Randy's reads in 2012

Hoping to reach the 75-book mark again in 2012, but this time as an actual member of the group.

Welcome! Thanks for joining us!

Hi, Randy!

Welcome to the 75-ers. I predict you're going to enjoy this group A LOT!!

Have fun...

Randy,

Be sure to try out the Garth Nix books as well as Michael Scott. Enjoy your reading in 2012!

Welcome to the group, Randy. :)

Hello! Checking in for 2012 and fervently hoping I'll be able to keep up this time... :)

Howdy there, fellow Southern Ontarian! I'm in Brantford, but a frequent traveler to visit family and work in the tri-cities. Here's to another great reading year!

Welcome!

Hi All. Thanks for the warm welcome.

@ dk_phoenix: thanks for the local welcome!

Glad to see you joining us in 2012, Randy!

This being the last day of the old year, and it being unlikely that I will finish reading any more books this year, I thought I would offer up a list of my five best reads of 2011:

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
George Sprott: (1894-1975) by Seth
The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman

In total, I managed to read 81 books in 2011. There are lots of others that deserve honourable mentions, but I'll stick with a short list of my best reads.

Nice list, Randy! How about adding the books to Mac's 'Best of 2011' thread here?: http://www.librarything.com/topic/129634

>11 RandyMetcalfe: Oh I've adored Austerlitz since I read it in my first year of undergrad. Glad it found another fan this year!

Welcome to the group, Randy, and Happy New Year!

Welcome Randy. As a Librarian, I heartily endorse your plan to find your books at the library first. We try to have as broad a selection as possible, and then track it down and get it on loan from someplace else. I'm looking forward to seeing your 'eclectic' reading list this year.

Greetings to alcottacre, MickyFine, ronincats, and tututhefirst. I don't know how you found me with the volume of traffic in this group; I'll never keep up.

I don't know if I will manage a review for each book I read, as I see that many others do, but at least at the start I'll make the attempt. And without further ado, here follows my first completed read of 2012.

1. In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

Amidst the meanderingly precise descriptions of faces, personalities, and internal states of near-delirium, the charming but endlessly frustrating characters, the incessant dithering, the sub-clauses atop of sub-clauses all the way down, the startling unexpected observations, and the sheer weight of sentence upon sentence, I always return to one further fact: Proust can be damn funny. His comic set-pieces, such as M. de Charlus’ strange behaviour at Balbec, or M. de Norpois’ equivocal reasoning, are worth the price of admission. Of course there is far more here than I have gathered in one reading. Wonderful – I’ll read it again, and again, and its value, for me, shall increase with time.

#17: I started on Proust last year, but I am going to have to find a volume with larger print than my current edition of Swann's Way. I just cannot handle the tiny print.

Glad to see you enjoyed your first read of the year, Randy!

I also started Proust this past year, reading Swann in Love for one of my f2f book clubs. "sub-clauses atop of sub-clauses " indeed!

There is a new(ish) translation of Proust that one of my reading companions thought much clearer than the Moncrief. I think the translator was Davis or Davies. You might look for it. Type is probably bigger too!

#18: Thanks for the mention, Judy. I will see if I can find Swann in Love in the new translation.

I find Proust so intimidating I'm just not sure if I'll ever tackle him. But I'm thoroughly impressed you did Randy and I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. :)

#21: Sometimes a book, or set of books, sits on your shelf long enough that it almost takes it upon itself to demand some attention. "Read me, or pass me on to someone who will!" Despite that I found myself reaching page 118 and then setting this one aside for six months. Returning to it, the only way to tackle it was simply to decide to read 30 pages per day, every day. And that worked. It picked up the pace of the action, which can seem slow, and it allowed the long passages to swirl, atmospheric. On the other hand, I rarely enjoy spending such a long time with characters with whom I have only limited sympathy.

What I've been wondering is whether Proust's ideal reader, back when he wrote the books, would have been more in tune with the narrator and his self-inflicted miasma. Or does Proust intend for his reader to get a bit exasperated? Or maybe I just need to let it sit on the shelf again for a few years and age a little in order to mellow.

2. Vox by Nicholson Baker

It’s Baker in his early days – revelling in his control of language, pace, the minutia of individual obsession, the elegant construction of sentences. But it’s just not that funny, y’know. And without the humour (see, for example, The Anthologist, or The Everlasting Story of Nory, or even Checkpoint), the humanity is adrift, not exactly lacking, but untethered.

3. How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish

Simply delightful. Stanley Fish appreciates “sentences that take your breath away.” His enthusiasm is infectious, fuelled by examples drawn from great literature. He makes you want to read each of those works (and countless others) slowly, so that you can savour every last sentence.

This is not a manual of style or correct usage; comparisons with Strunk and White are misplaced. There are a few simple exercises suggested, but what Fish is aiming at is not pedagogy, and certainly not pedantry. It is, rather, I think, a genuine wish to encourage readers (and writers) to refocus on the very stuff that makes great literature great: sentences.

What are sentences? They are basic building blocks of meaning, an organization of items in the world, a structure of logical relationships. It sounds a bit like the early Wittgenstein re-heated by J.L. Austin. It’s not. Stanley Fish is an unapologetic child of the New Criticism. His formula – Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation – is nothing less than a justification for steeping oneself in the finest sentences that the history of literature can provide. Which is precisely what he does.

>24 RandyMetcalfe: I got that book for my birthday back in November but haven't cracked it open yet. I'll definitely have to bump it up the mental pile. :D

#24: Never heard of that one, but I will be looking for a copy now. Thanks, Randy!

4. Eleven by Mark Watson

This novel has a thesis. It is that the world, the world we live in, is completely deterministic. One action or event sets off another, which sets off another, and so on in an unbroken chain. As one character puts it, “Whatever’s meant to happen, happens.” Watson’s authorial voice is surprisingly consistent on this point across the span of the entire novel. Thus the novel progresses from a single minor event, a failure to act on the part of our protagonist, Xavier Ireland, which sets in motion a chain of seemingly unalterable effects involving eleven different people. Indeed, so thoroughly determined is the world that even minor characters often have announced of them precise details of what they will be doing or saying 20 years hence. It’s not just that what happens happens, it’s that everything that is going to happen is laid down.

That’s a surprising thesis for a novel to maintain, though of course the characters and events of novels are certainly determined by their authors. But it would not seem to leave a great deal of room for action, for intention, for drama. So it won’t come as a surprise to learn that the characters themselves in Eleven are not, typically, collaborators in maintaining the apparent thesis that the novel has undertaken. In fact, the over-riding feature of many of the characters is guilt, a condition, I would say, markedly at odds with the deterministic thesis.

Xavier’s life is literally turned upside down by guilt (he is a transplanted Australian now living in London, England). The main action of the novel takes place almost six years after the events that have driven him from his homeland. And once again Xavier seems to be the origin of a further sequence of unfortunate events. But if the universe is indeed ordered by causal chains, then surely those chains reach all the way back. There is no justification, within the logic of this novel, for why a chain would only go back as far as one of Xavier’s acts of commission or omission. How can he be responsible?

And so the novel fights against itself and never quite pierces the murk of conflicting and contrasting conceptions of action, agency, cause, and culpability.

Nice review, Randy!

5. They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Persuasive Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

They, Graff and Birkenstein, say that writing well is a lot like entering a conversation. It involves listening to what others have said and summarizing it, fairly, prior to stepping up to add your own true, smart, logical statements or opinions (the I say) which may be in agreement with, at odds with, or both in agreement and disagreement with different aspects of what the they have said. The thesis is presented through a sensible division of chapters into the salient points, first, on how to layout what “they say,” e.g. with the art of quoting, moving on to a variety of ways to enunciate and clarify what “I say”, and rounding things off with some useful chapters tying it all together.

I say that this is an excellent and helpful book for students, whose advice, if followed could alleviate stress, low grades and tears, as one makes one’s way through academia. The only chapter I found less than convincing was chapter nine on the use of vernacular or argot in academic writing. But perhaps that is due to cultural differences for a non-American reader/student, or because I am now more than 20 years away from direct classroom experience. In any case, the book as a whole should be of great service to students and educators.

#29: As I am re-entering the world of academia, it sounds as though that book might be helpful to me. I will see if the local library has a copy. Thanks for the review, Randy!

Very nice review of They Say/I Say, Randy.

6. Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

Love, loss, and loneliness combine in this superficially superficial novel. Murakami presents a world of isolated characters on singular trajectories, whose paths sometimes cross but never truly meet. Like the characters themselves, emotions are untethered, emerging as love unrequited, unconnected sexual desire, and an unspecified fear. Only child-like friendship, fiercely loyal, singular, and platonic, seems real, something characters can cling to but, sadly, not build upon. The prose is lithesome, youthful, and unadorned, yet at times almost dreamlike. Sort of a curious combination of Camus and Alain-Fournier. The setting, nominally Japan with a visit to a nameless Greek island, is sprinkled with enough namechecks of world brands such as Amstel, Heineken, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, that it feels like it could be taking place anywhere, or in keeping with its orbital theme, somewhere high above the earth. Or perhaps we are in a dreamworld, the “other” place that the characters sometimes seek, or fear they have lost themselves to. This is a novel that will prompt new thoughts, but will not settle down into a one-line summary. Highly recommended.

This is my first Murakami. It will not be my last.

So glad you discovered Haruki Murakami, Randy. He's one of my favorite authors. The book of his I like the best is one of short stories. It's called The Elephant Vanishes. Look for it.

I like his work because it's usually easy to read, dreamlike or wistful, and sometimes a bit surreal. I like Japanese literature in general, although Murakami often incorporates a bit of Western culture into his writing.

#33: Thanks for the recommendation, Madeline. My wife is also a fan of Murakami's short stories, but I don't see that book on our shelves. I shall look further afield.

Nice review of Sputnik Sweetheart, Randy. 'Superficially superficial': I like it!

7. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life by Martha Nussbaum

Readers of Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness or Love’s Knowledge will not find the position and core arguments presented here to be new. The literary imagination, as practised through the reading of novels, provides insights necessary, she believes, for any adequate moral or political theory. Reading well-constructed, sensitive, realist novels develops moral capacities in citizens; failing to do so stunts their claims to humanity. The target here is any simplistic economic rational choice theory, such as is often deployed willy-nilly by public servants or those who would have hopes of becoming public servants. (The sophisticated and subtle theories of real economists are largely immune to these criticisms.) The extension and refinement of the argument in this case is to focus upon judges, whom Nussbaum argues need to be, in Adam Smith’s phrase, ‘judicious spectators’, fully alive to the all too human aspects of the cases before them. This they accomplish, at least in part, through development of their literary imaginations.

Nussbaum, as ever, is a sensitive reader of the literature she deploys in her argument. She may be a touch blind to the level and breadth of antipathy towards her view out there in the ‘real’ world (or even in the world of philosophy); sensitive novel readers, on the other hand, will tend to agree intuitively with her stance. Perhaps this explains why she moves on so quickly to the practical implications of her position for judges and others rather than delving more deeply into the roots of her own view. Or perhaps there is a fear that no philosophical position can be taken seriously in America unless it has clear implications for public policy. For my part, I could stand more, much more, scrutiny of the relationship between reading novels and our moral lives. Nevertheless, this contribution surely helps.

I'm not aware of Nussbaum's work - thanks for the review.

Nice review of Poetic Justice, Randy. This is a topic that is greatly interesting to me, in particular the way in which the reading of literature can help young (and old?) physicians to become more empathetic toward their patients, so I'll put this book on the top of my wish list, and hopefully read it later this year.

#38: One that comes to mind, though it has been years since I read it and it does not seem to be on my shelves at the moment, is Robert Coles' The Call of Stories. I'll keep a lookout for others that might be of interest to you.

8. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

This wonderfully gentle novel follows Eilis Lacey as she moves between Enniscorthy, Ireland, and Brooklyn, New York, in the early 1950s. Eilis is bright but thoughtful, always reflectively engaged with her surroundings. Almost from the first, Tóibín subtly establishes distancing devices and coping mechanisms for Eilis, establishing for her a determined inner life. Eilis is decisive but also self-persuasive, so much so that, by the climax of the piece, we see her winding herself into an excruciating self-created dilemma, which may not be fully justified in terms of Eilis’ character. But then, like the Gordian knot being hacked away, the tension is suddenly released. Eilis is freed to move forward with her new life, with just enough of a reminder of other possibilities to ensure that she will always nurture an inner, private life, an emblem of her independence. Highly recommended.

I read Brooklyn either last year or the year before. I really enjoyed it. I definitely second your recommendation.

#36 Very interesting review - I don't know Nussbaum's work either, but what an interesting subject. I was commenting on my own thread about my lack of reading in my own professional area (religion/theology) and wondering to myself whether my preference for reading mainly fiction/novels was purely about escaping from professional responsibilities, or whether it is actually is helping, as much as more obviously relevant theological or philosophical works might be, to keep my moral sensibilities and capacity for empathy and compassion alive.

I love your reviews!

9. Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction by Keith Oatley

Professor Oatley begins from the vantage point that fiction presents opportunities for the reader to ‘model’ or ‘simulate’ worlds. We become partners with authors in a play of fictional actions and emotions that trigger neurons in the very same centres in our brains that would be activated were we to be performing these actions or experiencing these emotions for real. The object of this play is social as we situate ourselves in a social world. And being so, it is at the same time conversational, that being a key component of the social. It turns out that talking about fiction, as readers, is one of the most useful things we could be doing.

Unsurprisingly this is rich ground for a cognitive psychologist and sometime novelist to plough. The main portion of the text sets up the basis for the fiction as simulation theory. Here, every statement seems to be supported by some psychological study. But few, if any, of the supporting materials are challenged. Which may be the way psychologists build positions, seemingly by accretion. For my part, I worry that the conceptual roots of these various studies and theories from the past hundred or more years may not, in practice, cohere so nicely. But perhaps this is merely a way of noting that psychology is not philosophy.

The final three chapters are especially interesting: ‘Writing fiction’; ‘Effects of fiction’; and ‘Talking about fiction’. The first of these provides some practical guidance for potential authors, drawing upon Flaubert’s writing practice. That practice consists in five phases: planning, scenarios, drafts (of which there are many), style, and finally the finished draft. The chapter on the effects of fiction asks whether reading literature is good for you. Oatley treats this primarily as a question about measureable outcomes such as increased cognitive or problem-solving abilities. He acknowledges that in a time of severe pressure on educational curricula, such demonstrable benefits may be essential to sustain literature’s place in our schools. But of course for many, the idea that literature might be good for you is really a question about whether it is morally improving. Here Oatley hands off to Martha Nussbaum’s writing, uncritically, to settle the matter. The final chapter may be particularly interesting to those of us who attend book clubs or participate in online discussions of our reading. Oatley states emphatically: “To talk about fiction is almost as important as to engage with it in the first place” (178). It’s a great statement and I agree with it, naturally, though I would prefer to see much more on the relation between such discussions and the (potential) moral benefits of reading literature. That, however, is not a criticism, merely a wish for future reading.

Although written for a general audience, Such Stuff as Dreams has a vast number of citations in the forty pages of endnotes that function almost as a parallel text. It seems, at times, as though Oatley has canvassed every possible study, monograph, or text at all relevant to his project. Thankfully his twenty-plus page bibliography should provide the keen student of these ideas ample fodder for further investigation.

Finally, it must be said that the editorial staff of Wiley-Blackwell have not carefully proofed the text as numerous distracting typos are present.

oh, typos in a book about reading! Shame on them.

Thanks for the very interesting review. I'm not sure I would read the whole text, but the last few chapters sound very interesting. Perhaps I'll look for this in the library. Is it a new book?

#45 Hi Judy. Yes, newish - 2011.

10. American Pastoral by Philip Roth

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is filled with bile, lyrical bile. Whether in the voice of Seymour Levov, “the Swede”, or his brother Jerry, or his father Lou, or the Swede’s daughter, Merry, or almost any other character, the potential for an excoriating rant is virtually irresistible. The anger, or envy, or contempt, or, sometimes, distorting idolatry, is released shotgun fashion – its spread is wide and indiscriminate and it may not necessarily kill what it hits. Distorting idolatry might sound odd in that list, but love in this novel, whether of Zuckerman for the Swede, the Swede for his daughter or his wife, or various characters for “America”, is often so blurred and overridden with wish fulfilment that it begins to feel a bit more like hate for whatever the real object of that love might be.

The novel opens with a long framing device in which Roth’s writerly alter-ego, Zuckerman, introduces us to the Swede. The Swede is almost too good to be true, and not surprisingly cracks in the façade soon begin to emerge. At that point the frame of Zuckerman is dropped and the novel continues in revelatory fashion from the Swede’s perspective. That has the effect of making the frame appear to have been superfluous. No matter. By then the rants are in full flown against LBJ, the war in Vietnam, capitalism, anti-capitalism, Nixon, intellectualism, almost each character, against the narrator (the Swede) himself, and more.

We follow the Swede from his origins in Newark to the superficially idyllic and pastoral setting of Old Rimrock, with his near-Miss-America wife, Dawn, and their stuttering daughter, Merry. Merry’s impulse to rant is nearly matched by her speech impediment. It is an articulate inarticulateness, with explosive consequences, that is mirrored by other characters, and, possibly, by Roth himself. We see pyrotechnical displays of language but I fear it may be mere display. As ever there is no counter-balance, and the reader is left with the suspicion that despite piercing insight, Roth has missed something equally obvious. Or at least that is how this reader reacts.

11. 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

A novel is “a long story bound enticingly between the closed covers of a book.” That, it turns out, is about as comprehensive a description of “the novel” as one is likely to get. At her best, Smiley humbly acknowledges the irreducibility of “the novel”. Unfortunately, the first half of 13 Ways does not always display Smiley at her best. Instead, through chapters exploring such matters as what a novel is, who is a novelist, morality and the novel, the art of the novel, and more, Smiley evinces a seeming compulsion to render. Thus the preponderance of universal claims beginning, “All novels…,” or, “Every novel…,” and so forth. None is convincing. At times they seem naïve, wilful, petulant. They culminate in a dubiously singular analytical theory that Smiley dubs “the circle of the novel”.

My advice is to set aside the first half of 13 Ways and start in around page 270. The following 300 pages consists in brief summaries and observations of two to three pages in length on each of 100 novels, a representative sampling from the history of novel writing (as opposed to a ‘best of’ selection). In these pages Jane Smiley earns our trust. Each novel is considered on its merits, unfiltered by cod theories. We see a sensitive and sensible reader, responsive to the texts, challenging but also willing to be challenged. Perhaps not surprisingly there is a complete absence of ponderous pronouncements on “the novel”. One gets the impression that in her heart Smiley knows that each novel of merit stands on its own creating its own universals from its own particularities. Thus Smiley notes that “really, in the end, all the reader can say is, ‘Read this. I bet you’ll like it.’”

