Chatterbox's 11 in 11...

I'll be repeating some categories, and introducing a few new ones!
Trying to keep the pattern going, I'll try to read 11 books in each category, and include a bonus book in each category.

1. New New Things
Authors new to me, relatively recent books

2. The World We Live In
Books about current affairs; in the news

3. You've Gotta Read This!
Recommendations from LTers and other friends

4. Get Me Out of Here...
Escapist Fiction: mysteries, chick lit, historical fiction

5. Next, Please.
Mystery books that are part of a series.

6. Once Upon a Time...
History, non-fiction

7. Culture Vulture
Books with a connection to art, music, books or philosophy

8. English as a Second Language
Novels in translation; many will probably be from Archipelago

9. Destination of Choice
Books set in, or featuring, or about, cities that I have visited want to visit, lived in or know well. Fiction and non-fiction.

10. Great American Novels & Novelists
Classic fiction or books by iconic authors that I still haven't read -- Faulkener, Dreiser, Phillip Roth, etc. etc.

11. Viva Europa!
I'm changing this final challenge to focus on novels published by Europa Editions. I'm participating in their Europa blog challenge, with the goal of reading about 25 of these by year-end and ultimately reading their entire backlist. We'll see!

11 in 11 Challenge:




Total books read in 2011:

Category One: New New Things




1. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, **** STARTED 10/18/11, FINISHED 10/19/11
2. Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon ***** STARTED 3/14/11, FINISHED 3/15/11
3. The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, **, STARTED 6/30/11, FINISHED 7/1/11
4. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell ****, STARTED 5/15/11, FINISHED 5/17/11
5. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht ***1/2 , STARTED 4/13/11, FINISHED 4/17/11
6. City of Thieves by David Benioff ****, STARTED 1/7/11, FINISHED 1/9/11
7. Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings, ***1/2, STARTED 1/24/11, FINISHED 1/25/11
8. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt ****, STARTED 10/7/11, FINISHED 10/9/11
9. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, *** STARTED 2/10/11, FINISHED 2/11/11
10. The Dew Breaker by Edwige Danticat **** STARTED 6/10/11, FINISHED 6/30/11
11. In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut, ****, STARTED 4/20/11, FINISHED 4/21/11
Bonus book: Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt, **** STARTED 5/16/11, FINISHED 5/20/11

Category Two: The World We Live In




1. Rez Life by David Teuer **** 1/2 STARTED 11/11/11, FINISHED 11/28/11
2. The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov
3. All the Devils are Here by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean, **** STARTED 1/15/11, FINISHED 1/16/11
4. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, ****, STARTED 1/28/11, FINISHED 2/4/11
5. Little Princes by Conor Grennan STARTED **** 2/19/11, FINISHED 2/21/11
6. Elizabeth and Hazel by David Margolick, **** 1/2, STARTED 10/31/11, FINISHED 11/1/11
7. Rock the Casbah by Robin Wright *** 1/2 STARTED 12/22/11, FINISHED 12/30/11
8. The Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur ***1/2 STARTED 9/4/11, FINISHED 9/5/11
9. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns, **** STARTED 10/25/11, FINISHED 10/31/11
10. The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb **** STARTED 12/2/11, FINISHED 12/5/11
11. Never Say Die by Susan Jacoby **** STARTED 12/8/11, FINISHED 12/17/11
Bonus book: Ancestors and Relatives by Eviatar Zerubavel STARTED 11/1/11, FINISHED 12/1/11

Category Three: You've Gotta Read This!




1. Spring Tides by Jacques Poulin, ****, STARTED 8/29/11, FINISHED 8/30/11
2. The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna **** 1/2, STARTED 7/12/11, FINISHED 7/15/11
3. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson ****1/2, STARTED 1/27/11, FINISHED 1/30/11
4. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines, ****, STARTED 10/28/11, FINISHED 10/29/11
5. Where the God of Love Hangs Out **** by Amy Bloom READ 1/9/11
6. Zone One by Colson Whitehead ****1/2, STARTED 11/27/11, FINISHED 11/29/11
7. The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot **** STARTED 6/10/11, FINISHED 6/11/11
8. The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander, ****1/2, STARTED 10/25/11, FINISHED 10/31/11
9. A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland **** STARTED 5/26/11, FINISHED 5/31/11
10. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes **** STARTED 9/22/11, FINISHED 9/24/11
11. The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys STARTED 4/12/11, FINISHED 4/13/11
Bonus book: A Treasury of Regrets by Susanne Alleyn, ***1/2, STARTED 4/27/11, FINISHED 4/30/11

Category Four: Get Me Out of Here...




1. Tides of War by Stella Tillyard ****1/2, STARTED 8/9/11, FINISHED 8/10/11
2. A Place of Secrets by Rachel Hore *** STARTED 3/18/11, FINISHED 3/23/11
3. Summer of Love by Katie Fforde ***1/2, STARTED 7/12/11, FINISHED 7/13/11
4. Queen by Right by Anne Easter Smith *** 1/2, STARTED 7/5/11, FINISHED 7/10/11
5. Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran **** STARTED 2/15/11, FINISHED 2/18/11
6. Queen of Last Hopes by Susan Higginbotham, ***, STARTED 4/25/11, FINISHED 5/5/11
7. Promises, Promises by Erica James, **1/2, STARTED 1/14/11, FINISHED 1/15/11
8. Elizabeth I by Margaret George **** STARTED 6/8/11, FINISHED 6/27/11
9. Emily and Einstein by Linda Francis Lee, ***, STARTED 2/12/11, FINISHED 2/14/11
10. The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley ****, STARTED 6/4/11, FINISHED 6/5/11
11. Prophecy by S.J. Parris STARTED ***1/2 STARTED 5/25/11, FINISHED 5/30/11
Bonus book: Catching the Tide by Judith Lennox STARTED *** STARTED 5/27/11, FINISHED 5/28/11

Category Five: Next, Please!




1. Death in a Scarlet Coat by **** David Dickinson STARTED 5/5/11, FINISHED 5/8/11
2. Hanging Wood by Martin Edwards **** STARTED 3/9/11, FINISHED 3/12/11
3. The Preacher by Camilla Lackberg *** 1/2, STARTED 5/11/11, FINISHED 5/13/11
4. The House at Sea's End by Elly Griffiths **** STARTED 2/2/11, FINISHED 2/4/11
5. Terra Incognita by Ruth Downie ***1/2, STARTED 4/6/11, FINISHED 4/18/11
6. Damage by John Lescroart ****, STARTED 3/27/11, FINISHED 3/29/11
7. The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves, **** 1/2, READ 5/14/11
8. The Orchid Affair by Lauren Willig, *** 1/2 STARTED 1/22/11, FINISHED 1/24/11
9. The Delicate Storm by Giles Blunt ****, STARTED 2/17/11, FINISHED 2/21/11
10. A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear *** 1/2 STARTED 2/7/11, FINISHED 2/8/11
11. All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming STARTED 3/4/11, FINISHED 3/6/11
Bonus book: A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley, *** 1/2 STARTED 3/24/11, FINISHED 3/25/11

Category Six: Once Upon a Time...




1. Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich **** STARTED 10/8/11, FINISHED 10/18/11
2. The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O'Shea, ****1/2, STARTED 10/21/11, FINISHED 10/27/11
3. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder STARTED 3/13/11
4. A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos by Dava Sobel **** STARTED 12/20/11, FINISHED 12/27/11
5. To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild ***** STARTED 3/30/11, FINISHED 4/30/11
6. George, Wilhelm and Nicholas by Miranda Carter, **** STARTED 8/5/11, FINISHED 8/24/11
7. Molotov's Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky ****1/2, STARTED 12/7/11, FINISHED 12/19/11
8. Crowded with Genius by James Buchan, STARTED 12/29/11
9. 1776 by David McCullough, ***, STARTED 10/11/11, FINISHED 10/14/11
10. The Swerve by Paul Greenblatt, *****, STARTED 11/10/11, FINISHED 11/24/11
11. The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester, ****, STARTED 9/15/11, FINISHED 9/23/11
Bonus Book: Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz, **** STARTED 8/3/11, FINISHED 8/7/11

Category Seven: Culture Vulture




1. Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony Amore ***1/2, STARTED 8/23/11, FINISHED 8/26/11
2. Why Mahler? by Norman Lebrecht ****1/2, STARTED 10/5/11, FINISHED 10/9/11
3. Wit's End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table by James Gaines, ***1/2, STARTED 12/16/11, FINISHED 12/17/11
4. Lastingness: The Art of Old Age by Nicholas Delbanco **1/2, STARTED 2/6/11, FINISHED 2/8/11
5. Changing lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music by Tricia Tunstall *** STARTED 9/17/11, FINISHED 9/25/11
6. Mr. Langshaw's Square Piano by Madeline Goold *** 1/2, STARTED 11/8/11, FINISHED 11/12/11
7. Evening in the Palace of Reason by James R. Gaines ****1/2, STARTED 10/28/11, FINISHED 11/5/11
8. Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky ****1/2, STARTED 9/6/11, FINISHED 9/7/11
9. Verdi's Shakespeare by Gary Wills STARTED 12/22/11
10. Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven by Ross King **** 1/2, STARTED 1/13/11, FINISHED 1/25/11
11. Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch **** STARTED 5/7/11, FINISHED 5/28/11
Bonus book: Young Romantics by Daisy Hay **** 1/2 STARTED 5/17/11, FINISHED 5/21/11

Category Eight: English as a Second Language




1. The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, ****, STARTED 4/6/11, FINISHED 4/8/11
2. Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys ****1/2, STARTED 5/6/11, FINISHED 5/30/11
3. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata **** STARTED 5/17/11, FINISHED 5/18/11
4. Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes ****, STARTED 11/21/11, FINISHED 11/23/11
5. Ravel by Jean Echenoz **** 1/2 READ 1/4/11
6. Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi ****1/2, STARTED 8/1/11, FINISHED 8/2/11
7. The Accident by Ismail Kadare *1/2, STARTED 11/7/11, FINISHED 11/10/11
8. In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar **** 1/2 STARTED 3/29/11, FINISHED 3/31/11
9. The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout, **** 1/2, STARTED 3/10/11, FINISHED 3/11/11
10. The Shadow of What We Were by Luis Sepulveda, ****1/2, READ 6/30/11
11. Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto, ****, READ 7/30/11
Bonus book: Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramagao

Category Nine: Destination of Choice




1. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan **** STARTED 11/15/11, FINISHED 11/17/11
2. The Dogs of Rome by Conor Fitzgerald **** STARTED 11/25/11, FINISHED 11/30/11
3. The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya **** 1/2 STARTED 3/6/11, FINISHED 3/9/11
4. Arriving in Avignon by Daniel Robberechts, ****, STARTED 11/5/11, FINISHED 11/6/11
5. Prague Fatale by Phillip Kerr ****, STARTED 11/12/11, FINISHED 11/13/11
6. St. Petersburg: A Cultural History by Solomon Volkov
7. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain ***1/2, STARTED 3/17/11, FINISHED 3/18/11
8. Venice by Peter Ackroyd **** STARTED 4/23/11, FINISHED 4/29/11
9. Vienna Waltz by Teresa Grant *** STARTED 12/13/11, FINISHED 12/16/11
10. Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light by Niall Lochery ***, STARTED 9/6/11, FINISHED 9/29/11
11. Berlin 1961 by Fred Kempe **** 1/2, STARTED 6/9/11, FINISHED 6/13/11
Bonus book: The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler *** 1/2, STARTED 10/15/11, FINISHED 10/22/11

Category Ten: Great American Novels & Novelists




1. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, ****1/2, STARTED 10/1/11, FINISHED 10/25/11
2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, **** 1/2, STARTED 12/27/11, FINISHED 12/28/11
3. Independence Day by Richard Ford, **** 1/2, STARTED 9/25/11, FINISHED 9/30/11
4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
5. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, **** 1/2, STARTED 1/21/11, FINISHED 1/26/11
6. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, ***1/2, STARTED 2/27/11, FINISHED 3/2/11
7. The Dean's December by Saul Bellow **** 1/2, STARTED 3/18/11, FINISHED 3/31/11
8. The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth
9. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison **** STARTED 12/22/11, FINISHED 12/31/11
10. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather **** STARTED 12/9/11, FINISHED 12/10/11
11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain ****1/2, STARTED 8/10/11, FINISHED 8/23/11
Bonus book: Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray ****, STARTED 9/16/11, FINISHED 9/19/11

Category Eleven: Viva Europa!




1. Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon ***1/2, STARTED 8/22/11, FINISHED 8/31/11
2. Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson ****1/2 STARTED 8/29/11, FINISHED 8/30/11
3. Old Filth by Jane Gardam ****1/2, STARTED 11/15/11, FINISHED 11/18/11
4. Eros by Helmut Krausser **** STARTED 9/18/11, FINISHED 9/22/11
5. My Berlin Child by Anne Wiazemsky *** 1/2, STARTED 9/28/11, FINISHED 9/30/11
6. Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz ***, STARTED 11/5/11, FINISHED 11/6/11
7. Between Two Seas by Carmine Abate, ****1/2, STARTED 11/11/11, FINISHED 11/12/11
8. Swell by Ioanna Karystiani *** STARTED 11/18/11, FINISHED 11/21/11
9. Tokyo Fiancee by Amelie Nothomb, ***, STARTED 12/8/11, FINISHED 12/9/11
10. Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky **** STARTED 10/29/11, FINISHED 10/31/11
11. The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane **** 1/2, STARTED 10/26/11, FINISHED 10/28/11
Bonus book: An Accident in August by Laurence Cosse **** STARTED 10/3/11, FINISHED 10/4/11

You have a nice selection of categories lined up for next year's challenge. I will be intrigued to see what lands in your 'Culture Vulture' category!

>12 Chatterbox: - How many books did you take possession of? Sad to say - I've heard of none you've listed from him, but will follow with interest all your categories and books. I'm afraid if I tried to decide now what I'll want to read in Jan, I'd have to read them now. Better to wait and surprise myself next year.

#14 -- A lot! Many were books by G.A. Henty, and a lot were poetry. I'll probably throw one Henty that I haven't read into this challenge. The only books I'm actually adding are the ones that have been sitting unread on my shelf for decades. The rest are just appearing as "candidates", to remind me that they are there and could be read, if I haven't done so already!

I like your categories especially the Destinations one. 'Once upon a time' had me thinking you were branching out to fairytales till I saw what you've got lined up to read there!

Great categories, and you've got a good start already. I'm reading The Devotion of Suspect x right now.

Nope, definitely not fairy tales! (Not my speed anyway...) Perhaps a bit of a misnomer... Still, the idea is of things that happened in the past (and that we're all probably quite grateful we're not living in those times today...) I'm looking forward to the Phillip Blom book about the Enlightenment in that category. And I think I'm getting a copy of Peter Ackroyd's book about Venice for Xmas...

I just scored a copy of The Devotion of Suspect X from Amazon Vine today! The other was the final book in a trilogy by Jonathan Rabb. Unbelievably, I have both of the others (one on Kindle, one hardcover) and have read NEITHER.

I finished X a couple days ago. Far better than I thought it would be. Would like to know what you think, but it's hard to talk about it without spoilers.

Well, I fell short of my 1010 target by 4 books -- although, ironically, I had read 4 bonus books in some of the categories. So I ended up reading 100 books in 10 categories. Just not equally divided! I'll try to do better this year...

Early reads will probably include Prague and Why Mahler?

The first book of the year for this challenge -- and a memorable one!

Ravel by Jean Echenoz is, I suppose, technically a novella, but in actual fact it's more a series of vignettes or impressions: suitable, given that many of the subject's best works are episodic piano works such as Le Tombeau de Couperin and Valses nobles et sentimentales. I loved this book, not just because I enjoy Ravel's music, but because of the way Echenoz deftly weaves together minor themes -- the composer's patent-leather shoes ("without which he is nothing") and passion for very rare steaks -- with the major ones of creativity and mortality. Echenoz chose to skim over the last decade of Ravel's life; after showing the reader the composer about to embark on a triumphal tour of the United States at the outset, he states bluntly that Ravel would live for only another decade. And the final third of the book, indeed, shows us his gradual mental and physical deterioration and the impact of frustrated creativity in a few heartbreakingly well-chosen words. The writing is sometimes jarringly vivid, as when Echenoz describes Ravel's hands ("too-short, gnarled, somewhat squared-off fingers" and "exceptionally powerful thumbs, the thumbs of a strangler, easily dislocated and set high on the palm"), sometimes laugh-out-loud witty, as when several young women, acolytes, hoist Ravel's suitcase into a first-class train carriage ("The luggage is quite heavy, but these young women are so very fond of music") or a pianist's mangling of Ravel's careful composition (he was "ornamenting phrases that never hurt a soul.") Echenoz describes the composition of some of Ravel's latest and best-known works, including Bolero ("a thing that self-destructs, a score without music, an orchestral factory without a purpose, a suicide whose weapon is the simple swelling of sound"), but what he is really describing is the slow death of a creative genius. At first the topic is that of insomnia and Ravel's battles with it, such as his attempts to find "the best position, the ideal accomodation of the organism called Ravel to the piece of furniture called Ravel's bed". But really, sleep is a proxy for death, which also elude Ravel as his creative faculties fade. Like sleep, of which Echenoz writes "In a pinch you can feel it settling in, but you can't any more see it than you can look directly at the sun. It will be sleep that grabs you from behind, or from just out of sight", death is an elusive surcease. An impressive and beautifully-written book; I'm off to seek out more of Echenoz's work. 4.6 stars, highly recommended.

One more to report on:

City of Thieves by David Benioff was a compelling novel, although it paled in comparison to The Siege by Helen Dunmore. Like Dunmore's novel, this book revolves around the siege of Leningrad. The two "heroes", the scrawny 17-year-old son of a "disappeared" Jewish poet and the brash Kolya, a strapping Red Army soldier, are odd companions in a quixotic search for a dozen eggs for a top colonel's daughter's wedding cake, in the midst of a siege so severe that people are boiling down the binding of books to get protein from the paste. To obtain the eggs, Lev and Kolya undergo some amazing adventures. It was a good novel, chock-full of drama and historical detail, but it never really became more than that for me. Perhaps I was more interested in the ordinary human stories in Dunmore's novel than the extraordinary adventures Benioff chronicles? To me, at least, this book fell short at least comparatively speaking. But I'd still recommend it; 4.1 stars.

I enjoyed City of Thieves also. I agree that's not as lofty as some of the heavyweights about the siege like Life and Fate but a good adventure with the siege as background. Glad to see you have your 500 book ticker in this thread.

I already have City of Thieves on my wishlist. I am now going to add the Helen Dunmore book as well.

DeltaQueen -- add The Betrayal to that list. It's the sequel to The Siege; personally, I liked it just as much although the almost claustrophobic sense of being under siege in winter gave the first book a unique quality. Both were among the best novels I read in 2010.

Finished Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom, a collection of beautifully-crafted stories, which varied in the degree to which they really resonated with me. I immensely enjoyed those "linked" series, one of which explored the relationship between a stepmother and her stepson after the death of her husband and his father, the stories taking place over decades; the other focusing on two late middle-aged people who unexpectedly transform decades of friendship into a love affair in front of a CNN news broadcast as their spouses sleep upstairs. Bloom casts no glamorous veil over the perils of middle-aged love; Clare falls and breaks her leg; William bumbles around on canes and is on a rigid diet to control his diet. Again, these stories follow the characters over the course of several years. Some of the stories in this collection remind me of the late, great Laurie Colwin, deftly analyzing the idiosyncracies of human beings with both compassion and affection. But a few just didn't work for me at all -- I finished them thinking "what???" to myself, unable to understand what the point was in putting all those words down on paper. It's as if Bloom was telling a story simply to tell a story, and that story itself just wasn't that interesting, at its heart. So I have to stick with a 4.3 star rating -- good, but uneven and therefore not great. Recommended, however, and I'll look for more by her.

Thanks Chatterbox, I have added The Betrayal as well.

Two more to report on!!

1. Finally got around to reading All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. I'm not quite sure what makes this book, as the subtitle proclaims, the "hidden" history of the financial crisis -- by now, all the avenues the author explores have been fairly well trodden. Their biggest contribution is probably to pull everything together and synthesize it, thus saving readers from having to wade through what I think are probably smarter and more insightful books, such as The Greatest Trade Ever by Greg Zuckerman, Chain of Blame by two other reporters, and Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett. All of those books came out in late 2009, and genuinely broke new analytical ground. So, this book focuses squarely on the issue of subprime loans, and looks at the ways in which the regulators, investment banks, rating agencies, Fannie/freddie, the derivatives market etc. not only prolonged but exacerbated the subprime bubble, so that the carnage when it burst was much worse. Only it doesn't explain the thesis that forthrightly -- you need to dig through about 150 pages before realizing the picture the authors are slowly drawing for you. It's up to date -- dealing with some of the stuff that came out during the Senate's look at Goldman's trades, for anyone who doesn't want to have wade through 900 pages of exhibits -- but I didn't come away with any fresh "aha" moments, and I don't think that's just because I've been living this stuff for 2.5 years. It's well-written, but not nearly as insider-y as many other books (like Andrew Ross Sorkin's tome, or even the Merrill Lynch book that I just finished reading) so that doesn't add value. While it tries to explain complicated issues like synthetic swaps, it doesn't really do so clearly enough for a general reader, I fear. Recommended only to those who can't get enough financial crisis reading under their belt: 3.9 stars.

For the record, my thoughts on the top crisis books, now that I've read most of them, are:
1. Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin -- the chronology
2. The Greatest Trade Ever by Greg Zuckerman -- for the mavericks who saw it coming
3. Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett -- for the derivatives angle
4. Chain of Blame by Paul Muolo and Matthew Padilla -- for the nasty details of the subprime debacle.

I'm not including my own book in there because that would be too self serving! :-)

2. Promises, Promises by Erica James. (no touchstone) Standard chick lit fare; a group of individuals have intersecting lives and romantic woes. All is sorted out by the final page. Erica James is usually good at delivering what I think of as "comfort reading", but either she's flagging or I just gave up caring, because this book simply irritated me. I kept muttering at the characters, "how come your marriages are THAT bad in the first place??" because the obnoxious spouses are such caricatures that I couldn't suspend disbelief that a sympathetic hero or heroine might have ended up hitched to such a loser. So, only 2.3 stars for this. Avoid it... OK, it passed a few hours, but even as escapist fare, this didn't really pass muster.

