jfetting's 101010 challenge

This looks like fun! Here are my tentative categories:

1) Science, but not Mine
2) LT Group reads
3) Real-life book club
4) History
5) Biography
6) Women authors
7) Anthony Trollope
8) Stefan Zweig - the 2010 Author Theme Reads author
9) 1001 books
10) Shakespeare

Right now, I'm planning on reading 10 books in each category but that may change.

Bold text w/ a date next to it indicates "read"

Welcome! Great categories. I, too, have the 'I will aim for 10, but we'll see' goal :)

Thank you!

Category 1: Science, but not mine. Meaning, no primary sources and no developmental biology. This category is for science books for the general reader, not scientists. This list, like all, is subject to change, but it is a fun activity while stuck in the lab. - COMPLETE

1) The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene - 9/26/10
2) On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson - ok, 1 dev bio book - 6/21/10
3) Relativity by Albert Einstein - 10/7/10
4) Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould - 10/25/10
5) Cosmos by Carl Sagan - 8/8/10
6) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn - 12/7/10
7) Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould - 4/17/10
8) The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin - 7/11/10
9) The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
10) The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson - 11/12/10

Category 2: LT Group Reads - COMPLETE

1) The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (monthly author reads) 1/22/10
2) 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Group Reads - Literature) 2/25/10
3) Moonflower Vine by Jetta Carleton (Missouri Readers) 1/22/10
4) King of the Hill: A Memoir by A.E. Hotchner (Missouri Readers) 4/1/10
5)The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (Monthly Author Reads) 4/09/10
6) Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell (Group Reads - Literature) April/May 10
7) When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes by Jay Feldman (Missouri Readers) 5/30/10
8) This is Graceanne's Book - P.L. Whitney (Missouri Readers) 7/26/10
9) Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym (Monthly Author Reads) 7/26/10
10)Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell (Missouri Readers) 9/30/10

Category 3: Real-life book club - COMPLETE

1) The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown - 1/07/10
2) The Witches of Eastwick - John Updike - 3/21/10
3) The Likeness - Tana French - 4/27/10
4) The Murder of King Tut - James Patterson - 5/23/10
5) A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini - 6/27/10
6) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - 7/19/10
7) The White Queen - Philippa Gregory - 8/22/10
8) The Girl Who Played With Fire - larssonbystieg::Stieg Larsson - 8/18/10
9) The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri - 10/24/10
10) Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier - 11/15/10

Category 4: History

1) The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman 7/14/10
2) London: the biography by Peter Ackroyd - 8/22/10
3) After the Victorians by A.N. Wilson
4) The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicolson 3/3/10
5)The History of God by Karen Armstrong 1/15/10
6) Constantine's Sword by James Carroll
7) Civilisation by Kenneth Clark
8) The Devil in the White City by larsonbyerik::Erik Larson - 11/29/10
9) The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories by Herodotus - 9/12/10
10) Family Britain by David Kynaston 3/28/10

Category 5: Biographies & Letters - COMPLETE

1) The Brontes by Juliet Barker - 5/25/10
2) The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams - 9/17/10
3) Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig - 10/15/10
4) Graham Greene: A Life in Letters by Richard Greene - 11/7/10
5) The Brontes: A life in letters by Juliet Barker - 10/21/10
6) Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey - 12/19/10
7) Darwin by Adrian Desmond - 8/2/10
8) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot - 6/4/10
9) The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley - 6/15/10
10) Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford - 9/26/10

Category 6: Women authors - COMPLETE

1) An Academic Question by Barbara Pym - 1/10/10
2) House of Daughters by Sara-Kate Lynch - 8/21/10
3) My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult - 6/6/10
4) Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett - 6/19/10
5) Faithful Place by Tana French - 10/19/10
6) The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant - 2/13/10
7) The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson - 4/10/10
8) The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry - 5/27/10
9) A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark - 11/11/10
10) The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 2/25/10

Category 7: Anthony Trollope

1) Doctor Thorne - 3/11/10
2) Framley Parsonage - 5/11/10
3) The Small House at Allington - 6/2/10
4) The Last Chronicle of Barset - 7/5/10
5) Can You Forgive Her - 8/16/10
6) Phineas Finn - 9/25/10
7) The Eustace Diamonds - 10/7/10
8) Phineas Redux - 10/31/10
9) The Prime Minister - 12/26/10
10) The Duke's Children

This should get me through Barset and Palliser

Category 8: Stefan Zweig - the 2010 Author Theme Reads author - COMPLETE

1) Chess Story January '10
2) Amok and other stories February '10
3) Beware of Pity 4/7/10
4) The Post-Office Girl 5/31/10
5) Journey into the Past 12/26/10
6) The World of Yesterday 7/19/10
7) Selected Stories zweig - 11/10/10

plus three books by the mini-authors
8) The Radetzky March by josephroth::Joseph Roth - 2/5/10
9) Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki - 6/8/10
10) The Road by Cormac McCarthy - 10/8/10

Category 9: 1001 books - COMPLETE

1) The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1/2/10
2) Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams 1/24/10
3) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre 1/30/10
4) Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne - 11/19/10
5) Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky 4/21/10
6) Buddenbrooks by mannthomas::Thomas Mann - 7/2/10
7) The Double by José Saramago - 6/26/10
8) The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt - 9/7/10
9) Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell - 9/8/10
10) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - 12/21/10

Category 10: Shakespeare

1) 7536925::Henry V - 5/18/10
2) Richard III - 5/15/10
3) Twelfth Night - 7/26/10
4) Romeo and Juliet - 11/22/10
5) The Merchant of Venice - 12/19/10
6) Love's Labour's Lost - 11/21/10
7) The Tempest
8) Henry IV, Part I
9) Henry IV, Part II
10) Comedy of Errors

Nice - I like your categories and reads. I'm doing Shakespeare as well & I think I want to read every history book you've listed. I hope you enjoy Devil in the White City - it is one of my favorite non-fiction reads.

Ambitious list and very interesting. I have starred your thread for future reference. Who knows how much I might learn the easy way! I am particularly interested in the Science, History and Trollope.

Well, thank you! It is an ambitious list, so if I don't manage to read everything I won't beat myself up about it. I'm also looking forward to the Trollope. I'm deliberately waiting until January to start Dr. Thorne, and I'm getting impatient.

I read The Lace Reader earlier this year and it just blew me away. I hope you enjoy it. I'm also reading The Lost Symbol for my challenge. When are you reading it?

I'll be reading it in January for my book group. And I've heard a lot of good things about The Lace Reader so I'm looking forward to that, too.

You've got a lovely mix of books, I'm sadly lacking on the non fiction, which is terrible really. I always think my downfall is not reading as much non fic as I should.

I love Year of Wonders, such a beautifully written book. Anna is such a strong character, even after all the heartache and tragedy she suffers. I'm looking forward to reading People of the Book next year.

A few of us are doing a group read of Herodotus' Histories in case you are interested in including it in your history category.

That's a good idea - I can swap out Tacitus and use Herodotus instead, and have company! What group is reading it?

It's a few people doing this challenge. I think we're starting in Jan., 1 book a month. The thread hasn't been started yet but you'll see it when it is.

So far, in January, I'm pretty pleased with my 1010 challenge progress.

1) For my "1001 books" category, I've read The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams.

The Idiot was brilliant. It took me most of December to read, and when I was finished I couldn't stop thinking about it. The one part I found most compelling is when D. had the "idiot" of the title, the Prince, describe the feelings of a condemned man being led out to his execution. It's a fascinating bit - how time seems to slow down, and the man plans out what he'll think about the last few minutes. It's particularly compelling because Dostoyevsky himself had been condemned to death in his youth for political reasons, and had a very last minute (as in, brought out to the firing squad, standing and waiting his turn) reprieve. The book is worth a read for those pages alone, but of course the rest is wonderful too.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is wonderful, too, in a very different way. I think that Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers ever; his Hitchhikers series still makes me laugh out loud, and I've probably read it about 15 times. This book isn't quite as good, but still better than just about anything else out there.

For my History challenge, I finished reading Karen Armstrong's The History of God. I think it was a good introduction to the subject, but keep in mind I'm no religious historian. She tried to do a lot, in only 400 pages, and so by necessity she way oversimplified. This wasn't such a problem for me when she was talking about history, but when she started predicting where monotheistic religion will go in the future, her Eurocentrism really started to grate. No one seems to matter to Armstrong besides Northern Europe, New England, Israel, and the Middle East. Specifically, white people in Northern Europe and New England and Israel, and Arabs in the Middle East.

My group read category this month included The Return of the Native for the Monthly Author group and The Moonflower Vine for the Missouri Readers. I loved them both. I love Thomas Hardy always, and The Moonflower Vine was a wonderful new discovery.

Oh, there were two more. for my Real Life Book Group category, I read The Lost Symbol which had exactly the same plot as The Da Vinci Code and some really terrible writing. For my Women Author's category, I read An Academic Question by Barbara Pym which was unfortunately completely forgettable. It's too bad, since I really loved Excellent Women.

Glad to hear that Dirk Gently is good. I picked it up recently and am planning to read it sometime this year, whenever it sees the top of mount tbr

I read The Eustace Diamonds this year and I really enjoyed it. I'm planning on reading The Warden this year also, but then I might do it as an audiobook.

I really liked The Warden. It's the book that sucked me in to the world of Trollope fanhood.

I finished another read for my 1001 category - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre. Super fun spy novel. These Cold War spy novels are great, and I just discovered them.

26 :: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a fun novel? I read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, and I thought it was great, but not exactly "fun" - more like "very depressing." You've intrigued me about Tinker, Tailor... now!

Oh, it is way less depressing than Spy Who Came In From the Cold. It's like a puzzle, and puzzles are fun.

#26 I also just discovered the John le Carre novels - I read Spy Who Came in from the Cold a few months ago and am planning to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in February. Very glad to see your enthusiastic comments!

@28 :: Okay, good to know! :)

>25 cmbohn:, 26 I really liked The Warden. It's the book that sucked me in to the world of Trollope fanhood.

Me too, and esp. after Barchester Towers. And the Barset series works well on audio too.

ETA: Do let me know if I rant on about Trollope too much. I have a terrible memory as to which threads I've mentioned him on! I probably sound like a stuck record :)

Can't rant about Trollope too much here. I gave him a whole category to himself this year!

>26 jfetting:/27/28 I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at the end of last year, and have to confess I found it really hard going: just too confused by who everyone was and what they were trying to gain. I've heard that the Smiley books do get a bit easier to follow after that though - will be interested to hear your thoughts if you read the rest of the series.

There are more Smiley books!?! I didn't even know - thanks for telling me!

I finished a couple more books. For my "Women Authors" category, I swapped in Mavis Gallant's short story collection The Cost of Living, which is an ER book I needed to get read and reviewed. I've been wanting to read it for awhile, and it absolutely lived up to expectations. She isn't someone I'd ever heard of before (tragically), but her stories are wonderful. She herself is a Canadian expat living in Paris, and so most of her stories are about Canadians living in Europe, from right after the war to about 20 or so years later. My favorites were the title story "The Cost of Living" and "Autumn Day", but there wasn't a single story I didn't enjoy. Highly recommended to those folks who like short stories.

I also read The Radetzky March as part of the Author Theme reads group (so I'll probably stick this one in the Group Reads category, although it may end up in 1001 books depending). Another fantastic book - it's set in Austria immediately before WWI, and is about three generations (though mostly the third) of men after the first generation is raised up socially after saving the Kaiser's life. The novel has a sweetly nostalgic tone (being written sometime in the 30s), which I enjoyed. One of the best books I've read in awhile.

>34 jfetting: indeed - The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People. According to rebecanyc, THS gives away quite a bit of the plot of TTSS, so it's lucky you've read them in order!!

I've got a copy of The Cost of Living on the shelf - looks gorgeous. I really enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's interview last year with Mavis Gallant, though I now can't remember which publication it was in (Granta??).

Edit for touchstones

Do read it - it is wonderful. I can't recommend it strongly enough.

I didn't get anything else finished until today, since I've spent the past week reading 2666 by Roberto Bolano for my LT group reads category, and continuing to read The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories for my History category (and also a group read w/ the 1010 challenge group).

The Herodotus is surprisingly readable and entertaining, for ancient history. I'm thankful that I'm reading the well-annotated Landmark edition, which points out where Herodotus is clearly making things up (in Book 2 of The Histories, he describes an animal that he calls a hippopotamus that has no resemblance to an actual hippo). I'm not totally sure why his history of the wars between the Persians and the Greeks included this little digression into ancient Egypt, but it was fun.

2666 was a difficult read, and I don't think I really understand it, but I loved Bolano's writing, and the different stories that make up the novel. They are only loosely connected, and I guess I had expected that the final book would tie up the loose ends and link them all together. It does not (sorry to anyone who hasn't read 2666), but the story it tells is even better. I will definitely be looking up more Bolano in the future.

Finally, I'm subbing The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison into my Women Authors category. I got it from Bookmooch, and when it showed up in the mail I picked it up and then read it until I was finished. What an amazing accomplishment, and a first novel too! It is beautiful, and heartbreaking, and unforgettable.

The Bluest Eye was the first Toni Morrison I ever read, and I have been a confirmed fan ever since - I even did one of my finals dissertations on her books. Though I haven't read A Mercy yet: I've developed this stupid habit of "saving" books by the authors I treasure most for a "special treat", which given the way my shelves are ballooning tends to mean I never actually read them.

Looking back, I realise how lucky I was in terms of what I read as a teen. We had a school bookshop, run by my English teacher, and he was fantastic at recommending new stuff based on what I was enjoying. I read The Colour Purple, asked for more Alice Walker; he didn't have any, but said, "You might like this...". Looking around with fresh eyes nowadays, it doesn't look like the publishing industry makes it easy to transition from reading teen books to reading "proper grown-up novels". I can't think why that would be.

Other good things about the school bookshop: because some of the stock had been there for many, many years, there were a LOT of classic books that I got for very, very few of your earth pennies... And helping out there once a week 'counted' as my compulsory hobby session. Hurrah!

I just finished reading a book for my Anthony Trollope category, Doctor Thorne. Doctor Thorne is number 3 in the Barsetshire series, and unlike the first two there is hardly a clergyman to be found! It's about class differences, and people who are obsessed with marrying those who have wealth and birth. The rich family, high-born-but-not-titled, squanders all their money and expects the son of the family to marry money. The sentence "Frank must marry money" appears roughly 30,000 times in the book. Frank, showing remarkable good sense, does not want to marry money OR birth, he wants to marry Mary Thorne. Troubles, and quite a bit of Trollopean hilarity, ensue. The ending is obvious almost from the get-go, but that's ok.

I loathe the Gresham family (except Frank, of course). Seriously. Lady Arabella should be slapped. Repeatedly. I find myself unable to sympathize with her illness. Plus, it is bad enough having to read about a money and class and family obsessed society, I cannot even imagine how awful it must have been to live in one. Someone is not marriage material just because they have no money and their parents weren't married? The book is a pretty strong (very strong?) statement against this sort of nonsense, which is good. And Trollope's writing is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

It took me forever to finish reading The Witches of Eastwick for my Real Life Book Group category. I hated it - I haven't hated a book this much in a long long time. It joins Billy Budd, Nostromo, Bonfire of the Vanities, and The Sorrows of Young Werther in my personal Worst Books Ever Written list.

I just can't stand Updike's writing. I hate his sentences, I hate his characters, I hate the way he describes things, I hate the words he chooses, I hate his flimsy excuses for plots, I hate the way he makes New England sound, I hate everything about his books.

#40 lol! Jennifer, please don't hold back your real feelings! Seriously, though. I've never even been tempted to read this book. After reading your comments, and browsing the first few reviews posted (which were just lukewarm, despite the respectable 3.5-ish overall rating), I don't think I will EVER be tempted to read this book. Hope your next book is so much better.

@40 Hah! The real thrashings here at LT are pretty few and far between. Resfreshing to read yours!

It makes me angry to even think about it. I read it for my book group, and we all hated it. So that was fun.

I've been reading another book for my History category, Family Britain by David Kynaston, which is also an ER book I needed to get read and reviewed (so a more coherent, actually thought-out review is on the book's work page). I loved Austerity Britain, and also loved Family Britain. They both cover so much of the culture of (in the case of Family Britain) 1950's Britain. Instead of just being about Big History - government, elections, senseless invasions of Egypt - they are about people's lives during this time. Housing, television, sports, what they ate for dinner, etc. And I love that sort of thing.

The only downsides are that 1) the books are huge and take forever to get through and 2) as an American, I know precisely zilch about cricket or soccer football. So sentences describing "wickets" or "bowling" or "strikers" have no meaning whatsoever for me. Do they really have tea breaks during cricket matches? And have the nerve to call this a sport?

#43 I also enjoy learning about history as it affected the daily lives of ordinary people - you've written a great review. I had to laugh at your comment about taking a tea break during a cricket match. I have no idea if they really do that or not, but the mental image of a stadium full of civilized Brits stopping the play of the game so that everyone can sip a cup of tea as compared to that of a stadium full of uncouth Americans at a baseball game yelling and screaming obcenities at the players and coaches and referees while jumping up and spilling beer on other fans just struck me funny.

That is funny. I remember watching a Cubs game when I was about 12, and Andre Dawson got all mad because of a called third strike, and threw a 7 minute long temper tantrum in which he stamped and shouted and threw all the bats out of the dugout, and all the fans in the bleachers threw their cups and whatnot onto the outfield (this was at Wrigley), and they had to stop the game to clean up. Yay America!

I just finished a book for my LT Group Reads category - the latest Missouri Readers group read, King of the Hill: A Memoir by A.E. Hotchner. My copy actually has the later book, Looking for Miracles, so I read that one too.

The first tells about life in St. Louis during the Depression when Hotchner was 11. It's told in the voice of an 11yo boy, which was annoying at first but then just right. So many horrible things keep happening to the kid, but the story is told with such exuberance and zest that it is hard to feel sad. LFM is set 3 years later, when the total city boy spends a summer as a camp counselor. It's pretty great too.

For me the best thing about the book was the setting. Hotchner's boyhood was spent just a few blocks away from where I spent my 7 years in St. Louis as a grad student. So I could really see all the action - I know exactly what the corner of Kingshighway and Delmar is like (still sketchy after all these years), and what the houses along Forest Park look like between Skinker and Debaliviere (huge and gorgeous) and what a St. Louis summer evening feels like (a sauna). Did the book make me homesick? How much do you think it'd cost to send some Ted Drewes up to Maine?

I've done some futzing with my categories. I took out the Travel Books category and put in Stefan Zweig, this year's Author Theme Read Author, instead. His books weren't really fitting in any other category, but I'm going to be reading a lot of them, so he gets a category of his own. Plus, all his novellas and short stories will really help balance out all the chunkster history books on my list.

So, a quick recap of my Zweig reading for the year. I started out with Chess Story, which is his last work and one of his best. It's a brilliant little novella about the effect of torture and solitude and Nazi Germany on the mind of a prisoner. It was a great introduction to some things that keep popping up in Zweig's work, such as the way he frames his stories by having a character telling the narrator a story (he does it over and over). Then I read a collection of short stories and one novella, Amok and other stories, which were genius. The latest was his only novel, Beware of Pity, which was heartbreaking but so, so good. I also read The Radetzky March as part of understanding Zweig better (they were friends and contemporaries), so that book got moved to this category.

Other reading: a group read book, The Moonstone, for the Monthly Author's read. It may end up moving over to 1001 books, but we'll see. I loved it, either way. Brilliant. It should have been cliched and ridiculous (stolen cursed gemstone, mysterious Indians, terminally ill parents, etc) but it was fantastic and I could not put it down.

From the first category, Science (but not mine):

Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould. So, this is his first collection of essays about science and evolution and Darwin and whatnot, from columns that were originally written back in the 70s. I'm a big fan of his work, both in terms of his contribution to evolutionary biology and his ability to make science so accessible to laypeople (I'm guessing, anyway, that he is good at that.) It is interesting to see the differences in his style, between his earlier work and his later, more mellow essays.

The essays themselves are fantastic. A lot has changed since the 70s, even in his field, and some things that I had assumed were handed down carved in stone were actually recent changes, the most obvious example being the essay in which Gould argues that instead of teaching that there are two kingdoms, Animalia and Plantae, living things should be divided into 5 kingdoms: Monera (bacteria), Protists (single celled eukaryotes), Animals, plants and fungi. I had no idea that anyone was ever taught anything other than the 5.

My favorite thing about Gould is how he wasn't afraid to point out where we scientists are wrong. We are often wrong, and we aren't very good about admitting it. Our saving grace is that science is, at its core, about facts. When we are able to test things, we find out we are wrong and we change our hypotheses. Problems arise when facts aren't available, or testable, and this is especially a problem in a field like evolution. Science isn't done in a vacuum; it is done by people who live in a particular society or culture (whatever that may be), and these people have internalized their society's prejudices and the like. So when scientists don't have facts to work with, they will unfortunately make up things that tend to support their society and culture. Gould has 3 or 4 killer essays at the end where he rants and raves about how shady a**holes some scientists use bits of knowledge about other species and evolution to promote or support ideas that are flat-out racist and/or sexist and/or classist.

It is disheartening that this nonsense is still around today, in all the b.s. evo psych nonsense that places like msn.com love to publish about biological determinism.

#47 I read a couple of books from this series of essays years ago, and loved them. Stephen Jay Gould is very good at making science accessible to laypeople, and manages to do it without being condecending. In fact, he explained things so well that it made me feel incredibly smart when I understood what he was talking about. Thanks for the reminder to go get something else by him - I see the library has quite a few of his books.

A couple new additions:

For my Real Life Book Group category, I finished April's book The Likeness by Tana French. I loved it - it is even better than In The Woods, I think. I don't really even like this kind of book, this whole mystery/police procedural kind of thing, but French's books rock. The Likeness starts off with a murder, and the corpse is identical to the protagonist, the cop Cassie Maddox. So of course, they send Cassie off to do some undercover work pretending to be the victim, to try to catch the murderer. It sounds ridiculous, but French makes it work. I've already reserved my copy of Faithful Place, her next book, which comes out in July.

For my 1001 Books category, I finished another one of Dostoevsky's works, Demons, which I didn't love as much as I did Crime and Punishment or The Idiot, but was still very very very good.

So far this month, I've read book 5 in Herodotus. He's getting more into the action of the history, with fewer digressions into geography and customs of different places.

I finished another book in my Trollope category, Framley Parsonage. I liked it almost as much as Barchester Towers, and more than Doctor Thorne (although Dr. Thorne himself does show up again in FP). It is another book, like DT, about marriages between different classes, and the reaction of the unhappy mamas to this. It is also about a clergyman who is a little bit deluded into thinking he is a member of the upper classes, and the trouble that ensues. And it is about the Proudies (whohoo!) and Dr. Grantly (whohoo!) and Miss Dunstable (whohoo!). In short, all the favorites from BT are either back, or mentioned. Everyone who deserves it lives happily ever after. Until the next book, at least.

I realized I haven't done a Shakespeare yet, so I read Richard III over the weekend. It is great - Richard is totally evil and vicious, but I was totally rooting for him anyway.

I finished another in my Shakespeare category, Henry V. Super good. I liked the way the chorus was used to move the action along.

In addition, I finished the May book for my Real Life book group - The Murder of King Tut. It is inaccurately called "nonfiction" - you see, Mr. Patterson, when you use characters that actually existed, and historical events that actually happened, and you make up a bunch of dialogue and add some hypothetical murders, it is called "historical fiction", not nonfiction. It is also poorly written, poorly edited, poorly researched, poorly executed, and poorly argued. Worst book I've ever read in my whole life, and it even inspired me to put the copy of Along Came a Spider that someone once gave me on Bookmooch. I can't handle any more of his prose.

Also he is wrong. Tut wasn't murdered, he died of a genetic bone disease (because he was from consanguinous parents) combined with malaria.

ETA: I forgot to mention that I also read Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell for the Group Reads category. Great book, but not really much of a group read discussion. Sometimes I think that people vote for books in group reads that they really have no intention of reading. This is a problem w/ my real life book group, too - we put list of books to vote for online, and picked the top 12 vote-getters, but some of the people who voted never actually came to book group, so we get stuck reading crap like this Tut b.s. that no one who comes regularly even wanted to read in the first place. That is why I like the Missouri readers group so much - it's small, but we vote and then all participate.

#51 Jennifer, I'm interested in your comments about Murder of King Tut. I've never read a single word by James Patterrson, but added that book to my wishlist when I saw it listed as a nonfiction. I was skeptical, but decided to give it a try. I've seen some other critical comments since then, so I think now it's coming off the list (assuming I haven't deleted it already and just don't remember). Science vocabulary question - does "consanguinous" mean that his parents were brother & sister?

It isn't nonfiction at all. Well, maybe the chapters where he and his wife and his agent talk about how awesome his theory is might be considered nonfiction, but the rest of it is straight up historical fiction - lots of conversations (from ancient Egypt), lots of sex, all sorts of ridiculous. I think King Tut is really interesting, and would like to find some real books about his life, and not this drivel.

And yep! They did some genetic testing and think that his mom and dad were siblings. It sounds like there may have been lots of inbreeding in his family tree. This is another thing Patterson gets wrong, I think.

I just finished The Brontes by Juliet Barker for my Biographies and Letters category. I've gushed all over it in my review on the books work page.

I read Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, The Life of Charlotte Bronte last year, and I was a big fan of it, but wanted to read something less biased (Gaskell and Bronte were friends and there was no way The Life was unbiased). Barker's book is (I think) considered the definitive work on the Bronte family, so I read it. I am so glad that I did. This is a gigantic, dense, detailed, fascinating depiction of the family from Patrick in Ireland all the way to the death of Arthur Bell Nicholls. I've been boring all my labmates senseless the past couple weeks by telling them all about the lives of the Brontes. The book focuses most on Patrick, Charlotte, and Branwell, mostly because not much is really known about the rest. Nothing substantial, anyway, and corroborated by primary sources.

The Brontes does a lot to knock the Bronte myth on its behind. Gaskell's book, for example, left an impression of Charlotte as this saintly, patient, genius-martyr, who sacrificed her health and happiness for her father and her family. She neglects to tell us (unlike Barker) about what a bully she was to her sisters, and how they resented this, and how she completely misjudged Anne, and how she flirted with her publishers and broke off relations with them after one of them got engaged to somebody else, and what an ungrateful snob she was toward her employers, and how despite all the money spent on her education, she refused to actively find work after Brussels, and let Anne and Branwell support the family, AND after Emily's death destroyed her second novel.

Branwell was very naughty, Patrick was much kinder and more understanding than Gaskell portrayed him, and Gaskell herself was a scheming, underhanded bitch when it came to writing Charlotte's biography, going to the extent of trying to trick Nicholls (CB's husband at her death) to turn over all Charlotte's papers to her. Charlotte's "friend" Ellen Nussey comes off very well in Gaskell's book, and not well at all in Barker's. Emily's and Anne's death scenes are tragic. There is a poem Anne wrote after she received her diagnosis of fatal TB that is heartbreaking, and totally contradicts Charlotte's claim that Anne "welcomed" death.

See! I can write pages and pages about The Brontes, but will just conclude by saying that this is one of the best written, best annotated, best researched, and most enjoyable biographies I've ever read, despite the big chunkiness of it. I didn't want it to end, and I didn't want 1848 to show up AT ALL. Despite the way that Charlotte's sainthood is stripped away, the real person she actually was is as interesting and sympathetic as ever. If I could build a time machine, I'd take myself and sufficient isoniazid, rifampin, pyrazinamide, and ethambutol doses back to Haworth Parsonage, c. 1848, and save Emily and Anne, and keep Charlotte from suffering so much.

#53 I agree about wanting to find an interesting book about King Tut - which is why I was tempted by Patterson's book in the very first place!

Two more additions to my challenge. First, in my Women Authors category, The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry. This had a lot of buzz when it first came out a few years ago, but like many super-hyped books this one fell a little flat. It was fine, I liked it, I'll probably read it again someday, but I don't think it was that great. 3 stars.

For my Group Reads category, I totally jumped the gun by two weeks and read When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquakes by Jay Feldman. Not at all what I expected - apparently I never read the subtitle. I expected more geology and plate-shifting stuff.

#56 I'm looking forward to the Feldman book - I won't ask for details, but I hope there is at least SOME geology and plate-shifting stuff.

54> If you'd like to read another chunky (but really good and very readable) biography of "America's Brontes," check out The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall.

Oh, that does sound good. I really do like chunky biographies of interesting women.

I got a couple books finished on a quick trip to St. Louis for a wedding this weekend. First, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It would have fit in my history, science, or biography category but I put it into the biography one because the others are full. The book was wonderful. In a lot of ways, it was horrifying to learn how little control we have over our tissues, and I do wish that the scientific community could somehow find a way to give the Lacks family some sort of financial compensation. I mean, HeLa cells can go for up to $1000 for a vial! Plus, the book left me with a list of scientists who I think should go to jail.

The other book, My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult, goes into my Women Author's category. Better than I expected, and I cried at the end. Like a baby.

I forgot to trash The Small House at Allington! Despite my deep and abiding love for Anthony Trollope, I really didn't care for Allington. This is what I had to say about it:

Well, even the great ones have to strike out sometimes. This was, sad to say, not good. I think it may be one of those books that ages badly - the Victorians may have liked it, but I didn't. Trollope's writing is the only thing that got me through to the end, really. The story is different than most of his - the heroine gets engaged in the third chapter, so you know that this can't end well for her. It doesn't; she gets dumped by this epic d-bag Crosbie, and the rest of the book is about the ensuing suffering. Her suffering, his suffering, the new wifey's suffering, the suffering of this random guy who is in love with the heroine, the suffering of this random woman that the random guy had promised to marry but who he doesn't want to marry because he is in love with the heroine, the suffering of the helpless reader who keeps slogging through all this in the hopes of seeing some of the Trollope brilliance...

The characters, except for an elderly earl and his sister, and an elderly squire, were all awful. I couldn't stand a single one of them, especially the heroine, Lily Dale. Lily Dale is the kind of woman who, when dumped by her fiance for another woman, keeps loving him anyway. He is a total jerk, but she'll never, never, never love anyone else ever. Because she BELONGS TO HIM. Even though he doesn't want her. She out-Fanny Prices even Fanny Price. Now admittedly, I'm the sort of girl who prefers the Becky Sharps and the Moll Flanders of the literary world to the Fanny Prices. But even Fanny had some self respect; her drippy cousin had never broken an engagement with her. Lily Dale? Stands by her man. Even when he doesn't want to be her man. Even when he becomes some other woman's man.

Yuck. Trollope writes some great female characters. Lily isn't one of them. The only redeeming parts of this book involve Lady Dumbello (nee Griselda Grantly) and Mr. Palliser.

Boo! But it fills another slot in my Trollope challenge, so onward!

I just finished reading Some Prefer Nettles for my Author Theme read category. The main author is Stefan Zweig, but we read mini-authors too, and this year 2 of the mini authors are from the same time period as Zweig. Joseph Roth was very similar to Zweig, and Junichiro Tanizaki was very different. The Austrians focused more on the end of an era, on the rise of war, and of the effect of WWI on Europe and its youth. Very nostalgic, very melancholy. Nettles was a very different book - it is about the end of a marriage, and two people who can't quite manage to take the final step. It is also about Japan in the 20s, and the allure of Western culture vs. traditional Japanese culture. It made me want to go visit Japan.

Recently, I finished two more challenge books. The first was for my Biographies and Letters category - The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. I love these collections-of-letters books; I think you can really get a sense of what a person is like by reading their mail. And the Mitfords were a fascinating family - they were a rich, titled British family, so in some ways, the Mitford sisters were early "celebutants", but they were so much more than that. Two sisters became fascists, and friends with Hitler. Another one became a Communist and famous author (that'd be Jessica). A fourth became one of my favorite authors (Nancy Mitford). And a fifth became the Duchess of Devonshire.

Their letters, though, have very little to do with current events or politics (except as how their politics affected their relationships with each other). It is much more a study in family dynamics - I said over in my 100 challenge thread that the changing alliances of the Mitfords totally reminded me of my mom and her 4 sisters. It is hard to keep track of who is aligned with whom at any given time. Also, the Mitfords all had a wickedly dry sense of humor, so the book is really, really funny.

The second book was The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett, and I read it for my Women Authors category. I liked it, but didn't love it. The character who I wanted to see get his comeuppance didn't, not at all. Fictional bad people should be punished!

This past week, I've finished On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson for my Science category, and The Double by Jose Saramago for my 1001 category.

On Growth and Form is about how mathematics and physics and forces and whatnot underlie the size and shape and growth of organisms on the planet. It was originally written in 1917, seemingly in response to all the natural selection talk that was so hot those days ;-) We've learned a lot about cells and tissues since Thompson's day, and so there are chapters where his arguments are less correct than other chapters. For example, he spends a lot of time arguing how surface tension accounts for the shape and cell division behavior of single cells - he says that they behave like soap bubbles, split like soap bubbles, etc. Except that many cells don't do this, and people have done measurements and found that surface tension is only a small influence on cells. Because cell membranes aren't bubbles - they aren't homogeneous - and cells themselves aren't balls of air. They are filled with proteins and cellular structures that actively influence cell size, shape, etc.

Another example (me picking nits) relates to cell packing in tissues and a comparison to beehives. Sure, hexagonal packing is the best way to get the most of any object into a given space, and this is true of some of the simplest epithelial tissues (the wing of a fruitfly, for example, so pretty) but not of the majority of tissues.

But hey, he was writing in 1917, and was pretty amazingly close given the state of science at the time. And for me as a scientist, this book was a really helpful reminder to step back now and again from the genetic interactions and mutations and signaling pathways that make up my work, and remember that in the end these cells I'm working with need to obey the laws of physics, too.

The Double was great too, in a different way. It wasn't initially in my challenge, but I wanted to read one of Saramago's books after he passed away last weekend. It is about a man who watches a video only to find that one of the extras looks exactly like him. He is driven to learn the identity of the actor, make contact, meet him, etc. The consequences are surprising. And bad.

I finished two more - A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini for my Real Life Book Group challenge, and Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann for my 1001 category. Both were excellent, but very different.

Oh no! I've finished the whole series! The Last Chronicle of Barset is a fitting end to what has turned out to be one of my favorite series of novels. It is Trollope at his best - the writing is funny, the characters are terrific, the narrator keeps imposing himself into the storyline - everything a fan could ask for. Well, maybe a fan could ask Trollope to get rid of the unnecessary storyline involving Conway Dalrymple, and all of the bits involving Lily Dale (why!?! why more Lily Dale!?!), and a lot of the Johnny Eames parts. I mean, the edition I read is 1200 pages long. Yes, you read that right. TWELVE HUNDRED PAGES. Good thing it reads so quickly!

Of the series, my favorite characters came out of the first two books (The Warden and Barchester Towers) and I thought that the new characters were completely unnecessary (Dalrymple again). The best parts are about Crawley, and the Proudies, and the Grantlys. I have to say, even though he rubbed me the wrong way back in The Warden, I love Archdeacon Grantly. And I feel a lot more pity for Mrs. Proudie - it wasn't her fault that she was an ambitious woman born at a time when most ambitious women were stuck at home. But the real heartbreaker came at the end, when ***spoiler alert*** a very old, sweet, favorite character died.

Now on to the Pallisers.

I've really enjoyed reading your thoughts on Trollope! I only discovered him fairly recently, and so far I've only read The Warden and Barchester Towers...but I definitely plan to continue with the Barset series!

A rant about Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex:

So. Where to begin? This is one of Darwin's books that came out after The Origin of Species. In Origin, Darwin was very careful to not really mention natural selection in reference to human beings (he was worried enough about how people would take natural selection in reference to animals). Being a big fat coward, he decided to just skim over that and let other people (like T.H. Huxley) fight that battle for him until society was more receptive to the idea, then he wrote this.

In the first part, Darwin patiently and methodically blasts apart all of mankind's alleged "specialness". All the differences between us and other higher mammals (esp. the primates) are differences of degree, not kind. Parts of this section I liked - Darwin obviously spent as much time staring at his dog as I do at mine, trying to figure out what they are dreaming about. Other parts, not so much, for reasons I'll rant about later.

The second section is about sexual selection. Part of the criticism of natural selection came from those traits that had no obvious survival advantage. Why have blue eyes or yellow feathers or stripes? Darwin's answer - to attract the ladies. In part 2, he goes into excruciating detail about the differences in appearance in the sexes throughout the animal kingdom, from mussels on up to humans. Birds alone get four chapters! Butterflies get two! This is Darwin at his best, and most enjoyable (my copy has gorgeous color plates to go along with it). But then he gets to man...

And now we get to why I'm only giving this book 3 stars. I know that it is wrong to judge other times and places by the culture and values of today. And I tried not to - I really did. But I just can't help it. Darwin was a (slightly inbred, actually) Victorian English gentleman - and as such, he was a big ol' racist sexist asshole (although he did kindly agree that other races are probably of the same species as himself). He's great at describing animals, but when it comes to mankind he is incapable of pulling his head out of his ass and not applying his bigotry to his science. This is social Darwinism at its worst - he uses natural selection to promote his (and his culture's) place atop the universe. Women, other races (and "Spanish" is apparently a race, to Darwin), etc are all inferior to him and his fellow rich English dudes, because evolution selected him to be so! It's science! It must be so! In his concluding chapter (where in Origin we got the poetry of "endless forms most beautiful"), he goes so far as to say that "inferior" people should stop breeding to promote the advancement of Homo sapiens. It was hard to read. I don't have the stomach for this sort of thing (probably because I'm just a stupid girl).

The higher the pedestal, the harder they fall. Screw you, Darwin.

Huh! I didn't realize he had books that portrayed such views -- I thought that was something we knew about him mostly from his letters, and that he'd always shied away from saying his thoughts about any humans whatsoever in real books.

I'm in the middle of Guns, Germs and Steel, and it sounds like the perfect antidote to The Descent of Man.... My guy is all about the fact that Eurasians got guns, germs, and steel first only because Eurasia is oriented east to west instead of N-S like the other continents (and thus Eurasia was able to transmit food and ideas -- like farming -- further and faster and earlier and keep building on its own successes). The focus on human domestication of plants and animals is a totally different approach to the way that natural selection worked in building human societies!

I loved Guns, Germs, and Steel - and I agree that the whole E/W vs N/S argument is really convincing and interesting. I've been meaning to read Collapse forever - have you read it yet?

No, I haven't read Collapse (hadn't even heard of it -- indicates what I know about anthropology >.

good lord, but I forget that LT auto-strips all < tags.... I've forgotten the rest of my message of course, but it was along the lines of, but cultural anthropology is less interesting to me than grandiose causal connections, and I can't tell from the reviews which format Collapse fits better -- but it looks like it may be interesting enough to be worth thumbing through to see, I think.

@ 68, 69

read it, read it, read it! It's even better than Guns, germs and steel.

Just found this thread and have been enjoying your posts. Thanks for all the insight on your Author Theme Read choices. :)

I will have to find The Last Chronicle of Barset. I really love those characters.

Another history book under my belt: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

I know almost nothing about WWI (and most of what I do know comes from Rilla of Ingleside and All Quiet on the Western Front). So I learned a lot from this book, which covers some of the immediate causes of the war, and the first month of fighting. I can't really understand the mindset of the political or military leaders of Germany, France, and England at this time - were they crazy? What the hell did they think would happen?

Lots of battle descriptions and troop movements usually bore the pants off of me, but Tuchman is a really good and interesting writer, and kept my attention. Not dry or boring at all.

Another addition to my Stefan Zweig category:

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

This book calls itself an autobiography, but it isn't really. It's much more a memoir, but not really of Zweig's life. Actually, it is an elegy for the Europe in which Zweig grew up, where culture mattered, and people didn't slaughter each other, and life was good.

I've read a couple of rabidly anti-Zweig articles which trash The World of Yesterday, and I think that is totally undeserved. Zweig was wealthy, and talented, and never had any trouble getting published (even as a teenager), and knew everyone who was anyone in the art, music, and literary worlds of the time. There is a LOT a lot of name-dropping. If I'm being completely honest, I'd say that if this book was written by someone like Updike, looking back on the end of a long happy productive life and bragging about all the cool people he knew, I'd hate it. But poor Zweig - he wrote this in 1941, an exile from his native Austria, all his possessions and friends and family lost to him forever (as it must have seemed at the time) since going back to Austria meant death to this Jewish writer, his books burned and forbidden in his own country. And so, if he wants to write about the past, about how awesome it was living in Paris before WWI and hanging out with Rilke(!), so be it. He deserves to.

The book was sad, and nostalgic. In some ways it reminded me of Speak, Memory, another memoir by a fiction writer that is far too pretty to be nonfiction. Nabokov, though, got to live happily ever after. Zweig shot himself in Brazil a year after writing this. If only he'd waited...

A bunch of reading accomplished in the last week or so:

I finished Book 7 of Herodotus: The Histories for my history category. This is the one where the Persians finally invade Greece, and so the preparations for war and the battle of Thermopylae took up most of it. I'm embarrassingly badly-read in world history, and ancient history in particular, so I had no idea what the outcome of Thermopylae would be, and happily cheered on the Spartans until that dirty sneak brought the Persians around the mountains and all the Spartans died. Boo! I also really enjoyed the descriptions of the battle dress of all the different tribes that fought with the Persians, and the nuttiness of Xerxes (for instance, where he had his men flog the Hellespont and insult it for the storm that destroyed his bridge. I'm sure that strip of waterway was suitably chastened.)

I re-read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens for my real-life book group this month. I'm picking up on a lot of grumbling from other group members (cause Dickens is so hard) but I really love this book, and had forgotten how funny it is in spots.

I finished two books for my LT group reads category - Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym for the Monthly Author Reads group and This is Graceanne's Book by P.L. Whitney for the Missouri Readers group. CH was good, very British, very Pym, a little too melancholy for what I need right now. But I like it very much, and will like it more when I am in a better mood. This is Graceanne's Book was finished in one go, everything else I needed to do today was ignored until I was done. It's that good. The subject matter is difficult (a mother beating one of her children), but the book wasn't bleak or depressing. The relationship between the siblings lightened it up quite a bit. Highly recommended.

Plus, I'm almost done with my LT group read category. However, I can guarantee that I'll be doing more of those, and finding other categories for them.

76 I've been shaking my head in anxious puzzlement at you guys who do the group read of Herodotos, but you actually make it sound kind of exciting. As for the nuttiness of Xerxes, I guess the writer is slightly biased towards the greeks :) Making your enemies look like utter buffoons was part of propaganda back then too, it seems. My wife read Suetonius The twelve ceasars a few years back, and that's just packed to the brim with people making horses senators and building mausoleums for house flies...

Sorry I'm way behind on this thread of yours, but I wanted to second the recommendation that you got for The Peabody Sisters back in message 58. I really enjoyed that book!

And I need to get going on the Trollope Barchester Towers series. I've only read the first two so far - love your reviews!

I added The Peabody Sisters to my wishlist. It looks good! And Herodotus is much more entertaining than I expected - not dry at all. Really fun propaganda!

Reading-wise, I read Twelfth Night for my Shakespeare challenge after seeing it live a couple weeks ago. It's a fun one - silly, dirty, entertaining. I also finished Darwin: the life of a tormented evolutionist by Adrian Desmond for my biography category after a long struggle. It was a good attempt, but there is just no easy way to make Darwin the person interesting. He was sick a lot, and stayed home, and didn't do anything really after the Beagle trip besides think and write and vomit and not publish. The story gets better when Hooker and Huxley are involved, but Darwin himself was still pretty dull, and cowardly.

Twelfth Night is one of my favorites. I also enjoyed the modern film adaptation they made: She's the Man. Silly high school comedy with soccer, kind of in a somewhat similar style as 10 Things I Hate About You, adapted from The Taming of the Shrew.

I love Twelfth Night too! There's a film adaptation with Imogen Stubbs and Helena Bonham-Carter that's very good -- although I'll admit that "She's the Man" is fun too! :)

I re-read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens for my real-life book group this month. I'm picking up on a lot of grumbling from other group members (cause Dickens is so hard) but I really love this book, and had forgotten how funny it is in spots.

Do I detect some eye rolling going on here? My book club read Great Expectations and no one said it was so hard. Would you like to join? We meet one Tuesday night a month from September to June.

Yes! I'm in. I want to be in a book club that is willing to read good literature without whining about it. Half my book club didn't even finish it ("I just can't read him. He's so wordy."). The other half thinks that the first half are insane. The real tragedy is that we were supposed to read Anna Karenina but that was shot down but the first half ("just too long!") and instead we're reading the stupid dragon tattoo books. Which aren't really stupid, but they sure as heck aren't Tolstoy.

Oh wait. You live all the way over on the other side of the continent. Never mind. I can't join your book club. *sigh*

I just finished Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

This is technically a re-read, but I read it so long ago I didn't remember it at all, and I'm pretty sure I never finished it. It is a really interesting layman's version of life, the universe, and everything. My favorite idea from the book is that the elements (with the exception of hydrogen and helium) were created within dying stars. All the carbon that makes up your body and mine and this couch and the dog at my feet originated in a star. More exciting elements, like gold, came from supernovae. How cool is that?

Sagan writes beautifully. There is a chapter on interstellar travel that ends with a description of what we put on the Voyager spacecraft to let putative other civilizations know about Homo sapiens that actually made me cry. Obviously the book is dated - about 30 years old now - but still worth a read if you want a general survey of the universe.

84: Sigh, I miss Carl Sagan.

Me too. Another one who went too soon.

86, have you read his The demon-haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark? I've been pushing this book on everyone I know. And you remind me that I'm due for a re-read of Cosmos.

I'd read several of Carl Sagan's books when I was a teenager (several decades ago) and they were really inspiring. I still have a copy of Dragons of Eden somewhere. It's definitely time for a re-read. Recently, I was in Ithaca and saw some of the displays on the Sagan Planetary Walk. Thanks for the great review of Cosmos.

I've just added The Demon-haunted World to my wishlist. It sounds wonderful. The only other one of his books I've read is Contact, which is of course super fun. And I also love the movie.

I finished another one for my Trollope category, Can You Forgive Her?

The first book in the Palliser series, and it is quite a bit different from the Barchester world. For one thing, the characters are much richer. For another, they are much naughtier. Contemplated adultery, elopements, women who don't want to be married, attempted murder, throwing ones sister down to the ground in the middle of a rainswept moor and breaking her arm... none of this would have happened in Barchester.

I was annoyed early in the book - why do all these Trollope heroines go for the jerks? It's like he is the beginning of the "women don't like nice guys, they only like assholes" myth. Things work out in the end, though, as they should in a Trollope novel. But there are some spots where I began to wonder if Trollope was going to take some great big risks, considering his Victorian audience.

Anyway, super good, 4 stars. Lady Glencora is my new favorite Trollope heroine, and somebody I think it would be really fun to hang out with.

Ooh, Can You Forgive Her? sounds really good! I've only read Trollope's first two Barchester books, but I really liked both of them. I need to read me some more Trollope soon!

I miss Carl Sagan Not being a science-person, I would never had thought to say this, but I find that I really do agree. I've only read one of his books - I think it was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors - but I used to read the columns he wrote periodically in the Parade Magazine in the Sunday paper. I didn't necessarily agree with everything he said, but I always found him to be thought-provoking, and I liked the way that he explained himself so that a non-scientist like me could understand his points.

I've been seeing you - and many others - talking so much about Trollope this year that I decided I had to give him a try. This afternoon I stopped by the library and picked up The Warden. Will this be a good place to start?

I started with The Warden, and I think it is exactly the right place to start. It isn't as good as Barchester Towers (the next in the series), but I don't think BT would have been as good if I hadn't taken all of The Warden to meet the characters. Plus, it is a great intro to Trollope's writing AND is much, much shorter than a lot of his stuff, so if you don't like it it'll be over soon.

if you don't like it it'll be over soon - sort of like a visit to the dentist? Still, good to know - also that the next book will be better. It's easier to keep plowing through a book that isn't great if I know that the series gets better later.

Finished a couple more this weekend. First off, I read House of Daughters by Sarah-Kate Lynch for my Women Authors category. It came recommended by a coworker, who will not, in the future, be trusted with book recommendations. Not a good book, and very silly. It's about three half-sisters who are brought together after their mutual father dies and leaves them the vineyard in Champagne. They hate each other at first, but through the help of a magical old gypsy woman they end up overcoming lots of troubles and becoming a loving family. There! Now I've given away the ending, and everyone can avoid this book.

The second was for my History category, London: the Biography by Peter Ackroyd. It was super good; he tells the story by topic (crime, dirt, streets, food, markets, animal torture, prisons, fires, etc) instead of in chronological order, and it is a great setup. I really enjoyed it, and now want to go to London ASAP. Maybe someday.

