Q3 FAVOURITE READS

Just a few days left in the third quarter - time to get your thoughts together or finish that book that's bound to make the list.

What reading stood out particularly for you through July, August and September?

>1 SassyLassy: Uhm… did you mean to include June and exclude September from Q3 or is your brain just refusing to accept that September is almost over?

Hee

fiction

evening chorus

Lessons in Chemistry

so long a letter

non fiction

the lost education of horace tate

Hands of my father

orwells roses

mixed harvest

Hee

fiction

evening chorus

Lessons in Chemistry

so long a letter

non fiction

the lost education of horace tate

Hands of my father

orwells roses

mixed harvest: stories from the human past

Despite the quarter not being quite over, I don't think I'll be able to squeeze in any other top-notch books in the next few days. I had several great nonfiction reads this quarter:



Fallout : the Hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world by Lesley M.M. Blume was excellent, and I would heartily recommend it to just about anyone.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwama and Bryan Mealer is an inspiring memoir about a young man who builds a windmill in Malawi.

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride is a fabulous memoir and great on audio.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann was also very good, if not quite as good as Fallout. There is a movie version coming out next month that is getting a lot of buzz. Martin Scorcese directing, and De Niro and DiCaprio, among others, are acting in it.



The best fiction book of the quarter is by far This Other Eden by Paul Harding. But I also enjoyed The Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavić a lot.

>2 AnnieMod: Good to see people read closely! Good catch.
Probably the latter - my brain refusing to admit September is almost over, especially because in this part of the world, the last two weeks have been the only "summer" we've had this year.

I read more books in the last three months than I did in the previous six. I'm not sure what's different but I'm not complaining!

The following are in the order I read them.

The Eerie Excavation by Ash Harrier
Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks
Far From the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson
The Path of Thorns by A. G. Slatter
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

>8 rhian_of_oz: how much did you like How High....? the review compares it to Cloud Atlas and Station Elleven, which I both loved. How does this one compare?

My favorite reads of this quarter were:

Glory by Noviolet Bulawayo which is about the history of Zimabwe and its corrupt and tyrannical governements. It takes inspiration from Animal Farm but is far from being a copy.

L'empereur c'est moi : une enfance en autisme by Hugo Horiot. The author is a high functioning autist and tells about his childhood and the struggle of his mother to lure him out of his shell and fight against doctors and psychiatrists who were recommanding abusive cures and blaming her for her son's condition. This was very moving.

>10 chlorine: Ooh, Glory would be a good choice for the African Novel Challenge. I wonder if I can squeeze it in? The Horiot sounds interesting too, but it doesn't look like it's been translated. I love the cover.

Edited to fix typography

>9 cindydavid4: It is beautifully written and I enjoyed it very much. I haven't read Cloud Atlas and it's been awhile since I read Station Eleven, but I would say this one has a different feel, the best way I can describe it is "quiet".

>11 labfs39: It would indeed be a perfect fit and I do recommend it. It took me some time to get into it but afterwards I really enjoyed.
Coincidentally I am currently reading a book from Lesotho!

>12 rhian_of_oz: thanks, will have to check it out

Highlights of the quarter for me were two comic SF novels, The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis and Starter Villain by John Scalzi.

>13 chlorine: Which book is that? I haven't read anything from Lesotho yet.

>16 labfs39: It's called Basali!: Stories by and about women in Lesotho.
It's a collection of very short stories collected by the editor who organised a writing workshop to encourage people to write in English, with a reflexion on how the language should be different from pure formal English in order to reflect the specificities of Lesotho.
It's interesting though I lack some cultural knowledge to understand some things. It's out of print sadly but I was lucky to find a second had copy at a perfectly reasonable price on ebay.

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (audio, read by Freya Miller)

Fatelessness by Imre Kertész

The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

Fatelessness by Imre Kertéz

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

I'm into month three of the biggest reading slump I've been in in decades, but my notes say I enjoyed the two books I read in July very much. They were:

Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Empty Houses by Brenda Navarro

Seems like I read those years ago.

>20 Nickelini: month three. I can’t imagine. I’ve had slumps but not as long. I hope you can get out of it soon.

3rd Quarter favorites:

Lois:
AfterLives by Abdulrazak Gurnah (partial re-read)
Walk the Blue Fields: Stories by Claire Keegan (hard to chose from the three read!)
Nonfiction: Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (2022)

Michael:

Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker (science fiction)

I read a lot of fluff in Q3, much of it pretty forgettable.

The Miracles of the Namiya General Store was a bit different from my current fantasy romance binge, and I enjoyed it a lot. I read it in French and the translation was very good.

A Little Too Familiar is definitely a part of the fantasy romance binge, but it's the one I enjoyed the most, because of the humor and because it was really nice to read a romance without a trace of sexist prejudice.

Coming to this a bit late, but my Q3 favorites, based on what I rated 4.5 or 5 stars:

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley
On Immunity: An Innoculation by Eula Biss
Fun with Kirk and Spock by Robb Pearlman
The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson

Well. That's an odd little collection of books.

>24 bragan: Bill Watterson has a new book, The Mysteries (which I can’t find the touchstone for. It is co-authored (drawings not the text) with John Kascht.

ETA:it’s not a C&H book.

>25 dianeham: I know, I just got it in the mail yesterday. :)

>26 bragan: me too! :-)

Where is Q4?

>28 kjuliff: It will be posted toward the end of December, when readers know more about their favourites for the quarter.

Slim pickings for me in Q3, largely because I was on the move so much. Nice to catch up with a pile of older Boekenweek gifts, but there was nothing really earth-shattering there, and they did distract me for a disproportionate amount of time. Of books I would go back to, I think the stars were:

— The eighth life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili
And two non-fiction books that also came out of the RG Black Sea theme read:
— Border : a journey to the edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova
— Black Sea by Neal Ascherson

I was also hoping to enjoy Elif Shafak’s The island of missing trees, which I’d been saving up, but found it rather a disappointment, for various reasons.