The Orchid Affair by Lauren Willig -- OK, the latest installment of the "Pink Carnation" series of romantic adventure novels is anything but literature. But it can be very silly and funny and thus good for the winter blahs. A case in point: "Three whole days with Colin’s charmingly dysfunctional family was not my idea of a romantic weekend. It was, however, my idea of an Agatha Christie novel," muses modern-day heroine Eloise Kelly, still sleuthing into the spies of Regency England. In the historical part of the narrative (which makes up about 80% of the book), Laura Grey is undercover as a governess in the household of a member of Napoleon's police force. "One could hide an army in the Hôtel de Bac and still have room for an amateur theatrical troupe, a haberdashery, and a few aspiring sopranos," Laura muses. A goofy approach to writing like that tells me Willig isn't taking herself too seriously, which wins her marks. What loses some marks is that this time, the past and present narratives are so loosely connected as to make me wonder why she bothered with the Eloise story when the real meat lies in the historical adventures. Cotton candy for the brain, but fun escapism. 3.4 stars.

@28 -- This book is on my shelf, and I'm eagerly looking forward to it! I agree with you about the Eloise storyline, though...it's really nowhere near as interesting as the historical stories!

Under Fishbone Clouds by Sam Meekings was an ARC that I got via the Amazon.com Vine program. Sadly, it promised more than it delivered. It's the story of Junyi and Yuying, a couple who endure the horrors of the second half of the 20th century in China. On the surface, the book has a lot going for it, from a great backdrop to wonderful writing. But the way the author chooses to recount this saga is awkward and disruptive, and prevented me from ever really engaging with the characters or believing they were "real". A full review is posted on the book's page; I'm rating it 3.4 stars, mostly because of the caliber of the writing, but with a bit of a wince. I can't really recommend it, although I'm sure many readers will love it. This kind of book meets my definition of "self conscious" writing: an author throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, into the mix to show readers how clever he is. I felt exhausted and disconnected from what should have been a powerful story.

... and one more...

Defiant Spirits by Ross King. King is the author of several well-known books about art, architecture, etc., such as The Judgment of Paris about the rise of French Impressionism. There's no touchstone for this book, which hasn't yet been released outside Canada, and probably has a smaller audience than King's other work: this time, he has crafted a group biography of the early 20th century artists (largely landscape painters in the Post-Impressionist tradition) who collectively came to be known as "The Group of Seven". Given that the book is co-published by the McMichael Collection (an Ontario art gallery that is largely devoted to works by this group and their contemporaries and heirs) it's a very even-handed look at the artists, their works, their attempts to craft an identifiably "Canadian" school of art in the midst of widespread public indifference to the arts and a widespread Canadian quest for a national identity. Not surprisingly, both the artists' careers and the issue of national identity got a big boost from the horrors of World War I, documented by some of the painters and in which Canadian soldiers stood out for their bravery in some of the fiercest battles. That segment, in which King examines the way the war galvanized Canadians in different ways and ties it to the art being produced by group members, is perhaps the strongest in the book, although the whole thing is a very, very intriguing look at the attempt to craft something truly "independent" on the part of painters like AY Jackson, Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris and J.E.H. MacDonald. As King points out, the painters are -- ironically -- now seen as old-fashioned and conservative. He notes that they were never as entirely revolutionary as they claimed to be, but also does an excellent job of pointing to the ways in which they did recraft and reinvent techniques and approaches to painting when tackling the Canadian landscape. It's a great story, an intriguing book about the birth of an artistic movement, and will go on my "memorable books" list. Even if you're not interested in reading 420 pages about these artists, it's worth checking out the paintings next time you have an idle moment in front of the Internet. Recommended to anyone with an interest in art or to any Canadian with an interest in the perennially pesky question of "who are we, really?" 4.3 stars.

Finished As I Lay Dying, the first novel I've read by William Faulkner. Since it's for my RL book circle, whose members impose a "no discussion before the meeting" edict, I'll hold off on posting any thoughts on this until after tomorrow evening! But I did rate it 4.5 stars...

ETA: This was my first Faulkner novel, read for my RL book circle. Loved the multiple points of view and the complex and detailed characters, revealed skilfully through the shifting voices of the characters; the plot itself, and the way the father shifts all responsibility to his children while opportunistically grabbing at whatever he can, were fascinating to ponder. Definitely an author to read more of...

Ah, but we don't count! You can whisper what you thought to us... :)

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson is a book that more than lived up to everything I've heard about it. It's a novel that is really about a collection of mysteries; a mystery story that's really a novel about a host of characters. Amazingly, Kate Atkinson manages to pull it all together and pull it off beautifully. Her style is effortless and witty -- "Well, that was the end then, she was Americanizing words. Civilization would fall," muses one character. Or: "Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on." I relished this book; didn't care that I had figured out who one of the characters was (if not all the incredible last-minute twists). I found the structure -- the different cases all converge in different ways, as they end up falling into the lap of investigator Jackson Brodie -- worked wonderfully. All in all, 4.8 stars, highly recommended and onto my best books of the year list. I've already downloaded #2 onto my Kindle...

Sounds good! You don't give out "nearly 5s" lightly.

It is good! And here's another excellent read:

The House at Sea's End by Elly Griffiths is the third mystery featuring Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist who works at a fictional university along the bleak coast of Norfolk, and I've devoured them all in the space of only about six weeks, leaving me waiting anxiously for #4 -- for another year?? Horrors... This mystery looks fairly straightforward -- six dead bodies are found buried in the shifting sands, and the forensic evidence appears to tie them to a mysterious incident during WW2. Then there are some modern deaths -- but who is the link? I find the character of Ruth -- smart, awkward and gawky, a new mother -- particularly appealing and well-crafted, as is her strained relationship with the (married) detective who is her daughter's father. There are few perfect characters in this series, but also few false notes in the writing or characterization. Highly recommended series, 4.2 stars.

Wow. NetGalley is just now offering the 2nd one, The Janus Stone so I didn't realize the 3rd was out. I guess I'll just have to add The House at Sea's End to my ever-growing wish list.

Lori, it's only out in the UK. I enjoyed the first two so much that I promptly put in an order for #3 and sucked up the horrific shipping charges. (I refuse to use Book Depository, as they play bait & switch too much -- even if I get what I want at the price they originally set when they say I will, I end up feeling so cross at being manipulated.... I just don't like rewarding that behavior!

Am going to stick The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report into this challenge, in the "world we live in" category! Just because I can't think of what else to do with it...

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: (No touchstone available...) This is the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and to anyone who has been following the deliberations and reading about the issues, it's as dull as ditchwater. On the other hand it's worthy, as it serves as a record of what happened and why. (I'm in general agreement with the thesis that the crisis could have been avoided.) But the final verdict is that the report spends too much time focusing on what was known (and adding to the level of detail) and less time on those details -- the e-mails, the comments, by people in positions of power that signal just what happened and how they were thinking the way they were, etc. Rather than rehash the details of the collapse of Bear Stearns or Lehman, I would love to have read more about the commission's conclusions re Richard Fuld or Jimmy Cayne. Now I'm going to have to go and read all the background materials instead. Valuable for what it is, frustrating for what it isn't; recommended only to those who need to read it or haven't read the first thing about the crisis and want to understand it. 4 stars, despite my reservations

Lastingness: The Art of Old Age by Nicholas Delbanco doesn't have a touchstone, but that's OK -- I can't recommend that anyone else go off and read it...
Some great artists – Monet, Goya, Liszt, Yeats, Hardy – continue to work well past the age of 70 – a phenomenon Delbanco refers to as "lastingness" and sets out to analyze in this slim volume.
But why? The answer seems to flummox Delbanco himself, judging by the way he dances nimbly around it. The book ends up feeling largely like a rehash of the events of some lives of several artists, some better known than others. That’s interesting enough, especially to anyone unfamiliar with them, but it’s not enough on which to base a book. At times, this reminded me of the potted Ladybird biographies of famous composers that I read at the age of 8 or so.
What’s really missing is some theory underlying Delbanco’s observations: that some artists stop producing great art; others shift their focus and still others continue to forge ahead despite the physical limitations that age imposes. Why the differences between them? There’s a cursory discussion of aging and the brain, but it’s never really linked to creativity – I’ll have to look elsewhere if I want to find out if there are scientific studies being done on this subject. He observes that some artists seem to create for themselves – but why? Perhaps Delbanco is too ambitious; he needs a narrower focus to explore a part of his theory first. Ultimately, this ended up shedding no fresh light on the subject for me.
There’s also a lot in here that is actively irritating. Delbanco muses that Wilfred Owen was killed in the final months of World War I while Robert Graves survived the trenches and died at 90. “Had the trajectory of enemy bullets been infinitesimally altered, the fate of these two poets might have been reversed.” Well, yes, of course. And the point is? We’ve all mused on the random nature of circumstance; few of us try to write books based on those musings. Delbanco says J.D. Salinger’s late work, never seen by outsiders, may be worse than his early promise indicated. Or it may be far better. Again, stating the obvious. Add to that some excessively florid turns of phrase, unnecessary anecdotes (I didn’t really care much about the author’s success in finding four-leafed clovers and found it didn’t add to his central argument) and the occasional glaring error (he describes Napoleon’s brother, briefly king of Spain as “Joseph Napoleon” – he was, in fact, “Joseph Bonaparte”) and the book became harder to struggle through to the end.
I’ve rated it 2.5 stars; the only reason I'm being that generous is that Delbanco has the wit to ask the questions in the first place and I imagine this will find many readers among those who are interested in learning more about the arts on a basic level. But it doesn’t deliver what it promises, by any stretch of the imagination (artistic or otherwise), and I can’t recommend it.

Happily, the next one, A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear, was a bit better!

My review is as follows:

I confess: I find it very hard to love Jacqueline Winspear's sleuth, Maisie Dobbs. She's just too perfect. She's compassionate, particularly toward those who deserve it (who are always grateful.) She's wise, and sees into the minds of those around her. (In this book, she knows just how to help her assistant, Billy, and his family, without offending Billy's pride.) She's clever and solves mysteries. She's always poised and rarely flustered. Is she altogether human??

That reservation is one of the reasons I can't fall in love with this series, however well Winspear conveys a sense of time and place -- in this case, England in the early autumn of 1932. All the elements are there -- the lingering effects of WWI, in the form of a college devoted to pacifist ideals, at which Maisie goes undercover to teach at the behest of the secret service, and the looming menace of fascism, in the shape of the attraction of some characters to embryonic Nazism. Maisie's actual assignment ends up taking a back seat to her investigation of a death that follows rapidly on her arrival at the college, and she pursues the trail of clues to its conclusion with very few false steps. (Even the Scotland Yard detectives and the secret service folks aren't enough to derail her!)

If you're looking for a mystery novel rich in character development and ambiance, this isn't it. On the other hand, I could see Agatha Christie, if she were alive and writing today, crafting this type of novel -- a straightforward whodunnit with a cast of supporting characters and just enough red herrings to keep life interesting. (Although to be fair, Winspear is far better a writer than Christie!) If that's the kind of mystery you like, this will be right up your alley, and if you've enjoyed previous offerings in the series, you'll find this one of the better ones. (A tip: don't try reading it without having read at least a few of the earlier books, or the offhand references to "offstage" characters and an understanding of Maisie's circumstances will elude you.)

I'm glad to see that Winspear is moving the series forward not only in time (it's 1932 in this episode) but also in theme -- Maisie's investigations involve, at least indirectly, the fascist menace. This may not be a terrifically memorable book for me, but it's a serviceable mystery that helped me pass several hours in an entertaining fashion, and a solid enough read to warrant 3.5 stars. Recommended primarily to fans of the series.

Full disclosure: I received an advance copy from the publishers via NetGalley.

41> "Serviceable" doesn't exactly make me want to run out and get a copy. I'm with you though. I don't like my main character to be a Mary Sue, and once in awhile a person who is quite ungrateful for the help livens things up a bit (and makes it more realistic). ;) Good review!

Yes, a Mary Sue is indeed the way to describe her! Still, lots of people seem to like this series far more than I do; I keep coming back to it because I'm interested in the period. I'm very glad to be able to find the books as advance copies, meaning I don't feel like I'm spending serious $$ on them...

Yup. I hear ya.

Finished The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. Well, kudos for a clever title and a creative concept, but I couldn't relish this book. Let me rephrase: there were elements here that I liked, but they tended to be fleeting. Overall, I found the plot became overly contrived (when a reader is incredulous because she thinks she is reading one kind of book and it morphs into something else -- unnecessarily -- she tends to get irritated) and the characters strangely flat, especially when set against the main plot element here: that Rose can taste the emotions of people who prepare food, to the point where she ends up being able to distinguish which factory in Italy prepared the pasta and whether produce is really organic and whether it was picked by a grumpy farmer. That's clever enough; she didn't need to embroider it to the extent that she did. The writing is often excellent, but sometimes -- again -- a bit too florid. If Rose tasted a meal I'd prepared after reading this, she would have concluded that I was unimpressed and glad to move on to a new book. 2.9 stars, many folks will probably like it but I found it very banal, just dressed up in quirkiness.

I read something similar in another thread and am now debating whether or not to bother with it. It did sound like an interesting premise for a book. I recently read A Mango Shaped Space a YA fiction book but about synethesia, where people see letters as colors or can taste shapes, etc. That book was very well done.

dudes22> Interesting connection between synethesia and the "magic" of tasting emotions. You've given me something to think about, but I think I'll skip on Particular Sadness! Chatterbox, I trust your judgement.

Another one I can't recommend wholeheartedly, alas, although I enjoyed it as a fluffy book and so it fit the category I added it to ("Get me out of here..."):
Emily and Einstein by Linda Francis Lee (no touchstone available) is another whimsical romance/chick lit book that manages to rise above its genre enough to make it a good read. It's not as good as her hilarious send up of the self-anointed social elite of small-town Texas in The Devil in the Junior League, but it's warm and fuzzy. Emily's husband Sandy is killed in an accident -- he's been messing her around, but nontheless, she's broken-hearted (she doesn't realize the full nefariousness of his deeds). Then she realizes that she'll have to leave the apartment in the Dakota in NYC owned by Sandy's family trust, that skulduggerous colleagues (if that ain't a word, it should be) are undermining her at the publishing company where she works and that she has a lot of other problems to deal with. But wait: Einstein, a dog injured in the same accident that killed her husband, is there to help. Could it be -- gasp -- because Sandy's spirit has entered Einstein, and that he's been given a chance to redeem himself? (That's not a spoiler, it's obvious from the first pages...) OK, this is not a great book or even a thumping good read, but if you're looking for something utterly mindless after having your wisdom teeth out, it will work. Emily is too good to be true, none of the characters are really convincing, but it's still kind of a fun read. I DO recommend The Devil in the Junior League as a thumping good read, however. 3.1 stars

Hurray, finally a more appealing book!

The book du jour is Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran. This is a novel by a friend, so I may be a bit biased, but it's a lively, "thumping good read", a look at the events of the French Revolution through the eyes of the woman who became Madame Tussaud, Marie Grosholtz. (I didn't get a freebie; I got it from Kindle on the day of publication this week.) Already a sculptor in wax before the fall of the Bastille, and with a foot in both camps (her uncle's salon entertains revolutionaries like Robespierre and Marat, while she tutors the King's sister in the art of creating wax figures), Marie is a pragmatist: she wants to be sure that she is able to provide for herself and her family, whatever the compromises that are required of her. That tradeoff demands more and more as the Revolution progresses. This isn't the story of the formation of the famous Tussaud wax museum, but rather of the woman who would create it (she doesn't even meet Mr. Tussaud until its final pages) and it's an intriguing way for a reader to get 'behind the scenes' of the events of the French Revolution. Probably this will be a more gripping read for anyone who hasn't read a lot, whether fiction or non-fiction, about that revolution and its characters, because it offers a very accurate depiction of what happened, what the individuals were probably like, etc. But there's also enough fictional license to make it entertaining to a well-informed reader. Don't look for historical fiction with a literary twist here, a la Wolf Hall; this is a more plain vanilla kind of book. Still, I enjoyed it -- 4 stars.
.

It does sound good. Congrats to your friend!

Congrats indeed! I just started it last night and I'm totally sucked in. It's a great book. I've read a little about the French revolution, and that was mostly non-fiction and YEARS ago, so this is a nice & entertaining refresher of the events, as well as my first introduction to Madame Tussaud. Cheers to Michelle Moran!

I am always in the market for good historical fiction, so onto the wishlist Madam Tussaud goes. Thanks.

Good review of Madame Tussaud. I have that book on hold at my library - actually, I froze the hold because I won't have time to get to that one for a couple of months, but I am definitely keeping it in mind for a spring/summer read.

Another book/author worth checking out is The Delicate Storm by Giles Blunt. OK, it suffered slightly by comparison with Blunt's debut mystery novel, Forty Words for Sorrow, which I read and loved last month: it's my favorite thing, a mystery that puts as much emphasis on characters and complex problems as it does on drama. As in that book, Blunt pulls no punches and delivers only a few easy solutions; when his detective, John Cardinal, solves one of his personal dilemmas, he is sucker-punched by something else. Non-Canadians may find the core plot, which revolves around the Quebec separatist movement of the 1960s and 70s, and the violence that it provoked in 1970, for its plot. (Although the main protagonists have been renamed, the two kidnap victims referred to are readily identifiable as themselves.) Blunt creates an intriguing scenario: what if one of the real culprits was never caught? He then meshes that with an interesting plot about contemporary murders in Cardinal's northern Ontario home town. Worthy in its own right, this isn't as good as the debut (sophomore slump, perhaps??) but I still enjoyed it. 4.1 stars, and I'm ready to move on to #3 in this series, which is still one of my fave discoveries of 2011 so far. Recommended.

...and one more!

Finished Little Princes by Conor Grennan, the memoir written by a young American who sets off like any 20-something these days to have "meaningful experiences". He intends to spend a few months volunteering at an orphanage (refreshingly, he admits that he intends this to impress others more than to make him a better person). Instead, it actually changes his life, as he becomes drawn into Nepal and the fate of the children he encounters, who may not be orphaned at all but rather the victim of traffickers, who have taken money from their impoverished families and promised to put them into boarding schools in a safe part of the country -- but instead abandoned them in Kathmandu. I tend not to like many books of this kind (the "look at me and how I helped make the world a nicer place"), but Grennan is honest about himself, his motivations and his achievements, and not at all preachy, so my qualms vanished. He also knows how to tell a story, and I was caught up in the narrative as much as any novel. Recommended, 4.1 stars.

Little Princes sounds like an interesting read. It's always refreshing to find an interesting book like that that is also an honest book....

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson is not really my cup of tea. On the one hand, I can appreciate what he's trying to do with this linked series of short stories (I kept thinking of Breughel's intricate paintings of the life of a community, but in this case Anderson was painting the inner lives of the town's inhabitants), but I'm at a loss to understand why this book seems to be seen as an American classic. He can't write dialogue, and while some of the descriptions are at times poignant and beautiful, those moments weren't common enough to make this a book to relish. I plodded through it for the book circle, and will probably send it out into the world via Paperbackswap. 3.4 stars, recommended if you want to read something by a guy who was seen as a model by Faulkner and Hemingway, I suppose.

#57 I was wondering if that one wasn't *too* literary. It's a classic, but I don't hear people talking about it much.

Hmm, I wouldn't have called it "literary" in that sense of the word. It didn't reach that level. It felt more like a period piece to me.

Finished another mystery for my "next please" challenge. All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer Fleming was the fifth in the series featuring Russ van Alstyne, chief of police in an upstate NY town, and Clare Fergusson, the Episcopal priest. Murder comes uncomfortably close to home for Russ & Clare this time around, and both end up as suspects in a case that divides the police department and the town. Clare, after two years getting caught up in police dramas, also has a diocesan watcher sicced on her in the shape of a new deacon, who is everything that she is not -- Elizabeth is proper, devoted to tradition, etc. Lots of tension all around in what seems to have become an accomplished series. This was a loaned book via one of the new Kindle lending sites, so I had to read it before it vanished (yesterday, but as long as you don't turn on the wi-fi, the book lingers and stays readable...) 4 stars, recommended.

Hmmm... You're making Winesburg sound not terribly interesting. I'll trust you and take it off my wishlist. Too many "classics" to read them all.

Oh, the responsibility... *grin*

Finished another one: The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya seems to generate a wide array of opinions, from folks hailing it as a cool new kind of novel to those disparging it as cut-rate Life of Pi. I happen to think it's neither, but just a very good novel told in an unusual way -- through a storyteller who sits in the main square of Marrakech and once a year tells a different kind of tale, one in which his brother played a key role -- the disappearance of two strange, almost mystical foreigners seen in the medina one day but who vanished the next. For starters, this conjured up the atmosphere, the reality of the Jemaa el Fna almost impeccably, and of Morocco more broadly -- I felt as if I were back there. I found the rhythm of the tale worked for me -- the storyteller's listeners chime in with their own sightings of the strangers and contribute elements to the tale, raising questions about the trustworthiness of any single narrative. I'm not big on reading Big Epic Messages into novels, although I suppose some readers can do that; for me, it worked very well on the most basic level -- that of a story, or rather, the difficulty in telling a certain story that is so recent and so personal compared to the others that the storyteller and his ancestors have recounted for centuries in the same square. On to the list of top reads of the year this goes -- 4.4 stars.

As I was reading a Frances Mayes book earlier this month, I noticed that she mentioned a storyteller in Marrakesh in her chapter on Morocco. I knew of the book you just read and wondered if it might be based on the real-life storyteller that Mayes encountered. It was, at the very least, an interesting coincidence.

I suppose it's possible, but there are storytellers who sit down crosslegged on kilims in certain parts of the Jemaa el Fna and recount stories -- just as Roy-Bhattacharya portrays. I suspect that he used that fact and spun his own tale around it. The Jemaa is really something to see -- to us it's a tourist attraction, to the Maghrebis, it's their traditional way of life, in many ways. (Well, they've done away with the camel and slave markets...)