And in the end, I did like 13 Ways, despite my increasing annoyance as I plodded through the first 270 pages. I’m so glad I continued on to read the whole of the remarks on her set of 100 novels (I only wish now that Smiley had been able to fulfil her original goal of a set of 275). On novels that I already knew well, I found Smiley’s observations invariably insightful. On novels that I knew of but have not yet read, I found new reasons to pick them up. And for those novels that were entirely new to me, I can only say that my potential reading world is now somewhat enlarged. You may, like me, finish by wishing that Jane Smiley (or some other sensitive and sensible reader) could provide comparable insights for every book you hope to read, or have already read and might now read again.

Excellent reviews of American Pastoral and 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, Randy.

Nice reviews!

I need to get around to Sputnik Sweetheart. But first I think will be Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which my husband has already read. I really loved Murakami from my first exposure to him - in the first pages of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle

#49 - 50: Thanks, Darryl and Roni. Encouraging remarks are always welcome :-)

#51: Hi Ursula. Sputnik Sweetheart was my first Murakami, but I think I will get round to The Wind Up Bird Chronicle later this year.

12. How to Grow a Novel: The Most Common Mistakes Writers Make and How to Overcome Them by Sol Stein

Sol Stein is charming. He offers practical advice for would-be novelists mingled with discrete anecdotes and examples from his long career as a playwright, novelist, editor, publisher, and non-fiction writer (he published his first non-fiction book at the age of 13). It would be no exaggeration to say that this book is suffused with wisdom, well earned. His three chapters on the state of the publishing industry at the end of the 20th century are sobering, if not disheartening. And yet, he counsels, great literature still manages to find its way to readers who care and who will keep it alive for future generations.

No doubt much of the practical advice in How to Grow a Novel can be gleaned in some form from other sources. But who else would inform the budding novelist that the most important thing she could learn is to be courteous? For Stein, to be courteous is to be constantly thinking of others, which for the novelist means the reader. What does the reader want? What will captivate or enchant the reader? What will bring your dialogue to life for the reader? What will help your reader stay with you as you shift point of view, or bring in some necessary back-story? In the end, it’s all about your potential reader. A writer, says Stein, is someone who cannot not write. And the novelist is, much like Sol Stein I suspect, a courteous fellow.

13. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Enchanting, if that word is not misplaced. Susanna Clarke’s delightfully austenesque style, full of wit and charm, breathes life into a world not so very far from our own. Early 19th century England is awash with nostalgia, of a sort, for an earlier time when magic and Englishness were near synonymous. For more than 400 years all that remains of English magic are theoretical magicians, steeped in a bookish history but unable to partake of practical magic. Mr Norrell of Hurtfew Abbey, Yorkshire, reduces theoretical magic to a mere nothing when he dramatically emerges on the scene as England’s sole practitioner of practical magic. England will never be the same again; or, depending on your point of view, England is finally returning to its natural state. Together with Jonathan Strange, his pupil and eventual colleague, Mr Norrell opens the door to unique opportunities in the ongoing battle against the French tyrant, Napoleon. But other doors are opened as well, and soon enough intrusions from Faerie begin to dominate events.

This is no mere exercise in fanciful world building. Clarke pours an intricate plot whose pace quickens markedly in the final third of the book. The climax is as dramatic, and unexpected, as you could hope. You will be surprised but entirely satisfied, I think. I took my time reading this book, revelling in Clarke’s masterful styling. I encourage you to do the same. Warmly recommended.

For those considering delving into Clarke’s world, I point you to the ongoing one-on-one tutored read in this group. Well worth lurking therein.

14. A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé

Ivan and Francesca have a dream. They believe in literature, truly great literature, and want to set up a bookstore that caters solely to that end: The Good Novel bookstore. No transient fiction, no genre junk, no latest must-reads as dictated by crass publishers and marketeers. Just good novels, as selected by a secret committee of experts. Who could object to that? It turns out a great many people, virulently and eventually violently. But is it a single angry individual or a co-ordinated group behind the attacks? And is the real target the bookstore itself, the individuals behind it, or the idea of some novels being better than others?

Laurence Cossé’s novel may be an honest attempt to write a novel that might get selected for The Good Novel bookstore. Or it may be simply a platform for hectoring the tainted publishing world (but hasn’t that been done repeatedly since the 18th century?). It is certainly an opportunity to orate on the virtues of great literature. And underlying it all is a curious exploration of idealistic love (Francesca for Ivan; Ivan for Anis; all of the protagonists for great literature).

The story of The Good Novel bookstore is related through a nested frame, with discordant intrusions by the narrator. It is so uneven that you cannot help but be suspicious of the translation. And the amorous pangs of the diffident main characters are risible. It is all just a bit sad. You may be enticed by the idea of The Good Novel bookstore, but this book will not be on its shelves.

I have been lurking on your thread and just wanted to say that I have been enjoying your reviews.

15. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Once you get past the fun of a “novel” whose chapters are each written from a different viewpoint and at different times in the lives of a loose collection of bridge-the-century Americans. Once you get past the clever second person narrative chapter, or the PowerPoint essay chapter, or the gonzo journalism interview chapter, or the Shteyngartesque future history chapter. Once you get past being even grudgingly impressed with the bravado. You will feel sad. Because the overriding emotion that Jennifer Egan’s impressive post-post-modern “novel” evokes is sadness. At least for me.

Most of the narrative voices in A Visit from the Good Squad are crushed by regrets for things done or things they will do, mingled with nostalgia. Or perhaps all nostalgia is somehow rueful. Even the child narrator of the PowerPoint chapter (it’s not so strange; there have been PowerPoint “story” templates for child educators around for years) is weighted down with fears of a planet in mass decline and parents who are barely coping. And the babyish txt-language of the final chapter does not hold out much hope for any meaningful communicative future. And yet, when you get past all that, that elegiac tone and content, there is a real quest for narrative and aesthetic purity, whether in the “music” of Cezanne’s colours or the variety of silences in a musical fermata. Definitely worth a read.

#56: Hi, Carly. Thanks for lurking and de-lurking! I seem to be mostly lurking but I'm lurking with intent ;-)

I'm lurking too, and skipped your latest review because I'm scheduled to read the book for one of my f2f groups next month. Then I'll go back and read it.

16. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Not a perfect novel. At times it is overly directed by an imposing narrative voice. At times, especially in the third volume, discordant chapters appear simply to force a plot point, or render themes explicit that were earlier presented with a gentler and more efficacious touch. And yet I would more gladly reread a less than perfect Austen than a great many more perfect novels. (To be clear, I do believe that Austen also did write a perfect novel, perhaps the perfect novel, later in Emma.)

At its best, Sense and Sensibility shimmers with deft observations and exquisite turns of phrase. Is there anyone so adept at painting character whilst presenting backstory? Comic set pieces abound; Edward’s meeting with Elinor and Lucy is almost excruciatingly awkward. But there are also wrenchingly emotional scenes for Marianne and Elinor, respectively, that come across as piercingly real.

The narrator’s sympathy remains consistently with Elinor, but Marianne’s more emotional sensibility is not dismissed, and, when subjected to appropriate reflection attains to sense. They seem encircled by a sea of silly people. But so long as hearts are generous and pure, as in the case of Mrs Jennings and her daughter Charlotte, they are loved. For those that lack genuine fellow feeling there is disdain. Yet, even for these, Elinor offers courtesy and civility.

There is much more that might be said. Perhaps it is enough to say that, as with each of Austen’s novels, this one should be read and read again.

17. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and other stories by Susanna Clarke

Each of the stories in this collection is set within the world Susanna Clarke created for her enchanting novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Indeed, Jonathan Strange appears directly in the title story, and the Duke of Wellington appears in another, which is curiously set in the village of Wall from Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. For those familiar with Clarke’s novel, the stories might be thought of in the manner of her extended footnotes, here fully extended. They come across as flourishes, embellishments, and delights. They are tales.

There is a certain familiarity to the tone of these tales, most being written in the same austenesque style as Clarke’s novel. “On Lickerish Hill” is the exception, written in first person with a female narrator of curious education. Great fun! It would be hard to choose a favourite, but I suppose I might give the nod to “Mr Simonelli or The Fairy Widower”.

I believe the tales stand up well on their own, but they will be best appreciated, perhaps, by those who have read Clarke’s novel. Recommended.

18. Matisse: The Life by Hilary Spurling

Breathless. In Matisse: The Life, Hilary Spurling compresses her masterful two-volume biography into something more manageable for the general reader. I think she must have done it by simply removing all of the air and squeezing. Because the overwhelming feeling for the reader of Matisse: The Life is of a life – a very long life – lived at a fevered pitch. From his earliest days to his death eighty years later, Henri Matisse fought a battle with himself, his art, and his family. That Spurling is able to carry the reader along at breakneck pace across this landscape is testament to her ability as a biographer to present as much as possible for her reader and, otherwise, stay out of the way.

Perhaps every life of a great artist is filled with struggle. Here, each crisis is presented as a life crisis, whether it be the decision to break away from the grey palette of his northern youth, or to spend his last resources on an inspiring mounted brilliant blue butterfly, or to favour colour over conflict. This is the romantic, heroic life of self-inflicted penury, striving against norms, seeking within for some vision, which may only be appreciated fifty years hence. At the same time, Matisse clearly has a counterbalancing conformism, an almost bourgeois approach to the art business and to family. Spurling does not judge, though she clearly is in sympathy with her subject.

However interesting Matisse’s life might have been, what animates it for the reader is his art. Fortunately, Spurling is very good at describing works (the text includes a number of colour reproductions) and, most especially, at carrying the reader through the process of creation. Perhaps, like me, you will remain bemused by gestation periods of many years for certain paintings. But at least you will feel that there is probably something more there, just out of reach.

A long life worth living is filled with love and Matisse’s is no exception. Despite an early break with his father, the bonds of family remain rock solid. His relationship with his wife, Amélie, is completely integrated into his artwork. His children and later grandchildren are vital. He is at times irascible, petulant, domineering, childish, devoted, sanguine: in short, a man. One of the most delightful episodes, which here is passed over quickly without comment, occurs when Matisse, who had been looking after his new daughter-in-law’s dog while she and his son were on their honeymoon, refuses to give it back when they return. He had grown so attached to it that he could not bear to part with it the rest of its life. You cannot help but smile.

For readability, I might have preferred some spacing in this telling, a chapter here or there at a lesser pace in order to allow the reader to catch his or her breath. But perhaps that is asking too much. In any case, if you cannot spare the time for Spurling’s even longer two-volume work on Matisse, then I recommend you at least take up this compressed life. Just hold on to your hat.

19. Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity, and Moral Imagination by Susan E. Babbitt

Susan E. Babbitt transforms what clearly must have been a challenging philosophy doctoral dissertation into a book of broad scope and crisp insight. The crux of the matter here is the basis for a transformative rationality. As radical feminist political theory meets traditional meta-ethical ontologies on the battleground of theories of the self, personal integrity, and individual rational choice, everything is up for grabs. Babbitt is strident in her oppositions (philosophers she disagrees with tend to be described as both “wrong and misguided”) and just as fiercely determined to lay out a positive position that makes a space for radical critique of existing societal norms whilst preserving a focus on the act of becoming, the embracing of impossible, unjustifiable (in current terms) expectations that re-create the moral ground on which actions are judged. So, ambitious. And successful, in part, I think, at least enough to cause this reader to seek out her later writings.

A powerful literary example drives much of the first half of Impossible Dreams – the dramatic infanticide perpetrated by Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Babbitt explores this scene in detail, puzzling out what makes it a belligerent act of personal integrity rather than a “crazy” action. This is certainly rich ground to work. But at times it seems as though Babbitt forgets that the Sethe example comes from a well-crafted fictional base. She almost treats it as direct, historical fact. In fact, Morrison’s novel is so rich that it may be too complex for this philosophical thesis.

Babbitt makes good use of the most prominent moral philosophers of the early ‘90’s (when this text was drafted). She is not slow to point out their errors, as she sees them. The same holds true for feminist philosophers who, too often she thinks, disparage essentialism when something like an essentialist perspective may be necessary for the kind of bootstrapping critique that may be required for radical transformation of society.

In the final chapter, Babbitt argues against Martha Nussbaum’s neo-Aristotelian moral particularism as presented in Love’s Knowledge. Babbitt argues that Nussbaum’s brand of improvisationalist moral perception is simply too embedded in discredited racist, misogynist social norms to ever affect anything like the radical action that may be required. Babbitt opts instead for the radical critiquing made available by consequentialist moral theories (here represented by R.M. Hare). But this move is neither perceptive nor original. No one could be surprised to find that neo-Aristotelian particularism might run in tandem with a small ‘c’ moral conservatism. And for 200 hundred years, consequentialist theories, whether rooted in Bentham or Mill, have provided a basis for radical critiques of society. And so this final chapter looks like a red herring.

Nevertheless, there is much to ponder here. I will definitely be looking for further engagement with Babbitt’s thinking.

Re: The Ladies of Grace Adieu: I had no idea she had borrowed from Neil Gaiman! I wonder if he knew ahead of time? I really enjoyed those stories but could never get into Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

#64: Hi Carly. Yes, I'm fairly certain that Neil and Susanna are good friends.

ETA: Here is a nice joint interview with them: http://www.salon.com/2005/10/08/gaiman_clarke/singleton/

I like that interview, especially how they seem to relish their work and all the research that goes into it.

20. Ethics Through Literature: Ascetic and Aesthetic Reading in Western Culture by Brian Stock

In three lectures, Professor Brian Stock explores the ethical component found in reading. From Plato to Schopenhauer, the ascetic and the aesthetic at different times are in the ascendency. The different approaches seem to play off one another or perhaps enfold one another. A formidable scholar, Professor Stock demonstrates a remarkable facility with ancient and medieval texts that may overwhelm those not equally well versed (which was my experience). But his patient explications bring even obscure texts to life (I suspect he is/was a great teacher). And seeing some of these ancient notions reflected even in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse was thoroughly illuminating.

Those with a background in classicism or medieval literature will better appreciate the kind of textual analysis at play here. I found myself longing for a more direct engagement with the philosophical bases for these apparent aspects of reading, not as historical footnotes but as live ideas worthy of scrutiny. But my misapprehensions do not constitute a criticism of a book that accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish.

* * *

One book leads on to another. I came to the above book because it received two paragraphs in Keith Oatley’s Such Stuff as Dreams (see entry #44 above). His description of the book (p. 166), though not false, led me to believe that Ethics Through Literature would be a very different book. Obviously I’m looking for something in (some of) my reading at the moment. I’m looking for solid philosophical underpinning to the view that engagement with literature can or may have some morally beneficial aspect. But platitudes and hand waving are not sufficient; and neither is philology or classicism. I live in hope; it is very likely that the book I am looking for is out there. And if I truly can’t find what I’m looking for, then I guess there is a book waiting to be written. But where can I submit my requisition?

21. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

Sometimes I wish that all literary critics were obligated to first serve an apprenticeship as great writers of fiction. Surely, like Toni Morrison, they would then be better able to appreciate the practical challenges and choices writers face. And that might make them more sensitive to what those choices reveal. Although she was well taught as a reader, Morrison says that, “books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer.” In Playing in the Dark, Morrison turns that writerly attention on the canon of American literature and asks what effect the largely unspoken Africanist presence in America has had on the choices that writers make. The answer is fascinating.

The writing here sometimes explodes in flourishes of enthusiasm, almost poetic. And at times it seems that Morrison is presenting a prolegomena to a future body of criticism, or a platform of work for future students of American literature, rather than critical analysis itself. But when she does turn to specific texts, such as Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl or Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, her insights are piercing. Her scrutiny of Hemingway’s syntactically awkward locution “saw he had seen” in order to enforce the narrative silence of his black shipmate is a case in point. Morrison’s concern is with the choice made by the writer just there. Perhaps only a serious writer can appreciate the import of such choices.

Morrison says that, “thinking about these matters has challenged me as a writer and as a reader.” It’s the kind of thinking that we could each use more of as readers.

Wow. Can I steal your grasp of vocabulary and philosophy? Those are impressive review, not for their yea or nay, but for what they show of your grasp of these ideas. Any suggestions for where a philosophically ignorant person should start exploring?

#69: Really? Clearly the accident of a misspent youth. As for setting out on philosophical explorations, I would say you start from where you are. I know you are already involved in a vibrant and searching book club. I can't think of a better environment. But if it is formal philosophy you are interested in then I would suggest, tentatively, Bertrand Russell's "shilling shocker" from 1912, and still an excellent introduction to analytical philosophy, The Problems of Philosophy. A much more recent introduction, also from an analytical problems-based approach, is Thomas Nagel's What Does It All Mean?. They are both slim volumes but packed with accessible goodness (and they stay crunchy even in milk!).

LOL. Thanks. And yes, really. Very articulate reviews, more like discussions of the topics at hand.

22. Beloved by Toni Morrison

From the first page of the lyrical long first section of Beloved, the reader knows she or he is in the hands of a master storyteller. Morrison paints a harrowing picture through Sethe, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs, and, of course, Beloved herself. But Morrison’s prose never settles. It is always on edge, its images just beyond clarity. Long before Paul D is told explicitly of Sethe’s past, the reader has guessed what lies at heart of the eerie haunting of 124 Bluestone Road, Sethe’s defining action.

A reader might well ask why Morrison does not end the novel at that point. I suspect the answer is that her goal is something other than American Gothic. This is tragedy, more Greek than Shakespearean. Thus the lyricism gives way in the shorter second section to a sequence of viewpoints (Stamp Paid’s, Denver’s, Sethe’s, Beloved’s) that problematize Sethe’s earlier dramatic action and Paul D’s visceral reaction to knowledge of it. This is not justificatory; it is about seeing the act for and as what it is. Sethe’s life and the lives of those around her have been destroyed as a consequence of her action. In part, it is those consequences that help us to see really see Sethe’s awful choice.

The third section of the novel brings the transformed understanding home in the form of the chorus of the thirty women determined to exorcise 124 Bluestone in order to rescue Sethe. And especially in the return of Paul D, prepared to acknowledge now that his initial reaction had been unjust.

Having finished reading Beloved, you will want to start reading it again immediately. That sounds like a good idea. Highly recommended.

23. February by Lisa Moore

Grief changes everything. For Helen, whose husband, Cal, died in the Ocean Ranger oilrig disaster in 1982, grief suffuses her life. Everything she does, her children, including the one on the way at the time of Cal’s death, her work, her connections (or lack thereof) with others, all of it is enveloped in grief. But it’s more than that, because grief changes even what has gone before. It tinges the memory of her time together with Cal with foreboding and a previously unrealized sadness. It gets in all the cracks; it is in the very air Helen breathes. And it isn’t just Helen. The loss of their father affects each of her children, though perhaps her son, John, is most palpably affected. At one point, a seer grips his arm and states ominously, “You’ve lost someone in the past,” continuing a moment later to complete the vision, “Or you are going to lose someone in the future.” Well, yes, that about covers it.

