gordian Protocol by David Weber and Jacob Holo - that's about a time war (of sorts), which hinges on changes in the beginning of WWII. If that doesn't count - if you want a real-world war - Nevil Shute's Pied Piper is also set in the beginning of WWII.
14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
I've been book-bulleted a lot, but I don't always track it. I can't remember. I was led to MCA Hogarth by an LT review - and to Charlotte English, who's also excellent. In both cases (two different LTers, I'm pretty sure, and I don't remember who either one was), one book was reviewed but I couldn't obtain it immediately, so I read another and am now making my way through their catalogs.
15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
LOL. I read a lot of SF. The Gordian Protocol starts in the 30th century and wanders throughout a good chunk of time. Another one I just read was Subspace Encounter by E.E. Doc Smith - not sure of dates but well after humans have expanded beyond Earth. And I also just read Apocalyptic, an anthology about, well, the (various and sundry) apocalypses. Zombies to asteroids to climate change to....2017 to undetermined time in the future.
16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Hmmm. Lots with water in them, but actually focusing on water...Minnow on the Say is largely about a river.
17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Um...Pied Piper, I think - Shute is an Australian.
18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Eh. I don't care about covers enough to think they're terrible, mostly.
19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Rosemary Sutcliff, died in 1992.
20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
The Frozen Menace by Ursula Vernon - chapter book, but aimed pretty young. And still fun for adults, if you want something fun and mostly mindless.
21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Lots of people solving mysteries, but in romances or SF stories, not strictly crime/mystery novels. So the most recent one is Antony Gillingham, from The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne (yes, the Winnie the Pooh guy).
22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Well, e-shorts are published as separate books - so the 13-page Author vs. Character by Lazette Gifford. Or the 24-page The Velveteen Rabbit, if you want something that's usually published as a paper book.
23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
Eh...probably Finders Keepers by Craig Childs. That's the non-fiction about the why behind archaeology, and I struggled because I felt like the author was scolding me (for my interest in archaeology) for a good part of the book.
24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
The Complete Garlic Lovers' Cookbook. I'll be adding some more in the next couple days, library e-books that I got and read before I got around to entering them into LT.
25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
What Color is Night is largely a picture book. The Dragonbreath series (by Ursula Vernon) has illustrations throughout - they're part of the story, not additions (characters have speech bubbles that fit within the text, don't skip the pictures). And Durrell in Russia, the book about animals in Russia, is about equally photos and text.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
Regrettably, I turned 18 during the age when books were written in cuneiform, and since I was one of the unwashed illiterate masses back then, I’ll not be able to answer the question.

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival by Frances Ashcroft

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah.
Not big on comic novels in which one of the settings is called “niggertown.”

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
The bejeebers were scared out of me long before I knew how to read, so the answer is technically, none.
Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart pretty well simulated a bejeeber-removing experience though.

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Imperial Valley, a novel by Johnny Shaw. It’s about a hundred miles away, here in California. Decades ago I worked in that desert valley one summer.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Excluding biography:
1) The human body, in Bill Bryson’s Body: A Guide for Occupants
2) World War II sneaky warfare, in Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Maybe Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann?

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez by Miriam Pawel. Read several months ago and then re-read several sections in order to compose a review.

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
The book mentioned in question 9 led immediately to reading an autobiography titled Shamrocks and Salsa by Gerald F. Cox. LT member rocketjk mentioned it to me. Cox knew and worked with Chavez, though that hardly was all that was interesting about this priest turned married ex-priest. He started his autobiography very late in life. My principal criticism would be that I would have liked even more details about the events and stories he chose to tell. A great life.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Are we talking literary infatuation or the other kind?

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
California’s Imperial Valley, the city of Mexicali in Baja California, and the state of Sinaloa in Mexico.

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. WWII.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
Shamrocks and Salsa by Gerald F. Cox. Credit rocketjk.

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Hmmm . . . Clearly a blind spot in my reading.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Waterways both glorious and inglorious.
EDITED TO ADD:
Correction. The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad was the last one. But I’m keeping Abbey as an answer; it means more to me.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Greenstone by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Much concerned with the intermingling of whites and Maori.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Back from the Dead by Bill Walton. Maybe not so much terrible but I guess you’ve got to be a Grateful Dead fan. Very enjoyable book though, especially for people who saw the man play hoops in his great but curtailed prime.

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
The book I read most recently by a dead author probably was Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner. Or is this question meant to identify the author who died most recently?

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
I think I need to find a time machine to answer this one.

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
The “Continental Op” in Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Shamrocks and Salsa by Gerald F. Cox

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. He had ideas I wanted to hear but wrote in a way that nearly effaced living human beings from the text—NOT what he wanted. Not what I appreciated either. Glad I read it though.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Lately, just been reading old magazines. The most recent book added was Shamrocks and Salsa back in August. NOTE: My library here is a record of books read instead of a collection, primarily because so much of it is borrowed from the public library.

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
The California Deserts by Bruce M. Pavlik.

>141 jjmcgaffey: a biography of Hedy Lamarr focusing (theoretically) on her inventions, a biography of Elizebeth Friedman and how she and her husband developed modern codebreaking...