Finished a wonderful book, The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout (for my translation challenge. This is a ruminative novel (translated from the French) that serves as a damning indictment of religious fundamentalism. Sadly, the kind of people who SHOULD read this novel are the very ones who will reject it out of hand, the kind of people who, in Djaout's valedictory work (found amongst his papers upon his 1993 assassination) have stifled the city in which his character, bookshop owner Boualem Yekker, has lived his entire life. Bit by bit, the life Boualem has known is stripped away from him -- his wife and children take the easy path and join the fanatics and soon only one old acquaintance is left, dropping by his bookstore to sit and chat idly or remain in silence as their old world -- that of ideas, of color, of music -- is torn to pieces around them. Boualem knows it would be easier to just stop questioning and start accepting the new orthodoxy -- "it would have been enough to join the herd, to bleat in unison" and "to grab a pair of those blinders they so generously offer and sport them. He would have been immersed in the peace that blindness secures. It would have been enough to take the gentle slope of abdication..." It's a piercing and poignant story -- don't look for many 'conventional' narrative devices, such as confrontations and dialog, as most of these are between Boualem and himself, in his thoughts and dreams as he drifts slowly toward the precipice. The Algerian author was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists, making this all the more poignant and prescient. Despite a claustrophobic feel, this was a fascinating and compelling short novel -- 4.6 stars, and onto my best of the year list. Highly recommended.

Wow! The Last Summer of Reason sounds very powerful. Must go on my wishlist.

cammykitty, you are my loyalest poster over here!!!

One more book wrapped up -- The Hanging Wood by Martin Edwards. (No touchstone available...) This is the latest in a rather good and too-little-known mystery series set in the Lake District of England. (I don't particularly like the author's other series of mysteries, featuring a guy called Harry Devlin, and can't recommend those.) This series, however, is excellent; it features some very strong characters, including historian Daniel Kind and cold case investigator Hannah Scarlett, who had worked with Daniel's father, a cop, now dead and who had been estranged from his son for many years. The author is adept at finding ways to bring together things that would intrigue a historian with real-life crime, and this outing is no exception: the daughter of a local farmer kills herself after trying to get the police to probe the long-ago disappearance of her brother; the investigation revolves around a local library and historical association patronized by the gentry with whom the victim's family has long been entangled. This perhaps isn't the strongest book in the series (which begin with The Coffin Trail, but it's still a solid entrant in the British police procedural tradition. I got an advance copy of this thanks to NetGalleys; some of the others are very affordable on Kindle ($5/$6 or so). Recommended to mystery fans; 3.8 stars. I'll definitely keep reading this series, if only for the superb sense of place -- the Lake District at its best -- and to find out what happens to the characters, whom Edwards has a real knack for making "real" human beings.

:)

Ended up staying up late last night to finish Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon. It won the National Book Award last year, and I can see why -- I had only intended to read a few chapters and get a flavor of the narrative, and found myself completely caught up in the characters, especially Medicine Ed, the old African-American stablehand/assistant trainer, whose wry comments on the characters whose lives revolve around the third-class racetrack in West Virginia that has become his home (although he dreams of retiring to a swish mobile home somewhere) sound almost like the comments of a Greek chorus. In medieval Europe, the lord of misrule was the character who, one day a year, turned the social order upside down. While one of the horses in Gordon's narrative carries that name and doesn't appear until late in the book, the lord of misrule is at work early on, turning everything topsy-turvy from the moment that Tommy, a would-be scam artist, and his girlfriend Maggie, in love with the horses, arrive at the track. The world around them shifts -- changes, major and minor, rock the lives of the various characters. But how many of those will be lasting? When the last race -- the one that pits the incomer Lord of Misrule against other horses the reader comes to know over the course of the book -- how much of the racetrack will just get back to the way it was? Gordon does a masterful job of developing charcters and even though these are often grotesques, it's impossible not to feel tremendous empathy for Maggie and Two-Tie, or even the racetrack "gyp" Deucey. I loved this book; 4.8 stars and highly recommended.

You've made it sound so interesting, I rushed to put it on my wishlist. Great review.

Finished The Paris Wife by Paula McLain but was left underwhelmed by what should have really captivated me -- the story of a fascinating era and group of people told through the eyes of a somewhat peripheral character -- Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson. Sadly, McLain makes the tale one that is rather banal -- Hadley just isn't that interesting a personality, coming across as a housewife caught up in bohemian Paris without really "getting" it. That makes the whole story unconvincing. Hadley never becomes three-dimensional, and is never really connected to her era or even to Paris. Those descriptions that exist feel as if they've been inserted just to remind the reader of the time and place, not because they are integral to the story in any manner. Paris is just a tourist guide-type backdrop, with encounters with all the famous folks of the era (Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound) thrown in. There are entire pages that simply sound like name-dropping summaries: "John Dos Pssos ... was back in Paris, riding the wave of his literary success and always ready for a good time. Donald Stewart showed up around this time... he ... would one day go on to be famous for screenplays like 'The Philadelphia Story', but for the time being, he was just a funny guy standing near the bar." It feels as if McLain has taken biographical material and fictionalized it -- dressing it up with background color about Paris and Hemingway -- to turn it into a novel. It didn't work for me, although it's competently written and I'm sure will find a lot of fans. 3.3 stars, more or less. I can't see myself re-reading this one...

Funny - that's exactly what I thought when I read The Moveable Feast a couple of years ago. I didn't even finish it.

The Paris Wife sounds sad. Not boo hoo sad, but wasted potential sad. What a frustrating read!

Two more read, both slightly disappointing -- at least, books that I had hoped or expected more from. Oh well...

A Place of Secrets, based on Rachel Hore's prior books, could have and should have been more compelling than it was. In this case, I think she was just trying to do too much in the space of one novel -- a relationship book; a novel with a historical mystery told through diary excerpts; a complicated family saga revolving around astronomy, archaeology and dreams, etc. etc. It took me five days to read a book that I probably could have devoured in a single setting, as I have with some of her other books, like The Memory Garden, which I'd heartily recommend to any chick lit/"Aga saga" fan. This was a "meh" 3.3 star book.

I don't think I'll ever be a real fan of Flavia de Luce. A Red Herring without Mustard shows that Alan Bradley is an excellent storyteller and has a real sense of style -- indeed, his descriptions of Flavia, her family, her home and the village are so acute that I couldn't help thinking that this would make a superb television series. I might find Flavia herself -- her precociousness and intellect -- more appealing at a greater remove than the first person narration of these books, too... In this instance, Flavia muses over the connections between a gypsy, an odd 18th century religious sect and an antiques theft and smuggling ring, while doing battle with her obnoxious sisters. While Alan Bradley has said he doesn't want his protagonist to get much older than 11, I'd like to see some character development if I'm going to read any more of these books... As it stands, I'm a bit weary of the lack of evolution in Flavia's family relationships, and without some kind of development, they will all end up as charming and quirky caricatures rather than characters. I'm sure others will find this more charming than I did; 3.6 stars.

I agree concerning the Flavia de Luce series. I'm not really a fan of first-person narration anyway; the only series where it really works for me are the Mary Russell and Thursday Next books. But Alan Bradley made me appreciate the artistry of chemistry where previously I'd seen only mathematics and logic, so I do appreciate the series for that and the other beautiful descriptions.

I suppose the wonder is that Bradley can do it at all, given that he's an older man putting himself into the mind of an 11-year-old girl of 60 years ago, living in another country. I suppose that's the advantage of never letting Flavia grow up -- she can remain a kind of gamine asexual quirky child. I have found that the first person can work for me, but it's harder to pull off really well.

Finished Damage by John Lescroart, as I was in need of some mindless reading. Nominally an entry in his very long-lived Dismas Hardy series, I was delighted to see it actually focuses more on some other characters -- newly-elected DA Wes Farrell, who is under pressure by some of his campaign backers to go easy on their son, whose conviction for rape and murder has just been overturned. The quest to get Ro Curtlee back behind bars is the focus of the novel, even as Ro's enemies start turning up dead... It's a fairly straightforward novel, we know who the bad guys are (for the most part) and even the one big twist I saw coming from miles away. Still, it's a good read, and a worthy mystery. Not memorable, but I was quite happy to let it distract me from "real life" or anything heavier for a day or so. 3.8 stars, mildly recommended as one of the author's better books of late.

I love the Dismas Hardy books and you've reminded me that I have a couple of his in the TBR pile. One will fit into one of my categories this year so maybe I'll try to fit in soon. Thanks for the reminder.

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar is a fascinating glimpse at the turbulence of Libyan society in the late 1970s, seen through the eyes of a young boy and mirrored in the turbulence of his own family. His mother feels as if she is the victim of her own family, forcibly married off at the age of 14 after being spotted having a coffee with a boy her age in public. Now Suleiman's father has become the victim of the Khadaffi regime, as has the father of his closest friend, Kareem. Suleiman struggles with truth that is withheld by his mother and his fathers' friends to protect him, and the truth that is shoved in front of his face by the television and the secret policeman who hopes to enlist him to damn his father. It's a classic story of a loss of innocence and the collapse of a family in the midst of oppression, but Matar's knack for characterization and his impeccable prose lift it well above average. Suleiman muses about the nature of vindication after watching a televised hanging: "Where were the heroes, the bullets, the scurrying mob, the happy endings that used to send us out of the dark cinema halls rosy-cheeked with joy, slapping one another’s backs, rejoicing that our man had won, that God was with him, that God didn’t leave him alone in his hour of need, that the world worked in the ways we expected it to work and didn’t falter?" But the author grabbed me with his prose much earlier on, when Suleiman describes his visit to the site of Lepcis Magna with Kareem and the latter's father: "Absence was everywhere. Arches stood without the walls and roofs of the shops they had once belonged to and seemed, in the empty square under the open sky, like old men trying to remember where they were going. White-stone-cobbled streets—some heading toward the sea, others into the surrounding green desert—marched bravely into the rising sand that erased them." This goes onto my "top books of the year" list; 4.7 stars. Highly recommended; it would be a very timely read right now!

The final book of March was The Dean's December by Saul Bellow. Unbelievably (and I admit to this only sheepishly) this was the first of Bellow's novels I had read, and found myself gradually slipping into his universe, both in terms of plot/character and his language. When the book opens, Albert Corde, journalist turned college dean, is in Bucharest with his Romanian-born wife, Minna -- her mother is dying and the couple have returned to the Caecescu-era city for the first time in their married life. The backdrop to this novel is one kind of oppression -- that of the totalitarian Communist regime in Romania. On the surface, it seems as if no environment in the world could be more dissimilar to Corde's hometown of Chicago, where he now lives and works. And yet Chicago, as the parallel narrative makes clear, is oppressive in different ways. When Corde left town with Minna, he left behind him a cauldron of of unrest to which his own actions have contributed: even his nephew and cousin have made common caused with the oppressed minorities of Chicago to the extent of defending a man accused of murdering one of Corde's students. The dean has written a series of stories exposing the harsh realities of life in Chicago -- just as harsh and just as hypocritical as anything to be found in Bucharest. Rather than being a brief escape, Corde's weeks in Romania prove to be the catalyst for dramatic changes in his life and his sense of himself. I found myself intrigued by the plot and Bellow's approach to it -- I sense that there's a lot here I'm not fully appreciating yet, and want to come back and re-read this when I'm more familiar with his work and the themes he tackles. But what was most captivating was Bellow's approach to language (who knew there was such a word as "dubiety"??). In his temporary exile, the dean realizes that his articles have demonstrated an "unwanted and misplaced high-mindedness". The physical descriptions convey the essentially idiosyncratic nature of the human body -- Bellow describes the way in which Corde's childhood friend used to carefully tuck his protruding ears into his cap, or the way in which Corde's own neck is too slight for the weight of his head, vivid details that made me laugh and almost gasp at the same time. I'd recommend this, and rate it at 4.3 stars, although ultimately I could that being a flexible rating, something that would change as I become more familiar with Bellow's work. I know I have a copy of Ravelstein on my shelves somewhere, which I acquired after someone had told me it was a tongue-in-cheek look at Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind (a controversial book on the whole great books debate). I'll have to put that on my list to read sometime soon and then move on to some of Bellow's better-known works.

Nice review of Bellow's book.

Finished The Devotion of Suspect X, an Amazon Vine choice that I've had sitting on my stack of ARCs for far too long. It turned out to be a very good book -- while not a literary novel (as some have dubbed it), it has a similar feel to the Jackson Brodie novels by Kate Atkinson. True, Higashino doesn't have the same flair for characterization as Atkinson. The best-drawn relationships in the book don't involve the main figure, Yasuko Hanaoka, but rather the three men who surround her -- police investigator Kusanagi, his old friend, physics professor Yukawa and Ishigami, the brilliant mathematician turned high school teacher and Hanaoka's neighbor, all former university classmates. A crime -- the murder of Yasuko's unpleasant ex-husband -- brings them all together. Perhaps only the systematic mind of Yukawa and his relationship with Ishigami can unravel the full complexity of the brilliant alibi concocted for Yasuko by the devoted Ishigami. This is a solid novel, and turned into a "must finish this now" book halfway through for me, causing me to put everything else aside until I had finished it. It also has one of the best twists imaginable in its final pages, even though Higashino doesn't give the reader enough clues to figure out the full solution themselves. I forgive the author for this, as it puts us in the shoes of the police investigators -- them trying to solve and us trying to understand -- the whys and wherefores of the situation. We have access to what at first seems to be all of the information to solve the puzzle from the first pages -- we think we know who, how and why -- only to discover in the last pages never to take anything for granted. Recommended to anyone who is looking for a real puzzle of a book with a different kind of background (the novel feels very Japanese in tone, does a good job of capturing what it's like to live in a modern Japanese city). 4.2 stars.

Nice review. I thought he actually had given enough clues. I didn't predict the twist, but when I looked back at the novel, the clues were there. It's tricky to give enough clues that it is a "fair" puzzle, but not so many that every reader sees it coming.

I agree, it's not literary, but it is a good mystery. I'm thinking that it is part of a series that has already been released in Japan, which would explain the strong characterization of Kusanagi and Yukawa. Clearly that was a relationship already in progress.

Another book that everyone has billed as literary, although in this case, the author's efforts to make it so are too evident for me to have relished it. A lot of other LTers have read The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys and loved and raved about it. I relished parts of it, but couldn't really become enamored of the book as a whole -- I found much of the plot terribly predictable, the characters not always convincing. (I understood the symbolism of Gwen sleeping under the heavy weight of a tome on roses, but also found that symbolism extremely heavy in its own right...) But the language was often beautiful, and made up for some of these shortcomings, although Humphreys has an unfortunate tendency to wander off into staccato phrases that are supposed to replace sentences but ended up annoying me. For me, the trick of a really great novel is one that, when I'm reading it, I forget the world outside and the fact that someone else sat down at a desk or table and wrote it; I couldn't do that with this book. In brief, a story about the short period in Gwen's life where she truly engages with other people, in the dark days of WW2 as she supervises a group of land girls assigned to turn a former garden into a potato farm. 4 stars.

Sorry to hear The Lost Garden wasn't as engaging as hoped for. I do like it when someone has a differing viewpoint on a book - it is pretty easy to gush about a book you love, forgetting other people may not be as enamored with it. Good review!

I have The Lost Garden somewhere in my TBR pile and found your take on the book interesting. I probably won't get to it this year, but hopefully I'll remember this when I do.

There are some books that I can appreciate, but can't ever really fall in love with -- and I hate that! I don't mind being out of step with other readers, although it's sometimes frustrating when I really can't see what it is they are applauding. More frustrating is when I can see what the author is trying to do, but they just haven't succeeded for me -- and when others rave about them.

That was definitely the case with respect to The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, a book by a very young writer that everyone is raving about (including the New Yorker). I didn't find it got that much more interesting, although I continued to admire the author's writing and her ambition in trying to weave together folk stories with the story of her main protagonists, the two strands never really gelled for me, and I found myself more mildly interested and curious about Natalia, the contemporary character trying to build a life in post-conflict Yugoslavia (although the country she lives in is never actually named, leaving it up to the reader to determine her ethnicity/religion, etc.) The war is a backdrop; the main story is... what? I'm honestly not sure. And that's the problem, for me as a reader. Obreht is a talented writer, great at limited story telling, but may have bitten off more than she could chew with this novel. I'll read what she does in future, but this is one of those books where the hype just didn't live up to the reality. 3.3 stars.

Also finished Terra Incognita by Ruth Downie, the second in a series of mysteries set in Roman Britain. These are amusing romps, witty and set in an interesting time and place that Downie brings to life. In this episode, the "medicus"/doctor, Ruso, heads north with his housekeeper/mistress/slave, Tilla, to the country from which she came, only to run headlong into rebelliousness coming from the community of which Tilla was once a part. These aren't books that are really memorable, but they are fun to read; a reasonable distraction. 3.4 stars; I'll read more in the series. Halfway between a cozy and a historical mystery. 3.4 stars.

I have been falling farther and farther behind on individual threads because of all the activities that have been going on in my life, but I resolved that I will catch up and so I'm reading one thread (at least) a day to try to catch up and you are one of today's winners!

I haven't been here since late in January, my apologies, but I see that my absence hasn't stopped you from reading some good books. I've been drawn to several of the books by Michelle Moran but just haven't managed to get a hold of them. Maybe later this year I'll get lucky.

Enjoy your reads. I'll try to keep up but you read so many so fast!

#86, heavens, no apologies needed/required/expected! I'm just as bad at keeping up with others' threads right now... Thanks for the visit!

Finished In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut, one of those rare books that flummoxed me while I was reading it -- I found my opinions fluctuating madly all over the place. It's broken into three segments, each of which involve a trip by the narrator/author, and encounters with other travelers. The first segment didn't appeal at all -- it felt too emotionally remote, too studied. The second one captivated me more both because of its nature and because I began to see how Galgut was using the device to show his own evolution as an individual in contact with others over time -- how, against a backdrop that is constantly in flux (as happens when one travels, literally), human relationships are the one constant, and yet these are just as mutable. Perhaps more intriguing to think about than to relish, and yet Galgut's prose is often strikingly beautiful as well. It was a nominee for the Man/Booker award last year; while I don't think it deserved to win, I could see why it was nominated and I'm intrigued enough to seek out some more by this author. Recommended; 4.2 stars.

Hmmmm... I'm hearing a lot about In a Strange Room. I'm getting curious.

Finished reading Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd, a Christmas gift from my brother & sis in law. It's not up to the standard of his books on London and the Thames, but is still excellent -- a thematic look at this unique city through the eyes of its residents and visitors over the centuries. It's not a straightforward history -- he explores themes and ideas, jumping back and forth in time to address the issue of light, of food, of justice and the family, as they evolved in the unique environment of Venice, which remained a medieval state until Napoleon walked in and took it over in 1797, but which also was a city-state one of whose occupants could declare as early as the 16th century that he saw himself as a free man in a free country. Ackroyd draws on a lot of other well-known Venice observers -- Jan Morris, Ruskin, Mary McCarthy, to name only a few -- as well as the obvious literary commentators, from Byron to Henry James and some lesser known figures of the early Renaissance. For me, it was the tiny details that abound here that made this book fascinating to read, rather than the scope itself -- to those who know a lot about Venice, there's probably very little tremendously new beyond Ackroyd's rather unexpected view of the city as both literally and metaphorically "insular" and one that has always relied on being able to command the attention of outsiders (through trade, or today through tourism). Recommended; 4.2 stars -- this would be a great book to give someone planning a trip to Venice, even though it's not a guide book as such.

Two more to report back on, the final books read in April:

To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild is, not surprisingly given the author's identity, a tour de force. I got a first version of this from NetGalleys, then went out and purchased a hardcover copy for my own library... Yes, it's yet another look at WW1, but not surprisingly, Hochschild (author of King Leopold's Ghost has taken a different angle, looking at the way the war divided ordinary people. Did the war need to happen? Did it need to be directed by foolish generals? Why did so many resist the overwhelming tide of patriotism and propaganda, at such a cost? The author tackles all those questions through the stories of stalwart believers in the British empire, socialists and suffragettes, and odd characters like lion tamers and coal miners turned politicians, all of whom came to conflicting positions via different routes. There are well known supporters of the war who paid a terrible price in these pages -- like Rudyard Kipling, who never recovered from the death of his son and yet who continued to support the war to the bitter end -- and well known opponents, like Bertrand Russell. But there are also the obscure figures, like conscientious objectors shot or imprisoned and brought to life in these pages. It's not a military history, although there are enough general details of the campaigns (and the way the generals ignored the ramifications of new technologies like the machine gun and barbed wire) to enable anyone unfamiliar with the war to follow the chain of events. It may not be a definitive history, but it's an accessible one that clearly lays out the causes and consequences, and focuses on the people caught up in the conflict for more than four years. A must-read; while not as brilliant as Paul Fussell's iconic book The Great War and Modern Memory, I'd recommend it as a one-stop book on the war for anyone who doesn't expect to be interested. Hochschild is a marvellous storyteller at his best here. 4.8 stars.

Also read Treasury of Regrets by Susanne Alleyn. Set in the French Revolution, in the immediate aftermath of Robespierre's terror, this is a somewhat interesting procedural mystery. It's solid, but never really gripped me to the point where I couldn't put it down, and it didn't really tell me much beyond the facts of what it was like to live in this interregnum, between Robespierre's rule and the rise to absolute power of Napoleon. Instead, there's a crime -- the death of an old miser and head of a family all of whom may have had motive and opportunity to bump him off -- and an investigator who follows a pathway through the clues to find the culprit. A bit predictable, but those who adore procedural mysteries will probably find more to enjoy than I did; I wonder if I might have enjoyed this more had I started by reading the first book in the series. (I realized about halfway through this wasn't it; that's the point where I figured out whodunnit, too.) 3.4 stars.

Good review. To End All Wars is going on the WL.

Finished The Queen of Last Hopes by Susan Higginbotham. I'm a fan of historical novels; have been since I was a child. And I loved the author's first book. But I'm increasingly recognizing that the historical novels I enjoy most are those narrated from different/non-traditional perspectives (i.e. not kings and queens) or those that explore ideas instead of just dressing up historical facts with dialogue. Unfortunately, this book meets neither test. It's an intriguing book, a revisionist version of Marguerite d'Anjou, one of the warring queens in the Wars of the Roses (wife to Henry VI). But by now I know the broad story so well that while I can marvel at the depth of research, I needed more than that in this book -- the story isn't new, the way it's told is very plain vanilla. Perhaps the research overwhelmed the issue of turning it into a novel?? Anyway, I'm rating this 3.1 stars and hoping that my next few books will make up for today's disappointments. Only for really avid historical fiction buffs; although I count myself as one, I also note it was very easy for me to keep putting this aside in favor of some other reading I was doing.