Lisa Moore’s style is distinctive and well practiced. Those familiar with her short story collections, Open or Degrees of Nakedness, will find the same fractured and faceted narrative structure here. There the glimpses she provides, mirrored by her fragmented and suggestive sentences, work brilliantly to create a mood and imply a whole life, a whole story. Whether such a style is as suitable for a novel is debatable, though it certainly works well enough for her first novel, Alligator. Here, however, everything seems muted, monotone, a bit depressed. That works well, of course, with the overall presentation of grief. But it does tend towards a single note. Sections with different characters as leads all sound the same and the characters begin to bleed into one another.

If grief changes everything and everything is grief, then sooner or later the reader, and one suspects also the characters, will start discounting. We start looking past the grief just as we look through the air to see the things that stand out. And what stands out here are the ties of family, the bonds of love, the blunders we make and how we rectify them, and the in-built drive to create new life and new love. Grief may be everywhere, but we get through it. Recommended.

24. Fair Play by Tove Jansson

Turnabout is fair play. In Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, a precise and delicate series of dramatic scenes are presented that paint the relationship between Mari and Jonna, lifelong friends, artistic colleagues, travelling companions. They tolerate each other’s minor manias, accommodate their idiosyncrasies, make blunders and rectify them, and contribute to each other’s art – writing (primarily) in the case of Mari, visual art in the case of Jonna. But most of all they remain open to the almost priceless small acts of kindness that are possible when love, respect, and friendship are the deep foundation of a relationship.

Such spare descriptive writing seemingly insists on transmuting into symbolism. For example, Mari and Jonna share a well-weathered boat named Viktoria, and fathers that were each named Viktor. But even here, Jansson refuses to accept mere symbolism opting instead for the transformative effects of nostalgia. In like fashion, their experience of the American west in the segment set in Phoenix follows hard on the heels of a discussion of the B-movie western. You might be thinking Baudrillard, but don’t. As the hostess of the Phoenix bar says, “Give these ladies some space…They’re from Finland.” That sounds like good advice. Recommended.

25. The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

There is something succulent in the late novels of Barbara Pym, like deliberately over-ripened fruit, or a haunch of game hung for an extended period. One feels that Pym knows her characters almost too well, and that she may not particularly like them. Yet she spends time with them, and invites us to do the same: slightly distasteful women, ambiguous and calculating men, vapid gentlewomen, and the ever-charming clergyman (here occurring only as a brief fellow train traveller sharing a table for tea). So how does Pym take a character one doesn’t particularly like, such as Leonora Eyre, and in the space of a single short chapter render her entirely sympathetic, even pitiable? Only exquisite mastery of her craft could explain Pym’s remarkable affect upon her reader.

The elegant Leonora is ageing more or less gracefully. She enjoys the attentions of men, both older and younger, whilst knowing how to keep restrictive commitment at bay. She may always know the right word or gesture, but like Henry James’ prose, which is alluded to, she can come across as cold. Of course that suits some English men perfectly, especially those who would be somewhat overwhelmed by a real passionate relation with a woman. Sexual relations, which are subtext in the early Pym novels, are rendered explicit here. However, they remain curiously unreal, no doubt because they were never Pym’s object. And that raises the question, what really is Pym’s object in this novel? The answer lies in the reading, and I suspect will change as you read it again and again. As I will. Always recommended.

26. Happiness Economics by Shari Lapeña

You might think, looking at the ingredients in this novel, that it is sure to be a winner. It’s about a struggling poet desperately seeking his muse juxtaposed with a number-crunching economist who just doesn’t get what all this non-quantifiable happiness is about. It’s got poet-guerrillas, and parkour proponents, alternative self-defence, and the impending financial collapse of 2008. You’ll be thinking funny, right? Not so much. (To be fair, there is a set piece late in the novel that will tickle you, but you will have been waiting for it for almost 200 pages, so it’s a bit too little, too late.)

Will and Judy live exceedingly comfortable lives in Toronto due to Judy’s success as a celebrity economist. Will is a struggling poet. They have two children, Zoe and Alex, on the cusp of teendom. Unfortunately the relationship between Will and Judy is inexplicable, and Will is not believable (do tenure-track professors at the University of Toronto often abandon their careers in order to write poetry and raise children?). Although poetry is referred to throughout the novel, one never gets the impression that the author has a deep appreciation for or love of poetry. And that further undermines Will as the central character.

I did like both Zoe and Alex, but they are minor characters here. The weight of the novel rests on Will and Judy and they do not have the strength to carry the load.

ETA: Touchstone now available and added.

27. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Tony Webster doesn’t get it, and he never will. That, at any rate, is the opinion of Veronica Ford, his one-time college sweetheart. It is an opinion that Tony, late in life, has come to share. But unbeknownst to Tony, and possibly to Veronica, there is no culpability associated with not getting it. And in some sense, here, ignorance is bliss.

Julian Barnes’ short novel has the feel of an extended short story. The opening section presents the nostalgic story that Tony likes to tell of his life, expansive in recounting his school friends and their various approaches to the driving forces of Eros and Thanatos (love and death), and the moral implications of action and intention; rather more compressed as the story moves into later life. Mingled with the early motifs and ceaselessly reiterated is the distinction between characters and events (i.e. story) on the one hand and the narratives we construct to convey same. Of the many formulations of history provided in the text, perhaps one left unstated might be “the narrative we construct of our past”. In the second, longer, part of the novel, Tony’s narrative of his past life undergoes severe and frequent transformation. As new facts come to light, whether as documentation or retrieved memories, Tony is forced to adjust his conception of himself and his friends, most especially Veronica, but also Adrian. Tony is constantly deciding what people and events are parts of his story, his narrative. And the sense of an ending, if there is one, is simply where the narrative stops being revised.

So much is compressed into this short novel that you may, like me, have longed for Julian Barnes to have been a bit more expansive. Tony is the only character revealed at length and he is, seemingly, an unreliable witness. But his very unreliableness is unreliable. For he is as reliable as his sources, never wilfully deceptive. One feels he would certainly “get it” if only some of the other characters were a bit more forthcoming. Like me, you may find the juvenile moral calculus employed by Adrian to be both implausible and impracticable. Moreover, muddling Camus and the analytical consequentialists is, I fear, just muddling. Nevertheless there is plenty here worthy of reflection. And certainly Barnes’ prose rarely puts a word wrong. One just rather wishes there were more of it. Recommended.

28. The Journey Prize Stories 23 selected by Alexander MacLeod, Alison Pick, and Sarah Selecky

Canada has a healthy crop of literary journals and magazines (though the number seems far too few if you dream of getting your own stories published). In fact there are far too many to hope that any single individual might purchase, or library might stock, the full range. This, if no other reason were available, makes the annual Journey Prize anthology of best new writing from Canada an invaluable resource. Fortunately other reasons abound, not least of which is the excellent and varied writing on display.

The 2011 collection, selected by Alexander MacLeod, Alison Pick and Sarah Selecky, is of a high standard (not unlike the fine writing of the selectors). I did not find a single story here that I thought out of place amongst its peers. Some surprised, impressed, or startled me: Miranda Hill’s “Petitions to Saint Chronic”, Jessica Westhead’s “What I Would Say”, Jay Brown’s “The Girl From the War”, and Seyward Goodhand’s “The Fur Trader’s Daughter”.

I have no idea whether any of the above will go on to stellar literary careers. But I will be watching for them. I encourage you to pick up this anthology and make your own selection.

Now you've gotten me interested in the Barnes, as well as the Journey Prize. Maybe if I get super-organized, I can read everything that catches my eye. Ha!

29. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

That the university town of Troy is described as “the Athens of the Midwest” ought to be a signal that a conflicted tragedy on a Homeric scale is about to unfold. And that’s mostly true, although the “Homer” is more Simpson than Greek. Tragedy abounds—from the songbirds caught off guard by winter’s full force in the opening paragraph, to child abandonment, infanticide (sort of), fratricide (sort of), roommate-icide (sort of), racism, paternalism, terrorism, and people who quote Nietzsche. In the face of so much tragedy, Moore offers us Tassie Keltjin, intrepid baby-sitter, kilt clad bassist, and bard. When Tassie expresses doubt that the stars and the planets have anything to do with our lives down here, her roommate, Murph, succinctly replies, “How could they not?” They’re both right: the gods have no interest in us, yet we find ourselves buffeted and banged about by random chance, coincidence, and gruesome reality.

Fortunately, Tassie, her family, and her close friends have uncanny wit and revel in verbal gamesmanship. Because there is no making sense of things. Life just doesn’t make sense. And so you’ve got to laugh.

Lorrie Moore packs a wealth of observation, and disappointment, into this burbling novel. Sometimes it feels so full, you’ll think it will spill its bounds. Yet, she manages to keep it and Tassie on course through the worst of everything, even a metaphoric visit to Hades, to renewed hope and the return to the life of learning, and Starbucks. Be prepared to be surprised, confounded, appalled, and amused. Highly recommended.

Nice review, as usual!

30. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Love, I suppose, is a state of wonder. Sometimes numbing, sometimes bedazzling, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, sometimes filial, sometimes paternal, and sometimes conjugal—love is a perennial challenge for a novelist. Ann Patchett obviously loves a challenge. And since a writer’s ambition ought to know no bounds, she picks up the challenge of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Dante’s Inferno, and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. To these she adds some dilemmas of medical ethics, participant observer anthropologists, and ethnobotanists. And I’m only just scratching the surface of this rich text. Indeed there is so much here to think about and discuss and reconsider that I doubt any consensus of opinion will form on this novel for some time. That’s as it should be. But love, I think, is a central core around which the other themes swirl.

Marina Singh is a physician turned pharmacological scientist. She suffers from unresolved father love, which transfers to a kind of worship of a former professor with a powerful personality, Annick Swenson, whom Marina later must seek out deep in the Amazonian rain forest. Her task is to check on the progress of Dr Swenson’s research into an infertility drug, as well as to verify the demise of her former colleague Anders Eckman, who preceded her in a similar quest. There is something unsettling about Marina’s awe of Annick Swenson. But she is not alone. Other scientists are equally in thrall, as is an entire tribe, the Lakashi. Such adoration, however, seems to be transitive since Annick herself previously experienced it for her own former professor, and late paramour, Dr Rapp, the discoverer of the Lakashi tribe and, more importantly, the variety of pharmacological treasures which they steward. It is unsettling because such love may imply a corresponding dislike of the self. And to some extent it feels either implausible or unsavoury this late in the day.

An equally niche form of love might be found in the paternalism that underwrites the non-interventionist ethic of the participant observer anthropologist and the ethnobotanist. Dr Swenson insists on leaving the Lakashi in their natural state, despite having lived with them, on and off, for fifty years. (Her scientists have never bothered to learn the language of the Lakashi.) Yet at the same time she is secretly involved in research on a malarial vaccine which she knows would potentially lead to a population explosion in poorly developed countries were it might significantly reduce the child mortality rate. It’s a difficult dilemma, and Patchett is wise to give us no easy answer.

These are merely two of the aspects of love canvassed here. There is so much more in State of Wonder, that all I can do is urge as many of my friends as possible to read it, if only so that I’ll have someone to talk to about it. It is not a great novel, I think. Its virtue resides in its, and its author’s, ambition. Which I admit to being a bit in awe of. Long may she continue picking up the challenge. Highly recommended.

31. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Through a series of vignettes, Tove Jansson evokes summer on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. Sophia—an earnest but tempestuous little girl—spends her summers with her grandmother and her father. Her mother is dead, and one of the first questions she puts to her grandmother is, “When are you going to die?” Grandmother is wise and wily and immensely patient, but equally wilful as her young charge. Sophia is as quick to anger as the summer storms and just as quick to see that anger dissipate. With her grandmother she struggles with friendship, love, and ever-present fear.

Sophia’s father is a silent presence working at his desk or gardening or placing the fishing nets, but he does not speak. The focus is entirely on Sophia and her grandmother.

I am fascinated by what Jansson is able to accomplish with her simple, concrete, but thoughtful prose. At one point the grandmother admonishes a visitor, “Stop talking in symbols…why do you use so many euphemisms and metaphors? Are you afraid?” Certainly Jansson is unafraid to face head on the anguish of loss and impending loss. She follows the solution that Sophia and her grandmother arrive at on many occasions, which is to invent stories that incorporate the people and events confronting them, rendering them manageable. “It was a particularly good evening to begin a book,” notes the narrator, and I think you will agree when you take up this one. Certainly recommended.

What I said back at #81.

#84: Yeah, well, you always say the nicest things. (Which are still nice to hear!)

32. Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish has a mantra. It is, “do your job, don’t try to do someone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do your job.” It’s not exactly a mantra for success. But for people who like to keep their categories tidy, it will do (I suppose his mantra might have been, “a place for everything, and everything in its place”). In this instance, he is specifically urging his mantra on college and university teachers who, apparently, sometimes get confused about what precisely their job is. Fish can help: “the job of someone who teaches in a college or a university is to (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry they didn’t know much about before; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research should they choose to do so.” So, that’s clear at least.

The decade or so on either side of the millennium must have been a trying time for higher education in America as it became the battleground of the culture wars. Professor Fish was caught in the crossfire but he did not remain a non-combatant for long. The strident opinion pieces he wrote at that time form the basis of this vigorous defence of a non-political academia. Fish excoriates both the left and the right. But everything comes back to his so-called mantra and his neo-Kantian definition of the job of the university teacher.

There is something curiously sentimental about Fish’s view. The unworldly teacher and scholar inducts another crop of students into the virtues of some academic discipline in an institution whose existence is an end in itself. It hardly matters, it seems, that it may not describe any university or indeed any professor you’ve ever encountered. It stands as a kind of ideal against which, perhaps, we are meant to measure our actual practice. I worry that leads to pessimism about the future of higher education in America, since our actual practice so clearly fails to measure up. On the other hand, these institutions did manage to produce a thinker like Professor Fish, so perhaps there is still hope. Cautiously recommended.

Today is my Thingaversary. I have been using LT for three years as of today. I won’t be celebrating with a bevy of book purchases. But I do want to acknowledge in some way what a nice addition to my life LT has been.

I add books to my LT catalogue as I complete them, and I give them a tag and add them to a collection that indicates the year in which they were read. So LT functions for me as an external mnemonic. I also rate each book I add, but again, since rating systems are somewhat arbitrary, I treat that also mnemonically. I like to look back, usually at the end of the year, in order to see which books I liked most, or least.

This year is the first in which I have undertaken to write a review for each book I read. That turns out to be a nice challenge. It is also the first time I’ve joined any of the LT groups. Leaving comments on other threads does not come naturally to me, so I mostly just lurk. But I do scan through each and every thread in the group for book-related posts. And I have especially enjoyed lurking on the tutored reads; there is some excellent tutoring happening here.

My Thingaversary wish, if we are allowed one, is for the continued success of LibraryThing. Long may it flourish!

Happy Thingaversary.

Long may it flourish!

Hear, hear!

Happy Thingaversary!

33. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories by Gregory Currie

Gregory Currie’s account of narrative is firmly rooted in neo-Gricean pragmatics. He believes that pragmatic inference—inference to the intended meaning behind the words—is ubiquitous in the comprehension of narrative. For “narratives are artefactual representations” that typically emphasize “the causal and temporal connectedness of particular things, especially agents,” which together constitute the story that the narrative communicates. In this way the intentions of the author, or implied author, are made plain to the perceptive reader. It is intentionalism, certainly, but not the fallacious sort debunked by Beardsley; it has no forensic goal, but is just “a common-or-garden activity over which we usually exercise little conscious control.”

If narratives typically concern themselves with causal and temporal connectedness, it will be no surprise to find that they often serve an explanatory function. This is seen vividly in historical narrative (or narrative histories), but fiction also partakes. And it may also account for the reciprocal and mutually supporting relationship that Currie sees later between narrative and Character (by which Currie means “the idea of character as property, as inner source of action, something related to personality and temperament”).

In the final chapters, Currie embraces Character scepticism. This might be seen as an instance of a broader challenge to folk psychological (or folk narrative) concepts. It is possible that Character scepticism also has its roots in neo-Gricean pragmatics, though Currie does not draw the connection. In any case, it is a troubling position for the reader who may have casually accepted Currie’s fine distinctions and close argument as he elaborated a plausible account of narrative. For along with Character scepticism goes scepticism for virtues and much of the machinery of moral psychology.

Running almost in parallel with the main argument of Narratives and Narrators is a series of appendices to chapters that present a speculative evolutionary account of how certain features of the practice of narrative might have arisen. It seems strange until one returns to the earlier noted explanatory power of narrative. By the end of the book Currie is exploiting his evolutionary story to underwrite his Character scepticism (where other arguments seem to have fallen short). But this seems illegitimate; here a speculative evolutionary account confers the impression of a causal explanation for why Character might have arisen as a practice even though (pace the Character sceptic) there is no such thing. I suspect Currie’s philosophical opponents may find room for disagreement here.

Currie claims that nearly everything we may want in terms of literary criticism and the expressive impact of narratives can be sustained even in the face of extreme Character scepticism. I am not so sure. But I am sure that any serious analytical philosophical discussion of narrative in future will do well to engage Currie’s position directly and forcefully.

34. On Personality by Peter Goldie

The Routledge Thinking in Action series presents accessible but serious philosophical treatments of key live issues, concepts, or ideas. Like others in the series, Peter Goldie’s On Personality is more than an introductory text. He may be introducing the reader for the first time to philosophical disputes on the nature of character or the role of character traits and dispositions to act in specific ways. But he also is a philosopher of stature with firm views on which way the debate should proceed and thus argues forcefully for that stance. So, very much a case of thinking in action. And is there anything more exciting than that?

The initial chapters lay the groundwork of distinctions needed to discuss personality and character (they are different) sensibly. In the middle chapter, Goldie addressed head-on the apparent evidence from psychological research casting doubt on the notion of dispositional characters. He handily fends off the sceptics, I think, but acknowledges in turn the fragile nature of character and the conditions under which we are prone to misascribe character traits. Having secured our talk of character, he moves on to its vital role in our moral lives. On Goldie’s view we are responsible for many of our character traits and this suggests a rethinking of the ordering of praise and blame in particular cases. A proper understanding of character is thus a clear first step for philosophers working through the connections between agency, responsibility, and character.

Goldie concludes the book with a chapter on the role of narrative in the sense of the self. Although he is often described as having a narrativist position, it is clear that he differs significantly from others in the field. Since he accepts a distinction between narrative and what narratives are about, he sees no difficulty in discounting the view that our lives have a narrative structure; rather, he would say, our “lives, and parts of lives, unfold in a characteristic way which can be related in the form of a narrative (but which aren’t themselves narratives).” Narrative (i.e. self-narrative) is crucial for what he calls the ‘Augustinian inside view’. But it is equally important as an expressive indicator for others.