Saw a review about this and it looks fascinating. How are you liking it?

Q44:

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Difficult Light by Tomás González

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz: unstable and unreliable narrator, who is slowly descending into madness.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Memorial Drive: A Memoir by Natasha Trethewey. Memorial Drive itself is in downtown Atlanta, 3-1/2 miles from where I live, and the author and her mother lived about 15 miles away from me.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Mother-daughter relationship, abuse and murder of her mother by her second husband: Memorial Drive
Biography of a famous deceased author, James Baldwin: Letter to Jimmy by Alain Mabanckou

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
March, Book One by John Lewis

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Memorial Drive: A Memoir, which I read in August

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aranson, which led me to read My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing “Slow Medicine”, The Compassionate Approach for Caring for Your Aging Loved Ones by Dennis McCullough, MD

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Valeria Luiselli

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
United States, from NYC to Arizona, in Lost Children Archive

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Dumba Nengue: Run for Your Life by Lina Magaia (Mozambican Civil War)

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson (recommended by Caroline McElwee)

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
None that I can think of.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans)

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Difficult Light by Tomás González (Colombia)

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Lanny by Max Porter

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
March: Book Three by John Lewis, my US congressman, who died earlier this year.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
I have no idea, since I don’t read children’s books.

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
I have no idea, as I don't read crime novels.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Difficult Light by Tomás González (150 pages)
ETA: Actually, each of the three March graphic novels were shorter than Difficult Light.

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
I’m struggling mightily with my current book, Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi. I blame Donald Trump.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Zikora: A Short Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
The three book March series of graphic novels by John Lewis

>143 cindydavid4: The Hedy Lamarr was mildly interesting - if I'd been more interested in her than in her inventions, it would have been better. Lots about her childhood, how she got into the movies (oh yeah invention in here, not much info, suggest some stuff), her relationships, her... Not what I expected or wanted. Not terrible but not great. It really read like the author had this idea to write about her as an inventor but couldn't find much data to support what they wanted to cover so they filled in with lots of general stuff.

The Friedman biography was far more interesting, though the author was more worried about sexism than Elizebeth was. I like code-breaking, and this discussion of how a lot of modern code-breaking was invented was fascinating. The Friedmans and their teams were basically the American Bletchley Park...and reading it made me want to read my book(s) about Bletchley Park, the NSA, and other codebreaking, but I haven't gotten around to any of them yet.

>132 Dilara86: re#19 I should reword that question for clarity... ETA: Done! Also, re Russ. I read a lot of Russ in previously decades and I been away from the SF community for some years now, so was wondering if the younger readers were reading back that far.

>133 spiralsheep: The Frost book is not a volume of poetry, but a study/discussion/appraisal of that specific poem. Perhaps it could be labeled literary criticism/study. I like to read literary criticism, books about the place of books in popular culture and so on. I'd hadn't really run into a book discussing one poem, and being of Frost country I was intrigued.... (not sure I agree with all of this one, but it's interesting)

>140 jjmcgaffey: Interesting adaptation. I consider myself lucky if I remember to enter the incoming books these days.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
The Second scroll - A M Klein

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Infinite Jest I loved the first chapter, but just didn't want to read anymore.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
I don't scare easily

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Le Hussard sur le Toit - Jean Giorno Manosque (Alpes des Hautes Provence)The RAC route finder says it is 354 miles.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
The Rise of the Novel Ian Watt - literature
The Sea Around us - Rachel Carson - Marine biology

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
The Stars my Destination Alfred Bester. It is in 5,525 peoples libraries

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
The Haunter of the Dark and other tales of terror - H P Lovecraft. I read it last week

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Force of Circumstance Simone de Beauvoir which led me to read her The Mandarins
Force of Circumstance was part 3 of her Autobiography, but she had covered much the same ground in her Novel The Mandarins and so the fact and fiction question was intriguing.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
The wonderful Rick Harsch , but don't tell him

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
A Good Man in Africa: A Novel William Boyd - guess where?

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
From Here to Eternity James Jones - second world war Pearl Harbour.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
Village of Secrets; Defying the Nazis in Vichy France torontoc reviewed it and I hope to get to it next week

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
The Stars Like Dust Isaac Asimov - well its SF innit

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Water Music, T C Boyle The water is in the title

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Bestiary: selected stories Julio Cortazar Argentinian

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?


19. Who was the dead author you read most recently? And what year did they die?
Isaac Asimov died in 1992

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
I don't have any children

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Nicholas Fenton in a John Dickson Carr novel

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Michael Drayton Idea, The Shepherds Garland; Fashioned in nine Eglogs

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
La voie Royale - Andre Malraux. It was in French

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Water Music, T G Boyle I only add those books I read

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Vingt Mille Lieues Sous les Mers Jules Verne. Has some wonderful illustrations.

QUESTION 44: TWENTY QUESTIONS: JUST A BIT O' FUN.

duplicate

QUESTION 44: TWENTY QUESTIONS: JUST A BIT O' FUN.

This was a bit overwhelming, but definitely fun!