Another book finished! Death in a Scarlet Coat, the latest installment of the Lord Powerscourt mystery series by David Dickinson. It's now 1909, and Lord Powerscourt, intrepid sleuth, is asked by a doctor on his deathbed to investigate the truth behind the death of the 15th earl of Candlesby, a man nearly everyone was delighted to see dead. The book is a decent, if formulaic mystery; the series has lost the charms of novelty but I still enjoy the rather archaic writing style and Dickinson's characters. 3.9 stars, only for those who have read (and enjoyed) previous books in the series, but a good way to pass a few hours!

I'm nearly finished the mystery category after reading The Preacher by Camilla Lackberg, the second in a still-promising Swedish series. It was available on my Kindle while I was in Canada last summer; but it's just out in hardcover here -- odd. Anyway, I liked The Ice Princess enough to buy the remainder of the series, and this one pretty much holds up. In it, Patrik Hedstrom must solve the disappearances/murders of young women that seem to be connected to two similar cases in 1979, and that may be tied to a rather dysfunctional family, children and grandchildren of Ephraim Hult, the preacher of the title, who lucked into a big legacy on the strength of his revivalist ministry, which included faith healing by his two young sons. This second book has a few flaws, included an overly complex family structure that a reader needs to figure out; the fact that Patrik's wife/partner is too preoccupied with her advanced pregnancy to be more than a side character and some odd stylistic hiccups that I think are the fault of the translator. (They don't disrupt the ability to get engaged in the book, but occasionally niggle at the consciousness). So this is a 3.7 star book rather than 4 or 4.2 stars. Still recommended if you've read the first book, and I'll keep reading the series. ETA: the latter is for my 11 in 11 challenge.

Seems we had the same reaction to The Ice Princess - I too bought the rest of the series after reading the first one! Need to get around to reading them, though. :)

I'm planning to move onto #3 soon! I'm hoping that it turns out to be that #1 is the real indicator of how the series will progress, and that it was merely a case of 'sophomore slump'...

Meanwhile, have finished up the series mysteries category! And did it with an even better mystery: The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves. I thought this was an excellent mystery novel; a bit like a novel that just happens to revolve around a mystery. It's on the long side (535 pages), which may put some readers off, especially since the author has also chosen to tell the story from multiple points of view, particularly in the initial section. Indeed, it isn't until the final 120 pages or so that we see the crime & investigation from the POV of Vera Stanhope, the detective who heads up the investigations in Cleeves's latest series. There are oodles of red herrings and secrets in this story of a mysterious suicide followed by a murder in a remote corner of Northumberland; the plot revolves around three women doing an environmental survey at the site of a proposed gravel pit, and the characters involved in that project on all sides. Or do the roots go back further in time? I found it easy to follow wherever Cleeves led, and was grabbed by the story from the first to the last page. Not brilliant literary tome, but a fun & lively mystery, rich in characters and descriptions, that would be a great rainy weekend book. 4.3 stars, recommended.

Finished Swamplandia!, another of the novels by the 20 under 40 novelists anointed by the New Yorker. I think Russell's writing skills are amazing, as are her inventive powers. These made the novel an easy and often an entertaining read. But it never really transcended that -- a superb novel or even a "thumping good read" is one where I am almost absorbed by the narrative (literally) to the point where I can forget that I'm reading. With this book, I was always conscious of the process of reading and of the author herself -- almost as if she was one of the Bigtree alligator wrestlers showing me what she could do with one of the "Seths" in the alligator pit. She can do a lot, but sometimes what is more impressive is stepping back after reading a book and reaching that conclusion for myself. The other issue I had with this book -- and it's not one that will bug everyone, but any means -- is just the sheer unreality of it, which just seems to get more acute with each passing page. She may be trying to make a point here, about literary style, or whatever, but none of the characters here were people I could in any way relate to, with the very occasional exception of Kiwi. I didn't feel Osceola was a three-dimensional character at all, and Ava was just too far up in the clouds. When I hit the Bird Man, I threw my arms up in the air and began to wonder whether Russell was ABLE to write a character that wasn't a grotesque or an eccentric -- because here, even the mainlanders that Kiwi encounters in his gig at the "World of Darkness" are all eccentric/absurd to the extreme; Russell exaggerates human characteristics to the breaking point. I'm not a reader that demands a character to identify with or like; but I like to recognize and understand at least one of them; that they be human in some way. Even when Ada was battling human emotions such as grief, she was doing so in such bizarre ways that I found myself distanced from the novel -- again, I reverted to being a spectator. I wanted to love the book; instead, I ended up admiring it. 3.75 stars; I'll round up to 4 stars but really this was probably closer to 3.5 in terms of pure enjoyment.

Thanks for the review of Swamplandia! I've heard a lot about it, but still haven't decided weather or not to read it.

Cammykitty, it's worth a try... I'm interested in seeing how it compares to Mr. Chartwell, which I'm now reading and which has an even more surreal premise, but which I find far more focused and convincing narrative.

Meanwhile...

Snow Country was a re-read of a book by Yasunari Kawabata that I first read many years ago, in the early 1980s, when I moved to Japan and ended up living in a student dorm in the area that Kawabata writes about (albeit more than 40 years after he had begun the series of sketches that eventually went to make up the novel. Re-reading it I found it far less impressive as a novel, but more interesting as a reflection of changing Japanese society. The protagonist, if one can use that word of such a consummate dilettante as Shimamura, is SUCH a dilettante that he switches his area of focus (he's of independent means) to western ballet from Japanese dance, so that he's never really going to have to live up to his expertise; he can consider to ruminate on esoterics in isolation. The novel itself deals with romantic dilettantism: it revolves around Shimamura's contacts with two women he meets at a hot springs resort on three separate visits, their very different characters and yet his very similar response to both -- engagement, but then a pulling back when things begin to involve real emotion on at least one side. One is a young woman who, over the course of his visits, formally becomes a geisha; the other, a mysterious woman whom he first sees reflected in the train window en route to the resort, as she tends to another passenger, a dying man. It's a frustrating novel as so much is left unsaid and unspoken, requiring the reader to read between the lines very extensively. It also helps to have some knowledge of Japanese culture and society, as well as the history of Japan's contacts with the West in the first half of the 20th century. That irked a lot of people in my book circle; particularly the inability to even relate to Shimamura or Komako, the geisha, as characters. I had a different perspective, and found Shimamura reflective of the landscape in which he found himself -- frozen. Unlike Komako -- there's a lot of language revolving around color and cold/heat in the book -- whose head is at one point described as being hot and overheated underneath her geisha headdress, Shimamura is emotionally cold, however well shielded he may be from the elements. Even Komako's warmth can't touch him. I'd still rate this as a 4 star book, but going forward I'd certainly be more cautious about recommending it to others!

Finished Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt -- this was even more bizarre and esoteric than Swamplandia!, and more uneven in terms of writing and characterization, but at the same time a tighter, more focused and more intriguing narrative. It all revolves around the name Winston Churchill gave to his recurrent fits of Depression -- the Black Dog. Hunt has simply imagined the dog in question as real, if visible only to the dog's "clients" and not most of those 'normal' folks around them. The Black Dog makes his first appearance not at Chartwell, Churchill's home in Kent, but AS Mr. Chartwell, when he shows up to rent a room in Esther's home. To Esther's astonishment, Mr. Chartwell turns out to be a 6'7" ugly, smelly and eerie kind of black dog -- and yet she ends up allowing him to live there. Hunt does a terrific job of showing the reader the rather repugnant nature of living with a human-like dog -- and the shifting nature of his nascent relationship with Esther as well as his long-standing persecution of Churchill. There are bits and pieces of wonderful writing here ("the lonely monotony of the ghost days") and the story is elegantly constructed, leading up to an intriguing meeting between the dog -- now known to Esther as "Black Pat" -- Churchill and Esther herself. Extremely clever in plot -- how many people would choose to make manifest, literally, the phenomenon of depression? -- and structure; the writing is uneven and the characterization sometimes distant, but I didn't mind those flaws. Admittedly, I grimaced with distaste at some of Black Pat's antics and Hunt's descriptions of his smells, eating habits, etc., but that was also a sign of how engaged I was in the book. Creepy but fascinating; recommended, although it's not a book everyone will like. 4.2 stars; here's an author to watch, not least for her imaginative powers.

100 Sounds interesting. There is a type of faerie that is a black dog. Traditionally, it hunts church yards and you don't want to see one of them. You really don't want to see one.

If I catch a glimpse, I will close my eyes...

Another great book read:

Young Romantics by Daisy Hay is a wonderful addition to the literature available about the younger generation of Romantic poets (Shelley, Keats and Byron, rather than Wordsworth and Coleridge). While their heirs chose to view the poets as toiling in romantic solitude, the reality was very different, as Hay shows in this immensely readable history of their lives and works. Indeed, the central point of the book isn't a household name, but rather the poet and newspaper publisher Leigh Hunt, who maintained friendships of various durations and strengths with virtually all the main and the peripheral players and who always aspired to form a kind of Platonic academy with men of genius surrounding him. Of course, real life and strong personalities intervened -- and it wasn't only the men who had the genius. (Viz. Mary Shelley...) Hay does a superb job of blending life and literature and despite the incredible number of books on the group, collectively and individually, I thought this was a remarkable addition. A great introduction to the poets and their importance, as it is set in the context of the times and there is plenty of background about the main characters, the political and social environment in which they wrote and which shaped their ideas and concerns. Highly recommended; onto my best books of the year list. 4.5 stars.

(Last year I read a fictional telling of the story of some of the main characters in this -- Passion by Jude Morgan. Also excellent.)

It does sound interesting. I heard Percy Shelley always had an entourage.

Finished two more: I kinda feel as if I'm on track with this challenge (for now, at least...)

Chasing Aphrodite by Jason Felch & Ralph Frammolino is a more-than-competent look at the only gradually abating kerfuffle surrounding the looting of antiquities in countries like Italy and Greece and the black market dealings in these objects that came to light in recent decades. Its only real flaw is that it's one of a host of books on some aspect of the scandals and battles that have followed, which is a pity, as it's also one of the stronger and more focused narratives. The authors hone in on the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (well, Malibu, to be precise) and follow the narrative through the host of looted objects (or objects of uncertain provenance) acquired as the Getty emerged as the richest collecting institution in North America. To anyone who has followed the news reports, or read some of the other books, there probably won't be much that feels fresh. I'm one of those readers, but even so, I found this lively and intriguing; I kept reading to the very last page, eager to see how the authors would steer the discussion next. There's some impressive reporting here, and they are alert to the nuances of their subject, including the deep irony that Marion True, the disgraced Getty curator, was at once the advocate for a new approach to collecting and tougher due diligence, even as she couldn't resist accepting tainted donations and getting too cozy with museum donors. What emerges is a portrayal of an artistic world that is nastier, more back-biting and vicious than most of the general world might imagine (museum politics makes Washington look warm and fuzzy) and a fascinating saga of how some masterpieces from the Hellenic and Roman eras made it into our museums. It's another tribute to this book that I ended it resolved to head off to the Met soon and amble through the classical galleries, in case more of the objects vanish back to the places where they were unearthed by "tombaroli", aka tomb robbers. The other book to read on this subject, FYI, is Loot by Sharon Waxman, which takes a wider-ranging view of the issue of looting, focusing on a wider array of countries, objects and issues. I'd rate that about 4.5 stars, and this gets 4.2 stars from me. You really don't need to read any of the other tomes to get a good grip of what everyone is arguing about.

Catching the Tide by Judith Lennox is a piece of fluff I opted to read to cope with not enough sleep and too much stress. I suppose it fulfilled its function, but that's about it. It's the saga of two sisters, and a woman whose life interacts with theirs after her husband has an affair with the elder sister. Kinda Rosamund Pilcher-esque, with WW2 as the background, but Lennox passes up lots of opportunities to make it as appealing as the fluffy-yet-fun Pilcher sagas are. Not really recommended unless you're stuck on a cruise ship with nothing to read and want to numb your brain. 2.9 stars.

Prophecy by S.J. Parris (aka Stephanie Merrit) features Giordano Bruno, an Italian scholar and former monk excommunicated by the Catholic church, who in this novel (the second in a series) has taken refuge in Elizabethan England. It's kind of a last stop for him: should the Catholic powers supporting Mary, Queen of Scots invade and put her on the throne, the Inquisition would follow and his life would be forfeit. Besides, Bruno has an admiration for Elizabeth and her scholarly interests. In the prior book in the series, Bruno played a role in defeating one conspiracy; now he's resident in London at the French embassy and (inexplicably to me) ends up sitting around as part of the discussions in a grand plot to unthrone Elizabeth and free Mary. The plot is a lot more complex than that -- rather too tangled, in fact -- and there's a lot of occult-like distraction which doesn't help that plot move forward -- but the detail and color are great, and Bruno is an interesting character. Solid book, but one to borrow from the library rather than purchase. 3.6 stars, mildly recommended and not nearly as good as Dissolution and the other Shardlake mysteries by C.J. Sansom. I'll be reading the third in a series of similarly-set mysteries by Rory Clements which take a different view of some of the characters in this one; I think I generally prefer that series.

And one more...
Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys is a WONDERFUL novel that deserves its own lengthy review, and so will get one in the next few days. It's an extremely complex narrative, with many twists and turns, some big jumps back and forth (the narrator has a penchant for leaping forward with a big spoiler and then stepping back to fill in the narrative gaps.) In essence, it's the story of "Tom", a Polish student in the 1930s, and his effort to keep the woman he loves and is obsessed with, the actress Tola, from getting involved with the WW2 resistance, by inventing an entirely fictional group named Rondo, and enlisting her in it -- with tragi-comic results. It takes a long time to get to that point, but I was caught up in the book from the first few pages, and although I ended up borrowing this from the library, I'll be buying a copy for myself, as it's something I'm going to want to re-read, and read some more. The only thing that keeps this at 4.7 stars is that I sometimes felt the need of a road map and list of characters; reading this requires one's full attention and repays very thoughtful reading.

I like the sound of Winesburg, Ohio. It sounds similar in feel to Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, but maybe I'm wrong. And Young Romantics sounds really good as well. Thanks for the reviews.

#107, thanks for visiting! Winesburg is an odd book... I wish I had liked it better. What it really reminded me of in feel is Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology. The focus is on characters and, through them, telling the story of a community. But yes, Young Romantics is a book I can recommend unreservedly. I think this might have been the author's doctoral dissertation; I hope she's working on something else.

Meanwhile...

A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland was a sometimes fascinating voyage into what "real" silence looks like, feels like and 'sounds' like. Maitland, who became a feminist and a Christian in the late 60s (she hung out with Bill Clinton at Oxford), went on to become a Roman Catholic and a novelist/short story writer. Increasingly, however, she hungers for solitude and silence, and this book is the chronicle of her attempts to seek it out and her ruminations on the nature of silence. The best thing about this book, IMO, is that it isn't a stunt memoir -- this is really how she lives, and it wasn't just an experiment undertaken in order to blog about it or write about it. The other big plus is that she's got a brilliant mind and is a talented writer. But... I couldn't love it. It wasn't the religious elements, which are there, but downplayed as much as is possible given that a big chunk of the world's experience with silence has come as a result of religious conviction (whether Christian hermits or Buddhists). The one small thing that irritated me slightly was the extensive quoting of often repetitious material, from creation myths to poetry. Don't get me wrong -- I'm interested in these things. But I'm MORE interested in what Maitland thinks of them -- after all, it's her book that I am reading. The larger issue is a more fundamental one. Maitland is scornful of the noisy world and its frivolous concerns, and in many respects I share that basic opinion. But the reality is that the kind of solitude she seeks out and views as necessary or at least helpful for human beings to realize things about themselves is a luxury in our world, even for those who might be able to tolerate the extremes that she can. Moreover, I kept wondering about what the people that loved her and needed her in their lives thought about all this? I'm essentially more solitary than group oriented, but even I found my eyebrows rising up towards my hairline on a few occasions. I'm quite sure Maitland is self-aware and that her intentions are pure, but she seems to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to what others might need, psychologically, from her -- her presence, her attention, etc. And while a bit more silence may be very good for all of us, we couldn't cope as a society with people who retreated from others in the way that Maitland does. So this was a fascinating book, raising lots of provocative questions, more personal than George Prochnik's book about noise that I read last year, but with its own set of issues. 3.85 stars (am I getting picky, taking this to the second decimal place???)

Hiya

Thanks for the review of Swamplandia! which I have been toying with putting on my wishlist. I think, from your review, it's safely off!

Re: message 105, do you know Giordano Bruno was a real person? He was in London from 1583-85.

#109 -- Yes, I do know a reasonable amount about Bruno -- including his ultimate fate, which makes reading these books a bit odd, to say the least! And some of the situations and conversations more than little ironic...

I would give Swamplandia! a try from a library, or sample a Kindle book, or something... I hate being an arbiter, as opinions on some books are so varied. In this case, I suspect I'm in the minority, and while I didn't love it, neither did I loathe it. At either extreme, I can be very insistent about my opinion -- for instance, I adored Rondo -- but in that tricky middle ground, I struggle... Which reminds me, I need to work on the review for Rondo. In my free time - LOL!

How funny is this...
Tina and I both won Prophecy in the May ER batch and borrowed Book 1 from the library before talking to each other.

After reading your review, I'm really looking forward to it!

Aha -- sisters-- great minds thinking alike! Here's some more to ponder:

The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley is classic brain candy fluff, but a delightful Sunday read, especially for someone with a lingering migraine. Eva returns to the Cornish manor house where she and her recently-deceased sisters had spent many happy years as children, in order to scatter her sister's ashes. She stays on to help friends turn the manor into a tea garden, revolving around its famous roses. But then she finds that somehow she can "slip" into the past -- specifically, to 1715, and the little known Jacobite rebellion that was brewing at the time. It's primarily a love story/time travel historical novel, with a very very fun twist at the end of the book, when Eva realizes she may not be the only time traveler around. It reminds me of two of Dinah Lampitt's books which, despite their rather lurid 70s/early 80s style covers, are actually very interesting and sometimes funny time-travel based sagas. In one of those, As Shadows Haunting, the main character, Sidonie, is a specter who witnesses what happens to Lady Sarah Lennox and her family and friends at Holland House (her new home is in today's Holland Park, near where that vast house once stood.) In the other, Banishment, the heroine literally slides into an existing body and is caught up in the events of the English Civil War (1641-1645, more or less), and has to get accustomed to living without toothpaste and other stuff in a world where people fight each other on horseback. The latter is a closer parallel to this and both characters must face a decision on what world they belong. Kearsley's latest was a fun page-turner and a thumping good read; 4.2 stars, recommended if you like her books or this kinda stuff. I particularly liked this because it's set on the south coast of Cornwall, only a dozen miles or so from my own fave vacation place (though I only go off-season!!)

I'm glad to see your review of The Rose Garden! I have another Susanna Kearsley book on my TBR shelf right now (The Winter Sea), but I bought it on a whim without really knowing much about it. Sounds like I will probably enjoy this author!

I really enjoyed The Winter Sea and other Kearsley stuff. I have The Rose Garden out of the library right now and will probably get to it this weekend.

I really enjoy Kearsley; in some ways, she feels like a throwback to the days of quality romantic fiction, before everything became about ripped bodices. I'm no prude, but when the plot is tissue thin and just an excuse to get from one sex scene to the next, I get very, very, very bored!

I'm going to re-read The Winter Sea, which I just added to my Kindle via their big sale (which ends on the 15th...)

If you like that type of novel, Barbara Erskine is quite similar to Kearlsey. Her earlier stuff is more heavy on history than the latter but its all quite good. I can't say that I like romantic stuff either but this is definitely more story with a little romance thrown in for good measure.

Yes, I enjoy some of Erskine's but tend to back away when she gets too far into the supernatural. Sure, time travel or whatever is inherently supernatural, but she has things that border on demonic possessions, reincarnation, etc. etc. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Which is why her latest has been languishing unread for a while!

Today's opus:

The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot is essentially a case study in snobbery, a snapshot of how it rules the lives of a collection of women (many of the men are elderly, or off at war -- the time frame is roughly the summer of 1944) in an England where class issues are about to be even more challenged than they already had been, by the high cost of peace. Roona Bolby -- Miss Bolby -- goes off to be a live-in governess at the home of Lady Rushford; she is ecstatic to leave behind her lower-middle class existence at a Birmingham boarding house and return to the aristocratic milieu where she feel she belongs. Miss Bolby -- through whose eyes we seen a large part of the plot develop -- is an unreliable narrator, and one of those individuals who, if you saw their activities televised, would make you recoil and wince in embarassment for them. She draws attention at the drop of a hat to her sister's marriage to a man who becomes a knight and a general; to the role she played in another noble household, to the bracelets she wears that were allegedly presented to her mother by a Rajah. But were they really? That is her public claim, but so many of her other claims are so patently unlikely, that the reader ends up questioning even that. Initially the reader's instinct is to have compassion for someone whose sense of identity is so fragile, who has never been allowed to let her natural talent for singing flourish, whose mother has bent and twisted her sense of what is right and appropriate, and who at heart is so fearful. But over time, we realize that just as others can be harsh and scornful of Miss Bolby, she in her turn can cause incalculable damage, behaving almost like a tank in her single-minded determination to claim the respect she believes she is owed for her status. The only character here that I see as "above" class snobbery of all kinds is Reenie, the new kitchen maid who has never been "in service" before and cheerfully admits she has no idea of what to do. She does, however, know instinctively how to relate to everyone she comes across as individuals, not people of a certain status, and she is the only person here to do so. She's also the only one who seems comfortable in her own skin, not needing the protective coating of a defined class position. Particularly intriguing: the author of this was the sister of a member of the English aristocracy, so she knew whereof she spoke. Recommended; it might feel like a women's novel, but then the role of women in shaping class considerations can't be ignored and this had ripple effects throughout society for generations. I was left wondering whether any of these individuals, however pleasant some seemed, would be able to survive in a classless world. Intriguing; 4.1 stars.

