** Best Reads - Quarter 2 of 2011 (April to June)

CharlasClub Read 2011

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** Best Reads - Quarter 2 of 2011 (April to June)

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1charbutton
Jun 27, 2011, 2:17 pm

Mine are:

Brother I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat, a deeply moving memoir of her preacher uncle, of her father and of Haiti

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, a pretty much perfect story of three generations of one family living and dying in the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to World War One

The Blackbirder by Dorothy B. Hughes, a tale of World War Two espionage and Nazis with a great female lead

I've just started a very large biography of Jean Rhys so I don't expect to get through anything else this month. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's best reads of the quarter.

2rebeccanyc
Editado: Jul 5, 2011, 4:22 pm

I had a slump in the middle of the quarter, but read some excellent books both at the beginning and the end (and if I finish the two books I'm reading now before the end of the month I'll have to add them too).

Fiction
Soul and Other Stories and The Foundation Pit, both by Andrey Platonov -- stunning and creative looks at the insanity of Soviet Russia and the struggles of the people living in it.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago -- a wonderful story-teller, am amazing writer, great characters, and fascinating ideas. I read this for the Author Theme Reads group and it will not be my last Saramago.

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer -- a dark satire told by a wickedly perceptive narrator; Mortimer has a great ear for dialogue.

Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories: Selected by the Author by Arthur Conan Doyle -- as good as I remembered from my childhood.

A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o -- another winner from Ngugi, an exploration of the choices people make in times of conflict and, above all, of all forms of betrayal.

Once upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell -- a deeply unsettling, thrilling, poetic, and inspiring novel about a confident and mostly fearless teenager struggling to survive and discover her own identity after a series of horrific events. Campbell gets better and better.

Nonfiction

Gulag by Anne Applebaum - - an eye-opening, thought-provoking, comprehensive, nuanced, and readable book that combines impressive scholarship, newly released Soviet archives, and quotes from Gulag prisoners.

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole -- an always fascinating look into the medieval documents saved in the attic of a Cairo synagogue: the scholars who found and interpreted them and the people and poetry that spring to life from their pages.

3lilisin
Jun 27, 2011, 5:29 pm

My favorites were without a doubt The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo and The Box Man by Kobo Abe. I wrote some reviews that can be found on their work page. Just really great books.

4Mr.Durick
Jun 27, 2011, 6:07 pm

Jane Eyre and Mansfield Park so far.

Robert

5Cait86
Jun 27, 2011, 7:42 pm

Three very different works:

Just Kids by Patti Smith, a memoir of NYC in the late 60s and 70s

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, a short story collection about Bengali immigrants in the US

No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod, a beautiful Canadian novel about the power and endurance of family

6StevenTX
Jun 28, 2011, 12:41 am

My favorite is Germinal by Emile Zola.

Runners up are:

Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

7janemarieprice
Jun 28, 2011, 9:20 am

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa'Thiong'o and 2666 by Roberto Bolano were my two highlights. Didn't get a ton of reading done this quarter. :(

8avaland
Editado: Jun 29, 2011, 10:24 am

I has a big reading slump in May and much of June, but still I was amazed to see I had some great reading.

In no particular order:

Five Bells by Gail Jones (2011, Australian) Lyrical story of love and loss, tying the lives of four people together, all converging on Sydney's Circular Quay area.

The Last Patriarch by Najat El Hachmi (T 2010, Morocco/Catalonia) Hard to describe this one succinctly, but a tough book to read made palatable by the narrator's mesmerizing storyteller's voice. Not for everyone, I suppose. But the narrator's voice is light, coming from some good and safe place in the future, and laced with a kind of black humor. It a book that both horrifies and haunts. See my comments on the book on my thread for further. I did a face to face interview with the author which will be in the next issue of Belletrista. The experience only served to enhance my experience with the book.

The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah (T 2010, Mauritius) Riveting story of a short-lived, intense friendship between two boys during WWII on the island of Mauritius.

Penwoman by Elin Wagner (1910, T 2009, Swedish) 1910 bestseller, the book of Sweden's women's suffrage movement. Enoyable tale of two women who are involved/get involved with the movement. The book is really well done and holds up well 100 years later.

Embassytown by China Miéville (2011, UK) Intriguing story about language and communication set on another planet. You'll never look at similes the same again.

The Wedding of Zein by Tayib Salih (1969, Sudan, T?) Wonderful tale of how the Village "fool" came to marry the most desired woman in the village. Small towns are small towns no matter where they are in the world!

Waiting by Goretti Kyomuhendo (2007, Uganda) Well done story (not terribly graphic) of how war affects ordinary village people, as told by a teenage girl. Set in the late 70s when Idi Amin's forces were retreating north through Uganda, pillaging and killing as they went.

eta to add comments on each book.

9Rise
Jun 28, 2011, 10:19 am

I only have 11 books read this quarter.

The best are The Ubu Plays by Alfred Jarry and The Old Capital by Yasunari Kawabata.

The worst: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.