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
1981 – Cujo by Stephen King & Midnight’s Children by Rushdie

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Our Mutual Friend, Dickens

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
The Summer Villa – lots of azure blue Italian sky

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Design – I couldn’t picture what the author was describing

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
I don’t get scared at fiction books and don’t read non-fiction that scares me

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
I live in Vancouver and Forgiveness by Mark Sakamoto had a large section set in 1940s Vancouver

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Soap and Water & Common Sense: the Definitive Guide to Viruses, Bacteria, Parasites & Disease by Dr. Bonnie Henry and Audrey Hepburn, an Elegant Spirit

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
The Decameron has 8,000 copies in LT. It was published in the mid-1300s. I also read Becoming by Michelle Obama, which only has half the numbers, but was published recently

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
This month I read Your House Is On Fire, Your Children Are Gone, which was my only 5 star read this year

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
I can’t find when I last did this

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
None the last 2 years

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
Once Upon a River – Upper Thames river, Victorian era

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Your House Is On Fire, Your Children Are Gone mentions the 30 Years War several times but the novel is about inherited trauma from WWII, as you find out at the end

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.

I recently found The Vegetarian on the sale table at Munro’s and bought it on the general good comments from my LT crew

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Nothing I can think of for a few years

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Breaking of a Wave was a fabulous read set on the coast of Tuscany

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Almost finished a book by Borges (Argentina)

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
I haven’t read any ugly books this year! Hallelujah!

19. Who was the dead author you read most recently? And what year did they die?
Last book I finished was Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, who died in 1969

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
The lovely and adorable The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam features Charlie Howard

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss – I have to say that my book club loved my recommendation of this book this month because they loved how short it was (and also loved the story as an October read)\

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared. My notes say “I struggled to pick it up and keep reading.” Yawn.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
The Ghost in the House, which I discovered last weekend at the wonderfully curated Armchair Books in Whistler, BC

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
I actually read a few, but the best was Italy Out of Hand by Barbara Hodgin

>147 baswood: #18 - That cover is so full of awesome

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
according to LT the first on my list is End Zone by Delilo, though I remember it as having been published in the 70s, maybe its the edition - and after a quick try at searching I'm going no further to bottom this (not great at seacrhing, but the data also looks a little messy).

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Dickens by Peter Ackroyd

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Life of the Beloved by Henri Nouwen

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Too many to remember which one, they are probably all ongoing when i get at it, one that comes to mind at the moment is Jane Eyre (got ill whilst reading it and threw me off)

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
Not sure I'd read them if I did that, in the past I suppose lots of History or politics books. the closest I can get these days may be Hope against Hope by Nadhezdha Mandelstam.

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
The Secret Garden not far away at all, were it to exist.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
biography (Charkles Causley) All Cornwall Thunders at my Door
essays (John Berger) Confabulations

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Maybe One, two, three, four - biography of the fab four and those they impacted

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
I stopped giving *ratings soon aftre I joined LT, as a writer something about it bothers me (crrrrritics) (or the me that would do it annoys me) (edit - and having said that i tended to give lots of high ratings so it was maybe a bit pointless, I like to try to just accept things for what they are (I hope)).

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Reading my first Peter Kingsley led me to his others, I started with In the Dark Places of Wisdom -- also reading Red Pine's translation and Bill Porter's book Finding them Gone have led me to others by him.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Pasternak at the moment.

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
The High Seas (Close Quarters)

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
All Cornwall Thunders at my Door - covered Causley's WWII service mainly in Gibralter and also some of the impact of WWI.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
The Comforters by Muriel Spark -- thanks to Thorold

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Catafalque by Peter Kingsley - about Jung and the prospects of civilization amongts much else.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
The obvious one would be Golding's to the ends of the earth trilogy - maybe also Causley's bio as he was in the navy, more recenmtly read.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
no idea

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Maybe

19. Who was the dead author you read most recently? And what year did they die?
John Berger (2017)

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
The Secret Garden? (or the Book of Classic poems)

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Don't read many - I will start one with DCI Sophie Allen

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Gospel according to Mark (?)

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
I don't think I struggle much these days so much as move on.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
I only add them when i read them these days but have managed to add Dr Zhivago translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
William Blake by Kathleen Raine or the book of classic poems illustarted by Jackie Morris

>134 AlisonY: q44-14 eek 😁☺️

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
2005 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Gödel, Escher, Bach : an eternal golden braid and its intimidating as fuck

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Introductory Statistics with Randomization and Simulation


4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Hurricane Season, uncomfortably vulgar

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
Confessions it was such a twisted story

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Closest I could get was Going Bovine. The characters drove through Indiana on I-80 so 152 miles. Turns out I don't read much about Indiana.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Literature (How to read Literature like a Professor) and Geology (The Rocks Don't Lie)

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Origin by Dan Brown, I think this counts as Popular at least it was at the top of NYT Bestseller list for a time.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Confessions, earlier this month.

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Superfreakonomics led to me reading all the rest of their books. Just like the odd way of looking at economics and the factors that control our decision making.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
McGuire, Seanan, feel like I'm going to read a lot of her books

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
The Chalk of Discworld (I Shall Wear Midnight)

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Confederates in the Attic, the American Civil War

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
The Hole based on lilisin recommendation and updates on translation

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
All Systems Red

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Fluke

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Fever Dream from Argentina

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
Death Threat

Book makes as much sense as the cover.

19. Who was the dead author you read most recently? And what year did they die?
Fuentes, Carlos 1928 to 2012.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
Busy, Busy People

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Sam Vimes

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
The Type poetry collection 48 pages.

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
The Lost Children Archive, I think the topic and the families falling apart was just hard to take.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Through the Woods

Q44: 20 QUESTIONS

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (757 pp.)

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?

Heather Crystle's The Crying Book

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies—I was reading it as part of a best short fiction judging process, so I read about 2/3 into a lot of collections. I thought this one was interesting, if uneven, and I'll definitely be going back to finish it.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
I'm not sure it scared me so much as spooked me and then stayed with me for a long time: Dan Simmons's The Terror.

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live?How close would you estimate it was?
Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration profiles one man who moved to 132nd Street off of Lenox Avenue in Harlem, which is 6.5 miles from my house (and one block from a good friend's apartment, where I stopped in this past Sunday).

7. What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
The Great Migration of U.S. Southern Blacks to the North (The Warmth of Other Suns, mentioned above) and the 1918 flu pandemic, in John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Michelle Obama's Becoming.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Danielle Evans's The Office of Historical Corrections, which is the last book I finished, last week.

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
After reading Madeline Miller's Circe I listened to her on the Ezra Klein show talking about translating mythology and classic poems, which got me excited to read Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, as well as a couple of books I already own, Stephen Fry's Mythos and Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which I read many years ago and probably not all the way through. Then I recently watched Miller, Wilson, and Maria Dahvana Headley, who just did a contemporary translation of Beowulf: A New Translation, talking at a Center for Fiction video event, and that got me even more stoked for all of the above. I love hearing how these women are engaging in such a lively, real-time way with these classic texts, and I want to read more.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
I'm decades late to this party, but Iris Murdoch. Some friends of mine started the Iris Murdoch Fan Girls Book Club at the beginning of this summer and we've read three so far, and it's been a blast. Now we're going to branch out to Muriel Spark, which I think will also be a lot of fun with this group.

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
18th-century Massachusetts, in Spider in a Tree.

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Asako Serizawa's Inheritors, a multigenerational collection of linked short stories dealing with the repercussions of World War II on one Japanese family.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
Oof, I have a terrible memory for those connections—people talk about books and they just worm their way into my consciousness and I pick them up when I can. The first one that comes to mind is A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World, recommended by... avaland? rhian_of_oz? Anyway, it was a good recommendation.

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Sarah Pinsker's A Song for a New Day, which was a near-future, post-pandemic and domestic terrorism music story—very prescient (she wrote it before our actual pandemic) and believable.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
Iris Murdoch's The Bell, in which the titular bell is submerged in a river and there is a rescue operation, as well as some very lovely passages on the glories of swimming.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Optic Nerve by María Gainza, from Argentina.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?

A lot of people liked it, apparently, but I hated the cover of Laura Van den Berg's I Hold a Wolf by the Ears. Great book, though.

19. Who was the dead author you read most recently? And what year did they die?
Randall Kenan's If I Had Two Wings: Stories. He died in August of this year.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
Hannah Shaw's Kitten Lady's Big Book of Little Kittens, which I reviewed for LJ. I don't read a lot of children's books right now, though when I finally get those grandchildren, look out!

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Pin, in Elizabeth Hand's Curious Toys.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Benjamin Nugent's Fraternity: Stories, at 160 pages. Which is fine, because it was a series of stories about fraternity bros and those are enough pages to devote to them.

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became. It had everything going for it that I should have liked—NYC, some cool apocalyptic futurism, and a really neat idea. But I found the lack of character development at the beginning disconcerting (I made it less than 100 pages in), and just the general noisiness of it without enough modulation... it just didn't work for me, and I didn't have the patience to see if it would. Shame, because I wanted to like it.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Riva Lehrer's Golem Girl, which I'm reading now.

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
Chronicle's lovely The Sea Journal: Seafarers' Sketchbooks, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones—lovely written and illustrated excerpts from sketchbooks, log books, charts, drawings, paintings, and other ephemera from nautical explorers. It's actually still living on my desk because I like to page through it.

Q44:
1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long
The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy 800+ pages (3 novels plus interludes)

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?

The Boomerang Clue, Agatha Christie

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger. Didn't finish because the time travel didn't make sense and felt very contrived.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
The Night of the Hunter, Davis Grubb

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it was?
Quicksand, Nella Larsen which takes place (partly) in Chicago, where I live.

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Scales to Scalpels: Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine, Lisa Wong, M.D.--about the Longwood Symphony Orchestra in Boston, an all-volunteer orchestra made up of healthcare professionals
The Wright Brothers, David McCullough, biography of the aviators

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Not sure if the "recent" is for the book, or when I read it, but I think both McCullough's biography of the Wright Brothers (see #7) and Agatha Christie (see #2) would be considered popular.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Besides some re-reads of Jane Austen, the last book I gave 5 stars to was:
The Light of the World: A Memoir by the poet Elizabeth Alexander, read in 2019

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
The Pastor's Wife by Elizabeth von Arnim led me to read her first book, Elizabeth and her German Garden

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
E. H. Young

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
Sanditon by Jane Austen, which is set in West Sussex, England.

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
One Fine Day, Mollie Panter-Downes; fiction, set in 1946 in the south of England on the coast, and concerns one woman, her family and her small village as they adjust to post WWII life in Britain.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
I was generously gifted about 20 books published by Virago by LTer Elaine (Liz1546) and it included several books by the author I am now reading, E. H. Young.

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger (did not finish)

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
The Misses Mallett by E. H. Young featured the Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon Gorge and River Avon near Bristol, England. It's an important landmark and symbol in the book.

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, born in Australia.

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?

One Fine Day: I wouldn't call it terrible, but I didn't see this cover's connection to the book, and the picture doesn't look very 1946 to me, which is the year the book is set in.

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?
Not sure if this means the most recent book I've read of a dead author, or the author who died most recently:
Dead author of a book that I read recently: The Misses Mallett by E. H. Young (1880-1949)
Dead author of a book that I read who died most recently: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1931-2019).

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
A Cafecito Story by Julia Alvarez, read in 2019

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
The dynamic duo of Bobby (Bobby Jones) and Frankie (Lady Frances) in Agatha Christie's The Boomerang Clue

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
Sanditon, Jane Austen, 65 pages

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
Bach: Essays on His Life and Music, Christoph Wolff. I loved some of the essays, but some essays were very dry and not very accessible when you can't hear the music. Took a long time to finish this book.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
Added to the Wishlist: The Half-Sisters, by Geraldine Jewsbury

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
McCullough's The Wright Brothers had some fascinating archival photographs.
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, was a powerful graphic book about his family's experience in the Japanese internment camps.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
The Dragon Reborn (WOT #3) - 1991 (I have read a number of books from 1991, but this was the first, read in 1992)

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:
Henry VI parts I II & III (Signet Classic) (688 pages)

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante by Osip Mandelstam

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
The Babylonian Genesis : The Story of Creation by Alexander Heidel (I finished the part with his translation of the Enûma Eliš. But gave up on his essays. My review says, “It all started to feel manipulated.”)

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
The Unwinding

6. Name the book that read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live? How close would you estimate it
was?
The Yellow House- New Orleans, about 6 hours east of Houston

7.What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?
Armenia and Dante - see Osip Mandelstam above (q3)
debunking the Cleopatra-as-a-wanton-temptress myth - Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?
Dune

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?
Titus Andronicus - read in July and August (takes a certain mindset to get 5 stars out of this.)

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt led me to an earlier novel of hers, The Blazing World

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.
Siri Hustvedt

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?
Istanbul

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?
Apeirogon is about the Intifada (but when I first read this question, it was actually The Shadow King - on the second Italo-Ethiopian war)

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation? And who was the LTer, if you care to say.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler - mainly thorold who got me interested in Anne Tyler, but many others here also did that (like ridgewaygirl). The last clear example of a book I actually read is Evil by Julia Shaw - because of reviews by Joyce (Nickelini) and Lois (avaland)

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?
Dune

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?
We of the Forsaken World... has four locations, one on the Amazon

17. What is last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste , born in Ethiopia

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?
My Kindle edition of A Lost Lady by Willa Cather. The cover has a woman with her back turned, oddly in clearly current clothes. But then has a green dot on her head, like a sniper is aiming at her. ?? This edition: https://www.librarything.com/work/179981/details/174968312

19. Who was the dead author you read most recently? And what year did they die?
Willa Cather - died 1947

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?
The House on Pooh Corner, read in 2013 with my son. He was 6 or 7.

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?
Not my thing, but Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line toys with the detective theme. Jai is the 9-year-old detective. (Memories of the Future toys with the genre too, going all feminist on Sherlock Holmes)

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?
The Comedy of Errors. My edition was 91 pages

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)
We of the Forsaken World... and, on audio, The Shadow King. Just didn't like them.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?
The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work (that's probably too much personal information. There is an answer to Q43 in there too)

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)
none

>155 kac522: 10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically to read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)
The Pastor's Wife by Elizabeth von Arnim led me to read her first book, Elizabeth and her German Garden

Hee, funny, i did the opposite! Either way, adored her writing, have read all of her books!

Out of curiosity I started collating and categorizing all the specific nonfiction topics mentioned question #7 (not an easy task) and this group is really wonderfully diverse in our choices. No one category of nonfiction dominated. I was curious how much of the nonfiction might relate directly to current events and the answer is: not as much as I thought there would be. Rather than just be told "this" is what is going on, it seems we take a longer view...oftentimes reaching back into history for our current perspectives.

>158 avaland: we are using nonfiction to escape from current events!!!!! Not surprised how diverse this group is, which is why I keep coming back!

>158 avaland: curious how that collating went.

>160 dchaikin: It's more than a bit messy as some listed the broad category, others a bit more specific, and some could be put in more than one category...but here it is:

Biography/Autobiography - Marc Chagall, Audrey Hepburn, James Baldwin, Charkles Causley, The Wright Brothers, Cleopatra

Memoir - Sara Paretsky (writing), Dr. François S Clemens, Natasha Trethewey

Travel/Travelogue - Tony Hawks

Science/Medicine - Marine Biology/Rachel Carson / The Human Body / Viruses, Bacteria, Parasites & Disease / Geology: Rocks Don’t Lie / the Great Influenza, Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine / Archaeology:American southwest & Mexico

History - WWII sneaky warfare / Fascism / Black Lives in British History / The Great Migration of U.S. Southern Blacks to the North

Philosophy - Russian Thinkers

Sociology and/or Cultural Studies : Anti-Racism / Immigration / Village Life in Botswana / Food /

Literature & Essays - The Rise of the Novel/ Analysis of Frost’s “Road Not Taken”/ Essays by John Berger / How to Read like a Professor / Journey to Armenia & Conversation about Dante by Osip Mandelstam

Sports: Russian Doping

Arts/Crafts - Knitting

>161 avaland: -- interesting.

Indirectly it reminded me that sometimes I see poetry counted as non fiction which I am really unsure about. Maybe it is fundamental to how categories work? Whilst IUwonder abiut it as non fiction I can't think of how I'd prefer it to be categorised, except just as poetry (and some surely more fictitious than other? or non fictitious). Hope this isn't a tangent for the thread but I'm interested what others think.

>162 tonikat: I used to attend a poetry reading group with more than averagely, hmm, ? well-read ? educated ? high-brow ? demographics and we regularly discussed the differences between poetry written as non-fiction, poetry written as fiction, and ambiguous poetry in the liminal spaces between non/fiction. We never came to any firm conclusions, except that there were at least those three categories of authorial intention and that readers will believe whatever they please about a poem's origins despite an author's claims.

Of the group's two published poets, one persistently wrote non-fiction and the other persistently wrote fiction. Despite actually having the authors in the room explaining their own work, at least one of the regular members never grasped the idea that poetry can be fiction.

So. The author is dead, long live the reader. Apparently.

>163 spiralsheep: - fascinating, thanks

In a way I also struggle to think poetry can be fiction -- but then is fiction fiction? There's many a writer I might wonder that of in some way. But I wonder such things far too much (for example I think of how Bob Dylan said how he realised soem things he wrote of others are really about him, and saw John Lennon quotign this recently (dodging a 'how do you sleep' question about Paul) but really can take it further, so when Wittgenstein says we'd not understand a lion if it could speak I start wondering what that may also say of how understood W felt (and lots of evidence he didn't feel understood at times, e.g. comments to Russell at times -- but this is a difference between subject as made up and yet characteristic of author and, well, what? Stuff made up and not mattering at all? I'm confusing myself.

Sounds an interesting group. I need a bit of that. But then again talk diverts.

Instead of the non fiction classification I'd be for a poetry classification.

>161 avaland: agree with kat, interesting!

I'm assuming it is my listing of the David Orr book-length analysis of Frost's poem that sparked the discussion about poetry: non-fiction or fiction. As for the poetry itself, I would give it a comfy spot interstitialy between fiction and nonfiction. But as you muse, is fiction completely fiction? And I will add is memoir truly nonfiction? (consider the fickleness of memory) Thankfully, libraries and bookshops have more than the two categories to work with:-) However,

I love the idea that some poetry might be fiction, some not; but who would be a credible judge of what is what?

>163 spiralsheep: etc. — yes, very interesting!

The boring answer would presumably be that we’re mixing up a question about how booksellers organise their stock with a question about the nature of what writers do, and that we shouldn’t expect to learn anything useful from it. Prose fiction is a big chunk of what people buy in most mainstream bookshops, so it’s worth having a separate category for it and allowing it to take up a large part of the shelf-space. The fact that everything else therefore has come to be called “non-fiction” in (English language) publishing jargon seems to be largely an accident.

I do remember learning at school that we should treat epic and narrative verse as fiction and lyric verse (“expressing the poet’s true feelings”) as non-fiction, but it’s easy enough to think up examples where that doesn’t work. Wordsworth being an obvious place to start!

>164 tonikat: "but this is a difference between subject as made up and yet characteristic of author and, well, what? Stuff made up and not mattering at all?"

I wouldn't pretend the influences of author, society, language, etc., aren't present in fiction. Even attempts at the most randomised production of literature are influenced by available language. But readers' filters, of self, of experience, of reading ability, etc., also exist. There have been more attempts at randomised writing than randomised reading.... ;-)

>166 avaland: "I love the idea that some poetry might be fiction, some not; but who would be a credible judge of what is what?"

Anecdote: I wrote a poem about a particular real tree. The poem was deliberately ambiguous but not wilfully obscure. Every time I've read this poem in public I've been approached and congratulated afterwards by at least one listener thanking me for writing such a moving poem about domestic violence. I always thank them for the compliment and say nothing more about the poem. I'm very glad people feel this poem gives voice to an under-represented subject (and possibly also helps them personally). Although it is odd when someone consequently assumes I've been a victim of domestic violence because I wrote a poem about a tree.