Things move quickly, I think, in this final chapter. You may reach the end rather wishing that there had been time to learn a great deal more about the philosophical treatment of character, personality, and the role of narrative in the idea of the self. But perhaps that is the best indicator of an excellent introductory text. Recommended.

35. Dogma by Lars Iyer

The return of this most one-sided of double acts—the philosophers “Lars” and “W.”—is most welcome. The droll delights of Spurious are equalled here in the fretful eschatology of Dogma. It is the end of things: the end of humanity, the end of life, the end of the rat infestation of Lars’ damp digs and, worst of all, the end of the Philosophy and Religion department at the University of Plymouth which spells the end of W.’s desultory career. Only dogma can save them now. Or Plymouth Gin, which (except in America) is readily available.

Iyer has a fine comic touch. The almost silent character, Lars, recounts the interactions between himself and W. primarily through the reported speech of W. It’s as though Laurel, of Laurel and Hardy, were silently telling the tale of he and Hardy’s dependent-abusive relationship. It is a technique that forever wrong-foots the reader. But you rather expect pratfalls here.

Lars and W. travel to America, where they (that is, W.) are astounded by the aforementioned absence of Plymouth Gin. They follow the conference circuit to Oxford, where they (that is, W.) set out the rules of their intellectual movement, Dogma. They visit Lars’ damp abode in Newcastle and W.’s sorry Plymouth. And throughout W. maintains a steady stream of quasi-philosophical speculation, abuse, and drunken revelation. Despite the attraction, death is too good for them.

Narrative is frustrated. Character is besotted. Philosophical and religious ideas flit by like moths headed for an open flame. This is the intellectual picaresque. And it should raise a smile or two, with or without Plymouth Gin.

ETA: switch of Laurel for Hardy :-)

Happy Thingaversary, Randy!

36. Vendredi ou La Vie sauvage by Michel Tournier

In 1967, Michel Tournier rethought the mythic story of Robinson Crusoe and his life of solitude and later companionship with Friday in Vendredi ou Les Limbes Pacifique. Ten years later he rethought that relationship again in a novel for young people that is direct, adventurous, emotional, and thought provoking. Each return to the Crusoe/Friday story for Tournier is a new beginning. In Vendredi ou La Vie sauvage, Robinson Crusoe must first unlearn his ordered European conception of the world and then, with Friday’s help, take the first steps to living in harmony with nature. Friday has an almost poetic relationship with the land (e.g. when he “dresses” the cacti) and its flora and fauna (e.g. his relationship with the goat, Anda, and his struggle with and later honouring of the buck, Andoar, whose death effectively saves Friday’s life). Robinson slowly comes first to understand and later embrace Friday’s stance. Eventually Robinson sees that his own long struggle for survival and rescue or escape has instead been a process of putting down roots and gathering the nutrients of the wild life into his veins. His decision to remain on the island when the chance to leave presents itself after 28 years thus does not come as a shock; it seems entirely fitting.

* * *

I am not fluent in French, though I have a wide vocabulary. I read Vendredi ou La Vie sauvage as a means to improve my reading skill (on the recommendation of a friend who is a French professor). Rather than slog through with a big dictionary in one hand and a great deal of cross-checking, I chose to use the Google Translate “gadget” on my iGoogle homepage. Each day I would switch my keyboard to French (which is very easy to do with any computer) and then type each sentence into Google Translate. I would translate it in my head first and then hit “return” and see how my translation compared with Google Translate. Sometimes they were very similar, sometimes mine was better (probably because translation algorithms tend to work word by word and thus cannot pick up contextual meaning), and sometimes Google’s offering was better. Did my reading fluency improve through this exercise over the course of a short novel? I’m not entirely certain. Sticking to one page per day, every day, was probably the real source of any improvement. On the other hand, I can now type on a French keyboard as quickly as on an English one! Which I suppose must count as a kind of fluency :-)

What patience! I'll remember the technique if I ever get back to my Spanish or French.

I used Google Translate a couple of years ago when I needed to read a book in Italian for my research. I only really know a smattering on Italian, and what I do know is the Italian of Ariosto, certainly not modern. So it really worked well for me!

37. Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto

An eerie yet familiar ethereal quality infuses the three stories of Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep. The first-person narrator of each is a border person, existing on the cusp between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, periodically crossing over and crossing back.

In “Night and Night’s Travelers” the death of Yoshihiro, the brother of the narrator, transfixes the lives of his sister, Shibami, his girlfriend at the time of his death, Mari, and the young American exchange student, Sarah, with whom he earlier fallen in love and later abandoned. Mari cannot sleep. Sarah cannot let go. Both have enduring mementos of their relationship with Yoshihiro. It is left to Shibami to serve as their medium, between each other and with the spirit of Yoshihiro.

In “Love Songs”, two women vying for the same man form a relationship so intense, yet unspoken, that it might be love. The death of the older woman, Haru, cements the bond somehow. The younger woman begins taking on some of Haru’s characteristics and is even visited by what she believes is Haru’s spirit. Her purposeful confrontation with the spirit is the necessary next step in her own transformation and broader understanding of love in its many forms.

Death also troubles “Asleep,” with the suicide of the former flat-mate of the narrator, Terako. Her death and the transitional state between life and death of the wife of the Terako’s boyfriend, trapped in a permanent coma, begin to sap the life force of Terako. She visibly loses her will to live, embracing exhaustion and sleeping for increasing numbers of hours, so deeply that she cannot even hear a telephone ring. Again, a visitation from the spirit realm triggers Terako’s rescue.

The themes of death, loss of will, and love permeate these stories. Tone is more important than action. Anxiety, perhaps about the transition to adulthood (most of the characters seem to exist in a state of perpetual late adolescence), dominates. Age or cultural distance may be a barrier to embracing the objects of Yoshimoto’s concern, but her writing itself is well worth reading.

38. The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Surprising. Pleasantly surprising. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians starts slowly and seemingly predictably. Young adults on the cusp of college discover, or rather are recruited to, the world of magic. One of them, Quentin, makes it through the unusual entrance exams and enters Brakebills, a college for budding magicians, real magicians. So far, so predictable, perhaps. But even early on there is an edge to Quentin’s engagement with magic that doesn’t necessarily follow the tried and trusty patterns of Narnia, Middle Earth, and Hogwarts. There is something random about events here. And soon enough that randomness sends the story skewing off in thoroughly unpredictable directions.

The young adults that are the focus of this story are late twentieth century post-adolescents who seem incapable of growing up. They are suffused with ennui and filled with unmotivated anger and angst. They are maybe what nihilists would be like if they considered nihilism itself to be a bit meh. And then the story morphs. It crosses into Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney territory. And then it morphs again and becomes a blood and guts adventure story, though rather in the vein of Heinlein’s Glory Road, but even quirkier. Expectations are stoked, frustrated, rekindled, sent far afield and finally relocate themselves. In short, much to my surprise, given the opening, I found myself enjoying this novel. I’m just not sure who to recommend it to.

I felt the same way when I read it, although I had no particular desire to read more in the series.

39. Mister Blue by Jacques Poulin

Jim is not a happy man, and his unhappiness intrudes upon his work, the writing of love stories, which proceeds at a crawl, diverts itself, pauses, grinds to a halt. He lives on an island in the St. Lawrence River in a house his father, years earlier, moved across the bay. Along with the house came memories, good and bad, of Jim’s early life, his failed marriage, his abandoned academic career, his relationship with his younger brother. It sounds like a recipe for despair, and certainly Jim borders on that state. But he has a couple of things going for him: his cats, including Mister Blue, and an inner drive for love, which in this case takes the form of his artistic muse, the mysterious Marika, who haunts a cave near the shore and whom he longs for incessantly but never quite meets.

Much of Jacques Poulin’s novel has a dreamlike quality. It ruminates. It mulls things over. It is full of false starts, erasures, and abandoned story lines. It is, in short, perhaps, an exploration of writerly creativity. Jim’s infatuation with (the possibly imaginary) Marika, who curiously seems to share his love of story (e.g. The Arabian Nights) and his shoe size (as evidenced by her footprints in the sand), traces the pattern of the difficulty he is having writing his current novel. Along the way, Jim encounters others who have been disappointed by love, or damaged by it. Each is working to reclaim some semblance of equanimity, or the possibility of new growth in healthier directions and locales.

I wondered, as I read this short novel, how much the island in the stream (which is nevertheless close enough to the sea to be affected by the tides) symbolises the artist. But I suspect there are a number of levels of meaning interweaving here, some of which might only surface if one were to read it in its original French. Gently recommended.

40. Jane Austen by Carol Shields

One imagines a sensitive novelist of particularity, such as Carol Shields, measuring herself in the process of writing this short literary biography of Jane Austen. For what better measure might there be? Now two hundred years since their initial publication, Austen’s novels continue to delight and surprise. Writing in obscurity away from the bustle of the writerly world of “workshops”, “MFAs”, “public readings”, “writer circles”, and “literary festivals”, without the input of her literary contemporaries, without the lucrative compensation of a hefty advance or a well-publicised book tour, with only the modest praise and encouragement of family and a few close friends, Jane Austen made the novel form her own. Shields strikes precisely the right tone here – respectful.

Shields’ prose is crisp and insightful, with just enough facts drawn from Austen’s correspondence and other sources to gently move along the progress of her life, whilst keeping the focus where it ought to always be, on Austen’s texts. A literary biography succeeds when the reader finishes it and wants immediately to immerse himself or herself in the subject’s texts. Reader, the desire to plunge headlong into a rereading of each of Austen’s novels is nearly irresistible. Delightfully recommended.

There's a Book Bullet! Jane Austen goes on the wishlist.

41. The Magician King by Lev Grossman

The challenge of a sequel to an innovative novel is whether the author can continue to innovate whilst still holding the reader’s interest. In The Magician King, Lev Grossman makes a good run at it. Almost inevitably, I suppose, in order to keep the pages turning he relies once again on adventure story tropes. The quest, this time, is for seven magical keys needed to preserve magic in Fillory and worlds beyond. Quentin Coldwater is once again at the centre of this quest, with the rest of the gang from The Magicians filling various supporting roles as well as the addition of a few new central characters.

Much of the novel concerns the back story of Julia, Quentin’s childhood friend, who took an entirely different path to magic than Quentin. Hers was the school of hard knocks, some very hard indeed. She’s a mathematical genius, naturally, but she and her friends arrive at the conclusion that only an invocation to the gods, the old gods, will help them reach the next level in their magical development. It all gets rather Gaimanesque at that point, which may not be something you can merely dabble with.

In many respects this novel is both more and less than its predecessor. It is more traditional and thus more predictable. It is less random (seemingly) in its trajectory, but also less surprising, and for me at least, less interesting. Fun enough, I suppose, but unlikely to generate street cred for the reader.

New York City recommendations welcome.

My wife and I will be in NYC for a week at the beginning of June. I'm looking for recommendations of bookstores, galleries, and/or sites of especial significance. We were there last year and discovered The Strand (heaven!) and Crawford Doyle Booksellers. I suspect there may be more.

Randy, you have a lot of advisors here in NYC. Aside from me, there's Jim (Magicians_Nephew), richardderus, chatterbox, _Zoe_, rebeccanyc - I'm sure I'm forgetting someone who lives here.

Kidzdoc (Darryl) doesn't live here but he seems to know more about the bookstores of NY than anyone I've ever met.

What is your preference regarding art, theater, sights, etc?

When someone comes in to NYC, it generally triggers a meetup. Would your schedule permit actually meeting some of us face-to face? We could make it a brunch and bookstore outing. Let me know, and I'll see if we can put together a plan.

Thanks, Judy. I guess I'm just looking for favourite spots, bookstores that simply call out for leisurely browsing, interesting small galleries in Chelsea or elsewhere (we have been to places like MOMA and the Guggenheim, and will probably return to them, naturally). Last time we sought out and found the park bench that Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sit on late at night in Manhattan looking out over the 59th Street Bridge. That was cool! That's the sort of thing I'm looking for. Something that would surprise and delight the person I'm with.

As for meeting up, I wasn't even hoping for that.

No pressure - if you'd rather not meet, that's fine. I figure you have lots to do here.

You might look into the Rubin Museum on 17th Street. It's housed in the old Barney's store, complete with the spiral staircase, and it's beautiful. Full of Asian art from Inda, Nepal, Tibet, and places around there. Peaceful and beautiful. you might check to see if they have any programs on the week you'll be in.

I don't know the galleries in Chelsea - I barely get to the museums as it is. Sorry.

If you'd like an atypical (non-midtown) Manhattan experience, I'd suggest going up to the Cloisters, at the very northern tip of Manhattan. A castle that was brought over brick by brick from somewhere else, it holds a wonderful collection of medieval tapestries and armor and other stuff of the era, and is set in a dazzling park overlooking the Hudson. They sometimes have music as well.

Great suggestions. Thanks!

And I thought of one more that might be very pleasant. The city recently refurbished an old elevated industrial train track used to deliver freight in bygone days, and turned it into an elevated park called The High Line. It runs from about 12th Street to somewhere in the 30's now, on the far west side. You can reach it wherever it runs by stairs or elevators (in certain areas) and take a walk with views of the river and great plantings and places to read. I don't get there as often as I'd like, especially as I'm only a few blocks away. It's a great walk above the streetscape.

If you look up The High Line, you can probably find a map with entry points. Quite unusual.

Another super suggestion. We walked The High Line last year. It's great.

It reminded me of the Promenade plantée in Paris.

42. The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart

Some time before the Mysterious Benedict Society formed, there was just a small orphan boy with rather particular traits named Nicholas Benedict. In this prequel adventure, Nicholas’ narcolepsy is only periodically a hindrance. But it is something he would like kept under wraps as he joins a new orphanage known as ‘Child’s End. That doesn’t sound promising for Nicholas. Nor does the regime in which he will be locked in a windowless room at night so that his nightmares do not disturb the other children.

Fortunately Nicholas is blessed with an eidetic memory, a great drive to learn (mostly through rapidly reading and then recalling each and every book in the orphanage library), and a remarkably resourceful wit. Together his prodigious memory, abundant storehouse of information, and reasoning ability get him out of numerous scrapes and, not too surprisingly, into a few. But Nicholas is not all alone in his endeavours. He finds a friend in John, who bravely protects him from the Spider gang of bullies at the orphanage, and in Violet, who has a host of challenges of her own not least of which is deafness. The three embark on a quest for a treasure that might save them all from fates that look less than appealing.

It is a return to form for Trenton Lee Stewart. This book has all of the verve of the first in the series. By concentrating his attention on only three children, and only one extraordinary child, he is able to add dimensions to their characterisation. Plot holds the reins, naturally, but Nicholas’ education will be something he can’t learn (or memorize) from books. There are extraordinary people in the world, and here we get a glimpse, perhaps, of why Nicholas Benedict grows up to become one of them. If, like me, you feel compelled to persist with a series once you’ve started it, you will not be disappointed when you reach this volume of the Mysterious Benedict Society series. Enjoy!

43. Underground: a novel by Antanas Sileika

Brilliantly written reportage might hope to attain the epithet, “it reads like fiction”. Could historical fiction legitimately aspire to the claim that it “reads like reportage”? And if it were historical fiction that reads like reportage reading like fiction, what then?

This is a workmanly piece of writing – well-structured, spiced with romance, driven forward through a temporal sequencing of events, unburdened by complex characters that might need development or effort to align the sympathies of the reader, highlighted by a few set-piece scenes of visceral violence, and tied, finally, to the real lives of people living in present day. You might think it had been shaped by a writing school in order to attract government grants during its “research” phase, and a film deal during its “post-production” phase. In which case, you will not be surprised to learn that the author is the Director of the Humber School for Writers and that Underground has recently had its film rights picked up.

Depending on your point of view, the above description will have you lining up for a chance to read this novel of (a) life in the Lithuanian underground in the latter half of the 20th century, or moving quickly on to writing a tad more adventurous and less predictable. Either way, you win.

Interesting review. I'm more used to the opposite situation where a nonfiction book reads like a novel. The only book that comes to mind that successfully takes this approach is World War Z, written as an oral history of survivors of a world-wide zombie outbreak. Brooks uses the old horror standby pretty effectively to talk about how humans react to and cope with catastrophic change. Different sort of thing altogether from Underground. Oh, and it's been optioned too. :)

Note to self: don't visit the Strand bookstore on the first day of your NYC vacation.

44. The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

The stories collected here may not be individually compelling, at least not initially. Together they generate certain harmonics, overtones that reappear reflected or distorted as they move from one story to the next. Lassitude is, perhaps, the overarching emotional dynamic (if lassitude can be a dynamic). And most often the main character is struggling to reach escape velocity from the doldrums of the middle years (25 to 35) in which, it seems, these individuals are not yet fully formed (like an echo of adolescence).

The title story stands out, with its casual magic realist plot device, but equally telling is “TV People” and “The Dancing Dwarf”, which for some reason had me thinking of Peter Carey’s Tristan Smith. On the other hand, “The Second Bakery Attack”, “Lederhosen”, and “Barn Burning” cross the cusp of a life-change without appeal to non-realist technique, and they do this just as effectively.

Characteristic Murakami internationalist brand references abound and only one or two of the stories is tightly fixed to a Japanese locale. Sometimes it feels as though this is writing for the export market. Or maybe that veneer appeals locally. In any case, it does not detract from a set of stories that may continuing sounding long after the book is set aside.

45. The Heights by Peter Hedges

This is definitely going to be the last novel I read in which a central character has a languishing doctoral dissertation that he or she just has to get finished. Really! As Tim struggles to complete his Ph.D. his wife, Kate, takes on the challenge of changing the world through the mechanism of a philanthropic foundation that she has been asked to help set up. Kate had been at home with their two young sons, whilst Tim taught history at a local school further delaying his thesis completion. It’s time for some role reversal, but there are more reversals to come as loves, old and new, sprinkle this comedy with ups and downs and (somewhat) predictable mayhem.

Ostensibly this novel is set in wealthy but quaint Brooklyn Heights, but in reality all the reader gets is the façade of townhouses, fruit-named streets, and views of lower Manhattan. Not to worry. The story works whether or not it has real roots. And since so much of the surrounding detail – Tim’s thesis completion and oral defence; Kate’s philanthropic foundation’s absence of criteria for awarding grants; Anna’s (their friend) fabulous wealth and curious marital relations – is entirely fanciful and hardly believable, it is best to take it for what it is, a disneyesque cinematic impression of “real” life.

The story is told in chapters alternating perspective between Tim and Kate, periodically interspersed with chapters from the perspective of other characters. The most interesting of these, perhaps, are the few chapters from the point of view of one of Tim’s former students, Bea Myerly, who has a formidable crush on him. I liked Bea. Maybe the whole story could have been told from her perspective. In any case, the action is light, the characters are sketched in at best, and the frothy whole no doubt goes best with a skinny latte grande.

46. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Elizabeth (known as ‘Daisy’) is a teenager from Manhattan shipped off to her English country cousins in advance of the birth of her “evil” stepmother’s first child. She is cynical, world-weary, anorexic, and angry. And you might think she is about as marginalized and isolated as a young person can be. Until war breaks out in various countries including Britain and America and Daisy becomes even more cut off. Existentially cut off. Except that by then she has already bonded with her cousins who have become the family she never knew she missed. Indeed the bonds are so immediate and visceral that they seem to be able to share each other’s thoughts.

Meg Rosoff has created a thoroughly believable voice in her first-person narrator, Daisy. I loved her New York sensibility and her observations (never overdone) of some of the differences between life in America and life in England. Daisy journeys through an emotional as well as a physical landscape as she moves from cynicism to friendship to love, fear, desperation, horror and more. It is a fast-moving spectacle and all the reader can do is hold on with both hands. Recommended.

47. Watching Baseball Smarter by Zack Hample

This is a breezy, accessible and often humorous survey of the various positions, strategies, and structure of Major League Baseball. It comes with a very useful glossary that runs the gamut of baseball terms and lingo from a to z. Even a serious fan of the game will find things here that surprise and enlighten. But it should be a fun read even for those (relatively) new to the game. You’ll read it, and then you’ll want to recommend it to a friend. As do I.

* * *

This is one of those books that I would not have discovered had it not been read and enjoyed by a fellow LTer. It’s not the first, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

48. Tiger Hills by Sarita Mandanna

This grindingly linear tale set in the mountainous Coorg region of India follows Devi and Devanna across more than 60 years from 1878 to 1939. It begins as a star-crossed romance which, at times, is grafted clumsily onto an historical novel. And perhaps inevitably it takes on the trappings of the family saga. There are moments of high tension, sporadic passion, anger and remorse. But they are like fits of pique that dwindle almost immediately so that the overall emotional coherence is lost. It’s all rather unfortunate, since the first chapter or two might lead you to suspect you have found an author with, at the very least, some descriptive abilities. However, when the first suicide is trotted out as a device to move the plot along, your heart will start to sink. By the third or fourth such clunky intrusion you will lose all hope. The only thing that may drive you on to the end is the thought that for some obscure reason your book club has selected this as the book for this month. Failing that you will surely set it aside long before reaching the half-way mark. As I rather wish I had.

I'm glad you liked the baseball book!

49. City of Thieves by David Benioff

Set aside the wartime heroics, the picaresque buddy story which undoubtedly has its roots in Cervantes, the burgeoning of love in mid-winter. Set it all aside and just admit that this is a story about the power of literature to raise us beyond ourselves in order to create something new. In the prologue to City of Thieves, David Benioff’s grandfather, in response to his grandson’s importuning questions about his time during the siege of Leningrad, exhorts him: “’David,’ he said. ‘You’re a writer. Make it up.’” It’s good advice. And also lucky for us as readers because the story he goes on to make up is compelling, thoughtful, witty, and tragic. In short--brilliant!

Teenager Lev Beniov is forcibly paired with Kolya Vlasov, a verbose private from the Red Army who has inadvertently gone AWOL. Colonel Grechko tasks them with securing a dozen eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake. They can find the eggs or die. Of course since they need to find these eggs in the besieged city of Leningrad, whose inhabitants have been starving for the past ten months, both options look to amount to the same. Fortunately Kolya considers their being alive to be already an improbability, so they might as well get on with the task.

Kolya leads Lev from one adventure to another in the few days they have been given to complete their task. Along the way they debate Russian literature from Goncharov’s Oblomov to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Relevancies abound but are never laboured. Benioff maintains a light touch that keeps the action to the forefront and lets the erudition coast along in the wake. It lets the story be enjoyed on many levels at the same time. This is ‘making it up’ the right way. Highly recommended.

50. Room by Emma Donoghue

Writing this novel has to be considered an achievement, or possibly a feat. The inspired choice of five year old Jack as the narrator presents innumerable challenges that Donoghue meets valiantly. It also has advantages. It allows her to treat of a situation so horrible that one rather wishes it were not even imaginable let alone possible. Through Jack’s naïve eyes we persevere, if only for his sake. But it is hard going, claustrophobic, and emotionally stifling.

The second half of the novel opens up new possibilities. Here things begin to lose direction, to meander, to go this way and that without a clear purpose. Maybe that is to be expected, but it may also have something to do with the downside of Jack’s narrative voice. Once his world expands the voice becomes much less persuasive, either too knowing, fey, or twee. It’s a risk for any writer, I think, though Donoghue does manage to present at least a few brilliant moments. I especially liked the utter incomprehension of what has occurred found in the voice of a woman commiserating with Jack’s grandmother: ‘”Well, I don’t know. I spent a week in a monastery in Scotland once…and…it was so peaceful.” I also liked Jack’s step-grandfather or ‘Steppa’ who seems to have a natural connection with Jack.

The ending is something of a disappointment, if only because the emotional and narrative closure it brings seems antithetical to the psychological scars the atrocities committed would have induced. Of course if closure is what you are looking for—the tidy settling of our exfoliated emotional skin like dust in an unused room—then Donoghue’s otherwise intriguing tale will fully satisfy. I just wish the focus of such a narrative feat truly were unimaginable.

51. Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino

There is something fascinating in a great writer’s observations of the literature in which he is immersed. Might they reveal clues to his own prowess, or ogres against which he long strove? These occasional essays span a thirty-year period, from the 1950s to the 1980s—effectively, Calvino’s productive span as a writer. They vary considerably, from the journalistic to the academic. But across their range one spies a gentle, thoughtful reader teasing out the very roots of story and pressing to the edges of narrative form. It is thus no surprise to see Calvino’s fascination with such subjects as the structure of Orlando Furioso, or Candide, or even Robinson Crusoe. It is, however, useful to observe his admiration for Stendhal and Balzac, Tolstoy and Hemingway. His acknowledgement of Borges as one of his literary fathers goes without saying. But would you have guessed at Galileo as a forerunner? Of course in any eclectic mix of literary shorts there is likely to be discussion of works entirely new to one. This is true here also. But I like to think that some of these authors will gain new readers brought to them by, so to speak, a friend. In any case, I feel a keen desire to return to Calvino’s works of fiction in order to re-experience the culmination of his long life of reading and thinking about story.

52. Noriko Smiling by Adam Mars-Jones

There is a great deal to like in Adam Mars-Jones’ extended essay on Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring. Like the renowned benshi narrators who accompanied the virtuoso performances of silent films in Japan’s pre-talkie film era, Mars-Jones steps through Ozu’s film with us from establishing shot to final image. At times he offers almost a frame by frame study pointing up oblique glances or nuanced non-committal grunts from lead actor Chishû Ryû whose import might be lost on a first (or tenth) viewing. This can be illuminating. It makes Noriko Smiling well worth reading by Ozu fans despite whatever other drawbacks may be present in the text.

The book as a whole consists in one long essay that, apart from the scene-by-scene and near-shot-by-shot description, canvasses the wide range of commentary that has been written on Ozu, and Late Spring in particular, by film critics, Japanologists, and even historians of censorship. It is clear that Adam Mars-Jones is well versed in the critical background. But at this point a couple of unfortunate habits of his post-modern essay style come to the fore.

He repeatedly disavows any specialist knowledge, frequently (apparently) undercutting his authority by appealing to Wikipedia and the buzz on Internet to support his points (or to rail against). Sometimes these come in the form of asides, sometimes in the form of explicit (proud?) claims to ignorance. None of them can be taken seriously, and cumulatively they present as a kind of argumentative tic or, since they are clearly deliberate, posturing. The effect is not unlike a famous American academic philosopher from Harvard giving a talk on metaphysics but with an “ah-shucks, I’m just a country boy, y’know” patter. Maybe it works on radio; in print it just looks silly.

The other aspect of the book which, I think, many readers will find distasteful is Mars-Jones’ invariable need to belittle, mock, chastise, and outright dismiss every critic to whom he refers in the course of the essay. That kind of camp snarkiness might work in short doses on BBC Radio 4 (where you can sometimes find Mars-Jones appearing) but in an essay over 200-pages long, it just comes across as shrill.

I said above that these were unfortunate habits. They are unfortunate because they are unnecessary, contributing nothing to Adam Mars-Jones’ eventual interpretive stance, and distracting, since one might well suspect that it is the snide comments that are the real point of writing such an essay. In the end, Mars-Jones has a useful interpretive suggestion for how to read Ozu’s Late Spring. And while I disagree with it, I won’t do him the same disservice that he offers other critics of dismissing it out of hand and then repeatedly mocking the person over the ensuing text. I’ll just let you decide for yourself.

If you can ignore the stylistic dross, then Noriko Smiling is well worth reading, whether or not you ultimately agree with Adam Mars-Jones’ interpretation.

53. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

More than 50 years after its original publication, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is just as angular and opinionated as ever. It is a world filled with haints, hot steams, incantations and secret signs that Jean Louise—otherwise known as Scout—and her brother, Jem, must negotiate. But there are worse things in Maycomb than imaginary night frights. And better. On one side are formidable aunties, and equally formidable neighbours, though it takes Scout and Jem a fair bit of time to determine just which side those are on. By the time they are face to face with the worst of Maycomb (and possibly of mankind) they have learned a thing or two about the better as well. And at the top of the better column, undoubtedly, is their father, Atticus Finch.

Lee does such a good job painting a believable picture of Alabama in the 1930s that it begins to seem almost unbelievable that men like Atticus or children like Jem and Scout could emerge from such an environment. Where does their strength of character come from? How are they able to hold to their resolve come what may? And how does Atticus continue to place himself in other men’s shoes day after day and not end in self-loathing?

I suppose that To Kill A Mockingbird was intended for a child readership, but its content and themes are more than serious enough to give any adult pause. And if you missed out on this classic and are coming to it late in the game, as I have, then you may want to take a moment to imagine your younger self reading this novel. And you may also wonder whether that younger you would have developed more strength of character, more resolve, and more fellow feeling than you have as a result. Maybe.

54. The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler

The narrator of Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Goodbye, Aaron Woolcott, is crippled in his right arm and leg as the result of a childhood virus. He always tells everyone that he can get by just fine. Which he does. Unfortunately his real crippling lies deeper; a lifetime of fending off solicitous mothers, sisters, and sympathetic young women has left him, perhaps not surprisingly, isolated emotionally. With the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, Dr Dorothy Rosales, who is literally flattened when a huge tree comes crashing through the sunroom of the house, Aaron finds himself bereft. But of what he is bereft?

In typical Tyler fashion, this novel is filled with unusual individuals who are presented as run-of-the-mill. Dramatic action, even action as dramatic as trees crashing through houses, is muted. Interior thoughts and self-doubt predominate. And there is a gentle sprinkling of light humour and passing psychological insight.

Somewhat unusually, there is a ghost lurking in this novel. Not the much talked about visions of Dorothy that Aaron experiences periodically during the year following her death. Rather, it is the character of Dorothy herself. She is endlessly enigmatic and always just out of reach. Who is this woman? She is an Oncologist of Hispanic origin with a respected medical practice. She is curiously muffled emotionally and strangely unpractised in social interaction. Very curiously (but entirely unexplored in the novel) even after years of marriage, Aaron has never met Dorothy’s family. Aaron’s call to her brother with the news of her death is his first occasion of speaking to him. I wanted to learn a great deal more about this woman. Alas, this is Aaron’s story and he either doesn’t know anything more about his wife, or doesn’t want to know.

As ever, when you try to situate an Anne Tyler within the range of her (now 19) novels, you find that it fits somewhere in the middle. As do all of the others. Gently recommended (for lovers of Anne Tyler novels).

55. A Winter Book by Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson’s stories beguile. Most are set on or near the islands off the coast of Finland. Most are quasi-autobiographical. Raised in a family of artists, she knows the pleasures and the effort involved in artistic achievement. The most damning accusation the small child stand-in for Jansson can think of in one of the stories is to call the woman she dislikes an amateur. That challenge for authenticity, for aesthetic realism, for the right word or gesture, persists across the 30 years from which these stories are drawn.

Some, such as “The Stone”, capture the intensity of a child’s perception and the importance of a child’s objectives. Others, such as “Flying”, partake of a magic-realist touch, but without any posturing. Always, even in “Flying” the stories are grounded in a concrete, practical, love of the physical—the sea, the wind, the small beauties found on a Nordic islet, the presence of mother and father, the games a solitary child plays to amuse herself.

Of course, across so many years one expects to see a wide range of stories, and this collection does not disappoint. “The Squirrel” and “The Boat and Me” stand out as remarkable achievements, I think. But all of the stories here are well worth a read, a welcome addition to the writings of Jansson available in English.

56. My New American Life by Francine Prose

Lula is an economic migrant. She entered the USA on a tourist visa ostensibly to visit “relatives” from her native Albania. But in fact her plan, all along, has been to get work, whatever work she can find without a green card, and then figure out some way of perpetuating her new American life. She succeeds, in her way, despite numerous obstacles and an encroaching balkanization of life in New York and surrounding environs. Near the end of her tether and her visa, Lula is taken in as a sort of au pair / governess / nanny to the teenage son of an emotionally wounded ex-academic, Stanley, who now works in the City. Stanley’s wife slipped into mental illness and out of he and his son’s life one Christmas eve and with her she took much of their reason for living. They exist now in a kind of after-life, the entombed suburbs of New Jersey. Lula, one way or another, is the new blood that may bring them back to life.

Francine Prose is a deliberate writer. I can only think that she must have chosen an Albanian refugee/immigrant narrator dismayed at the fear-induced paranoia of Bush-Cheney America for a reason. Does she want her reader to hear echoes of the 1997 Barry Levinson comedy Wag The Dog? Maybe it’s just me. Certainly the stories bear no resemblance other than Lula’s habit of writing “true” stories – a memoir that her high-powered immigration lawyer informs her will very much help her case – which liberally borrow from Balkan folktales and literature. And perhaps because these events take place in the heartland of The Sopranos (a television programme that is referenced a number of times in the novel), it makes sense to introduce a trio of gangsters (Albanians in this case, not Italians) in a shiny black Lexus who inveigle their way into Lula’s dull life in New Jersey and eventually connect or re-connect her with the wider family of Albanians coursing through the veins of America.

If you are getting the impression that this novel doesn’t quite know what it wants to be—political satire, immigrant biography, bildungsroman, chicklit, state-of-America report—then you are on the right track. It is always fine writing from Prose, but here it doesn’t add up to a unified whole.

57. Literature and the Question of Philosophy edited by Anthony J. Cascardi

I suppose that in any survey canvassing the breadth of philosophical thought in some area one will inevitably find some works virtually unreadable, and some that one might wish had been unwritable. Fortunately, the process of winnowing gathers some wheat. In this collection of papers, edited and introduced by Anthony J. Cascardi, I would identify the papers by Arthur C. Danto, Peter McCormick, Martha Nussbaum, Dennis Dutton, and Alexander Nehamas as a fine harvest.

Nussbaum’s paper in particular, “’Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination”, is undoubtedly a significant contribution to her thinking and writing on the relation of literature to our moral lives. Here she once again explores the fine perceptions that Henry James’ characters depend upon in order to arrive at small actions which themselves are remarkable, though perhaps unnoticed, moral achievements. This is the kind of “seeing” that Nussbaum believes we should aim at: “Obtuseness is a moral failing; its opposite can be cultivated.” Moreover, she would argue, James’ later novels are certainly one of a number of routes to its cultivation. Towards the end of this carefully argued paper, Nussbaum considers what possible role philosophy may have in relation to novels such as the ones she explores: “The philosophical explanation acts, here, as the ally of the literary text, sketching out its relation to other texts, exposing the deficiencies of other forms of moral writing.” Philosophy, then, serves literature as an ally in the quest for moral understanding. Not an inconsiderable partnership, if you accept Nussbaum’s argument.

Of the other substantial papers here, I will limit myself to Arthur C. Danto’s, “Philosophy as/and/of Literature”. It was certainly daring of Anthony J. Cascardi to place this essay at the front of the collection since, with typical brio, Danto presents a withering treatment of the dubious merit granted philosophy by those in the literary brigade declaring that “philosophy is literature”. He demurs. If it were only their failure to comprehend the nature of reference, that would be enough, though it would, regrettably, condemn literature to the realm of intertextuality and remove it from having anything remaining to do with life, our lives. But the error goes further, Danto insists, for the very nature of a philosophical question is misapprehended. Danto, whose introductory philosophy texts thrive on this very question, is more than up to the task of providing correctives. The result is a drubbing spectacle that is suspiciously fun.

Finally, full marks go to Anthony J. Cascardi who valiantly introduces each paper with an effort to draw out salient points and, importantly, to connect it, however tenuously, with the papers in closest proximity, philosophically speaking, in the collection. Perhaps he does not always succeed, but he presents an adequate model of open intellectual inquiry, which will not be bound by artificial limitations such as the so-called analytic/continental divide.

" . . . and some that one might wish had been unwritable": well said!

58. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

It is highly likely that, like me, you are a re-reader of Jane Eyre. Why? The melodrama is risible; the coincidences beggar belief; the transformations in situation and fortune are almost like a fairytale. And yet something draws you back. Surely it must be the conviction of Jane’s narrative voice, her flinty unwillingness to be misused, her determination, her luck of survival, her daring to even consider love, but also her resolve not to submit to anything less than the equal marriage of (unfettered) true minds and hearts. It is Jane alone who draws us back. What a curious and singular character she is.

It is certainly true that Jane encounters her fair share of repugnant individuals in her short life. Nothing redeems the behaviour of Mrs Reed or her children, and Mr Brocklehurst is a sorry substitute, fixated as he is on an economic spiritual ideal of education mostly suited for shaping souls for the next life and not the one before them. But Jane also has luck. Whether it comes in the form of the inspirational Helen Burns, or perhaps her best mentor, Miss Temple, Jane somehow attracts the succour of the good and just individuals she meets. Even the otherworldly St John Rivers is counterbalanced by his more amiable sisters.

But of course it is Mr Rochester who fascinates Jane, and she him. He is both ugly in form and, at least initially, ugly in character – officious, peremptory, and dismissive. More ugliness lies beneath, too much perhaps. Rochester tempts fate by enticing Jane into a liaison that can only blacken his character. He tempts fate, and fate intervenes.

Brontë’s world is heavy with the clash of dark and light, good and—not evil perhaps, but—sullied nature. My temperament leads me to prefer Austen, but every once in a while, I find it necessary to come back and re-read this gripping tale. Recommended.

59. Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

First novels, even if they do not entirely succeed, should be ambitious. They should (perhaps) tackle huge themes, involve great moral struggles, create intimate character portraits, and they should have heart. Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ first novel certainly takes on a huge theme in slavery. She focuses on the tangled web of allegiances and betrayals that arise when master-slave relations are sexualized and, more especially, when then they bear fruit in the form of children. She introduces us to four black slave women brought together over a number of summers at the Tawawa resort in “free” Ohio, where their masters have gone to “take the waters”. Mawu, Sweet, Reenie, and Lizzie have varied histories and divergent futures. The tale of any one of them would be enough to melt the coldest heart. So, if the novel does not entirely succeed, it can at least be seen to be headed in the right direction.

Told from the perspective of Lizzie, whose situation is complicated by her “love” for her master and the father of the her two children, the few succeeding summers at the resort lead to tragedy and, at least for some, new beginnings. The Tawara resort (which did in fact exist) thrusts these slave mistresses into close proximity with freed and freeborn blacks. Is it any wonder they feel both the pull toward freedom and the future, as well as the call of kith and kin further south?

Lizzie can read and write, modestly. But her curious state, as both a willing and unwilling participant in her own subjugation, makes her a not entirely trustworthy perceiver of events. Her vision, both moral and emotional, is clouded. Enough so that she willingly reports on Mawu’s plans to escape, all the while believing that she does so for Mawu’s own good despite knowing the severe beating Mawu will suffer at the hands of her master as a result. Is she any better judge of her own situation? It makes it difficult to fully sympathize with Lizzie’s own plight. And it also tempers our enthusiasm for her later re-visioning because it too may not have a solid base.

The writing here is at times uneven. It is almost as though, with such richness before her, Perkins-Valdez sometimes cannot decide what to focus on. That is not such a bad problem for a first novel. If her reach has exceeded her grasp, well…that’s why they invented second novels.

Reading a good-but-not-quite-right novel makes something like Jane Eyre seem all the more amazing.

In truth, I probably pulled my punches with the Perkins-Valdez novel. It is a "book club" selection that will engender lots of discussion about its subject and themes but absolutely none about its writing. I think I'll skip that session.

60. The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s third novel is almost a return to form. It is certainly a return to themes of loss and searching, dissipation and disappointment, and the overwhelming sense that one’s life just hasn’t gone the way one planned. But there is also something unfinished about this novel, much as its main characters never seem, despite the passage of years, to escape from their adolescence.

Gavin, Sasha, Daniel, and Jack were The Lola Quartet in their final year in high school in Sebastian, Florida. Gavin, who suffers from heatstroke (a nice touch), can’t decide whether he wants to be an investigative reporter or a private detective. He wears a fedora and, sometimes, a trench coat (but not out in the Florida heat) as though he is trying on his future life. Ten years later he is still trying it on, though some avenues have recently been closed. Is it a case of arrested development, or just the usual life filled with regrets? Sasha has a gambling problem in high school, and ten years later she still has a gambling problem. Jack discovers early on that he does not have the drive or talent to become the musician he hoped he would be and turns to pills, a habit he still has ten years later. Daniel suffers a disappointment that sours his perspective and embitters him toward Gavin, and ten years later he is a sour police detective. Anna, Sasha’s younger half-sister, is the nominal target of all their attention. But Anna’s response to any situation is always an immature fight or flight, and both options end up hurting people.

There is no doubt that Mandel has talent. And I was really hoping that The Lola Quartet would be a return to the form she showed in her first novel, Last Night in Montreal. But numerous characters that show no progression, recurring themes, and borrowed plot devices (as in her second novel, there is a major plot device here which seems borrowed from the television series The Wire) leave me unable to enthusiastically recommend this novel.

61. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The characters in Emily Brontë’s novel are so extreme, so given over to their passions, so driven and wilful that you will, certainly, want to pull your own hair out. From the dissipated yet cruel Hindley, to the emotionally divided and divisive Cathy, to the mindlessly foolish Isabella, and her ineffectual brother, Edgar, to the stunted, brutish Hareton, it is a cavalcade of distasteful, even monstrous, types. But none compare to the fiendish Heathcliff himself, whose unrelenting vengeful monomania brings ruin upon them all. How Heathcliff’s perverse passion for Catherine came to represent any sort of ideal of romantic devotion in the many years subsequent to the novel’s publication is a mystery to me.

If possible, it might be best to set aside the principal characters and their extreme emotions and actions, and turn instead to the descriptive prose with which Emily Brontë renders the wild moors, the relentless inclement weather, and the brief wonder of spring or a sunny summer day. Even more intriguing is the bracketed narrative technique, initiated by the loquaciously risible Mr. Lockwood and then, more prosaically, carried forward by Ellen Dean. That Ellen Dean at one point encourages Mr. Lockwood to pursue a possible marriage with the younger Catherine deliciously risks the confusion of narrative and plot, and Mr. Lockwood does well to get himself as far away from Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights as possible. His return later in the year rightly heralds the wrapping up of loose ends and the natural dénouement of the tale.

Wuthering Heights, even today, seems so singular, so extreme that, if you still have hair at the end of it, you might wish to set it on its own shelf in your library, isolated and incomparable. A curious, dark masterpiece recommended only for the brave of heart.

Just delurking to say how much I enjoy your descriptions!

Thanks, Roni, that's very kind of you to say.

62. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Writers write, as they say. That is about the only certain advice one can receive from a book on writing and life and the writing life. With a wry, self-deprecating, brutally honest demeanour, Anne Lamott informs her students that the way to become a writer is to sit down every day at the same time with a clean piece of paper or the file on your computer you’ve been slaving over for more than a year—and write. Only those who have actually attempted this will appreciate, along with Lamott, just how difficult it may be to fulfil that simple injunction. She is well aware that you will stare at the page or the screen sometimes for hours on end; that you will reconsider your decision to post-pone the fun you could have had working on your taxes; that the corner of your desk will become endlessly fascinating and just may be the grain of sand in which you will perceive the whole…yes, just about anything is more enticing, at times, than writing.

This book shares a few useful techniques to help your writing process, which I’ll get to in a moment, but what makes it one of the best books on writing that I have read is Lamott’s compassion for others in her situation. Because more than anything else, this is a book about compassion. Compassion for others, certainly, but also compassion for oneself. That, and learning the value of producing an SFD: a “shitty first draft”.

Lamott has a strong belief in the power of writing per se. If you press on, word after damn word, reaching a certain number of words per day (she suggests three hundred as a target), eventually you will complete your SFD. And here is an important tip: don’t show your SFD to anyone. The embarrassment of riches (and the stink) of an SFD should be yours alone. Fortunately, once you’ve got an SFD you can move on to the rewriting stage—because having made something, your job as a writer is to make it better. Of course making it better can take a long time. It may involve sharing your current versions with your writing group, with a trusted but critical colleague, with an editor or your agent, if you have one. The good news is that no matter how bad they think your writing is or how much further you’ve got to go with it, at least you can rest easy that they didn’t see your SFD.

By all means borrow this book from your local public library. And when you’ve finished reading it, go out and find it in a bookshop somewhere. Because you’ll want to have it on the shelf in your office to glance at when you are staring at that blank page (or screen) to remind you that, well, writers write. (P.S. If you think this review is bad, you should have seen my SFD.) Recommended.

63. The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

Anna Aemelin is an elderly reclusive illustrator of children’s books. Her downcast gaze lovingly recreates the forest floor revealed each spring as the winter snows recede. If fluffy bunnies appear in each of her paintings, that is solely at the insistence of her publisher, from whom she also receives the text of the books she illustrates. She is fragile and susceptible to abuse, from publishers and marketing executives, and even from the local shopkeeper.

Katri Kling is a piercingly yellow-eyed astute young woman who looks after her younger brother, Mats, and protects herself from the same abusive shopkeeper, the town busybodies, and the horde of children who chant, without rebuke, that she is a witch. She sees Anna as a potential benefactor for Mats. She embarks on a plan to secure Anna’s allegiance. To do so she will need to open Anna’s eyes to those who take advantage of her. But the revelation of deception can itself be a form of deceit. And the wolfish chase of the prey can have unlooked-for consequences.

Jansson’s exquisitely subtle and precise prose resists narrative drive. It pauses. It changes direction. It migrates its narrative voice. And at every turn, it reveals new layers in Anna and Katri and Mats. At times it seems as though Anna and Katri are in a life and death struggle. But do either of them even know what a winning outcome might look like? At times it seems as though they are vying for the care and guardianship of Mats. At times Katri is caught out as, perhaps, just another bully of Anna, but Anna too is caught out, slyly obstructing Katri’s aims, even to the point of subverting her relationship with her constant companion, a purposefully unnamed wolfhound.

It’s an intricate dance and I find it entirely fascinating. I would be hard-pressed to come up with two more singular adversaries (or friends), and yet throughout the tone remains consistently cautious, inconclusive, even tentative. This is a novel that thoroughly deserves to be reread. Possibly immediately. Recommended.

64. Dr. Brinkley's Tower by Robert Hough

Just over the border, in the sleepy post-revolutionary Mexican town of Corazón de la Fuente, the erection of a mammoth radio tower will soon transform the lives of everyone living under its green-hazed penumbra. Dr Brinkley, the tower’s progenitor, is a million watt charlatan and his heavy brand of hucksterism and patent medicine, pitched to address men’s greatest fear, is wildly successful. But with so much potency on the loose, is it any wonder the citizenry of Corazón de la Fuente end up being shown the business end of his tower?

Robert Hough’s gentle, descriptive prose traces the hopes and fears of a wide selection of Corazón de la Fuente’s favourite sons and daughters in near-sepia tones. From the lame mayor, Miguel Orozco, to the Spanish hacendero, Antonio Garcia, to Madam Félix and the Marias of the House of Gentlemanly Pleasures, Hough treats his subjects with compassion and just enough self-awareness to keep them interesting. But perhaps my favourite of the many citizens of Corazón de la Fuente is the aged molinero, Roberto Pántelas, and his young love, Laura Valesquez. Their sad story, tragic but humane, captivates the reader. How could their end signal anything other than the downfall of Corazón de la Fuente?

Of course Corazón de la Fuente does not go down without a fight. The elder statesmen of the town, together with the young Francisco Ramirez, and the ancient curandera who foretold the malignant effect the tower would have, take it in hand to set things right. But perhaps too much has happened and too much has changed by then.

This is fine writing by an author clearly in command of his craft. A pleasure to read and to recommend.

65. The Way the World Works by Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker’s non-fiction, at its best, is as supple and textured and form fittingly precise as his fiction. The very first essay in this collection, “String”, is proof enough. It is a meditation on childhood, growth, the string that connects us to our kites and to each other, and the limits of any length of string. After reading “String”, you may want to stop safe in the knowledge that nothing else Baker could produce could equal this. You might be right. But then you would miss out on the care he takes over his copybooks in “Narrow Ruled”, and the anguish he experienced at the death of Thorin Oakenshield when his mother read him The Hobbit. And you would definitely want to chase along with his enthusiasms—for telephones, and Updike, and newspapers, and The New Yorker, and Wikipedia, and even for libraries (of a certain sort).

In any collection of writing across a fifteen-year span, you will expect to find a degree of variance. Here, not so much. But then this is mid-career Baker (one certainly hopes!). Most of these pieces are written well within his comfort zone. His reflective, ruminative strengths in fiction are all present here. Less certain are his argumentative pieces. Although obviously well researched, their focus can seem blinkered, as though a forest may in fact be hidden behind this ever so fascinating tree. What is a blessing for his ruminative writing and his fiction may not necessarily be helpful in formulating cogent argument.

Then there are the challenges he sets himself, such as exploring the world of action/adventure video games, which might dismay you. What strange economic forces could drive one the finest writers in America to spend hours, days, weeks even playing first-person and third-person shooter video games? Even though the resulting fish-out-of-water essay is a treasure, I found myself wishing The New Yorker had set him some different, more worthwhile task. Like flying a kite. Recommended.

66. Sweet Tooth: A Novel by Ian McEwan

On one view, duplicity is the novelist’s stock-in-trade. As such, all novelists are spies, of a sort, and all novels spy novels. Or perhaps the doubleness of fiction makes all novels metafictional, and all novelists purveyors of metafictional theory. Or perhaps the hot pursuit of plot, that narrative drive, is equally meaningful whether one is chasing a real fox or a faux-fox. One or all these views might be held by Ian McEwan and in Sweet Tooth he puts them all into play.

Serena Frome, a beautiful young Cambridge graduate, is groomed by a Cambridge don to enter the British internal security service, MI5. It is 1972, a transitional year for the world economy as the OPEC embargo begins to bite, the coal miners’ union flexes its muscle, the Troubles in Northern Ireland are about to overwhelm the British mainland, a snap election leads to a change in government, and Serena Frome, against all good advice, falls in love. Unfortunately her love interest is also her work target, the writer T.H. Haley, and everything from that point forward (or possibly earlier) is not entirely as it seems.

This is rich ground for McEwan as he explores conflicting interests (taste?) in fiction. As Serena undergoes her own form of sentimental education, the reader glimpses snippets from T.H. Haley’s short stories and first novella that are eerily similar to McEwan’s own early work. These are just tasters, however, as McEwan slips from one style to another and back again; it’s a master class by a master craftsman, each sentence deliciously precise. It hardly matters that Serena’s inner conflict is less than fully believable, or that her external conflicts border on the preposterous. (Well, it might matter, but go with it and wait for the twist in the tail/tale at the end.)

For my own part, I do not believe that fiction is by nature duplicitous. I think that misunderstands the relationship between truth and fiction. That makes me less than sympathetic to McEwan’s metafictional theses. But such disagreement is no bar to recommending this finely constructed novel and whatever sweet truth it cares to impart.

67. In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders

Satire has numerous guises but it tends to begin with exaggeration either of a personality trait or social condition, which may be gently mocking or cruelly sarcastic. Satire is rarely playful, or merely playful. Rather, it is directed toward some end—stop this craven subservience to free-market capitalism, stop listening to the insane recommendations of special interests, stop exploiting animals in bizarre inhumane experiments, beware those who would play upon your sympathy and sentiment.

Usually the target of satire is obvious, since otherwise it wouldn’t be much use in motivating specific action. And that is the case with most of the stories in this collection. Saunders uses gentle, and sometimes harsh, satire towards specific ends that are clear. Since the stories are well worked out, i.e. the exaggerated trait or condition is followed through with additional corresponding changes in the individual or society, they are enjoyable as artifice as well as (usually) humorous. Sometimes though the satiric invention seems to become an end in itself, as in “brad carrigan, american”, or the title story “in persuasion nation”. Here, it is as though the end at which the satire aims is too small for the hammer being used to hit it. We are forced to either revel in the inventive genius in its own right (which many will) or continue searching for something with a bit more traction.

Perhaps the most startling use of satire comes in stories that are not obviously satirical at first glance. In “the red bow”, family and friends of the victim of an atrocity are motivated to positive action through the emotional use of a symbol relevantly similar to a bow the victim had been wearing. But a seemingly unstoppable escalation occurs—with each iteration the symbol becomes larger and more invested with meaning, just as the targets of the action begin to escalate. It has the feel of Flannery O’Connor. There seems no way to hold back the unwanted conclusion. I liked this story in particular because it is less clear what the specific target of the satire is, and equally unclear what one could do about it. It seems less confident and less shrill, bordering on despair rather than self-righteousness.

For me, this collection of stories would be well worth recommending for “the red bow” alone. But every story here is certainly worth reading and all are worthy of a good long think.

68. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

Frank Bascombe claims to be a literalist. But he might better be described as a fabulist, constantly lying to himself and others, inventing life histories for chance acquaintances (which mostly turn out to be far from accurate), and struggling to reassert his personal narrative in the face of his oldest son’s death two years previous, his inconsistent actions since that time, and the end of his marriage. He exists, often, in a dreamlike state, muddled and meandering, often overtly acting at cross-purposes with his best intentions. By contrast, what he admires in the athletes about whom he writes is that they can be within themselves, in the moment, totally fixated upon the task at hand. He aspires to that level of unconcern with his surroundings, his past, and his future. But Frank was never an athlete even in college, and in the end it is his words that must see him through.

It takes some time to get to know Frank, not least because of how poorly he knows himself. He praises mystery—in life, in people, and in circumstance—and says he wants to preserve it, yet he is the consummate explainer, filling in all the details of a person’s life even when, in most cases, he has to invent it. He himself is unclear about what he means by mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with the son for whom he is entombed in mourning. Perhaps it has something to do with his persistently spouting proposals of marriage, but never in such a way that they could be taken seriously. He is a man divorced from his wife, from the politics of his time, from his own family history. He seems to be adrift in a sea of suburbs and insubstantial, place-holder, accommodations, that can neither substitute for the absence of community nor inspire hope for the future. His monthly gentlemen’s club for divorced men might easily be a model for all of our modern relations—insincere, uncommitted, grasping after distractions in order to avoid the real issues and emotions that are thundering down upon us. The very distractions in which the sportswriter specializes.

Ford’s writing here is deft and subtle. Frank Bascombe is a man of words, by nature and by profession. But what purpose do his words serve, either when he was a short story writer, or in his career as a sportswriter? He claims that with his sportswriting he is doing about all a man could hope to do in addressing the problems of family, community, nation, even life itself. But he doesn’t really believe it, does he? He is a man hiding from himself, perhaps, and his real fear may be the literal truth he cannot face.

This is no novel to be raced through. It needs to be savoured, maybe even mellowed by age. I’m not sure I would have liked it as much had I read it more than twenty years ago, when it was first published and when I was more than twenty years younger. Reading it today, it felt entirely apt. Certainly, long before the end I had reached the conclusion that Ford is a writer more than worthy of the effort. I would gladly read this novel again. And anything else Richard Ford has going. Highly recommended.

Although I may not read the books you are reading, I am certainly enjoying reading your reviews.

69. Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

Eleanor Henderson breathes life into a time, place, and milieu. The time is 1987, the place is New York City and Lintonburg, Vermont, and the milieu is the niche hardcore punk "straight-edge" scene. The protagonists are children, teenagers all, but children seemingly torn from their own childhoods. Orphans, adoptees, runaways and waifs -- their relationships with the parental adult world is as fraught and complicated as the world itself. And yet, like an experiential juggernaut, these youths insist on becoming adults, through pain and misfortune and hope and the possibility of love.

Jude and Teddy and Johnny and Eliza are the generation following that of promiscuous drug use and sexual freedom. One way or another--either through tragedy or steely will--they turn their backs on the choices their parents made. Jude, especially, runs the gamut from pot smoking, gas huffing fifteen year old to straight-edge abstainer of alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, and meat. Sexually confused but not sexually ambitious, Jude moves tentatively toward increasingly adult relations both sexual and caring. Johnny is an equally impressive portrait from Henderson, though sexually more adventurous. Strangely, it is Eliza, the wilful, privileged, now pregnant teen who is the least believable character.

At times the writing seems forced, with awkward movements of characters to different locales. At times there are chapters that feel like information dumps, bringing the reader up to speed on the punk and straight-edge scene of the '80s. But these are minor problems in a first novel that undoubtedly provides ample evidence of Henderson's potential. Well worth a read.

70. Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Beyond the limits of nostalgia lie a strange land of wistfulness, dream, and fetish. This is the landscape that Michael Chabon charts in Telegraph Avenue whose nominal focus is Brokeland Records, a struggling used-record store on Oakland's storied Telegraph Avenue. Brokeland is a natural focal point for nostalgia, as customers seek to revisit the music of their youth. But it is also the jumping off point for visitations to the land beyond nostalgia, as some customers seek out the false (?) nostalgia of times which were not their own. As, for example, when one customer, the hefty white whale-lawyer Michael "Moby" Oberstein, embarrassingly takes on the argot of the black hip-hop artists he admires. Or, when Julie Jaffe and Titus Joyner, both teenage boys, live their imaginative lives in films that were released when their fathers or even their grandfathers were young. This slip from nostalgia to false nostalgia to outright fetishism tokens a corresponding, and possibly worrying, disconnect with one’s own time and place.

Chabon’s writing here is never less than rich, at times moving up the colour palette to lurid, as when he takes on the stylistic excess of H.P. Lovecraft in order to dramatize young Julie’s imaginative life, or when he follows an exotically coloured, escaping parrot in one long paragraph over ten pages. This might be described as filmic writing, as Chabon moves from scene to scene, with long-shots and close-ups and jump-cuts. Initially it works against a close emotional connection with any one of the large cast of characters. But over the course of such a long novel that temporary distancing is more than compensated for by the emotional impact of culminating plot.

Fathers and sons, without doubt, are the pervasive motif in this novel, as well as the respect due to each. And although motherhood and certainly pregnancy are important both in terms of plot and language—the two main female characters share a midwifery practice—Chabon does not succeed in bringing them or their concerns fully to life. Perhaps there are some territories that remain yet unexplored by this absorbing writer.

Don’t be put off if the music and films referenced in the novel are only on the edge of your awareness. This is not, or at least it shouldn’t be, a contest in geeky knowledge. Indeed the suggestion is, iterated over and over again here, that it doesn’t matter whether you have direct experience of pop-cultural phenomena. Second or third-hand experience will more than suffice. Or even just a name dropped in the right place.

Plenty to think about and enjoy here. Highly recommended.

De-lurking to say that I very much love Chabon, and this one looks just as good as the others I've read - thanks for the recommendation!

71. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Delightful. Beneath the frothy, steamed-milk, surface of this novel broods a dark Italian espresso of love and regret and more love. Of course love leads to complications, not least of which are the children of passion, excised, hidden, shunned, or, accepted, nurtured, and acknowledged. Between Florence, Rome, and an isolated port along the Italian Riviera, a complicated tangle of parallel plots develop in 1962 during the chaotic filming of the Richard Burton / Liz Taylor spectacular, Cleopatra. The choices made by each character in this fulcrum of decision – the naïve but fruitful neophyte actress, Dee Moray; the failed novelist, Alvis Bender; the sombre yet hopeful minor hotelier, Pasquale Tursi – create ripples spreading through the years, coming ashore again more than forty years later.

Jess Walter is masterful in his delicately comic prose, which, even when bounding through a zany scene, holds deep veins of poignancy and honesty. Time after time, I found myself marvelling at Walter’s touch: entirely impressive, without calling attention to itself. Even when he undertakes chapters in alternate modes – there is a short story chapter, a movie pitch chapter, a self-important autobiography from an unsavoury Hollywood producer, a play (all of these ostensibly with different “authors”) – Walter perfectly integrates these modes into the story as a whole; this is never mere display and technical bravura. Moreover, Beautiful Ruins is as singular in its writing as Walter’s previous two novels, The Zero and The Financial Lives of the Poets. When each new work raises the bar of respect for an author, you can only hope his career flourishes long into the future.

Perhaps our lives, and the stories of our lives, cannot hope to amount to more in the end than beautiful ruins. If so, then we could do worse than hope for a bit of Jess Walter’s humane insight into the wonderful process of our ruination. Highly recommended.

Beautiful Ruins sounds really good. Where do you find your fiction? You frequently seem to be reading great books that haven't gotten a lot of press.

A fair number of books I read are the most recent offerings from authors whose books I've read in the past. I tend to stick with authors, if they've written at least one good book. In the most recent case, Beautiful Ruins is very curiously marketed. The copy I had (from the public library) has a cover which would convince you that it was 'chick lit'. I would never have picked it up on the basis of its cover. But nothing I've read by Walter in the past would suggest his writing in that vein. And although he certainly toys with the form, I would say he is up to something far more subtle.

Another source I have for book recommendations is our local independent bookshop, Words Worth Books. The proprietors and staff are incredibly well-read, and regularly pull out hidden gems for me. (I also like that we don't always agree about the quality of these gems, in which case we have a 'healthy' discussion on what goes in to the finer points of gemology!)

I've also got a few friends (outside of LT) who feed me their best recent finds. As well, as you know, a few people within LT whose recommendations I take seriously :-)

And lastly, I've got a number of shelves of TBR books, many of which are now no longer current but which fortunately do not lose their value as great reads no matter how long it takes for me to get round to them.

But mostly, it's just plain dumb luck. I always feel incredibly lucky if the next book I read turns out to be a winner.

72. Milosz by Cordelia Strube

Cordelia Strube has a talent for portraying precocious, though troubled, young teens. Perhaps this explains why Milo, the titular hero of Milosz, is a thirty-something man who sounds an awful lot like a precocious, though troubled, young teen. Milo’s life is fractured and fraught, a slightly traumatized childhood leading to a career as a failed actor, orphan (sort of), and sad sack. His closest connection is to his 11-year-old autistic neighbour, Robertson, whose emotionally stunted relationship with the world and the people in it mirrors Milo’s own. And it doesn’t help that Milo’s house has become a world of chaos since being invaded by unwanted lodgers – Wallace, who owns a junk removal business but pretends to his English mum (who also ends up living in the house) that he is an accountant; Pablo, a handsome Cuban who sometimes gets work with Wallace but whose girlfriend has thrown him out; Tawny, a teenage Native American escaping from an abusive childhood on the reservation; and Gus, Milo’s estranged and presumed dead father, who has suffered either head trauma or a stroke and no longer remembers how to speak English (he can only speak Polish) or anything about his life with Milo, which we learn from Milo was not great, to put it mildly.

The story meanders, even lurches, in one direction and then another without a clear purpose. But that is probably because none of the characters manage to rise above their stereotypes. Certainly Milo himself has no ideas and no direction. His actions often seem out of proportion, or border on the irrational, and, with respect to Robertson’s mom, Tanis, definitely slip over into the creepy. It makes the “happy families” ending come across as forced, since Strube has spent the previous 300 pages confirming Philip Larkin’s famous observation of the effects on children of their mums and dads.

Quite apart from unbelievable characters, the very world Strube offers here is unbelievable. The elderly and befuddled Gus, both when in care and when returned to his home with his son, is only capable of speaking Polish. Yet incredibly, no one—not his care givers or any of the motley crew in Milo’s house—seems to have the wit to simply bring in some other Polish speaker from all of multi-ethic Toronto in order to communicate with Gus. Seems a bit unlikely.

I have enjoyed previous efforts by Coredlia Strube, especially Lemon, but I’m afraid Milosz just doesn’t get it’s act together.

73. The Woman Who Died A Lot by Jasper Fforde

Thursday Next returns for a seventh outing, a bit battered, achy, and with a pronounced limp, but otherwise in fine form. A few years have passed in Swindon, enough time for Thursday’s children, Tuesday and Friday, to have reached their active teen years. SpecOps has been disbanded, but there are reports that it may be resuscitated. Unfortunately, Thursday is overlooked in her application for head of the service, but, luckily for us, she is offered the post of head of the Wessex Library instead. It’s a library that packs a punch, especially given the full combat librarians of the Special Library Services (SLS). As you would expect from a Thursday Next novel, the grasping and mendacious global corporation, Goliath, is also back in the form of none other than Thursday’s old nemesis, Jack Schitt. Expect gunplay, a high body-double count, and the odd smiting from that Olde Testamente player of yore.

Jasper Fforde is once again writing with the confidence and verve that one expects of the creator of Thursday Next. There are plenty of twists and turns here with the introduction of Day Players—replicants whose lifespan is predictably announced in their name—and the extreme bendiness of the event timeline, which solves as many plot problems as it creates. There is even a gradual introduction of DRM, Dark Reading Matter, which undoubtedly will form the basis of Thursday’s next great adventure.

If you followed Thursday Next through the previous roller-coaster novels, then you will definitely want to stay in the car for this exciting turn around the track. Recommended for Thursday Next fans. Others may want to stick to safer fare, or better yet get started with the first in the series and catch up.

74. The Journey Prize Stories 24 selected by Michael Christie, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, and Kathleen Winter

The 24th edition of the Journey Prize Stories once again brings together the best stories published in Canada’s many literary journals and magazines in the past year, or at least fourteen of the best. Based on the evidence here the three member selection panel must have both enjoyed their task and struggled to limit it to the number chosen.

There are no weak stories in this collection, but of course there will be some that stand out for individual readers. For me, Kevin Hardcastle’s “To Have to Wait” showed immense poise and tempered emotion that stayed with me despite it being the first in the collection. Martin West’s “My Daughter of the Dead Reeds” is haunting. Andrew Hood’s “Manning” is grotesquely funny, but with a heart. And Kris Bertin’s “Is Alive and Can Move” was brutally real.

Always a pleasure to sample the best of Canada’s short story output.

How would this compare to McEwan's other novels Randy? I've had a mixed experience with him. Loved Atonement but really disliked Saturday.

Hi Karen. I would put Sweet Tooth in the same camp as Atonement, though the latter might be said to be about writing while the former is about reading. McEwan has a lot of thoughts about fiction, its practice, and its import. It's not like Saturday in the sense of the tense inevitability of ensuing violence or grotesque situations that often appear in McEwan novels, such as The Cement Garden, or The Child in Time, or even Enduring Love. That makes it more palatable, perhaps, but also less compelling. However, the one thing that is entirely consistent across all of his novels is his remarkably assured writing, where each sentence practically stands alone as well written. (Which, I suppose, can also be off-putting at times.)

I need to catch up on Thursday Next. I read the first four or so when they came out and really enjoyed all of them, and a couple more would be a nice reading treat.

That's great that you have a good independent bookstore. They are not that many any more, especially for new books.

@158 Randy. Thanks for the insight Randy - I have it on my 'to consider' list but wasn't sure whether to keep it there.

75. Dear Life by Alice Munro

Almost any story you choose to read by Alice Munro will better than almost any other story you might have read, even those by Alice Munro. There is something lulling in the cadence of her sentences, her observational choices, her sudden turns that are not turns at all. Something that makes you think, as you read one of her stories, that this is it, this is what real life, a certain life at least lived in a certain place and time is like. Honesty might be a word for it, if fiction can be honest. I hear the voice of my mother, or an aunt, or one of my grandmothers in these stories and I think, even if I disagree with what they are saying, that’s the way they see it.

Of the stories in this collection, I would single out “Amundsen” for its clash of naïveté and self-serving motives, “Haven” for the unflattering portrayal of familial relations, and “Train” for the way it treats a life as iterations in a quest for solidity and peace. But I might just as easily have chosen any of the other stories.

The final four pieces in the collection are grouped together under the title “Finale”. These are, Munro says, “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” In them, Munro looks at a few incidents of her childhood that cast her, momentarily, in an unfavourable light. They are, some of them, shameful thoughts or actions that she may be excising. In “Night”, her father reassures her. “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.” And it is precisely what she needs to hear in order to overcome her anxiety driven insomnia. Other regrets, such as not attending her mother’s final illness, death, and funeral are not assuaged by the calm comfort of a wise father. “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”

Highly recommended.

Congrats!

Congrats on reaching number 75!! :)

76. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Loads of fun. This is a romp through the geeky, backlit world of MacBooks, e-Books, and Google’s Big Box in pursuit of a truth entombed in a coded book of life more than 500 years old. If that sounds a bit far-fetched, then you may not be ready for the silly delights of D&D questors grown to manhood who find themselves still on quests but for real this time, even if, sometimes, that quest is only the retrieval of a book on a bookshelf thirty feet up by means of a ladder on wheels and a fair degree of good faith. And as with any good quest, the ultimate prize turns out to have been the quest itself, for that is where all the good stuff resides in Robin Sloan’s cheery tale.

Do you need to know how to program in Ruby in order to fully enjoy this book? Or how to interface with Hadoop in the world of big data? Or even the arcane mysteries of museum accession classification? No. But won’t you feel especially clever if you do? No need to fear, there is plenty more out there that will support your cleverness self-image. (But honestly, just how cool does Robin Sloan think working at Google really is? Answer: really cool!)

Recommended for a fun, light read and a smile.

77. The Best American Short Stories 2012 edited by Tom Perrota

In any collection of the 20 “Best” short stories from a particular year, there is bound to be some variation, a range of styles that test the elasticity of the term “short story”. There will also be some that will appeal more to one person than another. That’s as it should be. Fortunately there won’t be any hesitation in confirming that each of these stories deserves a place in this collection.

For myself, three stories stood out and three more might just as easily have taken their place. Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” more than equals the Raymond Carver story from which it finds its inspiration. Taiye Selasi’s “The Sex Lives of African Girls” is an astounding début; hers will be a career worth tracking. And George Saunders’ “Tenth of December” begins in a near incoherent fashion that eventually works itself around to a resoundingly coherent conclusion; he never fails to utterly impress.

Equally masterful is Jess Walter’s “Anything Helps” that brings the voice of a homeless man and his private thoughts vividly to life. Taylor Antrim’s “Pilgrim Life” feels like an entire complex novella packed into the short story form. And Roxane Gay’s “North Country” raises the awkward question of just how many times in one day a black woman from Nebraska can be asked whether she is from Detroit when she takes a teaching post in Michigan’s upper peninsula.

Not surprising to find this collection recommended, if only to renew your faith in possibilities of short fiction.

I read The Woman Who Died a Lot in October as well, and also enjoyed it quite a bit! And Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore was just put on my wishlist a day or too ago when Terri (tloeffler) reviewed it--sounds like fun.

78. Mimi by Lucy Ellmann

You may find mind yourself at times with the impulse to cheer, as you read Mimi by Lucy Ellmann. Give in to your desire. It is your better nature rooting for the irrepressible Mimi; for her erstwhile lover, Harrison; for Harrison’s gender-switching cat, Bubbles; and most importantly for Bee, Harrison’s artistic older sister who finds personal reclamation through her Coziness Sculptures and is generous enough to invite others to share her joy. If you enjoy a good rant, a loveable harangue, a hectoring friendship, and lists, lists, lists, then you may also enjoy this, sometimes dark, comedy. It is ‘sometimes dark’ because truly awful things happen to many of the minor characters and some of the major ones too. And, from a certain point of view, the underlying evil that is visited upon each of these unfortunates is the same: men. It’s enough to rouse you to a good rant, a loveable harangue, or a bit of hectoring. And there’s some nice talk of Bach and Beethoven too!

The plot is thin. A wealthy New York plastic surgeon slips on the ice, finds a stray kitten, becomes enamoured of a brash opinionated woman who opens his eyes to real love and the downtrodden plight of women everywhere, not least his older sister, and when the chips are down, he throws in his lot with women and becomes a feminist revolutionary (sort of). The characters, with the exception of the fascinating Bee, are equally thin and unbelievable. A piano-playing plastic surgeon, a sex theorizing speech coach, a social harpy named Gertrude (imagine!), brutalistic bullying husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and homicidal maniacs. Honestly, if you just added a bit of music, it might as well be opera. Which, strangely enough, it sort of is.

There is also something serious at the heart of this novel. But the ecstatic punning, verbal dizziness, and sometimes frenetic action might mistakenly lead a reader to assume that the vision Harrison sets forth at the climax of the novel is nothing more than a satirical manifesto, a bit of a lark, and too silly for words. That would be unfortunate. Unfortunate if Lucy Ellmann’s verve and élan worked against her polemic. Though I suppose it is the risk all writers take when they cozy up to comedy in pursuit of truth.

Gently recommended for ranting good humour and a recipe or two.

***

This is my first LibraryThing Early Review.

79. The Mess Inside : Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind by Peter Goldie

The death of Peter Goldie in late 2011, as is increasingly becoming evident, was an immense loss to philosophy. Few thinkers move so deftly between the rarefied atmosphere of analytic metaphysics, moral psychology, and ethics, and the real stuff of life, of who we are in our living rooms when we think about our lives. The posthumous publication of The Mess Inside, which was already completed at the time of his death, brings Goldie’s considerable insight to bear on the role of narrative in our lives. Not, as one might suspect (or hope), the role of fiction. But rather the role that our autobiographical narrative thinking has when we reflect on past actions (and errors), present plans, and future possibilities.

Goldie describes his view as a modest narrativist view. He disavows the strong narrativist stances of Alasdair MacIntyre and Marya Schechtman in which our self narratives constitute our selves. But equally he distances himself from anti-narrativists such as Galen Strawson who maintain that narrative has no role at all in establishing who we are. Goldie threads the needle with an account of narrative that acknowledges its capacity to provide narrative structure—coherence, meaningfulness, and evaluative and emotional import—to our lives without binding us to a fictionalizing metaphysics.

One of the distinctive components of Goldie’s view is found in his account of free indirect style, which he borrows from the literary critic James Wood. In literature, free indirect style facilitates an emergent dramatic irony as evaluative and emotional terms flit between a narrated subject and a narrator. Goldie argues that something similar occurs in our autobiographical narratives, where we also invest the actions of our narrated subjects (ourselves) with evaluative import: I think back now on my foolish behaviour at the office party last year. There, the regretful foolishness is projected by me as narrator on my own past action. This kind of self-reflective bootstrapping helps me to think through my past in preparation for a better, less foolish, future.

Equally important, perhaps, is Goldie’s use of the French notion of tâtonnement, which is a kind of tentative, groping towards something. It has a technical use in economics that Goldie, as a former investment banker, was no doubt aware. But here it characterizes the jumbled, blurry perspective we have on ourselves, a perspective that we revise again and again through our narrative thinking. It is, or can be, a lengthy process, but the narrative sense of self that emerges provides us, so Goldie maintains, with all we want and need in a narrativist account of the self, without the unfortunate fictionalizing metaphysical tendencies of strong narrativist theories.

There is a great deal here (much more than my brief survey permits me to show) to agree with, to question, and to outright reject. And there will undoubtedly be a fair amount of thinking, narrative or otherwise, spurred by Goldie’s substantial and subtle contribution. One only regrets that Goldie’s further participation in the conversation has come to a close.

80. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore’s first collection of short stories, originally published in 1985, displays all the wit, anxious punning, and well-earned despair for which she is now well known. Many of the stories are written in the imperative, instructional, second-person, which lends them a curious urgent listlessness. The first in the collection, “How to Be an Other Woman,” is almost breathtaking with its Mavis Gallant-like heroine slowly disintegrating in a claustrophobic New York. It would be hard for any collection of eight further stories to equal such a fine beginning, but Moore comes close with “The Kid’s Guide to Divorce” or “How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)”. For sheer worrying fun, turn to “How to Become a Writer.” It is a cautionary tale of compulsion and (almost) unrelenting discouragement. Still, for some, I suppose writing is the only self-help they can muster; perhaps it ought to have been recommended to some of the other sad heroines of these studies.

Collectively Moore’s stories present a world of uncertain relations, personal and interpersonal decay, a fractious superficiality, cold inconsistent men and tentatively demanding women. Action is muted. As though no conceivable action could rescue certainty from such an indifferent universe. Which perhaps is only to say that Moore appears to have tapped into the very spirit of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. And then there is the verbal playing which, when all else fails, at least offers a bit of a laugh, even if it sounds hollow before it fades away.

Always worth reading.

>169 RandyMetcalfe:. I confess this is a new name for me so had to do some quick research. I see she's also written a few novels. Are they to the same standard as the short stories you've read?

>170 Mercury57: Hi Karen. Lorrie Moore is known primarily as a short story writer, or at least most famously, especially the collection Birds of America. Her style and subject matter often divide readers. Her most recent novel, the 2009 A Gate at the Stairs (see my review at 80, above), is a case in point. I loved it. But lots of people did not.

>171 RandyMetcalfe:: Thanks Randy, I've not 'got into' short stories much until now so was wondering whether I'd get the same enjoyment from a novel. Maybe I should just overcome by resistance to the short story form instead,

81. The Sense of and Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue by Frank Kermode

You might, as you read Frank Kermode’s famous book, imagine yourself in the audience at Bryn Mawr College in the autumn of 1965 as he delivered the Mary Flexner Lectures of which the book consists. Perhaps even in that first lecture, titled “The End,” you would have surreptitiously looked about the hall to see how many of those present were taking it in. A fair number would have nodded at mention of Yeats, or murmured at the quotes from Wallace Stevens. I might have felt comforted by an Aristotle name check. But would they all be smiling sanguinely when the talk moved on to the eschatological, on to Apocalypse, Revelation, and the end of things? And would they have been any more comforted when Kermode’s hermeneutical insights were applied to fiction in the form of Robbe-Grillet? My guess is that a lot of those in the hall would have been like me, relieved that Kermode’s lectures would later be issued in the form of a book so that they could go over the content again in their own time. Having read through the text in its entirety, however, like me you may still be in the position of firmly believing that it will all make sense on the next pass.

Kermode’s erudition is breathtaking. The six essays draw on texts from philosophy, religion, theology, fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and sociology. His argument is at once far-reaching and subtle. Recurrent apocalyptic movements, he might argue, are manifestations of our in-built need for the conferral of meaning, the consonance of meaning conveyed through the sense of an ending. This demand is as much an aspect of our religious and theological thought, as it is constitutive of our literary endeavours. ‘Tick’ anticipates ‘Tock’. The gap between those two serves as the model of narrative form and the source of our contestable relationship with time.

That’s a glancing shot at best at one of Kermode’s key points. The book as a whole, slim volume though it is, is filled with both philosophical or narratological insights (not all of which the reader may wish to take up) but the real treat is their application to the business of criticism. Kermode is a marvel when he reads Spencer’s Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare’s Lear, or Sartre’s La Nausée. Or maybe it was just that in those bits I imagined his audience perking up with the thought that here at last was something they could get their heads around.

I haven’t finished with this book. But I feel certain that another couple of reads will solidify its central points for me. I always feel that way, no sense that the ending is yet in sight. Always worth another read.

82. Independence Day by Richard Ford

Frank Bascombe has entered his Existence Period. It’s that time in his life when he is unconnected to those around him, cut off from his ex-wife and two children who have decamped to Deep River, uncommitted to the current woman he is seeing, and fundamentally distant from himself. He tools around Haddam, New Jersey, in his large automobile, encased in a kind of protective shell, observing, noting, scoping out the particulars of properties he may be in line to shift in his new career as a realtor, idling at the curb and in his own life. But the Existence Period is unstable, bound to collapse at the first sign of real emotion, whether that be despair or hope in the face of tragedy. And tragedy is definitely lurking. Everywhere.

A momentous Fourth of July weekend descends into a nightmarish world of crazed house purchasers, senseless murder, self harm and mutilation, and the constant threat of violence meted out by others or oneself (if one’s impulses are given free rein), which is met by vigilance in the form of patrolling police, private security, metal bars on domestic windows, handguns, or mace. Or it is allowed to overwhelm one, washing through one’s life like a purging torrent. And there is little doubt that Frank, loquaciously professing platitudes and realtor buzz to stoke up the confidence of himself and his clients, is not up to the challenges that he is about to face. Little wonder that it seems highly likely that his Existence Period is about to come crashing to a close.

Once again Richard Ford’s writing is a marvel of density and light. He effortlessly draws the reader into claustrophobic inducing proximity to Frank’s mutable conscience and visceral encounter with his environment. Much of what we encounter here is remembered experience—a lot of ground has been covered between the end of The Sportswriter and the time of Independence Day. But how much of that reported experience is dependable? Frank is such a cocktail of conflicted emotions and aspirations overlaid with jaw-dropping rationalizations. A reader can’t help but begin to feel sorry for him (even if he isn’t especially likeable). You begin rooting for him to break the surface of his supposedly placid Existence Period even if doing so may destroy him.

And break through he does, though not in any way he would have planned or wished. And change does look set to come to Deep River and to Haddam. Crazed homebuyers transform into peaceable renters. The literally barking mad are rendered merely speechless. And Frank looks hopefully toward his next period, which may, he tells himself, be his Permanent Period.

Riveting reading. Highly recommended.

>173 RandyMetcalfe: I'm impressed with the erudite nature of your reading Randy. It would take me several strong cups of coffee to handle Kermode....
The reference to Bryn Mawr got me totally perplexed for a while since I couldn't imagine what Kermode could have been doing in this place where the college curriculum is more devoted to plumbing and hairdressing than literary theory. Took a while before I realised that the Brynmawr I know and the Bryn Mawr you mentioned are at totally different ends of the world. 'My' Brynmawr is a smallish town in Wales deep in the heart of what was the coal mining region. And there I suspect is the connection - many of the miners from these parts emigrated to Pennsylvania in search of work... and took with them the name probably.

>175 Mercury57: An understandable misapprehension. I've never been to your Brynmawr, though I must have passed near it on the way to the Brecon Beacons some years back.

83. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Like a fabulously intricate clockwork mechanism, gears turning, cams shifting, flywheels spinning, each part connected to the others but always partial, the synoptic view accessed by none other than the horologist himself, the one who sets it all in motion and perhaps winds it periodically so that that it does not run down—that is what The Night Circus is like. A brilliant conceit, brilliantly worked through. A tour de force. A feat. Top hats off to Erin Morgenstern.

Morgenstern rarely puts a foot wrong in this, her first novel. Having set the mechanism up and fully wound it, she lets it run its course, sustaining her tropes over the long breadth of her novel, keeping her reader involved to the end. There are risks, to be sure. She cannot avoid them. A mechanism, no matter how intricate, may not be capable of eliciting emotional commitment from its spectators. Wonderment, to be sure. But not necessarily love. And that same risk is mirrored by the characters within. Their individual feats of enchantment are, most certainly, enchanting, but is there enough there for the reader to truly care about?

Highly stylized writing, I think, takes on the burden of distancing. The reader, the characters, the story itself are pushed to the margins as the style takes centre stage. Of course that’s not all bad, especially if the stylist is as adept as Erin Morgenstern. But other than being impressed, I’m not sure I came away with much more after my encounter with the novel. Heartily recommended for its style and bravura performance; character and emotion, not so much.

84. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

In 1974, a singular event—Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center—is the intersecting point in the lives of disparate characters, each of whose stories becomes the focus of a separate chapter in this fine novel. A judge, a prostitute, an Irish monk and his brother, grieving mothers who have lost their sons in Vietnam, a young urban photographer, immigrants and Californian computer hackers. The walking man becomes their touchstone, their point of departure, and sometimes their destination. And as their lives separately unfold they also fold back in on each other perhaps stitched together by the trace of that performance that touched them all.

McCann’s poetic prose displays a genuine and loving appreciation for each of his central characters, capturing their voice with varying degrees of success. Or perhaps that perception of success will be due more to the reader. For me, the chapter from the point of view of Claire, the wealthy but bereft mother of Joshua, who was called up to count deaths in Vietnam by joining an elite group of computer programmers, is a marvel. With an obvious nod to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, McCann entirely enters the pathos of Claire’s grief-filled world. The other central characters seem less certain to me, sometimes rescued from cliché by anxious novelty. Always readable, but not always gripping.

A coda set in 2006 ensures that the novel encircles its unspoken spectre—the catastrophic loss of the twin towers twenty-seven years after Petit’s remarkable achievement, that walk which in its insouciance and innocence, perhaps, brought lives together in a way just as momentous though less scarring than that later catastrophe. The great world continues to spin. Some lives ended on that day in 1974, but traces continue in the lives of others. McCann suggests there is something hopeful in that. And I agree.

Certainly worth a read.

Agree with you that the McCann book was worth reading Randy. I picked it up in an airport bookshop purely on the recommendation of the sales guy and it kept me fully engaged for a good few hours. The most interesting aspect for me was how the stories and characters kept interweaving with each other.

85. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

In a flat, almost emotionless voice, Kathy—the narrator of Never Let Me Go—reflects upon her life and the lives of her childhood friends. Through her hesitating, refracted reminiscences, we learn of an alternate England in the 1990s where cohorts of parentless ‘children’ live their lives, at least until graduation, within the bounds of a school, in Kathy’s case, Hailsham. They make and lose friends, suffer emotional tantrums, pour themselves into their art projects, and grow under the watchful eyes of their Guardians, their teachers. But they never seem to have much knowledge of life outside Hailsham. And they are not especially inquisitive about it either, nor, for that matter, about where they might have come from. They think of themselves as ‘special’ because they are told that they are, but they don’t question in what their specialness consists.

Things are not entirely what they seem. Or perhaps they are exactly as they seem, but we simply are not being shown what else is there in the woodwork. Kathy’s narrative drip-feeds the reader information about this alternate England, and while that might easily become annoying, the world that eventually gets revealed is more annoying still. It isn’t too long before Kathy and her mates are regularly using terms like ‘donor’ and ‘carer’ and ‘completion’ in such a way that it seems they have always known what is in store for them, or perhaps they have been, as the teacher Miss Lucy puts it, “told and not told.”

It is not unusual for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro novels to feel like they too have been told and not told. He is a master of withholding. And here his chosen narrator is ideal for the purpose in that she lacks a coherent emotional inner life, creating a detached viewpoint but no real engagement. That works for and against the narrative in that it keeps the reader at a distance, spectating on the events in these denatured lives. It is unclear whether that also bars the reader from any real emotional impact when the full picture is revealed. I think it does.

Ishiguro is never less than precise in his technique. Admirable, certainly, but is it ever anything more than that here?

86. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

As for my part, I was willing to walk apace the Sisters brothers as far as San Francisco and back to Oregon City and somewhat beyond. And gladly too. Though they bring death in all its dimensions to man and beast. Though they are but minions of a man, the Commodore, powerful beyond reckoning. Though they drink too much. And eat too much. And have a penchant for women of the coin. Yet they are a fascination, to be sure.

Eli, the narrator of their tale, is a describing man who does not leave morals aside in the quest for sense. Charlie, his older and more ruthless brother, has the greater journey to travel, in a manner of speaking. But they are tied together by more than blood and where one goes the other follows. Together they converse and reason and settle upon a proper course of action. It is a joy, of a certain kind, to have been in their company.

Full praise to Patrick deWitt for bringing the Sisters brothers to life. He created two vivid and distinct characters whose interactions, often humorous and droll, are equal parts thought provoking and entertaining. I have no idea whether, as some have claimed, this novel presents us with a revision of the Western, but I do know that it is a very good read. And for that reason alone, none other being required, I heartily recommend it.

87. The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald was already 60 years old when her first novel, The Golden Child, was published in 1977. I think ‘zany’ is the only term that fully applies. It is a novel that spills over with enthusiasms and peculiarities. It has a plot that moves from London to Moscow and back to London, with a brief stop at the Moscow Circus. There are secret service agents and high intrigue and murders and fraud and double-dealing. But the overriding concern might be whether the reluctant protagonist, Waring Smith, will be able to sustain his mortgage with the Whitstable and Protective Society.

The setting is primarily the British Museum (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), whose administration, as portrayed here, is positively byzantine. (But fully believable for anyone who interacted with British institutions in the 1970s.) Sir William Simpkin, the playful benefactor of the museum and original discoverer of the golden treasure of the Garamantes, an exhibition of which is about to go on display at the museum, knows something isn’t entirely right about the exhibition. But there are multiple competing interests at stake, not least the hundreds of members of the public queuing in the rain to see the centrepiece artefact, the golden child. Fortunately Sir William inspires the loyalty of key members of staff such as Waring Smith, Jones Jones, and Len Coker. They attempt to thwart the forces of avarice and careerism. And thanks to the contribution of the sometime clown, Splitov—who does double duty as the Garamantian expert Professor Untermensch—they mostly succeed. Much frantic activity ensues, at least some of it sensible.

It is a helter-skelter ride. At moments you’ll see the brilliantly incisive wit and honest compassion that mark Fitzgerald’s later novels. At other moments you’ll see her struggling to keep all her plates in the air as the plot starts to run away from her. But overall, I think you’ll find an author you can come to trust. Gently recommended for zany good humour and moments of almost heart wrenching pathos.

I seriously need some good, zany humor at the moment. On the list it goes!

88. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

Pure nonsense. Sometimes nonsense is a good thing. It can be wacky or even charming. Here, I’m sorry to say, it is just dull.

The story follows the exploits of a 100-year-old man who escapes from an old-aged home, makes off with 50 million krona, eludes both gangsters and police, forms curious alliances, and largely confirms his recurrent motto, “Everything will work out just fine.” Interspersed with the story of his current exploits, we are treated to Allan Emmanuel Karlsson’s incredible life story in which he meets Presidents, kings, dictators, spies, and communists. Somehow he becomes fluent in Spanish, English, Russian, and Chinese (as well as his native Swedish). He drinks a considerable amount of vodka and notes that you should never attempt to drink a Swede under the table, unless you happen to be a Finn or a Russian. It’s not exactly new information, but it’s about the most reliable of anything you’ll encounter here. What is almost impressive is how such a remarkable life story can be so dull.

At first I thought the problem must be the translation. Later I thought that perhaps the whole thing was just an elaborate joke that the Swedish publishing industry was foisting on us (I’m still hoping that might be the case). But sadly, I ended by concluding that the writing itself is just as plodding and unimaginative as it appears. Even Candide, whose peregrinations must be a sort of source, had something important to convey. Here, not so much.

A good year

The end of the year is approaching fast. I suppose many of us will be tallying, selecting our favourites, and planning some key reads for next year. Before the tallying, favouriting, and planning begins, I just want to add something to this thread about how much I’ve enjoyed being in this group in 2012.

This was my first year in the 75 Books Challenge. And what a vibrant, raucous group it is. Some threads went through dozens of iterations. And while I didn’t post outside this thread very much at all, I did enjoy listening in on so many fascinating conversations on literature. And life. Because literature is merely a stepping-stone, sometimes. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Because of this group, I discovered numerous books that might otherwise have passed me by. I took up the habit of writing short reviews of each book I read, which is common in this group. And that turned out to be way more fun than I imagined it would be. I found the enthusiasm here for reading to be infectious and I tried to pass that on to friends not yet on LT. And I admired the way even disagreements over the relative merits of a book remained typically good-natured and encouraging.

In short, I’ll be back. Not because I intend to read 75 books in 2013 (though I probably will). Just because this feels like the kind of place I like to be. I look forward to seeing many of you back again next year. And I hope that there will also be some new folks discovering the group for the first time as I did this year.

Best to all in the year ahead.

>184 RandyMetcalfe: wish I'd seen this before I went and bought it on spec as a Christmas present. Luckily I have not yet wrapped it since I can tell from your review that my husband will not enjoy it.

Glitterfy.com - Christmas Glitter Graphics

I want to wish you a glorious celebration of that time of year when we all try to unite around a desire for Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward All. Merry Christmas, Randy!

Hi Randy! I've spent the last few months seduced by the cocktail party, and didn't keep up with your fine reviews, but made up for it by reading your entire thread all over again this morning, collecting suggestions along the way. Thank goodness I already have, or have read, some of the books you explore here! I look forward to reading those new wishlisted books one of these days, and also to what you read next.

Happy New Year!

>188 ffortsa: How very kind, Judy. I'm glad you found something here to your liking. As have I on too many threads to mention. Looking forward to your thread in the new year.

It does not seem likely that I'll finish another book before the end of the year, so I've decided to post my top picks from 2012 now.

Five best reads of 2012

Beloved by Toni Morrison – Lyrical and harrowing and awe-inspiringly well crafted.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson – Simple, concrete, thoughtful prose, yet entirely haunting. A marvel.
The Sportswriter/Independence Day/The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford (his ‘Frank Bascombe’ trilogy) – Incredible writing, deft and subtle, dense yet light, a richly realized portrait of a man and of America. (Still working to finish the third novel, but including it here for completeness.)
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott – Certainly the best book on writing I have ever read—the trick, it turns out, is that writers write.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – A completely enchanting, fully imagined world with gently stylized prose and, of course, magic.

I like your summary in post #185, and am glad you will be back again in 2013.

Of your best reads of 2012, I've only read the first two - but agree that they are very good indeed. There was a documentary about Tove Jansson on BBC TV a couple of days ago, including some footage of the island, which reminded me again of what a wonderful book that is.

>191 gennyt: Alas, the BBC iPlayer will not allow me to view the Tove Jansson programme from Canada, where I live (even though I am a British citizen). What a disappointment. Surely my browser should be able to detect that I support England in the cricket :-( I read a number of Tove Jansson's books this past year and have a few more lined up for the year ahead. Her writing really is remarkable.

Here's to a great new year ahead, Randy!

#192 That is a shame indeed! I would hope that the documentary would eventually be made available to other distributors (I don't know how these things work)...

# BBC I player is a great resource when it works......

>194 gennyt: and 195 The good new is (or was) that Tove Jansson's The Summer Book was discussed on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read last week. The BBC does not block my listening to Radio 4 (which is all I ever did when I lived in the UK anyway).

Yes, I heard that discussion of The Summer Book - there seems to be a lot of Jansson around at present. I'm glad you can still get Radio 4 (I can't imagine life without it!).