Stephen's Second Semester

I have just joined the group and rather than list the 50 or so books I read in the first half of the year, I am going to start with July. It seems to me that a few lines of commentary for each book would make the list more interesting, perhaps.
So here goes for July:
The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope. A rather lame last volume of the Parliamentary Series in which the Duke of Omnium learns that he cannot control his children to live according to his arcane standards. I much preferred the Barchester series.
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly by John Bardin. A slightly obscure writer of psychological thrillers in the 40’s. I loved another of his works, The Deadly Percheron, but this one not so much.
Everest 1921-53}. A special edition by the Folio Society. Two volumes, one extracts from diaries, the other photographs. The tragedy of the 1924 edition is a haunting British memory, even for those born later. And I was alive for the first successful climb in ’53, of which news arrived on the same day as the Coronation of Elizabeth II. A very strong memory from my time as an 8 year old.
One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard, translated from the Welsh. Found it in a list in the Guardian of the best novels set in small communities. What it did not say was that it was about small boys in a small community. Small boy lit is generally not to my liking, and I did not finish.
The Alienist. A novella by Machado de Assis, Brazils most celebrated writer, from the 19th century. Good, ironic, almost Kafkaesque. Not as good as his novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas which has the same irony but more humanity.
Thats all for now, the rest of July in the next post.

>1 scunliffe: OK, I'm fascinated on a totally superficial level by The Deadly Percheron. Is that like Cujo with draft horses?

I have to confess that until I read the book I didn't even know what a Percheron is! The title gives a good indication of the bizarre nature of the whole book. It really is worth a read, very quick, if you can find it.

The rest of July:
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. A powerful book which mostly seems like a preview of Thomas Hardy, lightened occasionally by retrospective touches of Jane Austen. You know right from the first chapter that there is a foreboding of doom, as a little girl plays alone by the deep waters of a lock. Harold Bloom thinks this is a great novel with a foolish ending, but I disagree with him about the ending.
Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley. Another in the Easy Rawlins series, made unfortunately quite topical by the tensions of the Watts riots.
Palace Walk by Naguib Mafouz, a wonderful book which I have already commented on.
Boswell’s Life of Johnson. No, I did not read it all in July. By contrast I listened to it over two years. The erudition, thinking, talking and writing of SJ is so amazingly rich that it needs to be consumed only in small doses. Boswell himself is an interesting character, but it is of course Johnson who dominates the book. Also a good look at eighteenth century British intellectual life outside academia.
Disgrace by J.M. Coatzee. A skillfully written book from which I I derived no enjoyment at all. Yes, I did learn something about the tensions of post apartheid South Africa, but otherwise I could only dislike the male chauvinism of the lead character. He judges all women by their looks, and does not hesitate to pursue those whose looks he likes. And he is completely confounded by his inability to control the decisions of his daughter in determining her own life. Meanwhile, as an unpleasant background, there is much dwelling on the killing of dogs.

August so far:
The Rags of Time by Peter Grainger. I met famous-on-NPR Nancy Pearl recently, and hearing my British accent she told me she had just discovered, an English mystery writer by name of Peter Grainger. I told her that my American wife, who was also there, had put me on the same track a year ago. The Rags of Time is about number six in his Detective Smith series. They are all very well written in a gentle tone, with characters who are more important than the crimes they commit or solve.
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell. Gritty stuff, especially for a woman writer in the mid 19th Century, illuminating the dreadful condition of the new working class created by the Industrial Revolution, and even mentioning prostitution by name(!). Written 40 years before Zola’s Germinal. It was her first novel, and she does better with the same theme in North and South.
Into the Rising Sun by Patrick O’Donnell. A pale imitation of Studs Terkel, focused on personal accounts of the Pacific War. So pale that I did not finish it.
Embracing Defeat by John Dower. An over-long (too much detail) but very interesting account of Japan under American occupation from 1945 to 1950. The last and possibly only time that America dealt well with a nation it had just conquered, setting it up for remarkably fast recovery. MacArthur deserves real credit for this, although he blew it all in Korea immediately afterwards. (see the General and the President by H.W. Brands).
Lady Audley’s Secret, the best known of the some 80 ‘sensational’ novels by Victorian author Elizabeth Braddon. Clue: there is more than one secret.
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. Still trying to figure this book out; the cast of grotesque characters and their bizarre antics certainly entertains, but since the central theme is the acceptance or rejection of Jesus there is more to it than just entertainment.
Blind Man with a Pistol by Chester Himes. The last of his idiosyncratic Harlem crime series. Set against the Harlem riots it has more obvious social consciousness than the others, so reducing Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones to less prominent roles.

I've just caught up a bit of CR and discovered your thread. Great you've set one up!

I'm almost embarrassed to say I've not yet got to a single George Eliot book. I definitely have to do something about that soon. I'm a big Hardy fan, so given your comments I expect I'll enjoy her writing.

Disgrace I found to be a strange book, and at the time when I reviewed it I borrowed a quote from someone else's review which I felt summed it up succinctly for me: "I can hardly remember being so detached from a book and yet unable to put it down."

It gripped me at times, but I agree the characters were horrible people, and it's one of those books I was glad to reach the last page of.