Yah, lately she was been writing some strange things. I really enjoy the older stuff where it was more focused on history.

Berlin 1961 by Fred Kempe is one of those iconic books about diplomatic history. We may look back today at JFK as a statesman, but this chronicle of his foreign policy missteps during his critical first year in the presidency may cause the reader to re-think this and other assumptions. Kempe (who I worked with when he was editing the WSJ Europe, but who did not ask me to review the book or send me a copy) has done a great job drawing on a wide range of contemporary accounts to build up a picture of JFK as a man who had never yet met someone he couldn't charm or a problem he couldn't de-fuse -- until Khruschev. The story takes the reader from JFK's assessment of geopolitical realities at his inauguration -- and missed opportunities to build a rapport with Khruschev -- to the twin disasters of the Bay of Pigs and the Vienna Summit, both of which persuaded the man in the Kremlin that he could take a hard line without risking nuclear war. As Kennedy himself later told his aides, "a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war." The wall in question, of course, is the Berlin Wall, set up (a barbed wire version thereof) almost overnight one summer Saturday morning in that critical year, setting the stage for a tank-to-tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie that autumn. This is excellent diplomatic history, if not always gripping reading on a page by page basis for the general reader (although the account of the wall going up, and the confrontation that autumn, both had me turning pages feverishly.) I also appreciated the way Kempe breaks up the narrative with three- or four-page anecdotes that illustrate the issues and the stakes from the perspective of participants such as a Miss Universe, a Berlin student, and others affected by the division of Germany in two. This is a chunkster, but if you're at all interested in the period, the personalities or the issues, you'll want to read all 502 pages. 4.5 stars.

Your last two reads are very different but both sound fascinating. Onto the wishlist...

For anyone who is following me here... I have just launched a book blog that can be found at www.uncommonreading.blogspot.com. For now, some of the content may feel repetitive (some of it has already been posted either here or on my 75-book challenge thread), but as the weeks pass, there will be more and more original content over there -- and the sooner I reach a critical mass of visible "followers", the faster I can begin book giveaways!

Finally finished Elizabeth I by Margaret George. This was a definite chunkster, a novel focusing on the last years of Elizabeth's reign, from the Armada onwards. In other words, it chronicles (in 680 or so pages...) the gradual process of disintegration as the queen sees her closest advisors and friends slip away, one after the other, and disillusionment and sadness set in. It's told alternately by Elizabeth and Lettice Knollys, her cousin and rival. Will be posting a longer review on my blog this week (and will link to that here); for now, I'll close with a note that this is probably a 3.8 star book, mostly because it's too long. I don't shy away from long books, but this was sometimes an ordeal to read, in part because it felt repetitive at times. Still recommended for HF fans, however.

The Shadow of What We Were by Luis Sepulveda is a little gem of a novella that won the 2009 Premio Primavera, an award for Spanish literature. I've blogged about this and Anna Gavalda's novel (just follow the link http://uncommonreading.blogspot.com/2011/06/summer-novella-mania.html), so I'll just say that this is the story of what happens when some old Chilean exiles return home and have a last chance to make a revolutionary gesture. I loved it; a brilliant novella to which the translation does full justice. I've gotta say, I'm tempted to just order blindly whatever books Europa Editions publish; I don't think I can go wrong. 4.6 stars.

And one more! Finally finished The Dew Breaker by Edwige Danticat. This was a puzzling book for me, because the concept intrigued me -- a series of stories linked by the past trauma of Haitians that they cover up in their new homes as expats. And yet, even given that kind of potential drama, I struggled more than I expected to finish a relatively short book -- it was the kind that I kept putting down and not going back to. Part of the problem was that the stories didn't all appeal to me to the same extent, so it was hard to step back and evaluate the book as a whole as it was to read it. Perhaps a book to go back to; definitely I think I'll need to try another Danticat novel to get a sense of her as an author. 4 stars, simply because I don't think for me it was worth more, despite some stellar moments, and not less, simply because there were some stellar moments.

I haven't read Danticat. I've heard the name a lot, but didn't realize Edwige was a female name, or that she is Haitian. She is, right? In my 12/12, I'm going to focus one category on the Carribean. Maybe we can revisit her together in 2012.

Sounds like a good plan, Cammy! yes, she's Haitian, and I'd def. be interested in reading more.

Almost forgot to update the list:
The last two Giller prizewinners have been so stellar (see my blog post here http://uncommonreading.blogspot.com/2011/07/canada-day-sentimentalists-and-gille..., that I felt sure the winning street would continue with Skibsrud's dark horse novel (it had an initial print run of a whopping 800 copies.) It didn't. Now, she could emerge as an immensely talented writer, based on some of the prose in this, but she ain't there yet, by a long shot -- both plot and characters get away from her constantly, and occasionally even the writing left me bemused and bewildered or just irritable. Eg -- "even my sadness I kept to myself and did not allow to blend or to combine in any way: with the sadness of my mother, for example -- also isolate -- as she came out bravely from the house and walked to the end of the drive, to stand beside the window and to kiss my father on the lips, with tears standing in her eyes, though she did not acknowledge them; that by not brushing them away she perhaps intended were not there." Took me three tries to read that sentence, and I'm not sure it was worth it. And that's the problem with this book, in a nutshell. There's a lot of oblique, opaque writing -- but to what purpose? A mildly interesting story of a daughter kinda/sorta/maybe trying to re-engage with her alcoholic and unwell father, who eventually tells her a story about his Vietnam experiences that apparently has haunted him for decades. But I never found this engaging or emotionally convincing. 2.4 stars. I'd say don't bother, but hey, it's only about 200 pages and that probably won't kill anyone.

Suzanne, I've just spend an enjoyable 20 minutes or so browsing on your blog. Some excellent reading there, I was very interested in your comments about the Giller prize, and your list of recommended summer reads. I must get to Three Day Road sooner rather than later.

Nice review of the past two Giller winners! I agree, the Giller does has a rather lucrative purse in comparison to other literary prizes. I have learned that my tastes in books don't mirror those of the judges as The Sentimentalists never attracted my interest and I abandoned The Bishop's Man quite early into the book as I found the plot development was just too slow for what I was in the mood for. That is a book I need to be in the right frame of mind before I read it, or I will just end up abandoning it again.

Now, that being said, I really loved your review of Brandys' Rondo. I will be keeping an eye out for a copy of that book to add to my shelves and have bookmarked your blogspot.

Thanks for visiting the blog, folks! I was amused to find that the Giller Prize folks are now following me on Twitter... *grin*

Finished Queen by Right by Anne Easter Smith. I still like historical fiction, and the context of this book was particularly interesting (the years that led up to the Wars of the Roses, and the context for them) but... In many ways, this felt like a "color-by-numbers" novel, in which the author has the outlines of a character's life, and dutifully fills them in in more or less vivid colors, depending on his or her skill, with the requisite numbers of war scenes, conflicts, love scenes, etc. etc. For some reason, this formula, which hasn't bothered me in the last 40 years or so, is starting to get on my nerves. So even though I was reasonably interested in this novel focused on the life of Cecily Neville (the mother of Edward IV and Richard III, and an ancestress of all England's subsequent monarchs), it never really touched me to the point where I had to put everything else aside and just read it. And there were a few times when knowing too much of the history was a handicap -- the author has an unfortunate habit of foreshadowing events that she doesn't even deal with in this novel, which ends with the coronation of Edward IV in 1461, when Cecily had another thirty plus years of life left to her. (She lived to see the birth of her great-grandson, Henry VIII.) And I do wish she'd had a better copy editor: eg, I think that one is supposed to thank another for their solicitude, not their solicitation. In any event, this was a 3.4 star book for me; only recommended to die-hard historical fiction nuts.

The latest book completed was a bit of fluff; what I think of as cotton candy reading. I've been stressed and a bit headachey much of the day, so this was my treat:
Summer of Love is by Katie Fforde, an English chick lit author whose books I've been reading for a number of years. Her last two weren't that good, so I was pleased to find this was an entertaining if predictable addition to the list. Fforde's heroines are always creative and crafty -- artists, decorators, designers or something along those lines -- and this time around, Sian's passion is for turning ancient clunky boring furniture into works of art with painted designs. But there's less attention than usual to the crafty subplot like this, and more emphasis than ever on the lurve stories -- the more amusing one was that of Fiona, the older woman, who falls for an antiquarian bookseller. Sian's dilemma as a single mother is mildly fun to follow -- should she settle for the man who adores her and is stable, even though he bores her, or take a chance that the man she is drawn to more than anyone might share her feelings and prove more stable than he seems? Well, if you read these books, you know the answer. A 3.3 star book for me; good book therapy. Off to find dinner, ice packs, meds and bed. Wish the thunderstorm that is threatening would just happen and get it over with! We had a few bits of rain an hour or two ago, but nothing significant.

Hope you are feeling better Suzanne. Headaches are the worst, nothing usually works for me but sleeping it off. I haven't read anything by Katie Fforde but I have some of her books on my wishlist. Every once and awhile I need a good dose of chick-lit.

Yes, thanks, the headache finally abated... It's always such a relief when that happens! A bit like being reborn!

Finished The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna, and all I can say is that the Orange Prize judges may well have been temporarily deranged not to honor this accomplished novel. It's that rare phenomenon, an "issues" novel that doesn't hammer the reader over the head and tell them "here's how to think about this!", doesn't short change either characters or plot in the author's pursuit of the message, and has a wonderful and evocative style. Yes, I'm sure it could do with a bit of pruning, both in language and content, but overall, I thought this story of individuals struggling to cope not with the violence of actual conflict but the more subtle kind of "violence" that is the aftermath/legacy of a war, both gripping and fascinating. To most of those he encounters in Sierra Leone, Adrian is just a "tourist" -- a do-gooder who will vanish after his year-long posting as a psychologist is over. Adrian is determined to leave some kind of positive legacy in a country whose citizens have not only visible but invisible scars left from the wars -- those he treats or attempts to treat include the victims of the most recent and most violent conflict, but of a crackdown on dissidents or potential troublemakers as far back as the late 1960s. Just as Adrian finds himself (unknowingly) in an odd triangular relationship with a surgeon at his hospital, Kai, and a young woman, Mamakay, so one of the hospital's patients, Elias Cole, who treats him as a kind of confidant, tells him the story of an earlier triangle, involving Elias, a fellow professor named Julius, and Julius's wife, Saffia. But Elias may not be a reliable narrator... I found the portrait of Kai, including his memories of childhood, his relationship with his young cousin Abass, his sleep disorders and his difficulty in deciding whether to follow so many of his peers and take the easy option of leaving his homeland to practice in the United States, to be the most affecting of the stories told here. I'll probably blog more about this over the weekend, when I've had a chance to digest it. But the bottom line is that while this novel isn't flawless (there are one or two "coincidences"; one or two ends that are tucked up altogether too neatly), it's certainly one of the best novels I've read this year. 4.7 stars.

Oh dear, I'm falling behind in this challenge -- especially if I factor in the "bonus books"!

At least I've completed one more: Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto. Set in post-colonial Mozambique, this intriguing and literally magical tale is told by a dead man, in danger of having his corpse dug up and hailed as a hero of the revolutionary struggle. Instead, he flies up to occupy a tiny corner of the body of a police inspector come to probe the murder of Vastsome Excellency, the guardian in charge of the seafront fort where the narrator is buried and that is home to a bunch of elderly residents, each of whom seems eager to confess to the crime and each of whom confesses to using a different method. The process of telling these tales reveals the gap between traditional and "new" Mozambique -- "they're all telling you things of great importance," the nurse tells him. "You just don't speak their language." The police inspector protests he speaks Portuguese -- but the residents belong to a different world, and speak its variant of Portuguese. And the real crime, the nurse tells him, is that the past is being killed off, including the roots that the residents have to magic, to the earth, to traditions -- yes, even the one white Portuguese resident who loves the frangipani tree of the title, the tree that plays a crucial role in all the various tales in this novella, including that of the narrator. A fascinating glimpse into a different form of magical realism, a new novelist and his world. 4 stars.

Wow! Under the Frangipani sounds really good. WL time!

Ditto 135!

It is... and it's short. So you can spend lots of time pondering all the symbolism!!

One more good one...

Finished Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi, which was the wonderful story of a middle-aged apolitical and apathetic man, Dr. Pereira, whose acquaintance with a young man in the Lisbon of the late 1930s forces him to reconsider his lifestyle, which has consisted of blocking out the news, eating omelettes and drinking sugary lemonade, and talking to the photo of his dead wife. I loved the delicately-written and perfectly-paced narrative, and the way the author sets it up as a kind of testimony, with "Pereira declares" every few sentences making it clear that Dr. Pereira is telling someone, somewhere this tale. But who and why? The ending hints at it, but I'm not going to hint at the ending... 4.5 stars.

Perreira Declares sounds good too.

Finished Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz, which was fabulous. Just a few thoughts here, as I'll be blogging about it and Geraldine Brooks's novel March together later this week. (I'll post the link here when I do. It's a great reminder that Brown was unusual for his time in really viewing blacks as equals, not just advocating an end to slavery and thinking about dumping freed slaves somewhere in Africa. It's also disconcerting how passionate beliefs can lead to war in a divided nation -- and frankly, it made me worry a bit about our current situation, even though the fault line isn't geographic (hopefully making "real" war moot.) I thought I knew the basic outlines of this story, but at points I didn't, and as always, Horwitz excelled at making the story come alive. This is the first of his books not to have his voice in it as an actor -- in the past, he has been present as someone exploring history, and this is a more conventional narrative. Very good, and timely. 4.4 stars. (And did you know that the great poet Langston Hughes is connected to one of the Harper's Ferry raiders??)

Tides of War by Stella Tillyard is one of those books that creeps up on you and you don't realize how hooked you've become on the narrative until you wander around with it in front of your nose and decide to keep reading until... whenever. Tillyard, who has written some excellent historical biography set in the late 18th century (Aristocrats is her best known opus, turned into a v. good mini-series) has turned her hand to fiction for the first time, with some unexpected results. This isn't potboiler fiction; indeed, the drama is understated throughout. Nor is it literary fiction. It's a quiet narrative about a time of immense personal transformation in the lives of her characters and the world they inhabit. When the novel opens in 1812, James Raven and some of his friends -- Major Yallop and surgeon David McBride -- are about to set out to join Lord Wellington in the latter stages of the Peninsula War. Their experiences there distance them from those they leave behind; meanwhile, Harriet Raven, one of the major characters, finds that independence suits her intellectual and personal curiosity more than she might have expected, even if her restlessness never seems to abate. Other key characters include Kitty Wellington, intent on carving out an independent existence rather than be viewed as the great man's chattel; her aide in this is Nathan Rothschild, the founder of that family's London branch. Tillyard moves effortlessly from the worlds of finance and science (the advent of the first gas lighting systems) to the battlefields of Spain and the back streets of Georgian London. By the end, while the fighting may have settled Napoleon's hash for good, there are questions looming about the kind of world to which the soldiers are returning, and new kinds of conflicts at home that emerge. As much of an intellectual challenge as a good novel -- recommended! 4.3 stars.

If either of the two above books sounds appealing, I think both are being offered this month via the Early Reviewer program...

139 - nice review -- I like Tony Horowitz's stuff - I'd read his Confederates in the Attic years and years ago and have recently acquired his book on the exporers in America... looks like I will have to add that to the wishlist.

I'm going to be re-reading Confederates in the Attic soon as I'm planning my next book, which will focus on family history/genealogy/identity.

BTW, I have reluctantly decided to change my final challenge. I had planned to read some of the books I inherited from my grandfather, but am finding it hard to bump them up my list -- many are weighty tomes, or else I'm finding I'm not as interested in reading something older about the Irish, for instance, as I am in reading a newish book about the Enlightenment. So I've tweaked my final challenge category to reflect my participation in the "Europa Challenge", a kind of bloggers' challenge to read chunks of the books published by Europa Editions between now and year-end. (Their titles include The Elegance of the Hedgehog and A Novel Bookstore, for those not familiar with the name.) I have found some of the best books I've read this year amongst their backlist, especially Rondo, and can't say I've ever been disappointed. Moreover, I've been introduced to some authors I might never have encountered before, so I'm happy to add a dozen of 'em to this challenge as an additional spur to keep reading!

Hey - Anything that keeps you going. This is supposed to be fun after all.

Sounds like a good plan to me! I've tried to read some of my grandmother's books before as part of a challenge on LT and they always got bumped too. Ah well, it's not like they're going anywhere! Enjoy your new discoveries through Europa - I haven't started reading their books yet since I'm trying to diminish the number of unreads on my shelves. :)

I inherited a bunch of books too, so I totally understand. & then as I was reading one of them, I realized my grandfather hadn't actually read the book. He always underlined passages and wrote notes in his books, and this book was clean. I'm sure every book lover leaves some unread ones behind.

A very quick update, as Hurricane Irene is closing in on his here in NYC.

Finished The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn sometime earlier this week (it's been a bit nuts, between looking after a friend post-surgery, and earthquakes, and hurricanes, so I can't remember which day.) Liked it, see why it's a classic, but while I chuckled along, and relished it, I didn't love it. I wonder if it's better as an audiobook?? 4.3 stars for me.

Stealing Rembrandts had an intriguing premise -- using the sagas involving various stolen works by Rembrandt - the world's most stolen artist -- to explore the issues behind art theft. At times very well-written, and certainly provocative when it comes to the issues, it didn't quite take off for me. Perhaps because it felt so earnest without every being gripping in tone? Still, worth reading for art world afficionados. 3.7 stars.

George, Wilhelm and Nicholas is an excellent group biography of three relatives of Queen Victoria, three emperors in the waning days of real monarchical power, and how their lives intersected and how each confronted different challenges (or the same challenge in different ways.) I emerged with surprisingly little sympathy for Nicholas II of Russia - I ended up feeling he probably deserved his fate not so much for being hapless but for the arrogance that accompanied his stupidity. World War I concludes this v. good and well-researched bio, a war that would claim two of the three men as victims. The only downside: the details of political manoeuvering occasionally become tedious, but not often enough to spoil an excellent narrative. 4.2 stars.

Be safe, Suz!

Yes, be safe! Stealing Rembrandts sounds interesting. Too bad it wasn't a bit more of a page turner.

Sunday AM in RI - we're just getting the beginning bands of wind and rain. Not supposed to be here till later in the afternoon. Hope you make out OK. Think I have Stealing Rembrandts on my wishlist somewhere.

Finished Spring Tides by Jacques Poulin; an excellent little book that sneaks up on you and turns into something quite dark and mysterious. At the beginning, all seems bright: a translator, code-named Teddy Bear, is delighted to install himself on an island with no other inhabitants that is owned by his boss, to focus on translating the comic strips. He plays tennis with a machine known as "the Prince", and for company he turns to his cat. But his boss has one fatal flaw: he's a social engineer, who simply wants people to be happy. And so, to maximize the happiness of Teddy and his cat, he drops off Marie and her cat -- and then a stream of other people. With each new addition, the dynamic shifts, and Teddy's original purpose and sense of well-being shifts. It's a fable, a parable -- but ultimately eerie. Recommended; 4.1 stars.

And one more... In the absence of working phone/Internet (verizon's fault, not Irene's), I've had some time to read!

Finished Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson, whom I am now dubbing the high priest of snark. The second book of this trilogy didn't live up to Cooking with Fernet Branca but this one definitely does. After his Italian home slides down a mountainside, Gerry Samper is living with his partner's family in England, and is miserable. Even his cooking experiments go awry, as when a field mouse appetizer produces what becomes known as the Great Puke among dinner guests. So it's back to Italy for Samper -- where he finds himself caught up in a canonization around Princess Diana and ends up writing an opera libretto -- the perfect outlet for his talents, both real and imagined. The culmination of this novel -- a performance of this -- had me laughing so hard I cried and ended up with hiccups. Def. recommended; several of the characters are back in this one, and Gerry's first-person narrative is interspersed with e-mails from his friend Adrian to a professional colleague to provide the necessary connection to reality. 4.3 stars

Wow, I need a nap. I was trying to figure out why on earth someone would want to read a book called "Rancid Penises" (or why someone would choose such a ridiculous title).

Hah! Yeah, a nap might be a good idea. This isn't Stephen's thread or anything. :)

#152 - You've given me my first good chuckle of the day! Although Eww - "Rancid Penises" sounds pretty gross.

Sounds like a good name for a punk band to me!

Given Samper's fascination with anagrams (which led to the title), and his obsession with very weird culinary inventions...

LOL! Anyway, I had to double back and ensure that I had typed that correctly...

Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon would have worked had it been less heavy-handed. In it, Weldon imagines the younger sister who died at birth (if I recall correctly) as a person, someone who had lived a life uncannily parallel to Weldon's own. (In this version "Frances" becomes the novelist, while "Fay" retires to the Antipodes to write cookbooks.) It's an amusing conceit, but the blending of Frances's reminscences and "angry old woman" comments with her observations of the possible coup d'etat being brewed up by her grandson and his young friends in her kitchen never really clicked for me. I bogged down halfway through; went back to finish it last night and ended up shrugging. Yes, she conjures up a bleak dystopia, one that may be all too probable (a world in which the events of the last few years are followed by a breakdown in the global economy and the rise of a new totalitarian government and a world dominated by CiviCams and National Meatloaf. But it's also fairly obvious; there were few surprises or turns in the narrative that would have made it unexpected, fresh or intriguing. Weldon writes well, but... 3.7 stars.

Finished Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur, a book that could have been interesting, but too often slid into sociology analysis and repeated key points. After the third or fourth khat-fueled interview with pirates, I ended up feeling that I'd heard all this before. That said, Bahadur makes some v. impt points about what drove people into piracy -- fishing pirates that eroded traditional livelihoods. Now, of course, that has become a rationalization. Bahadur kind of indirectly makes that point. This would have been a great magazine article; it's an OK book that was a bit more tedious to read than it should have been. 3.4 stars.

After a mediocre book, an excellent one! Outwitting History by Aaron Lansky was utterly delightful and an utterly unique and distinctive book, beautifully written, about the author's quixotic and tremendously successful effort to rescue Yiddish literature from oblivion. Books written in Yiddish -- the lingua franca of Europe's Jewish diaspora -- flourished from the mid-19th century into the mid-20th century, but the Holocaust, the assimilation of American Jews as discrimination there ebbed as well as the Israeli emphasis on Hebrew as the "real" Jewish language, combined to wreak havoc on Yiddish culture. What was gained -- stability, acceptance, a state -- often obscured what was in the process of being lost by the late 1970s/early 1980s, when Aaron Lansky decided to set out to save Yiddish books. This is a story of the people he met, including Woody Guthrie's widow (daughter of a Yiddish poet, she ended up hiring a young Meir Kahane -- a radical Orthodox Jew whose political party was later dubbed racist and undemocratic by Israeli authorities! -- to teach Hebrew to a young Arlo Guthrie...), and the books he saved, including a research tome published in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, and seized by the NKVD (making the copy he found the only one in existence) is utterly un-putdownable. Lansky started his crusade just early enough to meet some of those for whom living in a Yiddish-speaking world was the norm, and sees that world begin to die and in some cases be replaced by ultra-Orthodox shuls that despise these secular books and literally hiss and spit at Lansky and his colleagues, calling them heretics when they try to rescue them. Lansky clearly mourns the parting of a world that was so distinctive and created such a fascinating legacy -- but the one flaw in this book is that he doesn't give us much insight into where he stands on the question of assimilation. He hints at it, and quotes others, but as a reader, I would have liked to see him articulate his own thoughts as to whether widespread acceptance by American society has had, as a byproduct, the destruction of something valuable and unique, from Jewish neighborhoods and Yiddish-language periodicals to a sense of distinct identity. That may have been outside the remit of this book, but it would have transformed it into a remarkable book. As it stands, though, it's very, very good, and a must-read for people fascinated with books. 4.6 stars,

arg. Outwitting History has been sitting on my shelf staring at me for some time. i will have to bring it upstairs to my other (higher priority) shelf now.

:-O

Finished Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray and ended up enjoying it much more than I had expected, although what I really need is someone who is a jazz musician to explain HOW the structure is like a jazz work. I need more than just the statement that it is so; I know what I hear when I listen to jazz, but not how to relate that to a formal structure. An interesting comment at our discussion last night, and one I think I can agree with (and understand) is that in some ways the book is like opera (i'm thinking Verdi), with long sections being designed to be sung. (Which really doesn't address structure, but does go to style.) What it isn't, is a traditional narrative; for a novel it's strangely rambling (hence my earlier frustration) but still BEAUTIFULLY written memoir-style anecdotes of a community and a young African-American boy growing to manhood in Gasoline Point, Alabama. A book that requires a lot of careful reading to extract what's in there, but that proved worth the effort. 4.1 stars.

Book du jour: Eros by Helmut Krausser was strongly urged on me by Michael Reynolds, the editor over at Europa, as a great companion piece to Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys, which remains one of my fave books for the year. Reynolds suggested that Krausser was just as good and equally overlooked; I'm not sure I'm quite in agreement with the former, but it's certainly a good and interesting novel. It begins when a young journalist is summoned to the castle-like home of Alexander von Brucken, who has made several fortunes in postwar Germany but who is dying with only one thought on his mind: that someone needs to tell the story of his love for Sofie, the girl he met in an air raid shelter in the final days of World War II, as a young teen. He paid her 50 marks in order to kiss her -- and then she is evacuated, her parents die and Alexander himself is spirited out of the country after witnessing a horrible tragedy. But Alexander never forgets Sofie, and his obsession makes him a constant presence in her life, even if it's not always one she can see or understand. It's an eerie kind of story, told through the eyes of the man who is so obsessively infatuated with Sofie but also the woman herself, who turns to radical politics in the 1950s and 60s. Because of the narrative device -- the tale is being recounted by von Brucken to the first-person narrator -- I sometimes felt too distanced from the emotions, and wondered what was being concealed or emphasized by von Brucken -- was he the best teller of his own tale? The final pages raise some interesting questions about that, too. It doesn't always work, but when it does, this novel works well. 4 stars, recommended.

Finished The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester, one of his earlier books, about the man he notes is responsible for the foundation of modern geology (at least, in England). Full of fascinating and intriguing historical stuff, and most interesting when that is the focus. I admit that I got bogged down in some of the science, and really felt the lack of a cross-section showing the distortions in the various levels of strata that Winchester describes in words but couldn't really make me visualize. (There is an illustration of the layers in a 'pure' form, but since William Smith made his name because he noticed and recorded the way the various layers were folded and moving on angles, I kept trying to imagine what that was like.) Still, a great read about science in the first decades of the 1800s, and the impact that class and status had on someone like Smith, a self-taught enthusiast who made breakthroughs that transformed geology. Fascinating. 4.1 stars, marked down for the Anglocentric focus (was no one outside England doing any geological work at all during this era? I can't really believe that, but Winchester is silent on the context) and the illustration problem.

Read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, which I've been reading and re-reading since it arrived on Wednesday night, to try and get a sense of it. I found it to be a frustrating novel: I was absolutely blown away by his style and language, but was underwhelmed by the plot, which revolves around the old trope of a self-satisifed middle-aged man (well, in his 60s) being forced to confront the fact that he is self-satisfied, selfish, etc. and that his acts had unexpected consequences. The problems I struggled with were the fact that he foreshadows the course of the novel very clearly in the early pages of the novel, and made it very clear to me (at least) the kind of problem that had been created by the actions of Tony, the narrator, before page 50 of this 150-page book; the fact that several of his characters felt two-dimensional, and/or that there seemed to be little foundation for their actions (Adrian's two major decisions in this novel -- one revealed early on, the other not until the end, remain mysterious, even after two or three re-readings of the relevant pages to see if I had missed anything.) So while I was mesmerized by the beauty and eloquence of Barnes's prose -- he makes it look so easy, and I could cry at that! -- that I ended up reading about half of the book to myself out loud, the plot never enabled me to immerse myself in the narrative. I ended up focused on the author and his artistry, not on his characters or his plot. Now, I love Barnes -- his short stories are superb; I adored Flaubert's Parrot. But this isn't the kind of imaginative and creative work I've come to expect from his novels; if he wins the Booker for this, it would be like a movie star winning for a role in a movie that's just OK, after losing out in an ultra-competitive year with multiple star turns. I can't love this book of his, much as I wanted to, which leaves me (so far) not feeling passionately about any of the shortlisted books. That's in contrast to last year, when I was very excited by at least two of them. This was 4.1 stars for me; 5 stars for the writing.

And another one! Wrapped up Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema and the transformative power of music by Tricia Tunstall today. It's a NetGalleys book, which I wanted to read because I'm fascinated both by the tremendous buzz surrounding Dudamel and the phenomenon that is Venezuela's El Sistema. Alas, I didn't get much more insight into El sistema than I did from an earlier 60 minutes documentary (although I did get a lot more detail) and I found myself interested in the efforts to transplant the essence of El Sistema to the US, without really grasping much beyond the "what". I think the problem is that Tunstall (herself a music educator) is so enthusiastic about the whole phenomenon that she wasn't able to craft a really insightful book. It's borderline hagiography: there are endless quotations from music world luminaries about how revolutionary and wonderful the program and its products are, but I kept finding my questions went unanswered. What happens when you have a prodigy, given the insistence on orchestral ensembles? What happens, given the program's commitment to developing children, when that flies in the face of a child's talents or abilities - i.e. they can't move on with their peers without damaging the ensemble, or telling the child they aren't up to it? These must happen... And what happens to Sistema alums who find they can't make a living in music, or choose not to? What does it mean that El sistema was founded as an anti-elite, grassroots movement, but that it's now being embraced by elites elsewhere? And so on and so on. Better and more vivid writing would have helped offset these. Important because the subject is important, but ultimately frustrating for what it doesn't say, while it repeats praise to the point where I wanted to... well, never mind. 3.1 stars

@162 I always like Simon Winchester books but I always find them slightly dry.It does drive me mad though when you don't get a global review, not even a mention!

got a couple of Simon Winchester's books (including the surgeon of crowthorne) on the TBR

looking on wikipedia Nicolas Steno is the father of stratigraphy and he's Danish (mind you he was around 200 years before Smith)

#166 -- wow, thanks for checking that out! I had wondered what else was going on but hadn't taken the next step to check it out.

I think my fave Simon Winchester book so far is the one that he made his name with, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, aka The Professor and the Madman. I did just read his book about the Atlantic Ocean, and enjoyed it, and I still have copies of books about China and Krakatoa, which I want to read.

Alas, Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light by Neill Lochery was a disappointment and it shouldn't have been, given what was happening there and then. Lisbon in WW2 was an intriguing place; the lights were turned on, and in the shadows lurked a host of rogues and spies. Lochery dutifully chronicles it all, from the smuggling of wolfram (aka tungsten) on the backs of mules into Spain and thence to the Nazi regime, to the plot to abduct the Duke of Windsor. But it's never vivid or atmospheric; the pedantic style quickly becomes wearing and the choppy structure of the book oppressive, so I ended up reading it several short bursts over two weeks. You'd also never recognize the Portuguese regime of the time or the ambiance of Lisbon as portrayed in Pereira Declares; granted, that's a novel, but Lochery often seems to be finding ways to explain why Salazar wasn't really a dictator, or rather, why he was a good dictator for the Portuguese. I kept yearning for the material to be in the hands of a better storyteller; someone who could convince me of that fact rather than simply stating it. Nothing in this came alive -- and it's not just that it's non-fiction; I read a lot of that anyway. It's a good enough one-stop book on the time and place (to my knowledge, the only one in English) but that's all. 3.2 stars.

... and one more, also disappointing:
Finished My Berlin Child by Anne Wiazemsky. This is another book in the Europa series but while reasonably well-written, this memoir-style opus is actually disappointing, despite the fascinating experiences that must lie at its heart. The problem? The author is writing the semi-fictionalized version of how her parents met while doing Red Cross work in postwar Berlin, and the fact that she's writing about real people -- and her parents, to boot -- constrains the amount of fiction she can indulge in. So we never really get a sense of either of them as real people, ironically, despite the inclusion of letters and journals purportedly written by Claire. Anyone not familiar with Wiazemsky's other books (she has won the Prix Goncourt) would wonder why she has the reputation she does based on this. It's well written and very well translated, but that's about it. Read it if you're curious about the aftermath of WW2 in France and Germany, but otherwise my reaction is "meh". 3.3 stars.

Finally, a better book! Finished Independence Day by Richard Ford, a fascinating look deep inside one weekend of the life of a middle-aged man. On the surface, for most of the book, not that much happens: Frank Bascombe tries to collect the rent from tenants, tries to interest the buyers from hell in a home that has come on to the market, tries to spend a rewarding evening with his kinda-lady friend, Sally, and tries to prepare for a weekend visiting the basketball and baseball halls of fame with his teenage son, who is displaying some worrying behavioral traits (that include bashing his stepfather with a boat oarlock, something Frank has a lot of sympathy with, really.) We learn all that is floating through Frank's mind in what should be exasperating detail, but really isn't -- instead, it ends up being kinda the ultimate humanistic novel, the story of a man who tries to know himself, who tries to be engaged with others, but who is human and fallible, especially when it comes to reading those always-tricky other people with whom he emotionally engaged -- his ex-wife, Sally, his children. There are darker moments and hints of darker moments, but befitting Frank's confidence that he is in his "Existence Period", the crisis later in the book doesn't feel like one that is going to change the direction of the world -- just maybe tweak the direction of a few lives slightly. It's an unsettling novel in many ways; a reminder that life is something that happens, the increment of tiny little decisions of the kind that are everywhere in this story. And Frank is a very human narrator -- even when he does or says something idiotic, it's impossible not to remember that he's self-aware in a kind of klutzy way. As he muses to himself, "I'd paid handsome dues to the brotherhood of consolidated mistake-makers..." Recommended, but be prepared to devote a lot of time to some rather dense prose (in the sense of detail-crammed paragraphs and long sentences, not in a Joycean sense) and don't expect nice neat pat little epiphanies. A rewarding read. 4.4 stars

An Accident in August is a very imaginative "what if" novel by Laurence Cosse (author of A Novel Bookstore) in which she tries to get inside the head of someone who might have been driving the slow-moving car in the place d'Alma tunnel on the night Princess Diana died. To this day, no one knows who that was or what happened to him/her afterwards, so Cosse is free to do whatever she can devise, and she starts in the logical place -- how might a young woman, driving home from work, react when she realizes next morning that the horrible accident from which she fled in terror killed the princess? Well, logically, she'd go off to get her car repaired before anyone could put two and two together... and that is where Lou starts on her own path to a different kind of destruction... This is very creative and plausible; it's unnerving and scary, as well. The world might consider her guilty of playing a role in the very public tragedy, but what other tragedies might follow her effort to cover up that initial one? Cosse does an excellent job of developing a hypothetical scenario, although there are one or two steps in this that didn't convince me. Still a 4 star book; recommended.

Two more down!

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt. Hmmm, what to say. On the one hand, I could appreciate the writing and the almost picaresque nature of Eli Sisters's adventures (it's not truly picaresque, but the series of encounters he and Charlie have along their way make it resemble that in form at least.) And I thought the ending -- the final 10% or so of the novel -- was nearly pitch-perfect, both in the writing style and the plot developments. But I never fell in love with the book or the characters; I always felt distanced from them and it was never a problem for me to put the Kindle down and go read something else for a while. Indeed, sometimes I felt I needed to. I'm unclear whether that's because it's a Western, whether it's because of deWitt's somewhat deadpan writing style, carefully designed to mirror how someone like Eli Sisters might have spoken in his era. I'm not unhappy I read it, but it wasn't a great novel for me and I wish I'd had the patience for a copy to wend its way to me from the library rather than blowing some of my skimpy book budget on buying it. Oh well, live and learn. 4 stars, bumped up a bit because of the ending.

In contrast, I was wowed by Why Mahler? by Norman Lebrecht. Now, Lebrecht often comes across as an opinionated curmudgeon, and he must be an occasional thorn in the side of the musical "establishment". But in this book, he's writing about someone he reveres -- Gustav Mahler -- and doing so in a highly personal way, combining his own observations about the music and its impact on those who have performed it; details of the music itself and how it fits in to the course of music history; the context in which Mahler lived and worked, particularly in Vienna which alternately embraced him and kicked him to the curb. There are all kinds of fascinating vignettes -- imagine a teenage Hitler, in standing room, watching as the Jewish-born Mahler conducted one of the landmark performances of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde... -- and oodles of detail (Mahler's grave unlike that of other Viennese greats, is on the outskirts; to get there, the author walks past the Albanian embassy -- outcasts of the world, unite!), insight and emotion. Above all, Lebrecht's passion for Mahler comes across loud and clear: he was "a rock of verity in a sea of illusions, an idealist among pragmatists, a doer as well as a dreamer, a redeemer of truth from lies. His music can mean many things at once, bu tit cannot equivocate. It comes at you from afar like the light at the end of the tunnel, an irresistible destination." He shows how Mahler's music bridged the gap between Wagner, who had opened the door to new horizons in music, and the atonality of Schonberg (who was a friend) and Webern, whose work he didn't always understand but still promoted. Mahler "invites us into his life, asks us to share his struggles, his torments, his doubts, as if they were our own, as they often are. And then he withdraws, lost to the world, and leaves the rest to us." 4.6 stars, marred only by Lebrecht's decision to use his chapter on Mahler interpretations to lambaste some conductors (more boring than a hundred metronomes) gratuitously; rather than just a brief whistle-stop tour, it would have been more interesting had he focused on the interpretations he liked and why, in the same way he discusses how the posthumous 10th symphony came to be. This is a must-read for any classical music afficionado, and anyone curious about Mahler, his era and his music will find plenty to interest them even if they don't have a musical background.

I've never known (or, honestly, cared) much about Mahler, but your excellent review has me very curious. Consider it added to my wishlist!

Great reviews of both The Sisters Brothers and Why Mahler. I'll take your advice and wait for The Sisters Brothers to come up at the library. I'm not into westerns either, but there's so much talk about this particular book that I'm going to have to check it out.

It's supposed to be a Coen-esque Western, but even viewed through that prism, it didn't completely click for me. Admittedly, had there been less buzz or talk about it, my expectations may have been far more modest and I may have been more excited by what I read than I was.

Anyway...

Finished reading 1776 by David McCullough, or rather, listening to the author read it on an audiobook. For me, this was a triumph of research rather than insight or creativity. It's chock-full of fascinating detail of Washington's campaigns of 1776, but the thesis is presented only at the end in a few sentences and it's too often devoid of any broader political or social context. For an informed reader, familiar with the Revolution and its causes, this may be a better read. Had I been actually reading it, as opposed to listening to it, I may well have given up midway. Fortunately, listening to it put some life into the driest parts and drew attention to those parts that were already vividly described that might otherwise have drowned. 3.2 stars overall. I don't regret having listened to it (while I did a housecleaning), but don't imagine I'll want to re-read it.

Too bad about 1776. I've been curious about his books, but perhaps I'll look for something a bit less dry.

@ 175 -- I enjoyed 1776, but I think John Adams is a better book, and I would definitely recommend it even if you don't care about John Adams!

>175 cammykitty:, 176 I haven't read 1776, but I read John Adams in August for my biography colloquium and really enjoyed it. Although it's ~650 pages, it was never dull. It probably helped that I'm a Revolutionary War nerd, though.

I didn't NOT enjoy 1776, and it certainly wasn't a slog, but it wasn't what it could have been, at least from a historical perspective. I def. want to read the John Adams bio. I read about his daughter-in-law's impressive journey across war-torn Europe in 1815 last year in the excellent Mrs. Adams in Winter, which I highly recommend.

Finished another work of history, one I'm also a bit ambivalent about.
Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich is an ambitious task, nothing less than the history of the papacy from St Peter down to the current Pope, Benedict. Needless to say, a book can't do justice to that, especially in a mere 468 pages, and the pace is too brisk to allow for nuance. Nevertheless, reading this was kind of like finally figuring out the shape and nature of a city that you've only seen bits and pieces of before; now I understand the background to some events (like the Avignon papacy and the schism with the Eastern churches) and have filled in gaps in eras that I knew little of before (eg the Counter-Reformation.) Still, even taking it slowly, the last 100 pages felt like a slog, and I was irritated by a few tiny errors that crept in -- Marie Antoinette was not executed along with her husband but months later; Mussolini was not murdered by his former subjects when his government fell in 1943, after the invasion of Sicily but rescued by the Nazis and set up in a puppet government until the final collapse of fascism in April 1945. That made me wonder what else was lost, particularly in the latter stages of the book, where Norwich -- an expert on the Byzantine empire and Norman Sicily, who is also very knowledgeable about Venetian history -- is less familiar. Also irksome was the failure to mention such important issues as liberation theology, even in a sentence. Historians may not find much here to relish, as it's too much crammed into too few pages, but for anyone curious about European/Western history, this offers a solid overview of the evolution of the papacy from a spiritual into a temporal and back into a spiritual power again, and the ways in which various popes have interpreted their mission. 3.9 stars, could have been higher if not for the errors and omissions that I noted -- and if I noted them, as a non-Catholic and non-scholar, I worry about what specialists might find.

Oooo, you're more forgiving than I am on errors like that. Thanks for the Mrs. Adams rec!

I hadn't read Julie Otsuka's debut novel, When the Emperor was Divine but there was enuf buzz about it that I thought I'd pick The Buddha in the Attic, her next novel, from last month's list of Amazon Vine offerings. It's beautifully written, almost a prose poem, but the form is strangely distancing. It's written in the first person plural, and indeed it chronicles the collective experience of a group of Japanese "picture brides", arriving in the early years of the 20th century in California, slowly and painfully building lives and then being deported to camps on the outbreak of WW2. I knew the basic outlines of the history, and have read books like Obasan; still, the most powerful parts of this book were the final two or three chapters, when the Japanese women understand they are now viewed as traitors and when the local white population realizes what their departure means for community life. But up until then, the style -- at first intriguing and compelling -- had become first mildly annoying and then deeply irritating, like a dripping tap. (In the chapter where the women become mothers, there are 60 sentences in a row that begin "We gave birth...", (followed by details of how, where, when, to whom...) before finally, thankfully, one interrupts the litany with "Nine months later, we gave birth...") The combination of that repetition and the first person plural (which on its own might well have been fine) drove me nuts and keeps this book to 4 stars, despite the powerful content. Perhaps the author's intent is to force readers to confront the magnitude of the injustices confronted by a large group of women -- injustices delivered by their husbands, their employers, their neighbors, even their children, and finally their new country's government -- but "we" is never as compelling to read about in a novel as "I" is. Read it to enjoy the writing (some of the time); view it as a prose poem and you may find more here to appreciate.

The Warsaw Anagrams by Richard Zimler is bleak, bleak, bleak. That doesn't mean it's a bad book -- not at all -- just that I don't recommend you read it if you're already in the dumps. The main character, Erik Cohen, is a psychiatrist who is now confined to the Warsaw Ghetto; it's early 1941, and he's living with his niece, Stefa, and great-nephew, Adam. From the start, we know exactly how grim things are: Cohen is recounting his story as a spirit or "ibbur", to a man who inhabits an apartment near the one he shared with Stefa and Adam. And it's Adam's death -- murder -- the preoccupies him, as he tells Heniek the story of his efforts to track down the man who betrayed Adam to his murderer and the man who murdered him. The plot has a few holes and leaps, but what Zimler really does is give the reader the sense of mission that Cohen has -- pursuing small-scale killers of individuals among large-scale genocidal murders. It's a story of "the Before Time" and the struggles of the ghetto to survive. I'm a bit at a loss as to how to rate this, but will plump for 3.7 stars. It's good, but not great; well-written, but doesn't do any more than explore the basic plot. I'm glad I read it, but I'll also be glad to return it to the library.

Great review of The Buddha in the Attic. You should put it on the book page. I went to thumb it, and it wasn't there. :) Oh noes!

Cammykitty, you can always head over to Amazon and give it a "helpful" review over there! :-) I got tired of cutting & pasting reviews, so...

Finished The Friar of Carcassonne, the fourth winner in a row from Stephen O'Shea. This very readable work of history tackles an extremely obscure subject -- while the Cathar heresy and the Albigensian crusade have become almost trendy subjects (and contributed to tourism in the Languedoc), it's doubtful whether anyone other than medieval scholars have heard of Bernard Delicieux, a Franciscan friar who challenged both the monarchy and the papacy in the early 1300s -- and ended his days chained up in an inquisition prison. At first, it looked as if Delicieux's comination of persuasive power, logic, charisma and reputation for adhering to the spirit of his Franciscan order would carry the day, but O'Shea chronicles how his own failings and the circumstances shifted, giving his enemies the upper hand. This book is a great reminder of how efforts to ensure orthodoxy became more and more intense -- a battle against the Cathars morphed into a conflict between religious orders (the Dominicans and the Franciscans) and ultimately even within the Franciscan order itself. Delicieux lived just before the inquisition became truly institutionalized as a force, and sought to stop it in its tracks, and he lived in the Languedoc just as the region was being incorporated -- reluctantly -- into what is today France. It's a fascinating tale, and O'Shea tells it vividly, never forgetting that Delicieux's world was very different from ours today and we can't impose our moral sense or ethics on his contemporaries -- at best, he writes, these can only appear to as “strange people moving at a distance of several centuries, their outlook unfamiliar, alien even, like figures crossing a faraway field on a moonless night, to be distinguished only the in the dimmest of half-lights.” Definitely recommended if you're interested in obscure bits of history, the nexus of religion & society, etc., 4.4 stars

Finished the delightful and delightfully mind-bending The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris. To say that Mohamed is conflicted would be putting it mildly. On the one hand, he lives with his mother and younger brother at the age of 40, in the Algerian neighborhood of Paris of Saint Ouen (home to my fave flea market!). On the other hand, he has already "Gallicized" his name, and ensures that his skin is pale and hair straight enough for him not to be mistaken for an Arab in real life, so he's got a great job. Suddenly, Momo discovers his dream apartment, and sets out to build a dream life in it, complete with (at last!) losing his virginity to a possibly endless stream of non-Algerian women. "All that remained for me to do was to go over the wall, with the firm intention of becoming an individual who decides and charts his life as a Westerner, on a full-time basis, with every right thereto pertaining." Except that nothing happens quite as he anticipates; most of the women he encounters turn out to be Algerian, and he is haunted by another one the reader never quite encounters, an Algerian novelist named Loubna Minbar, whom he is convinced is masquerading as his concierge and stealing his writings. Questions of reality, of the narrator's reliability, multiply in the final pages, taking on an almost hallucinatory quality, and the until-then relatively distant narrator ends up playing a greater role. Fascinating, both in the style and in the substance -- the havoc that social discrimination can play on a psyche. A must-read for anyone interested in the immigrant experience in Europe, and it's translated by the wonderful Alison Anderson, to boot. 4.4 stars, recommended.

Book du jour: A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines is a book that several folks have told me I should read, and they are right. Set in the mid-1940s in Louisiana, it's the moving story of a young black man condemned to death in the electric chair; his godmother implores the local schoolmaster, as the one of the only educated black men in the region, to help him die as a man rather than as the unthinking hog that his own defense attorney described him as being during the trial. Grant's struggle to help Jefferson is the catalyst for a much broader struggle on his part, as the request brings him face to face with everything he's been trying to deny about himself and about the realities of his life and as he has to make compromises he deplores -- dumbing himself down, taking a subordinate role to the whites in town -- in order to fulfill the demands his community is making of him. At the same time, he comes to realize how he is asking too little of himself, and deluding himself on other scores. It's a moving and passionate indictment of Jim Crow laws in the South, and the damage they did. I couldn't help wondering, however, how the book might have been different had Gaines chosen to make Jefferson actually culpable -- in the first pages, it's clear that he was merely a bystander, unjustly convicted of being black and in the wrong company -- or had the story been written today, when discrimination is less extreme and evident -- indeed, banned -- but has not been banished from the minds of those enforcing justice. (Just look at the ratio of black murderers on death row vs all those charged or convicted of murder, and it's hard to see that justice is at work...) There's a lot of great writing and some fabulous characters, but not much subtlety when it comes to the issues. On one level, that's appropriate, but it's something I tend to prize in books about highly-charged subjects. 4.1 stars, recommended.

Great review of A Lesson Before Dying. I will keep an eye out for a copy of that one to read.

Another powerful novel to add to everyone's TBR lists! The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander is one of a clutch of stories about Argentina's "dirty war" against its own citizens in the 1970s/early 1980s that has been on my TBR list for a few months, and while I'm glad I got to read it, it was definitely a disturbing novel. The story revolves around a Jewish-Argentinian family, Kaddish Poznan, his wife Lillian, and their son, university student Pato. It shifts from a rather comical absurdism -- we first meet Kaddish as he's chipping off names from a walled-off section of the Jewish cemetery reserved for the pimps and whores, to protect their descendants -- to a tragic absurdism, as Kaddish staggers around Buenos Aires trying to arrange a very strange ransom for the son he fears may be dead after "being vanished". Fascinating and chilling; recommended. 4.4 stars.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns is a hard book to read on many different levels -- it's hard to keep track of all the players, all the toing and froing and the various factions that have contributed to decades of civil war in the Congo. At the same time, Stearns has done something very valuable, by at least attempting to create an orderly narrative from the horrors of factional infighting, corruption and interventionism from pretty much most of the country's neighbors, especially Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe. There are no heroes here and a lot of victims. I read this ahead of November's scheduled elections, and because a childhood friend of mine now runs a peace organization (Pragmora) and has just returned from Congo. Her take: the elections will result in more violence and the only question is whether that will rise to the level of civil war. 3.9 stars, simply because at times it was confusing to keep track of the narrative.

Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky starts out very well, but ends with a bit of a bumpy ride -- I felt as if I was lurching all over the place and ended up not being very sure what I thought about the character or the narrative. I did love Bronsky's writing, and the way she so vividly inhabits the character of 17-year-old Sasha, who lives to write a book about her murdered mother, murder her stepfather (vengeance for the death of her mother) and care for her younger siblings. She's feisty, unafraid, and yet vulnerable. A memorable character and book, even if it didn't quite manage to be as good as I hoped it would. 4.2 stars; definitely worth trying.

Had someone else on LT not been reading this and mentioned it to me, I would never have stumbled over Elizabeth and Hazel by David Margolick, although the book itself came up in conversation at a dinner I attended last week. (The person who recommended it enthusiastically described the narrative, but couldn't remember title or author. It's the story of two women whose lives remain inextricably linked some 54 years after a moment in their shared history was captured on camera: the snapshot of a 15-year-old Hazel yelling racial epithets at 15-year-old Elizabeth, attempting to enroll as one of the first black students at Little Rock Central High School only to find herself caught and isolated in the midst of a howling mob. Is someone's life defined by one moment in time? Margolick's book explores that, even as he recounts the lives of both happy-go-lucky and careless Hazel, and quiet, studious Elizabeth; their experiences that first crucial year of integration (especially those of Elizabeth; while Hazel left the school, Elizabeth remained for a year during which she was harassed without letup.) But the latter third of the book is most striking, as it deals with the brief friendship between the two; while Hazel had apologized to Elizabeth as early as 1963, in the 1990s the two women became friendly for a few years, an event that dewy-eyed sentimentalists chose to view as an example of how the United States could overcome its history of legalized discrimination and violence against its African-American citizens. Needless to say, nothing in life is ever that simple. The two women pulled apart, with Elizabeth disappointed and angry that (in her mind) Hazel showed no willingness to engage with the deeper-rooted racism Elizabeth was convinced still existed in her and her family; Hazel, for her part, being bemused by Elizabeth's growing anger and inability to look forward. "Whites weren't ready for desegregation in 1957, and blacks weren't ready for reconciliation now. Elizabeth didn't want reconciliation; she wanted revenge." Hazel grows to envy the openly racist students from Central, who gave Elizabeth far more grief and yet who never felt called on to apologize, and who lived quiet lives.

This is a fascinating book to read, because Margolick somehow manages (at least in my eyes) to do the impossible and walk the narrow line dividing the two women, understanding and communication the point of view of each while also understanding the flaws and foibles of both women. Moving to the US in my 30s, even as a US citizen, I had little understanding of how visceral these race issues were. In Canada, while such things exist, they don't carry the same weight, given the minimal history of slavery and Jim Crow-style laws. (But then in Canada, "visible minorities" historically made up a smaller part of the population.) Arriving as an adult, listening to both sides, I found both perspectives -- ably represented here -- distressing. I still struggle living in a culture where my attempts to get the almost completely black and Latino students at the high school 1/2 block away to not vandalize my home (broken windows; glass bottles flung at the security bars; mail stolen from the mailbox, etc. etc.) earn me the label 'racist' from the principal. I understand where that might come from, intellectually, but emotionally it is very difficult to be called such a harsh name. Hazel, in contrast, was a racist, or held racist views -- and became the face of bigotry. Yet she had the courage -- long before it was fashionable -- to apologize and seek forgiveness. Yet for many of those in Little Rock, no apology would ever be sincere enough to matter. I can understand why a traumatized Elizabeth pulled back from the friendship; why a despondent and exhausted Hazel withdrew. And yet the fact that they did saddens me.

So this was a very emotional book to read, even without having been part of the history myself. (Although my mother tells me that she was pregnant with me on her first trip to the Southern US in the early 1960s, and was so repulsed by what she saw that she fought to return to NJ, where my parents were living, early.) In a way, the issues that Margolick addresses in the later history of the two women are ones that seem to me to dominate the whole debate over race as a macrocosm, although happily we seem to have reached a point (in NYC at least) where I don't think anyone does a double-take on meeting a professional they've talked to on the phone to discover that that individual is black/African-American. An important book. 4.5 stars

Forgot to update this to note that I finished Ethan Frome, a great novel, very nuanced and well-written, albeit very different from the others by Edith Wharton that I've read (and the intro to my edition was a bit odd, focusing on race issues and implicitly arguing that there were racial undertones to the novel by virtue of the absence of non-white characters, which I found a bit odd, but hey, whatever). But heavens, it is depressing enough to send me in quest of a rusty razor blade with which to slit both wrists -- not just the ending to the story of Ethan and Mattie, but the way she depicts the ending to the story of the three of them -- Ethan, Mattie and Zeena, in the final pages. (Trying to avoid spoilers...) And I was in the doldrums enough as it was.... 4.5 stars, nonetheless, as the caliber of the novel cannot be denied, though it took me two weeks to finish reading a 99-page book.

Several great reviews here! A Lesson Before Dying and The Ministry of Special Cases are definitely going on my wish list.

They're def worth it, cammykitty... As is this one...

Finished Evening in the Palace of Reason, while listening with great enjoyment to lots of Bach -- cantatas, fugues, the Goldberg variations and ultimately the Mass in B Minor. James Gaines is no Bach, but he does a fab job for the non-specialist reader, offering alternating chapters about Bach and Frederick the Great, showing how each came of age and came by their views of life, religion and music, all leading up to a climatic meeting in Berlin only a few years before Bach's death, when Frederick issued an impossible musical challenge -- only to find that Bach went him one better. Gaines is excellent at handling the complexities of these two very different characters, and sets the musical debate squarely in the context of its time -- the Enlightenment, when someone like Bach could rest in religious faith and Frederick, a generation younger and raised by a brutal, dysfunctional father, found no solace in anything -- even music, ultimately. I thought Gaines's ability to capture some of the musical history here were very well done indeed; harmony, as he points out, was seen not in absolute terms, but by Bach's peers (including philosophers like Leibniz) as a reflection of a Divine plan or order; music's structure could reveal and could inspire, in an intellectual and religious manner, as well as provide pleasure to the senses. He captures the essence of the different forms in witty metaphors: "canon is to fugue what haiku is to blank verse". I found I learned a tremendous amount here; I'll never listen to the Brandenburg concertos again without recalling Gaines's observation that the fifth prepared the way for all concertos that feature solo instruments in a dialog with the orchestra. Ultimately, this is a book about the ultimate meaning of music; an ambitious task. Gaines doesn't quite succeed at that, and the alternating chapter structure is choppy (if perhaps inevitable), tempting the reader to abandon one story line in favor of the other. But it's still 4.4 stars for me; recommended to anyone interested in 18th century Europe, music, the Enlightenment, etc. Very accessible even if you've no knowledge of music, though being able to listen in to some of the music here as I read was fab. More serious a work than Eric Siblin's The Cello Suites, which I read and recommended last year, but still excellent.

@ 192 -- Sounds really interesting! Adding to the TBR list.

One that is a little more disappointing, and that I really can't recommend, unless someone is just being curious, is Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz. it didn't work for me, on several levels -- yes, even though Graham Greene called it the book of the year when it was first published back in 1980 or 1981. I can see why it might have appealed to Greene, but I found this novel, revolving around the lonely Alexander Abramov, Israeli spy who finds his dreamed-of woman sitting on a bus in front of him while he's on an assignment in England on his 41st birthday, to be disjointed. The premise is unnerving -- and while that can be a good thing, unconvincingly unnerving isn't. After spotting Thea and instantly recognizing in her the woman he believes he has always been intended to love, he starts sending her anonymous letters, accompanied by music that he asks her to play at certain hours of the day; the girl (she is in her final year of high school) does so, and writes back to "Franz Kafka" at a poste restante. He begins to manipulate her life, stalking her but deliberately refusing to encounter her as a real person, even as he woos her via the letters, making it impossible for her to build her own independent life. The icy character of Alexander makes him one of the most unlikeable figures I've read about in a long time, but not in a way that intrigues me. He's too remote for that, and Tammuz is juggling with too many ideas, too many points of view and an unclear narrative line. The interactions between Alexander and Thea at the beginning and end of the book bracket two segments seen through the eyes of her fiance, G.R., who dies tragically just before their wedding, and Nikos, a Greek Levantine, who becomes enraptured by Thea as instantly as both G.R. and Alexander, but has the advantage of being able to woo in person: both men have encounters with Alexander, to boot. At one point, a humorously exasperated Thea cries out, "God, why do you send me nothing but madmen?" and I couldn't say it better myself. There are elements of a great novel, and it's clear Tammuz is a thoughtful and careful writer, but there wasn't enough here to love to set against the muddled plot and disturbing stalking/manipulation theme to make me enjoy it. 3.2 stars; I can see why Tammuz isn't as well known today as someone like Amos Oz.

And one more...

Well, I have read what may be the first book I've ever read translated from Flemish! (Despite those high school years in Brussels...) Daniel Robberechts committed suicide in 1992; this slim volume, Arriving in Avignon, was published, I think, in the 1980s. It's hard to categorize: definitely a work of prose, but is it memoir? travelogue? history? novel? Ultimately, a blend of all of these that resists categorization. Its central character is up for debate -- is it the city of Avignon or the third-person anonymous narrator who seems endlessly to skirt it, en route to other destinations. (The notes to the Dalkey Press edition inform us that this is a metaphor for his reluctance to fully engage with real life as a mature adult; I'll accept that, but it wasn't something I was always conscious of while reading.) To me, the interesting part of this was the way in which a sense of place coexists with a sense of self, and the way the two act on each other. What imposes a place on our memory? Is it a frozen, static memory or one that is fluid? For the narrator -- Avignon is "a collection of streets that proceed at the speed of a pedestrian in a hurry, of boulevards that glide past at the speed of a bus; a town that revolves like a turntable with the increasing or decreasing speed of an arriving or departing train..." The city -- viewed only through the prism of a tourist moving briskly -- is contrasted with the anonymous Provencal town to which the narrator returns repeatedly, and which he explores so that every vista is imprinted on his memory. If you enjoy writers like WG Sebald (I loved Austerlitz) or even Georges Perec, this is a kind of experimental hybrid prose work that recalls some of their writing, and you might enjoy it. It's not going to be for all tastes, however. For some of the almost painfully beautiful descriptions, however, I'm giving it 3.8 stars.

Evening in the Palace of Reason sounds extremely interesting. Onto the wishlist it goes.

ETA: Found one on BM, but it's "ask first". Keeping fingers crossed.

#196: Hope that works out for you!

Here's one that no one needs to scurry off and read in this lifetime. I've read one or two of Ismail Kadare's novels before this, and my only question is which group of aliens abducted the real Kadare? On the surface this is an opaque, tortuous look at the relationship between Besfort Y. and Rovena. We know from the first pages that they day in an odd traffic accident (hence the title of The Accident) and that all kinds of folks are desperately seeking to understand why, but no explanation fits the facts until an anonymous researcher works to re-establish the very weird and dysfunctional relationship between the two. The story lurches from one encounter to another, where the two appear to argue about banalities and their relationship. Unless the whole novel is simply a giant metaphor, in which case I simply didn't get it at all. (i.e. the Balkans and mutual incomprehension between "races"??) There were parts that put me to sleep (on the subway) and parts that had me wrinkling my nose in distaste, as when Rovena inexplicably lifts her skirt to show her public hair to a gypsy woman who had encouraged her, when younger, to have many lovers, as a kind of boast that she had done so, possibly? I don't know and I don't care. I finished it, but I wonder why. 1.3 stars. One of the worst novels I've read this year, and from an author who is revered. Go figure.

Well, I started reading Between Two Seas by Carmine Abate -- and ended up not being able to put it down. After reading some v. mediocre or bad stuff, and some OK genre fiction, this book was utter delight; just what the biblio-doctor ordered. It's the story of a place -- a location in Calabria, in southern Italy, called Roccalba, that lies literally between two seas, the Tyrrhenian and the Ionian. It's here that Giorgio Bellusci lives and dreams of restoring the Fondaco del Fico, the inn where once travellers all stayed; even Dumas passed by and accidentally left behind a notebook with comments on his impressions, now a heirloom cherished by Bellusci. A chance encounter between the young Italian and a young German embarking on a photographic odyssey and career on a dusty road in Calabria ends up shaping both their lives -- because of it, both will fulfill dreams of different kinds but will end up paying heavy prices. The story is told through the eyes of Florian, their mutual grandson, who initially rather resents his chidlhood summer visits to Roccalba, where his mother is too delighted to spend time with her friends and relatives to take him to the beach, and where his grandfather Giorgio Bellusci's "thuggish" eyes rather scare him. After a tragic upheaval in the family, Florian doesn't go back until he's 18, when a series of events begin that will bring the lives of his two grandfathers full circle and Florian's resistance to what Giorgio wants of him begins to dissipate, with resentment giving way to understanding and love; he develops a sense of purpose along with maturity. While it's the story of a family, Abate's beautiful novel is really more of a love letter to a place and the prose descriptions of this part of Calabria just shine; they are so vivid and evocative they literally brought tears to my eyes. In some ways this is a romance, in the sense of deep connections between people and between people and places, but it's never sentimental. Abate's characters are all flawed and human, but they are portrayed through loving eyes. I'm going to race off and find his other Europa-published book, The Homecoming Party. This one won the Fenice-Europa prize for Fiction; I hope Europa rushes more of his books into English. 4.5 stars; definitely recommended. This was a library book, but I'm going to have to go out and buy a copy someday soon, as it's one I'll want around permanently.

Between Two Seas sounds like a great story.

Finished Mr. Langshaw's Square Piano by Madeline Goold; finishing this earns me kudos for getting a book off my TBR list AND for finishing another 11 in 11 challenge book. It was an excellent choice to read after the book about Bach as it deals with the shift from the harpsichord to the piano (and even mentions Frederick the Great's challenge to Bach that is at the center of Gaines's book -- see my earlier review.) The author buys a "square piano", made in 1807, one of the early generation of pianofortes and an instrument that helped make music part of popular culture and not just something reserved for the elite. She uses her new instrument -- originally shipped to Mr. Langshaw, an organist in Lancaster, as a way to explore the relationship between the makers of the pianos and their agents (like Langshaw) as trade opened up globally; to discuss the shifts in musical tastes; etc. Then she sets this against the social, cultural, political and economic upheavals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It's a very, very clever concept, and when she confines herself to that, the book is mostly quite fascinating, despite occasional but frequent repetitions of some elements, and inadequate information provided about others, such as the technical details surrounding piano manufacture and the causes of the Gordon riots, both of which references were so puzzling or opaque that I had to go scurrying off to Wikipedia. But those failings and the occasional lapse into fancifulness, where she tries to write about the people involved in making, transporting, playing the Broadwood piano as if they were characters in a novel. An example: she deduces that the piano might have been for Langshaw's daughter, simply because of a picture of the latter showing her hair might have been arranged by someone who is left-handed, while the piano shows signs of having been used by someone with a strong left hand. That's taking 2 and 2 and reaching 27, methinks. Those shortcomings trimmed half a star off this book and left it at 3.7 stars. I'd still recommend it mildly as a social/cultural history -- there is some fascinating stuff about the Wesley family and their ties to music and the Langshaws, for instance -- although it's likely to be more appealing to people who actually play the piano and can follow the poorly-explained technical stuff.

Still not sure if I'll finish the books in this challenge by the end of the year, but I'm trying!!

I think you're doing a great job! You write such excellent reviews, most everything you read is tempting, but I think I'll give this latest one a pass. Hope you are having a nice and quiet Sunday morning!

Sadly, Laura, I've been battling an epic migraine, but the comfort is that I know that eventually it will go away again -- eventually. Just can't read much while it's here! Yes, the piano book is really for afficionados, or anyone interested in 18th century social history. I'm intrigued enough by both that it worked for me, mostly, but not consistently enough for me to urge people to venture outside their comfort zones....

Finished Prague Fatale, the latest Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr. This one fills in some of the gaps between Bernie's pre-war adventures as a detective and private eye in 1930s Berlin and his postwar misadventures across Latin America; it's 1941 and Heydrich -- a guy who doesn't take "no" for an answer -- invites Bernie to Prague to investigate what he claims was an attempt on his life from inside the ranks of those in power in the Third Reich. Then another murder intervenes, and Bernie ends up in a position where he can't deliver justice -- or can he? Although this is chock-full of Bernie's trademark cynicism and wise cracks typical of a 30s/40s "noir" detective, it's also perhaps more bleak than some of his other books. But those who haven't liked some of the more recent books that jump back and forth too much in time, but who liked the earlier books, will still find plenty of stuff here to relish. Not for the faint of heart -- it's gritty and some of the characters are deeply nasty individuals (the author's note details their ultimate fate...) Recommended to series fans; 4.2 stars.