I need more for my History category (About the past), and think I'll add London: The Biography to the list - I don't find chronologies terribly interesting, so a topical organization sounds great!

Some more reading, from the past few weeks:

I read The White Queen by Philippa Gregory for my real-life book group category. Fun, fluffy historical fiction. I have no idea how historically accurate it is, but I enjoyed the story. For my 1001 books category, I finished The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt (it has been added to the newest version of the list). I liked it, but it wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be. I usually love these big, sprawly, multigenerational family stories, but I just couldn't get into this particular family. And the story seemed too show-offy for me. I love A.S. Byatt's work; I realize that she is fantastically well-read. She doesn't have to be so obvious about it.

Your review of House of Daughters made me laugh. I must admit I've never read Carl Sagan. Maybe I will pick up Cosmos and give it a try, since I like science books.

Cosmos is really good. Again, the main issue is how dated it is, but it is still a great read.

Two more this week! I had read Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell as an off-challenge, fun read. However, it turns out that Faceless Killers is actually on the 1001 list (the 2008 version), so I'm sticking it into that category. Faceless Killers is the first of the Wallander series, a bunch of Swedish police procedurals starring the overweight, miserable, frequently-beat-up, opera fan and cop Kurt Wallander. He solves crimes, complains about losing his girlish figure, contemplates eating salad, drinks too much, drives around in the middle of the night, and gets the crap kicked out of him. I think he's a lot more interesting a character than the odious Blomkvist who is all the rage right now. I really enjoyed this book, and have a whole huge series to read now. Whohoo!

The second book I finished was for my history category - The Landmark Herodotus: the Histories. Herodotus is often called the Father of History, as this book is the first re-telling of actual events (the Persian-Greek Wars) and not about mythological events (like Homer writes about). Herodotus digresses, and spends a lot of time talking about the people and cultures of various regions, and makes a bunch of stuff up, and tells a damn good story, actually. It was much easier to read than I had expected. At the end, it gets very exciting as he talks about the famous battles of Marathon and Thermopylae and the like. Of course, being a history idiot, I'd only heard of Marathon and had no idea how the other battles turned out, so it was a very exciting read for me.

For my biography/memoir category, The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

Apparently, the education of Henry Adams consisted of being really privileged and whining about it. Poor baby.

100, ha ha ha ha ha ha! Thanks for reading it so I don't have to!

That's great, Jennifer! I've never heard of the book, and I've already forgotten it.

For my real-life book group: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

This one started really, really, really, almost-stopped-reading-it slow. Larsson spends several pages listing (by name) all the furniture Lisbeth buys at IKEA and several more pages writing out her grocery lists (these appear throughout the book, actually. Why??). There is a chapter that may be the most unintentionally funny thing I've read all year - where we learn all about the sexual kinks of Erika Berger, editor of Millennium magazine and one of the many, many women who just can't get keep her hands off of the "seemingly inexhaustible" Blomkvist, who is just "so talented" in the sack that this otherwise intelligent women can't let him go. We also find out that Blomkvist is "so straight" that Berger teases him about being a homophobe. Because Blomkvist is all man. He likes sex with women so much that he... hates gay people? Not sure I follow that argument.

But anyway. Right around the point where I began seriously debating whether or not to chuck this book, things start to happen, and the story takes off, and it becomes unputdownable. I liked this better than the first one, probably because most of the focus was on Salander and not Sex God Blomkvist. Damn cliffhanger ending, though!

Your review of the second Larsson book made me giggle. The way I was able to write off those sorts of parts in the first book was the narrator point of view -- of course *Blomkvist* thinks he's good.... I'm not sure, if the focus changed, I'd be quite as able to accept it.

Several books from the last week or so:

For my Trollope category, I read Phineas Finn, the second book in the Palliser series. Lots and lots and lots of 19th century British politics, so a lot of the so-called action was confusing, but the story was great. Phineas Finn is one of the only Trollope novels I've read so far in which the lead is actually a man. Usually, even if he pretends to base the novel on a male character, it quickly becomes apparently that the women in the book are the real main characters. But Phineas is a likable character, not too weak and obnoxious.

I also finished The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene for my Science category. I'm not sure that I can really claim to have "read" this book - after the 5th chapter, I was pretty much just looking at the words and thinking "I have no idea what he is talking about". I don't have the easiest time understanding physics via words, and after my college physics background failed me, I was totally lost. But 11 dimensions sounds like fun, and strings are good, so yeah.

I picked up Hons and Rebels last night, a memoir by Jessica Mitford that goes into my biography/letters/memoirs category. Loved it. Jessica was the Socialist Mitford, and hilariously funny. However, the book covers some very non-hilarious events in her life, and so while it is laugh-out-loud funny in places, in other places it was very sad.

I started The Elegant Universe about a year and a half ago, and had to return it, unfinished, to the library when it came due. I never took physics in school at all, so nothing I read about that subject is ever familiar. I had an audio version, and listened as I was doing other things. I'm sure I missed plenty and didn't really understand a lot, but I figure that anything I get is more than I had before, so I've been intending to give it another try at some point. I think 11 dimensions sound overwhelming, but strings are comprehensible, so I'm willing. (Wait, not that kind of string. Oh, well. I'm still willing!)

I used all my string tying up the tomatoes in my garden. That's what you're talking about, right? ;-)

105-107> I think there's a video version of The Elegant Universe that was shown on PBS at one time. You can probably find it at your local library if not on the PBS Web site. It attempted to explain the concepts in the book a bit more visually.

There's help out there, if you don't want to give up.

I also bought the book, and haven't read it yet. Didn't take any physics, per se, but did have astronomy as my five credit science lab in college. Took it as a night class, which only made sense to me. Professor suggested I major in it, but he may have just been hoping that SOMEONE would major in it. I didn't major in it. I did get an A. :-)

If you want a counterpoint to string theory then The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin is interesting. Then, like me, you can say, I don't truly understand string theory but neither do I understand the objections to string theory. And modern cosmology theories? They become stranger and stranger. I sometimes wonder if the physics community isn't involved in a huge 'pulling our leg' collective joke. Big Bangs are commonplace and universes are near infinite- and the explanations, so far, for dark energy and dark matter are beyond bizarre. I think the endpoint might be that we're all just figments in some troubled cosmic creature's dream.

@103 God, I agree. Larsson's obsession with good friends having uncomplicated casual sex just because they feel like it is so tiresome it bring down all these books a notch and a half. And the dialogues leading into the sack leave me cringing in a corner.

I sometimes wonder if the physics community isn't involved in a huge 'pulling our leg' collective joke.

Me too!

Oooh, conspiracy theory. Everyone loves a conspiracy theory!

>109 VisibleGhost: What a hilarious review!

For my Trollope category, I finished The Eustace Diamonds. Up until the last three or so chapters, I thought that this was going to be one of my favorite Trollope novels. Despite being a Palliser novel, there is almost no politics involved. Instead, the main storyline involves Trollope's attempt at a Becky Sharp type of character (Lady Eustace) who may or may not be the proper owner of a set of diamonds that her late husband's family wants back. She is a sneaky, conniving, lying, nasty woman, and not interesting enough to make up for it (which is why she is merely an attempt at Becky Sharp). I really wanted to see her get her comeuppance, but (SPOILER ALERT) there is no way Trollope is going to make a rich and titled character uncomfortable/punished/shamed/etc. Things don't quite go her way, but she doesn't go to jail, either.

There is a subplot involving Lady Eustace's cousin Frank (who is Bachelor #2 in Lady Eustace's attempts to get a husband) and his poor, unattractive, uninteresting, virtuous, sweet, Lily Dale-like fiancée Lucy. Lucy is not at all interesting, except that she is unnecessarily rude to people, and this gets annoying. You can tell that Trollope wants us to think "oh, such a sweet, loyal girl" but it reads more along the lines of "obnoxious".

One big complaint I have with these Palliser novels: all the damn foxhunting. Trollope loves to describe foxhunting, for chapters and chapters, and I hate it because it is really mean to the poor foxes and they end up dying! So mean. And this is supposed to be fun?

For my science category, I read Relativity: the special and the general theory by Albert Einstein. After Einstein published the theory of general relativity in 1915, he attempted to write a sort of layman's version of special and general relativity for everyone else. I've had the examples Einstein uses in the book described, and quoted, and explained to me so many times in so many classes and so many other books that this reads more like a historical document than a scientific one. Oh, so that's where he said that. To be completely honest, other people do a better job explaining relativity than Einstein does. But then again, he did discover it. So overall he wins.

Finally, for my LT group reads category I read Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell for the Missouri readers group read. I'm of two minds about this book. On one hand, I liked the setup (not a plot, as such, but a series of vignettes that reveal the life and problems of Mrs. Bridge) and the writing was beautiful. On the other hand, it was so relentlessly depressing in that hidden, quiet, I-did-everything-right-but-this-life-is-meaningless-why-bother way that I hate. It made me feel so horribly guilty (for what, I don't really know). Overall, I feel the same way about it as I did about The Death of Ivan Ilych - I appreciate that it is very well done, but I wish I hadn't read it.

I finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which fits into my Author Theme Reads category as one of the mini-authors for the year. The only other book by McCarthy I've ever read is All the Pretty Horses, which I didn't care for. I don't particularly care for The Road, either, but it's a little better. So bleak! So relentlessly depressing! Why do they even bother?

And I know that by asking this I am completely missing the point, which was the relationship between the father and son in the new world that came about after the collapse of civilization, but how did our world end? Was it like On The Beach? But McCarthy doesn't answer that.

I'm about 100 pages from the end of The Road myself.
I don't remember much of All the Pretty Horses except that I think I enjoyed it.

Unfortunately I read both The Road and No Country for Old Men after seeing the movies which kind of made it feel like I was reading a screenplay. Sort of hard to figure out how I really like the book.