The author might be dead but their credibility is merely unwell. ;-)

>167 thorold: "The boring answer would presumably be that we’re mixing up a question about how booksellers organise their stock with a question about the nature of what writers do, and that we shouldn’t expect to learn anything useful from it."

Boring, perhaps, but true.

"I do remember learning at school that we should treat epic and narrative verse as fiction and lyric verse (“expressing the poet’s true feelings”) as non-fiction, but it’s easy enough to think up examples where that doesn’t work. Wordsworth being an obvious place to start!"

Also whole swathes of culture that have no apparent ideological separation between religion / myth / reality / history.

>166 avaland: when I answered the question I thought for a minute will I include poetry and so came back when you focused on the question (it wasn't the Frost analysis (a poem title?)) - it's just something I've been noticing recently -- partly as people have seemed to do it with such confidence (but then that is the nature of categories, just because they are used they sometimes seem to be used as definite).

>167 thorold: booksellers or librarians? (ducks) . . . makes me think Larkin was a librarian, and a poet, but then I think of how Heaney's lines as a 9 to 5 man in a way. I wonder what impact his work had on his work? Then again I'm always wondering what are good jobs for poets, and am struggling with that one. I've also been thinking how capitalism endlessly looks for ways to validate the distinctions in position people gain or do not gain, and that may be relevant to populism (sorry another tangent).

I remember that distinction too, handy and begging of exam questions asking you to say more.

>168 spiralsheep: it is a how long is a piece of string type question - I like to challenge categories I suppose, and for poetry recently whenever I saw people do this it begged the question for me.
They say that when you let a poem out there you lose any thought of defining it, but may gain others' reactions, or something like that, I can picture situations in which I may manage your acceptance and yet sometimes also some where I'd be almost snarling (eastenders accent 'leave it Kat it's not worth it'). In the end maybe need someone to write a book interpreting somethign that was totally clear to you to start with (if you're still about).

>167 thorold: The boring answer would presumably be that we’re mixing up a question about how booksellers organise their stock with a question about the nature of what writers do, and that we shouldn’t expect to learn anything useful from it. Prose fiction is a big chunk of what people buy in most mainstream bookshops, so it’s worth having a separate category for it and allowing it to take up a large part of the shelf-space. The fact that everything else therefore has come to be called “non-fiction” in (English language) publishing jargon seems to be largely an accident.

totally agree here, which is why I get so frustrated by labels in bookstores and how some books are shelved.

Its funny, I wrote poetry all my life (for myself, never published) I always thought of poetry as fiction, tho looking back on most of it, of coures it was nonfiction. I just finished the most amazing book Great Migrations that proves the point. Poetic memoir, about observation, nature, family, loss and love. Probably my fav nonfiction book this year and perhaps my fav of all my reads. Plan to reread it.....

Whats funny is that I keep paper tags near my reading area so I can mark favorite passages or chapters. After realizing I had marked 10 chapters in a row, I tossed them aside and just read the book. Thats how good it is.

>171 tonikat: "(eastenders accent 'leave it Kat it's not worth it')"

LOL!

I always think of Georgia O'Keefe endlessly repeating that her flower paintings were just flowers! (Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.)

>169 spiralsheep: Great anecdote. I'm glad you allowed them to take what they needed from the poem (even if it was unintentional). As once a writer of poetry, but now only a reader, I am somewhat torn between what the poet intends and what I might see in it. My son in his first year of college had to analyze Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and he wrote a very decent essay on how it was about hypothermia, complete with the evidence to make his case (he even researched the temperatures for the time & location where it was written). His instructor was not as amused as I was, gave him a terrible grade and told him it was about suicide (which shocked me).

****
Maybe we need a poetry question before the year is out. Unless we cover it all now ;-) If anyone wants to volunteer to write that questions, I'll be happy to take it.

>174 avaland: Perhaps they should've compromised on "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" being about suicide by hypothermia? Although the horse clearly had other ideas, lol. I admit the poem does remind me of aspects of "Because I could not stop for Death –" which I'm sure you know, but I don't read that as suicidal either.

A poetry and (song) lyrics question could be interesting, yes.

>174 avaland: As many times as I have read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," I would never think it was about suicide. It is one of my fave poems. I think poetry is open to the interpretation of the reader and how the reader sees it through a particular lens or mind set, which might differ from one reading to the next.

I see some poems as fictions in verse (My Last Duchess, the Highwayman), some poems as history in verse (The Charge of he Light Brigade, Beowulf), some poems as autobiographical observations in verse (haiku, everything by Dickenson). It's not The content that makes the difference as much as the form.

I also think that the difference between poetry and prose--highly subjective, I know--is that prose is about what is or could be, while poetry is about what it all means.

And, of course, there are exceptions and overlap, and that's excellent because it shows humans are highly inventive and the parameters of creativity cannot be boxed in by the scholars and book sellers.

>174 avaland: etc - I actually have an anecdote about that. When my dad was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Robert Frost was guest of honor at a banquet for him there. Someone stood up and gave a long speech analyzing "Stopping by Woods..." as being about having a death wish (so yeah, suicide). When he was done and sat down, the elderly Frost wavered upright and declared "Well, it was snowing, and I stopped to watch it fall in the forest on my way home..." and sat down again. In other words, Frost thought it was simple non-fiction, and everyone else is putting other meanings to it...which is kind of the point of poetry, for me!

>171 tonikat: I'm always wondering what are good jobs for poets, and am struggling with that one.

I vaguely remember a discussion on writers’ day-jobs somewhere along the line — have we been here before?

It is an interesting one, though — if you don’t count purely literary jobs like editing and publishing poetry or running workshops, I think teacher, journalist, clergy and medic are probably the most common occupations among the poets I’ve come across, but there are plenty of others known, including farmer, civil servant (Burns was both!), banker (Eliot), architect (Hardy), industrial worker, etc. Wasn’t Anne Sexton a fashion model at one point, and Whitman a nurse?

>177 nohrt4me2: It's not the content that makes the difference as much as the form.

Yes. “My last Duchess” seems to be pure fiction, whilst The ring and the book is — or at least claims to be — based on real events, but that doesn’t create a significant difference in the way Browning works with his material or the way we react to it. The real difference is that one of them is essay-length and the other book-length.

I think I’d put “The charge of the Light Brigade” down as “politics” rather than “history”, since it’s talking about events that happened only a few weeks before it was published. Not that that makes any difference to your argument!

Re "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"—anyone here read Paul Murray's Skippy Dies? There's a hilarious adolescent-schoolboy interpretation of that poem in the book and I've never been able to read it since without snickering.

>181 lisapeet: Oh, I loved Paul Murray's An Evening of Long Goodbyes. I kept meaning to read Skippy Dies. I will put it on my TBR list directly! Thanks for the reminder.

>178 jjmcgaffey: Hahahaha! I always had that problem with lit classes; everyone has their interpretations and should be able to express them but need to realize that was not what tha author expected

>178 jjmcgaffey: I usually refrain from telling people what Frost claimed The Road Not Taken was about because it would spoil their chosen meaning for that poem.

>178 jjmcgaffey: Hmm. I like that one because of the double meaning - it can be literal or figurative. Or both at once, the human mind is amazing.

>178 jjmcgaffey: "When he was done and sat down, the elderly Frost wavered upright and declared "Well, it was snowing, and I stopped to watch it fall in the forest on my way home..." and sat down again."

I believe it was Frost, although I'm not for sure about it, who, as the story I once heard goes, when questioned about the meaning of one of his poems, replied, "If I could have expressed myself any more clearly, I would have."

There are a variety of interpretations to "Snowy Evening." One, certainly, is about the allure of oblivion.

I never used that poem in college intro to lit classes because the "correct" interpretation had been drummed into students' heads in high school, and some of them were crushed with the weight of it.

Instead, I used to just turn them loose in the anthology and let them pick out things they liked and explain why. I also played recordings of poems so they could get a sense of the poem as a spoken thing. Tom Waits reading "Frank's Wild Years" and Johnny Cash doing "The Cremation of Sam McGee" were favorites. They're on YouTube. Having several students, male and female, read Kim Addonizio's "What Women Want" was always interesting. The reader's voice and emphasis changes what the poem means.

Apologies for going off road for a side trip down Memory Lane. Teaching that intro to lit class was always fun. Maybe it would be interesting to post a short poem and let people whack at that as a discussion question some time. I don't read enough poetry in my old age.

Geesh, I go away for a little while and then find 13 (!) unread messages here!

>175 spiralsheep: That would be a nice compromise ;-) Want to write a question?

>177 nohrt4me2: I also think that the difference between poetry and prose--highly subjective, I know--is that prose is about what is or could be, while poetry is about what it all means. Oh, I'm going to need to have a think on that thought. But it might have to wait until after the election.

>178 jjmcgaffey: Good story! (there may have been something similar related in the David Orr book as it sounds familiar)

>187 nohrt4me2: I had to write a paper in high school on Frost's "Mending Wall" I had very little to say about it as I thought the meaning obvious.... Maybe I'll get to Jay Parini's biography of Frost one day.

I did a paper on e.e. cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town" and read it as a ballad of unrequited love - Barbry Allen was the comparison I used, I think. The teacher didn't think much of it, as I recall.

> 189 I don't know that poem, I'll look it up. It is amazing how teacher's opinions of such things stick with us -- or maybe not amazing just what we so often know -- and where they baffle or oppress us it's so important to be heard in some way, to start to find our way again. I also don't knwo Barbry Allen so i will look that up too. I think I feel that aesthetic judgements are always subjective -- but then we go and give some people authority for reasons that seem quite good, but as I suggest, sometimes lose the knack of being able to contain them without that power and without losing respect (in either direction), I don't know for yourself, but where I disagreed with a teacher things could sometimes go quite wrong.

- really enjoyed reading them both btw

Nah, I've been convinced by a teacher a few times but if they just said something wasn't good I'd shrug and say I thought it was. Not necessarily aloud where the teacher could hear me, mind you.

>188 avaland: I've dropped a possible Avid Reader poetry question in your profile's private comments for you to consider, edit, reject, or post, as you please.

>192 spiralsheep: Got it, thanks. Will post Friday.

I thought it best to start one last thread rather than try to do the rest of the year's question here. See you there!