Finally read Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, which I can only describe as bleakly hilarious. Two men, old friends, but also rivals who despise each other in ways I think only men can. When a mutual friend dies, they both embark on projects that take them to a dangerous moral place -- and their ultimate self-destruction. Replete with irony, if not always a comfortable book. I loved McEwan's descriptions of hill walking and Clive's efforts to compose a symphonic masterpiece. 4.1 stars, recommended if you like the author.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam managed to be that unique book, something that is utterly different than anything else I've read, elegantly written, quirky and dark, all at the same time. Filth is Sir Edward Feathers, who, so folks whisper, is said to have coined the phrase "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong." Not that Feathers/Filth failed in London, but it was in Hong Kong that he made a fortune, only fitting given his origins as a Raj orphan, shipped home at the age of 4 or 5 to be 'educated'. Now, however, at the end of a very long life, nobody can remember much else about Filth beyond the acronym -- he's well known among fellow members of the Bar, but all of his judgments, opinions, etc. have proved evanescent. What is coming back to him, in the twilight of his years, are memories and the reader is treated to a constant stream of them as they return to him: of his time at "Sir's" "Outfit" that prepared him for boarding school; of a bizarre effort by his father to repatriate him at the age of 17 to avoid war in Europe; of guarding Queen Mary and helping wind her wool as a Guards officer; of encounters with former adversaries and long-lost cousins; of the women he loved and lost. But it's really a story of isolation; of how the young Filth ended up being moulded into the kind of person who is at heart cold, and yet who recognizes and regrets that state of affairs without being able to change it -- the epitome of the stiff upper lip. His aunts are preoccupied with golf and delighted to take his father's money and pass off all responsibility for him; his closest schoolfriend, with whom he spends all holidays growing up; casually makes it known that no one considers him to be one of the family. It's a poignant story, but one that Gardam's wit saves from tipping over into the maudlin. (At his wife's memorial service, for instance, she writes "Filth was not taken with flowers. He found them unresponsive, even hostile.") Definitely recommended; something I'm going to have to re-read. And I'll be looking for more by Gardam.

Good review. Old Filth is something I would probably walk past in the bookstore without even giving it a second glance. Your review has made me think 'hey, I might like this.'

Old Filth has been on my wishlist for far too long, there is also a companion novel written by this author called The Man in the Wooden Hat, written from his wife, Betty's point of view.

Swell by Ioanna Karystiani was a real disappointment from Europa. I suspect some of the blame belongs to the translator, unless some of the deeply weird turns of phrase and puzzling sentences were what the author intended, in which case I confess I'm baffled. (I don't care enough to go and seek out examples; it was too difficult the first time.) It's the story of a Greek shipping captain who, at 75, is addicted to life on board his ship with his cat and his crew and hasn't left the vessel for a dozen years. He's got a wife and a mistress and kids he hasn't seen and wouldn't recognize. But his bosses want him to retire and he's hiding a secret. The premise is intriguing and there are moments when it clicks, mostly when Karystiani is focusing on Mitsos's relationship with life at sea, but most of it is a drag. I couldn't read more than a dozen pages at a time. Not recommended; 2.8 stars.

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt was utterly fabulous, and deserved the national book award. It's really a triumph, a work of intellectual and social history that crosses disciplinary borders (philosophy, religion, history) and yet remains completely accessible even to a reader who isn't remotely familiar with the subject. As far as I'm concerned, any book that deals extensively with the bibliomaniac tendencies and book-hunting exploits of Poggio Bracciolini was going to be a winner; Greenblatt ensures this by not being hagiographic in the least. (Oh, and it mentions the equally admirable Aldus Manutius, too!) I'm amazed that I can read big massive books about the history of reading (think Basbanes) and never read about Poggio; that I can read big books about Venice with nary a mention of Aldus, who invented the paperback in the v. early years of the 16th century. Anyway... This tome is the story of the rediscovery of one of the great works of classical literature, De rerum natura by Lucretius, and its impact on the formation of the modern world, one in which man could question the gods and those who purport to speak for them. (Lucretius didn't know how atoms worked, but he nailed the concept thousands of years before Watson & Crick analyzed the structure of DNA...) I would have loved to see a bit more late in the book about the ways in which later philosophies echoed Lucretius's ideas, and perhaps a bit more analysis of some other ideas/books that might also have led people in the same direction -- it's a bit deterministic -- but that's a very minor quibble about a fascinating book. More people should think/write like Greenblatt. 4.8 stars, highly recommended.

Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes is one of those books that creeps up on you. I didn't like it much at all for the first 40 pages; was very irritated by the omniscient style -- lots of remarks like, he would remember this day many years later, as he stood on a dusty road near Hanoi, long after she had gone from him blah blah blah -- as well as from the ruminative narrative style that is more description and quotation from letters and journals than dialog. Then the story and the characters snuck up on me, and I found myself captivated by and immersed in the author's ability to capture a sense of time and place. Rarely have I FELT what it must have been like to be alive in the 1930s, feeling a sense of looming threat and being under attack. It's still haunting me, days later. That helps offset the strangely distancing impact of the author's style. I'm dithering between rounding up or rounding down, but this was 4.25 stars for me. Definitely worth a try. Written because the author felt Spain (her home nation) owed a tribute to Gerda Taro (as the young Polish Jew and accidental photographer) and Robert Capa (the Hungarian who fled his homeland and met Gerta/Gerda in Paris, when he was still known as Andre Friedmann.) If you're interested in photography, this is a must.

Rez Life by David Treuer is a book I got from NetGalley that ended up being more fascinating than I had anticipated, despite the fact that I got bogged down somewhat in the second chapter (which spent too much time opining drearily on fishing and treaty rights). Once past that point, and despite some bumpy points where the author likes to repeat himself, I found this a fascinating look at the Indian experience today, told with the author's own Ojibwe background at the heart of it but digressing whenever necessary to explore anything from residential schools to casinos. Treuer cherishes his heritage, but doesn't blind himself to the realities of "rez life" -- even those reservations made newly wealthy by casinos may be rich but their health is still poor, the kids still don't finish high school and are still more likely to end up binge drinking. At times the anger -- rightfully so -- creeps through Treuer's prose, as when he shows how the Dawes Act wreaked havoc on Indian land rights and how his forebears were deprived of access to basic services until they agreed to send their children to a boarding school, where those children would be taught to despise their native heritage and beaten for speaking their own languages. But the anger never takes over, and Treuer is as scathing about the lack of focus of the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1970s as he is about the whites today who don't understand the nature of "treaty rights". Fascinating, generally well-written and one of the most informative books on the subject I can imagine reading, especially since it comes from someone who comes from "the rez". 4.3 stars, recommended.

Thanks for your review of Rez Life. It sounds like a great companion to the William Kent Krueger books I've been reading this year.

Give it a try, Victoria -- it's dense in parts, but definitely worth it!

Zone One was a creepy novel by Colson Whitehead. The guy can definitely write - he has turned a dystopian zombie story into a literary tour de force and the way he wrote this had me wondering whether he doesn't think of the living/dead victims of the plague that become either flesh-devouring monsters or catatonic "stragglers" as a kind of metaphor for our society. But even on the basic level, this is a thumping good read, as Mark Spitz (a nom de guerre for one survivor) survives the immediate aftermath of the "Last Night" when the flesh-eating zombies descend, and now finds himself in the vanguard of an effort to salvage Manhattan on behalf of the new "phoenix" government in Buffalo. But just as Mark Spitz himself remembers being drawn inexorably to Manhattan as a boy, so the plague victims don't seem to want to leave. The book moves back and forth in time, telling us about the narrator's post-apocalypse experiences in flashbacks, and giving us a sense of the efforts made to rebuild. It's good, but not great, despite the writing -- I kept feeling that Whitehead's ideas were vast, but that he didn't have the time, focus or energy to develop them as much as he may have wanted to. And I don't want to own a copy as the descriptions of the flesh-eating zombies and their murders were extremely gross at times. (This was a library book.) Still, very good, recommended. 4.3 stars.

FINALLY completed The Dogs of Rome, which I kept picking up and putting down all summer and fall. It wasn't really the book's fault, more that it never really captivated me and forced me to keep reading. Conor Fitzgerald conjures up an intriguing plot set in Rome (revolving around dog fighting, so animal lovers may think twice -- it wasn't in your face as a lot of animal violence is in books, but still...) but I couldn't warm up to his hero, Alec Blume, who has a high opinion of himself and trips over his own two feet. I don't need to like a character to enjoy a mystery, but in this case, Blume's persona left me cold and leaves this book with a 3.9 star rating. For my 11 in 11 challenge.

Well, here's one that probably won't arouse much reading interest on anyone's part. Finished Ancestors and Relatives by Eviatar Zerubavel, which is a largely academic analysis of the genealogy mania from the point of view of a sociologist. It's fascinating when it comes to identifying issues like "genealogical identity", and why we persist in identifying Obama as a black man with a white mother rather than as a white man with a black father -- and the human tendency to select what ancestors they want to emphasize and which they choose to ignore. Ultimately, while it raised some issues that will be helpful if I'm able to forge ahead with my own book, I don't think there's much of a wider appeal here. A big part of it is self-evident facts and nothing about the methodology strikes me as provocative or fresh. 3 stars, for my 11 in 11 challenge.

The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb is a collection of portraits of individuals who, to him, represent the face of the new India, struggling to realize its de facto power in the global economy. There are portraits of the ubiquitous Indian engineers as a new kind of social caste; of a Gatsby-esque mogul who takes advantage of the hunger among Indians for professional credentials via his questionable management schools; of a from the Northeast near the Burmese border eager to carve out a future for herself in Delhi's "f&b" or food and beverages industry. They collectively serve as stark reminders that even as India spawns new millionaires every year, folks who snap up luxury brands with aplomb to reconfirm their status, the numbers of those who still struggle to eke out a living, like the hordes of migrant workers, grow even more rapidly, as does the wealth gap. It's the untold story of the transformation of the "BRIC" nations, and Deb paints a detailed and compelling portrait; what is to be done, he wonders, with the 400 million Indians who cannot become software engineers? Simply because farming is less productive doesn't mean that encouraging its dramatic transformation is the correct approach, at least insofar as social stability is concerned. From outside countries like India and China, we can look on at the transformations they are experiencing and see the risks -- that they are creating a world like that of Victorian London, divided between the very affluent merchant classes and the somewhat prosperous (or at least respectable middle classes) and an almost-Dickensian underclass. But as with environmental issues, those critiques aren't likely to be heeded; perhaps Deb's will, given his nationality. Still, this is far from a flawless book. Made up of five different profiles, with the overview and the broader messages introduced obliquely, it's choppy and sometimes Deb gets distracted, wandering off into his own ruminations, or making the same point over and over again. (One minor gripe -- figures throughout are given Indian style, in crore or lakh rupees, with a lakh being 100,000 and a crore 10 million. That may be common in Indian English, but Deb is writing for a much wider audience, and aside from one initial footnote, translating these numbers mentally first into the appropriate numbers of rupees and then into dollars was a major pain. Footnotes would have been just dandy...) More importantly, The book was in serious need of a more clearly presented thesis, one that the reader could bear in mind while reading each of Deb's mini-profiles. I've started reading a galley of Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy, which -- as it deals with the ongoing Maoist insurgency within India, rarely reported -- will serve as a kind of companion piece to this.

I was very disappointed in Tokyo Fiancee by Amelie Nothomb. Let's leave aside lots of little inaccuracies and silly comments that seem to be intended to look smart but really aren't. This was a memoir/novel that didn't endear me at all to the author, not because of the overall theme or the writing, but simply her perspective on the world. Early on, Amelie meets a young American woman, to whom she takes instant offense: "her presence obliged us to speak English, which made her hateful to me. I disliked her even more when I realized that she had been invited in the hope of making me feel more at ease." She recounts an odd experience at a Japanese inn on Sado Island, where an old man lurking to see her get out of the bath pretends not to understand her when she tells him to scram, responding he doesn't speak English. This, she comments scathingly, was a blatant lie. In fact, anyone who has spent any time in Japan in the 1980s probably had countless experiences of Japanese people being so freaked out to hear a foreigner speaking their language that they assumed that the individual must be speaking English and thus made that kind of reply. This happened to people with only a basic knowledge of Japanese (my most memorable one was when an almost hysterical taxi driver nearly ran into a concrete wall while screaming he didn't speak English) but also to a close friend who grew up attending Japanese schools in Osaka and sounded Japanese over the phone. She writes that there are almost no ski resorts in Japan -- there are hundreds, and certainly most of them existed when she set this book, in 1989. I know, I skiied at several of them. And so on, and so on. Maybe she's trying to make some kind of point, but it falls flat. Perhaps this book would be of interest to someone who has never been to Japan and wants to read a literary cross-cultural romance, but nothing about it rang true. Amelie claims to love Japan, but shows no sign of understanding it, even as she claims to cherish it -- and I don't think this was ironic. This left me in no hurry whatsoever to read any more of her books, regardless of how lionized she is. I rated it 2.9 stars, but purely for the writing, which often shines. But it wasn't an enjoyable read for me, on any level at all.

Sounds ghastly and slighty intolerant! I had that happen to me in China, my accent wasn't that bad but they didn't expect it, you have to wait for people's brain to catch up sometimes!

#216 -- exactly! Admittedly, Nothomb could have been pointing out her more youthful intolerance, but I really don't think she sees it that way. I suppose, to boil it down to basics, what I really found distasteful about this book was how judgmental she was of everyone she encounters, without ever showing the least sign of self-awareness or being able to apply the same standards to herself.

Oh well, happily the next book was a far better experience! O Pioneers! is the first book by Willa Cather that I read, and it was enough to encourage me to read more widely among her works. This story of Alexandra Bergson, who arrives with her family as a young child from Sweden in the Nebraska farmlands, is compelling on many levels, particularly when Cather deals with the ties between people and their settings -- Alexandra, who is utterly at home and in the right place, her two brothers, Oscar and Lou, who are dissatisfied and perhaps ill-suited to farming but have no talent for anything else, and the youngest, Emil, who as he reaches adulthood, is clearly the one member of the Bergson family able and prepared to tackle the new country on its own terms on a wider stage. Until, that is, tragedy intervenes. The nature of that tragedy, and Alexandra's response to it, probably reflects the manners and mores of the time in which she was writing -- I found her ideas of justice to be a bit bizarre, honestly. But overall, I was fascinated by the small character sketches throughout this book, of the mishmash of French, Bohemians, Germans and Scandinavians who have tried to carve out a future for themselves in a land that no one had ever tried to bend to his will before. 4 stars.

Never Say Die by Susan Jacoby is a book that all 30 year olds should read (but probably won't) and that will scare the wits out of any 50 year old (or anyone older). It's a sharp and pointed reminder that despite all the propaganda and hype, the odds are that the longer we live, the more unpleasant those lives will be post 80, 85, 90. Sure, there are exceptions -- but you can't count on being one of 'em. And that has policy consequences. A big plus, IMO, is that Jacoby focuses on separating the hype from the reality and largely leaves us to figure out what the implications are, although she points out the stupidity of research into prolonging life without extra research into everything from Alzheimer's and osteoporosis. Mandatory reading, given that those of us lucky enough to make it out of our 60s and 70s alive will be heading here. But deeply depressing... 4.2 stars.

Vienna Waltz is a sometimes fun and lively historical mystery/romance by Tracy Grant, aka Teresa Grant. The author has written two other novels, published more than a decade ago, which I read and enjoyed; this time, not only has she changed her name but those of her two main characters, so it's just as well I had forgotten most of the plot details! This one is set during the great Congress of Vienna, when the European powers met to divvy up territory after Napoleon's defeat; a Russian princess is murdered and the hero and heroine must find the culprit. The usual ups and downs ensue. Ultimately, a forgettable plot but an intriguing setting, which has made me resolve to read a non-fiction book on the subject. I was also reminded of how interesting a character Talleyrand was, and my curiosity about his niece by marriage, Dorothee of Courland, was also piqued. Alas, her memoirs extend to (gulp) six volumes... 3 stars.

Wit's End by James Gaines is a quasi-history of the "Vicious Circle" of the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, etc. Group bios are always perilous endeavours, and this book doesn't work on that level at all, but then I think Gaines was more trying to provide an overview of this group and how they came together and interacted. It's sketchy, so we see the superficial interactions but never really gain insights into what drove this collection of wits and journalists. He does make a convincing case for the argument that they were very much of their time, when the art of "public relations" was being born, and people began to be famous for being famous -- at least many of these writers were skilled, if not always as much so as those who didn't form part of their very closed circle. About a third of the book is made up of a series of fabulous illustrations. 3.4 stars, not nearly as good as Gaines's book on Bach & Frederick the Great. I'll have to look further afield for a book on the Round Table circle, although this book has kind of convinced me that they may not warrant the attention that the Bloomsbury types got -- with reason.

Molotov's Magic Lantern is a somewhat frustrating book to read, but also extremely fascinating. Polonsky, a longtime student of Russia and of philosophy, ends up living in Moscow, in a flat just below that once occupied by Molotov (of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and Molotov cocktail fame) from the 1930s onward. Starting in his apartment, surrounded by what is left of his once-massive library, she makes a voyage through books, through time and through space, investigating Russian history and the role played by its literary figures and exiles, some of whom were condemned to that fate by Molotov himself. (Although his wife was also one of the Terror's victims.) Her scope stretches from the Decembrist revolutionaries of 1825 to Khodorovsky, the oligarch that Putin has kept behind bars for years on what are probably trumped-up charges, although the bulk of her writing concerns Molotov's own era, from the Revolution to the collapse of Stalinism. This book doesn't hold up well against such titanic achievements as Anne Applebaum's Gulag or The Whisperers by Orlando Figes, but it's not intended to be of the same ilk at all. Polonsky uses a trip to a former health spa community where Dostoevsky once lived to ruminate on the latter's books and role in Russian letters and culture; she visits the town in Siberia where the Decembrists made the most of their near-permanent exile; she goes to the banya and to the dacha she and her husband rent. It's rambling and ruminative and occasional frustrating, but full of fascinating insights and it sent me scurrying to look for other books (like Akhmatova's poetry) almost constantly. For me, the merits outweighed the frustrations, so it was a 4.3 star book, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in Russian literary/cultural/political history. A good book to read to prepare the way for Volkov's cultural history of St. Petersburg, which is coming up on my TBR list.

Oh, no -- only 4 days to go. True, finishing the book below means that technically I have read 121 books, the total required under the challenge. But because that number is made up partly of bonus books in some categories, it means there are still some categories in which I have yet to read the full 11 books... Gulp.

A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel is the story of Copernicus and his discovery of which revolves around which -- the sun vs. the planets (and specifically Earth) in the early 16th century. She does a creditable job of this, even though it's not as detailed as her Galileo book, simply because we know less about Copernicus himself. The upside of that state of affairs, for this reader, was the fact that this gives Sobel an opportunity to flesh out the narrative by writing more about his times (the conflict with the Teutonic Knights; the emergence of Luther) and a chance to take a big risk, by imagining what might have happened when the young Rheticus arrives chez Copernicus from a hotbed of Lutherans, and tries to persuade Mr. C. to publish his work. Sobel writes this as a play within a book, and while I imagine a lot of folks will roll their eyes, I loved the result. It livened up what was becoming a bit of a slog (hey, I'm no mathematician and no astronomer) and was unexpectedly funny, giving Sobel a chance to show what she thought of characters like the bishop that Copernicus served. There's a lot of meat here, and it's an interesting book, though probably more for those of a scientific cast of mind. 4.1 stars.

Ah, now I have had my eye on A More Perfect Heaven so very happy to see your review!

As an aside, I would say 121 books read is an achievement to be applauded, whether or not you complete your categories. After all, it is all about reading..... ;-P

I say ... 121 books is 121 books. It's only arbitrary that you need to have categories at all. I think you've done a great job, even if my wish list is way bigger than it was at the beginning of the year. Congratulations!

Thanks, folks... I do kinda feel as if I'm cheating, though, so I'm going to keep going and see if I can get another five books or so read -- I think that's the threshold to get to at least 11 books in all my categories. We'll see....

Here's another one down, however!

Finally read the Great Gatsby, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for decades, literally. I can't believe I have never read it and I really liked it; Fitzgerald captured an era without being held captive by it. I found myself intrigued by comparing Gatsby's fiestas to the parties I've attended in the Hamptons, and laughing at some of the parallels, but also was moved by descriptive passages that didn't really move me in the film. I was also intrigued by Fitzgerald's theme of midwesterners finding themselves almost corrupted by the East Coast, an idea that Nick Carraway tosses out toward the end of the novel. Definitely recommended, 4.4 stars.

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You've intrigued me with Rez Life and Never Say Die -- especially the latter, though I an now a bit afraid to see what it says...

Suzanne, I'm wishing you all the best with getting those final five read.

thanks, Kerry! I'm now down to only three needing to be read, and I'm reasonably confident I'll manage two of those.

Here's one more finished:
Rock the Casbah by Robin Wright was very timely, being an overview and analysis of the "counter-jihad" in the Middle East that has unfolded this year; the author was very prescient in starting work on the book before the evidence supporting her theory was as apparent. That said, the book itself is very uneven. Much of it is a rehash of the events of the first few months of 2011, some background on cultural trends (new comedians, playwrights, etc. in the Islamic world; rap music and the Internet; women today) and then a couple of caveats in wrapup chapters that could have been interesting but felt rather perfunctory. Anyone who hasn't been following the news will find this fascinating and insightful; for me it was 3.5 stars. Recommended to anyone not familiar with the region who wants an overview of the reality vs the headlines or the propaganda.

Finished Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the journey of a young unnamed African-American man from a southern college for black students to New York and Harlem, and his myriad encounters with those -- black and white -- who challenge his sense of identity at every turn. With each new situation - some chilling, some hilarious, some just bizarre -- the narrator's sense of identity is rattled once again as his "visibility" is challenged. This is definitely a book I need to re-read, as I'm sure there is a lot that I simply missed or eluded me; I'm sure there were plenty of metaphors. A great argument in favor of a tutored read, but I'll have to let some time elapse before I'm ready to return to this -- while the writing is fabulous & authentic and fascinating, the way the subject matter is presented is often disturbing, and not always in a way I find convincing or useful in grasping the author's intent. Not an easy book, on many levels, and not just for the obvious reason that it's a chronicle of racism. 4 stars for now, with upward revision possible in the future.

OK, off to finish Crowded with Genius, which will be my final 11 in 11 book...