Don't forget to submit your comments in the Author Theme Reads group! :)

Will do! I have some comments to add about Zweig's Marie Antoinette, too. The reason that my posts in that group take awhile is that here, and on my other challenge thread, I just write down whatever I think about the book (whether that is serious or flippant or a rant). The ATR group is filled with thoughtful people who can discuss literature intelligently, and I can't so much, so I have to work harder on those posts.

Which leads me to another one for my Author Theme Reads category. So in addition to everything else that Zweig does so brilliantly, he also wrote several biographies, including one about Marie Antoinette. It isn't a biography in the Antonia Fraser sense of the word (although I did like her bio of Marie Antoinette as well). It is more of a psychological study of her, and particularly of the events and traits and other reasons that led to her downfall and the downfall of the French monarchy.

A couple thoughts:
1) Zweig writes beautifully. Even nonfiction. It's great.
2) Zweig is quite the little Freudian (which makes sense, given his time period and friendship w/ Freud). He puts a not insignificant amount of blame for the Revolution on poor Louis XVI's "little problem" for 7 years. You see, if Louis could get it up and be a man and impregnate his wife, then he'd be more decisive, and not such a spendthrift, and Marie Antoinette wouldn't have been so silly and wasteful and wouldn't have made the people hate them, and also he would have kept his brothers in line, so that he and MA and the kids would have been rescued, etc etc. I'm not sure I agree with that - the Revolution was going to happen, and no amount of sex was going to stop that.

The ATR group is filled with thoughtful people who can discuss literature intelligently, and I can't so much,

Yeah, right. You're not fooling me, you know.

Bah!

You write fantastically about literature. But you know what? You don't even need to. I actually think some of the reasons it's so quiet over there is because people are too scared to say anything. Boo. Let's just all write the first thing that comes to mind and have a huge discussion about that! :)

I swapped a different book in to my Women Authors category (no off-challenge books, now, since I'll have a really hard time even coming close this year): Faithful Place by Tana French. It was really good - another police procedural set in Dublin, starring Frank Mackey (the Undercover cop from The Likeness). Not quite as good as The Likeness or In the Woods - Frank is not as interesting as either Rob or Cassie, and this book was missing something in the mood (nostalgia? melancholy? something like that, although neither of these words really fit) that made the first two so so good.

Another problem with this one - I figured it out pretty quickly, and the only real mystery was when would Frank get it, too. And that is definitely a step down from the first two, which had me completely confused and thinking about the books even when I wasn't reading. But overall, Faithful Place is well worth reading, and I'll continue to wait impatiently for the next Tana French novel (which is allegedly going to star Scorcher Kennedy, that jackass).

For my biography/memoir/letters category, I finished up Juliet Barker's collection The Brontes: a life in letters. I think it is meant as a companion to her massive, comprehensive biography of the family, since she doesn't make too much effort to place the letters in context. If I hadn't read The Brontes first, I may have been confused, and certainly would have missed out on the significance of certain events (Branwell's misbehavior, etc). But it is fascinating, to read their letters.

Reading letters always makes me feel a bit funny. It all seems rather voyeuristic! But perhaps this is my misunderstanding of the time period; perhaps these letters were always intended to be public knowledge. (I'll confess I haven't been able to convince myself to pick up a volume for precisely that reason.... Perhaps if I was a better English scholar?)

I love reading collections of letters, for just that reason - it's reading other people's mail! Similarly, I think that is also why I like those Nick Bantock books so much - the Griffin and Sabine series. Very fun and sneaky. Re: the Brontes, although the letters of most authors of the time were written with an eye to publication (according to J. Barker, anyway), the Brontes' letters were not. Technically they were supposed to be destroyed after Charlotte's death, but thank goodness they all weren't.

I made it through two more books this week: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri for my Real-Life book group category. My first impression after reading the book was "OMG I love this!" but whenever I try to say anything about it, or discuss it, or write up a review, I fail. I have absolutely nothing to say about the story, and so the only thing I can really say about the book is that Jhumpa Lahiri writes such beautiful prose that I was tricked into thinking that the story was great, too.

For my science category, I read another Stephen Jay Gould classic, Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the nature of history. It's another winner by one of my favorites. Instead of being a collection of essays loosely related to one another, this book is all about the Burgess Shale, and how the fossils found within were initially miscategorized based on scientist's preconceived notions, and how the correct categorization revolutionized how we think about evolution, and the origin of different phyla and species, etc. Lots of great drawings and camera obscura images of the different species - there were some weird-lookin' critters around in the Cambrian days (one of them has five eyes! on stalks!)

I love how Gould insists on getting up on his pedestal in every book and shouting to the heavens that scientists make mistakes based on their preconceived notions, because we tend to think that we are strictly reason-based, and experimentalists, and infallible, and this is totally wrong. And totally irritating, actually.

And a brief overview of how I've done with my challenge, so far, with only 2 months remaining.

I've only managed to finish off one category, the LT Group reads one, but I know for sure that I'll be able to complete the RL book group category (one left), the Women Authors category (one left), and the Author Theme Reads category (one left). Shakespeare, while apparently the most pathetic with only 3 read so far, is being deliberately saved for last b/c plays are short, and I can usually get through one in a couple of hours, especially if I stick to the comedies. Biographies/letters I'm hoping to get through (3 left), as well as the 1001 category (2 left, but I can pick shorter books here) and the Trollope (2.5 left). History and science (4 and 3 left, respectively) are a maybe. But in reality, my F32 is due in the beginning of December, and I don't have much free time, so we'll see (and funnily enough, I will be reading science nonstop. Except that instead of fun popular science books, it will be stacks of papers with titles like "Morphometric Index of the Developing Murine Kidney". I know you're jealous). Wish me luck!

#125 Yeah, I'm jealous! I'm jealous of the fact that you seem to have a plan for completing your challenge, even if you're not sure you'll succeed. I don't have all that many books left, but I don't see myself getting any closer to finishing the right ones that will actually count for the challenge.

#124 Just to clarify - do you find it irritating that Gould gets on his soap box in every book, or that scientists continue making the mistakes he rants about?

As always, I love your insightful and amusing comments about the enormously wide variety of books that you read. Keep them coming!

Oh, sorry about that, I should have been more clear. What I find irritating is the attitude many scientists take that because they are scientists, they are entirely unbiased and free from preconceived notions, by definition. This is patently, demonstrably false, and it annoys the pants off me, and leads to heated debates when people are called on it. Scientists can be really obnoxious. Trust me on this. :-)

I love Gould and his soapbox.

That's OK - that's what I thought you meant. Unfortunately, scientists don't have a monopoly on obnoxiousness.

True, that. They're everywhere, the obnoxious people. Especially when I'm running errands.

I finished another for my Trollope category - Phineas Redux. This book rocked. It was so much fun. Trollope had said that he regretted Phineas's fate at the end of Phineas Finn, which is ***SPOILER ALERT*** to get married to one of Trollope's Boring Good Girls (this isn't much of a spoiler, though. With the exception of the odious Lily Dale, all the Trollope Boring Good Girls get married to the hero). But marrying the boring girl and moving to Ireland ended Phineas's interest as a character, so Trollope at the beginning of this book did the right thing and killed off Boring Wifey. Phineas comes back to Parliament and gets treated badly by his party for his naughtiness at the end of PF, behaves in a manner that he considers "honorable" to certain ladies, but is in reality stupid. He gets in so much trouble that he is eventually accused of murder!

The second half of the book is the trial, and the outcome, and odds and ends that I won't tell you because I don't want to ruin everything. Lady Glencora Palliser shows up frequently (yay!), and Madame Goesler, and Lady Laura Standish, all of whom are fascinating and fun (although I don't like Lady Laura much). This is a great book, overall. It ends just right.

A batch of reading finished in the last couple weeks. For my Biography/Memoir/Letters category, I read Graham Greene: a life in letters which was a very interesting selection of his letters that really gave a good picture of the man himself. I preferred his literary letters to his personal ones; Greene was a bit of a womanizer and his love letters are ridiculous.

For my Author Theme Reads category, I read a collection of short stories Selected Stories (zweig) by Stefan Zweig, which contained the following stories:

Fantastic Night (1922): Not my favorite of the lot, but I did appreciate the way it ended on a high note, emotionally. Although we know how things turned out for the protagonist, thanks to Zweig's framing device, it was so much happier than most of Zweig's work.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922): This was my favorite story in the book, and one of my favorite stories that he wrote, period. It's about a man, one of those who have many, many women in his past, and a letter he receives from a woman. She details how she has been obsessively in love with him from the age of 13, and had been a casual encounter of his at least twice, but he couldn't really even remember who she was. The story is so well-done - I couldn't stop reading until I had finished it.

Buchmendel (1929): Sad, this one. What really struck me about this one was the love of books, physical books, that Jacob Mendel possessed. The story was funny, in parts, like when Mendel wrote to "enemy" publishers during WWI demanding that his magazines or whatever be delivered, but it stopped being funny when he was arrested.

Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927): Although this was the one I most looked forward to, I didn't like it nearly as much as I liked the rest of the stories. Zweig does describe the mindset of an addict very well, and it was almost a surprise to me that the Englishwoman was naive enough to believe that her little intervention would have had an effect.

The Fowler Snared (1906): Cute story, about an old man who wrote love letters to a young girl, pretending to be from a young man, and who ends up falling for the girl a little bit. Set in one of Zweig's lovely elegant hotels, as so many of these stories are.

The Invisible Collection (1925): I loved this one, about an art dealer and a blind art collector, during the inflation that set in after WWI. It was a sweet story, a little bit sad but any Zweig story that involves happy people is rare.

And this book finishes off my author theme reads category.

I also read A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark which was good, although nowhere near as good as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I was surprised that Kensington was written in the late 80s - it had a very middle-20th-century-Barbara Pym-ish feel to it. This also finished off my Women Authors Category.

Finally, I read a great little book called The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson, which describes 10 of the more elegant and beautiful experiments ever. His list contains my favorite experiment of all time, the Michelson-Morley experiment, so I agree with that one. Also Galileo rolling the ball down the slope, and Newton poking at his eyeballs (ew), and Lavoisier and oxygen, and Millikin's oil-drop experiment (another personal favorite). It is a great book, and I want to describe each chapter but you should really read the book instead. One quibble, but unfortunately understandable given that Johnson was covering experiments over history: all 10 are dudes. He mentions, in his 11th chapter, a couple women who deserve to maybe be on the list (Barbara McClintock and transposable elements - yes, totally - and Rita Levi Montalcini & NGF - again, yes, totally, since she's one of my heros.) Another quibble is that it is pretty physics-heavy (although they do manage the prettiest experiments, since organisms can get yucky). I'd have included some of the great, early, pioneering developmental biology experiments, like Hans Spemann and Hilde Mangold discovering the organizer in Xenopus embryos, or some of the early lineage-tagging chick/quail experiments. Or even Mike Levine and eve stripe 2 in Drosophila.

I'll stop droning on about experiments now.

In my own field, I love Emlen's experiments: he raised birds in planetariums and manipulated the 'night sky' to measure migration orientation in relation to specific stars.

So many of those instinct/behavioral experiments are beautiful, too. The one you describe sounds really cool.

What a great and diverse streak of books you seem to be having! Ten most beautiful experiments sounds lovely. Always great to see another Spark fan. Haven't read A far cry from Kensington myself, I'm only about halfway through Muriel's vast production. The prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a favourite of mine, of course, but I tend to prefer her slightly more eerie books. Like The driver's seat or Not to disturb.

I think I might pass on Morphometric Index of the Developing Murine Kidney, though.

I have a whole anthology of Muriel Spark on my shelf, waiting patiently. I'm really looking forward to The Driver's Seat and Girls of Slender Means, and the others. It seems like a lot of people don't care for Spark, but she really had me with Miss Jean Brodie (of course, I also always picture the fabulous Maggie Smith in my head when I read it - "For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like"). Interestingly, she and Graham Greene were correspondents, and he was a big fan of her work.

I re-read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier this week, for my Real Life Book Group (finishing off that category). This makes 4 completed categories, with a little over a month left to go. I've loved this book since I first read it at about 13, but my reaction to the book changes as I re-read it. I used to think it was super romantic, and all that, and now I really find the relationship between Maxim de Winter and the 2nd Mrs. de Winter creepy. Too unevenly matched. She's more like a pet than a partner. But I love Mrs. Danvers always (yes, she's creepy too, but one of the best characters ever written) and I would give anything to get to go to Manderley.

I read Rebecca about 8 years ago, and it wasn't until I finished it that I remembered that I read it somewhere between grade 8 and grade 10. It obviously didn't make much of an impression on me then, but I do vaguely remember enjoying it. I loved it this time 'round, but romantic? Uh, no. Maxim de Winter should have been put out to sea. With no oars and no provisions.

So I've been completely unable to focus on what I'm reading lately - it's all just words on paper at this point. Right now, it is all just Things I've Read Before. Shakespeare seems to be working nicely - plays are short, and fiction, and all iambic-pentameter, so this week I've re-read Love's Labour's Lost (funny, silly, fluffy) and Romeo and Juliet (tragic, beautiful).

I don't love the Romeo and Juliet storyline (why didn't he just take Juliet with him when he went to Mantua in the first place?), but isn't the language just beautiful?

ETA: I also read Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne for my 1001 category. Not really a fan, I have to say. I was expecting it to be more exciting and interesting than it was.

One more for the history category - The Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen. So why does everyone rave about this book? It's choppy, it's boring, the author thinks his readers are idiots. He pulls a lot of "and boring person Y went to the fair, where he was hugged by a blind girl, blah blah blah. That woman... was Helen Keller" or "boring architect Z went to the fair, where he met a carpenter who insisted on washing his feet. That carpenter.... was the lord Jesus Christ". It isn't exciting, it doesn't draw out the suspense, it is gimmicky and stupid.

I really hated this book. Even the Chicago setting didn't rescue it. So much suck.

I also just went to the work page and it's recommending Reading Lolita in Tehran... which I happened to despise more than anything else I've ever read. I'm thinking I can firmly cross Devil in the White City off my list, even with the >4 jfetting:.0 LT rating. There are too many good books out there to waste my time with some that I have more than a 5% inclination of not liking.... I'm actually rather glad you did it so I don't have to.

>138 jfetting: Another example, I think, of not any book being for everyone. I read Devil in the White City several years ago and enjoyed it very much. I thought the crime was interesting; I was fascinated with the building of the World's Fair; and I liked the way the two were integrated.

I try to find patterns in my own and others' reading likes and dislikes. Sometimes it's obvious, but most often it's mystifying. Two people will love several of the same books, and then totally disagree on another book that in many ways is similar.

Another one for my science category: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn. More of a philosophy-of-science work. He talks a lot about the difference between "normal science" and the big, paradigm-shifting times of science, and how all the puzzle-solving (his word) of the normal scientist leads to the crises that trigger the big paradigm shifts. Very interesting. Also, I liked his description of "normal scientists" - their obsessive need to figure out minute little details, etc. Sounded really familiar.

Some futzing with my categories in the hopes of getting another category completed by the end of the year. So, I moved Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: portrait of an average woman from the Stefan Zweig category to the Biographies/Memoirs/Letters category. This move, combined with the almost-finished Eminent Victorians (it's hilarious, by the way. Who says you can't convey sarcasm in the written word?) will finish that one off (yay!). For Zweig, I have Journey into the Past, another delicious novella that I want to read (and it is short).

To finish off my Biography/Letters category: Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. Highly entertaining and snarky snapshots of the lives of four famous Victorians (or famous at the time Strachey was writing, or famous in Britain - I'd only heard of Florence Nightingale and Dr. Arnold, and only Dr. Arnold because he was the father of Matthew Arnold, the poet). It was really really really funny, especially when he was writing about people he didn't like.

Another for the Shakespeare category: The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Boy, is this a loaded one. Shylock is a fascinating character - loathsome on one of the hands, but completely sympathetic on the other of the hands. Yeah, he was horrible about Antonio losing the bet, but everyone in the whole damn play is terrible to him! I almost got the sense that Shakespeare wanted us to hate him, unconditionally, but S's genius in writing multifaceted characters kept sneaking in and making that impossible. Unless I'm the only person in the world who feels sorry for Shylock instead of hating him. Oh, and I hated the treatment of Jessica by just about everybody, especially that damned clown character (least funny comic relief ever).

Portia is great. Everything that she does is awesome.

The latest Trollope is The Prime Minister. Let's take this as two separate stories. Story number 1: our boy the Duke of Omnium aka Plantagenet Palliser is made Prime Minister, very much against his wishes. The Duchess, aka Lady Glencora, is overjoyed and determined to keep him in office. Much marital strife and political squabbling ensue. I loved this part, largely because Lady G is one of my favorite characters of all time. P. is a bit of a drip, but he finally stands up to his wife, a little bit, and that's nice to see. 5 stars

Story number 2: Emily Wharton, the pride of the Whartons, stuns the family when she rejects the angelic (and, necessarily, dull) Arthur Fletcher for the dashing foreign bad boy Ferdinand Lopez. He is Very Naughty, and descends into misery blah blah blah. I didn't like this storyline nearly as much. Emily isn't much fun, Arthur is worse, and Lopez isn't a three dimensional character in his own right so much as a receptacle for all of Trollope's (and the Victorian age's) prejudices against non-Englishmen, Jews, people who don't have landed estates, people who aren't lawyers, and people who aren't high class. It isn't enough to look, act, behave, speak, and be educated as a gentleman. Nope, you need CENTURIES OF ANCESTORS to be a real gentleman. Otherwise you become a caricature of all that is wrong with being... Portugese. 3 stars, mainly because I liked Emily's brother.

I managed to finish off the 1001 category by cheating shamelessly and re-reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens as I do every year. It's a favorite, I never get tired of it, you all already know all there is to know about it.

Finished off my Zweig category for real this time with Journey into the Past. Unlike most of his fiction, it lacks the "here let me tell you a story" framing, but there is an extended flashback (very screenplay-like). The writing is lovely as always, and he could so accurately describe emotional discomfort and embarrassment and paralysis that it is actually uncomfortable to read. A sad one, this. There is a chance for happiness at the end, but I don't trust Zweig's characters to take it.

I also managed to finish off my Science category with Darwin's surprisingly short The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. It isn't as interesting, or offensive, as his earlier works (The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, respectively). Mainly, just an interesting descriptive work about how emotional states and reactions are represented by physical actions and facial expressions. I'm glad I didn't read it in public, because I kept trying to re-create different emotional facial expressions based on Darwin's descriptions.

#145 Thanks for the reminder about needing to keep some books at home while reading! That admission alone makes in curious to read it for myself. I haven't read any other Darwin before, though, would it be an OK first book?

Do you like dogs? And babies? Then I'd say yes, go for it. Very readable.

I think that this wraps up the challenge for me, 8 books shy of the target. I could have possibly read The Duke's Children this week, but after reading the title of the first chapter it is pretty clear that Trollope is about to kill off my favorite character in the Palliser novels, and I don't want to read that yet. I also don't feel like rushing through Shakespeare, so I'll put that off until next year, along with the remaining 3 history books.

I'm happy with what I did manage to read, though. I've crossed off a lot of books that have been hanging around on my shelves for awhile, and had a lot of fun participating in group reads, and reading other people's challenge threads and of course reading all the comments people left here.

Next year I can be found in two places:

My 11-11 Challenge Thread

I'm doing a modified 7-11 challenge (7 books in 11 categories, since this year my problem with finished was due entirely to my inability to focus on challenge books). I'll be re-reading all of Austen, and the Brontes, and reading Proust (yikes!). There is a poetry category, and a drama category, and a John le Carre spy novel category, and a Mario Vargas Llosa category, among others. I'm looking forward to it!

and

My 100 books in 2011 Challenge thread

Hope to see you there! Happy New Year!

edited b/c I got MVL's name in the wrong order.