10GCPLreader
Jun 28, 2011, 10:45 am

I love this group! -finding some great recommendations. Here are my best reads from April to June:

We, the Drowned-- epic Danish seafaring adventure
Emily, Alone--poignant story of an aging widow
The Silent Land--speculative novel of avalanche survivors
Finn--re-imagining of Huck's father
The Sisters Brothers--exciting Western
Embers--lovely Hungarian novel

11Nickelini
Jun 28, 2011, 11:20 am

I read some pretty good books during this quarter, but the two that stand out are Bone China, by Roma Tearne and Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai; both novels are set in Sri Lanka.

I also enjoyed the non-fiction Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein.

12rebeccanyc
Jun 28, 2011, 12:18 pm

#10, GCPLreader, I am planning on reading We, the Drowned this summer for the Reading Globally theme read on the sea.

13stretch
Jun 28, 2011, 7:06 pm

Don Quixote which was pretty epic in spook and nature.

Stiff a great read and attitude about a subject that could have easily have been very macabre or too snarky.

14edwinbcn
Jun 29, 2011, 8:10 am

The books I most enjoyed reading were:

In April



Se résoudre aux adieux by Philippe Besson

About a woman who travels all over Europe, and keeps sending letters to her lost lover, who never responds. The book calls beautiful images to mind, and while pondering the past, the reader is drawn in to pondering their past travels to (some) of these European cities. Quite poetic, and with a hint to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. The best book I have read by Besson so far.



In May



Pompeii by Robert Harris

I am gradually realizing that in my appreciation of the novel, I cannot dispense with a good plot. Harris has contrived quite an original new version of the story of Pompeii, producing an extremely readable novel.





My life as a fake by Peter Carey

While other reviewers consider this book confusing, I disagree and find it masterful. There are some shifting dialogues, but with one of the character's speech always typically (linguistically) marked, the careful reader should not lose track. Not much of a movie-goer myself, I guess it would be hard to turn this novel into a film. An absolutely great read, with a great deal of humour and quite a pinch of horror.



In June



Winterwood by Patrick McCabe

To earn 5-star rating a book should trigger a physical response in me, some strong emotion. In the case of Winterwood that was a shiver. This is the first book since American Psycho that has given me a nightmare, and various images from the book keep coming back to me. While I usually donate books to our library right after reading, this books has a bit of a hold over me, and I need to have another look at it later, also to write a review for LT. While American Psycho is explicit in its descriptions of horror, this book is all suspense. Incredible disgust, incredible violence, incredible horror. I have linked the book to Dracula. I won't say more. I had read two other books by McCabe but find this one, so very much different from the other books, by far superior.





The black cloud by Fred Hoyle

I do not like the genre per sé, but quite enjoy reading the semi-philosophical sci-fi of the 1950s, thereabout, say John Wyndham etc. This reissue in Penguin Classics, was a very enjoyable read. Unfortunately, the book slowed down for about 20 pages in the final quarter of the book, but was still rounded off in a very satisfactory way. I was not particularly impressed by the afterword by Richard Dawkins. It might be a good idea to read it as an afterword, and not as a foreword, as I did.


15bragan
Jun 30, 2011, 3:58 am

Hmm, my highest-rated reads for this quarter were all non-fiction:

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynman
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating Elisabeth Tova Bailey

16rebeccanyc
Jun 30, 2011, 9:28 am

I've added Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza to my list in post #2, but that should be it for this quarter since I doubt I'll finish the other book I'm reading today.

17baswood
Jun 30, 2011, 1:01 pm

The very best reads for me were:

The vagabond, Colette
The story of art, E H Gombrich
Cooking of India, Santha Rama Rau

Just bubbling under were:
The discarded Image, C S Lewis
The discovery of France, Graham Robb
2666, Roberto Bolano

I also enjoyed Poems chiefly from the manuscript, John Clare

just two novels rated high in the last quarter.

18dchaikin
Jun 30, 2011, 2:58 pm

Best can be a difficult word for me to interpret. Here's three favorites:

Fire on the Horizon: The Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster by Tom Shroder & John Konrad

Florida in Poetry : A History of the Imagination by Jane Anderson Jones & Maurice O'Sullivan, editors

Island Fire : An Anthology of Literature from Hawai'i by Cheryl A & James R. Harstad

19Miela
Jun 30, 2011, 4:45 pm

Not sure what my best reads were, the past couple years have been kind of a reading slump. Mostly, I've been reading stuff on the Kindle, and the Morland books (a series about a family in Britain from the Wars of the Roses to at least WWI). I sample a lot of books, but rarely finish many of them, which also makes it hard to choose a "best" book.

20rebeccanyc
Jun 30, 2011, 4:55 pm

#18 Best can be a difficult word for me to interpret. Here's three favorites:

I always interpret "best" as "favorite" for these purposes!

21avaland
Jun 30, 2011, 5:16 pm

>18 dchaikin:, 20 Yes, that's how I interpret it for this purpose too!

22detailmuse
Editado: Jul 1, 2011, 10:39 am

  

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, fictional biography of a family whose teen son carries out a school shooting. Fascinating, disturbing, outstanding.

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard, collection of coming-of-age personal essays where growing up is as likely to occur at thirty as at thirteen or three.

Radioactive by Lauren Redniss, nonfiction vignettes that form a biography of Marie Curie and of radiation itself; generously illustrated with art created by “cyanotype printing,” which evokes a sense of radiation. A beautiful book, playful, thoughtful.

23arubabookwoman
Jul 16, 2011, 7:13 pm

My best book of the quarter was Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes.