Ursula's Words and Images, 2015 (2)

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Ursula's Words and Images, 2015 (2)

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1ursula
Editado: Sep 24, 2015, 2:04 pm



I've just moved to Italy, so it's time for a new start!

About my reading habits: I read fiction, a combination of whatever catches my eye and things that are on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. I go through a decent amount of non-fiction as well, mostly in audio form listened to while I'm running or drawing.

I plan to share my reading, obviously, and also probably photos and drawings.

Currently Reading:

          

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri, Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi, and listening to Island of Vice and In the Heart of the Sea

Language study:

  

Comunicare in Italiano by Angelo Chiuchiù and Nuova grammatica pratica della lingua italiana by Susanna Nocchi.

2ursula
Editado: Sep 23, 2015, 1:03 am

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►January◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Journey to the Centre of the Earth - finished Jan. 2 (225 pages) - ♥♥♥½ (review)
Code Name Verity - finished Jan. 8 (343 pages) - ♥♥ (review)
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman - finished Jan. 12 (audio, 23h 52m) - ♥♥♥♥ (review)
Station Eleven - finished Jan. 15 (333 pages) - ♥♥♥♥ (review)
The Book of Disquiet - finished Jan. 16 (262 pages) - ♥♥♥♥1/2 (review)
I'm Not Scared - finished Jan. 20 (200 pages) - ♥♥♥♥♥ (review)
Anna Karenina - finished Jan. 20 (807 pages) - ♥♥♥♥1/2 (review)
All the Light We Cannot See - finished Jan. 23 (531 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2 (review)
Orlando - finished Jan. 29 (333 pages) - ♥♥♥♥ (review)
A Pleasure and a Calling - finished Jan. 29 (281 pages) - ♥♥♥ (review)
The Red Queen - finished Jan. 30 (audio, 12h 52m) - ♥♥♥ (review)

January Total: 11
January Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►February◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Blood and Guts in High School - finished Feb. 7 (165 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
The Maltese Falcon - finished Feb. 7 (196 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Ice Ship - finished Feb. 8 (316 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
Venice: Pure City - finished Feb. 13 (audio, 14h 1m) - ♥♥♥ (review)
Invisible Cities - finished Feb. 18 (165 pages) - ♥♥♥♥♥ (review)
The Two Worlds of Marcel Proust - finished Feb. 24 (252 pages) - ♥♥1/2 (review)
City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran - finished Feb. 26 (audio, 9h 18m) - ♥♥
A Tale of Two Cities - finished Feb. 28 (382 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2

February Total: 8
February Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►March◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
The Italians - finished Mar. 4 (316 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
The Castle of Otranto - finished Mar. 8 (116 pages) - ♥♥♥
Untouchable - finished Mar. 15 (167 pages) - ♥♥♥
The Italians - finished Mar. 27 (352 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - finished Mar. 28 (audio, 14h 35m) - ♥♥♥
Boy, Snow, Bird - finished Mar. 30 (308 pages) - ♥♥1/2

March Total: 6
March Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►April◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Shakespeare Saved My Life - finished Apr. 6 (291 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
Deadline in Athens - finished Apr. 7 (295 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
Ciao, America! - finished Apr. 11 (242 pages) - ♥♥
It's What I Do - finished Apr. 13 (audio, 9h 7m) - ♥♥♥1/2
Two Lives - finished Apr. 27 (375 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Infinite Jest - finished Apr. 27 (1079 pages) - ?????
How Soccer Explains the World - finished Apr. 28 (261 pages) - ♥♥

April Total: 7

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►May◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Corelli's Mandolin - finished May 13 (435 pages)- ♥♥
World War Z - finished May 16 (342 pages) - ♥
The Steady Running of the Hour - finished May 29 (448 pages) - ♥♥

May Total: 3
May Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►June◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
The Pursuit of Italy - finished Jun 1 (474 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
Not My Father's Son - finished Jun 3 (audio, 6h 28m) - ♥♥♥
Ethan Frome - finished Jun 7 (189 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Homage to Catalonia - finished Jun 22 (232 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2
The Night Watch - finished Jun 23 (455 pages) - ♥♥♥

June Total: 5
June Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►July◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
Gone Girl - finished Jul 6 (419 pages) - ♥♥♥
The Good Soldier Schweik - finished Jul 10 (429 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Descent: A Memoir of Madness - finished Jul 11 (52 pages) - ♥♥♥
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - finished Jul 12 (259 pages) - ♥♥♥♥♥
The Postman Always Rings Twice - finished Jul 15 (127 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master - finished Jul 23 (289 pages) - ♥♥♥♥1/2
Dr. Mutter's Marvels - finished Jul 26 (audio, 8h 54m) - ♥♥♥1/2

July Total: 7
July Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►August◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
The Moor's Last Sigh - finished Aug 3 (448 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - abandoned at 50% (175 pages)
We Need New Names - finished Aug 8 (296 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
American Lion - finished Aug 11 (audio, 17h 17m) - ♥♥♥1/2
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - finished Aug 16 (395 pages) - ♥♥♥♥♥
Lonesome Dove - finished Aug 22 (945 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
My Life in Middlemarch - finished Aug 24 (audio, 9h 37m) - ♥♥♥
The Secret History - finished Aug 24 (546 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
The Trial - finished Aug 26 (171 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2

August Total: 8
August Statistics

◄╚╧╤╬╧╤╗►September◄╔╤╧╬╤╧╝►
The Bat - finished Sep 1 (331 pages) - ♥1/2
Blood, Bones & Butter - finished Sep 2 (audio, 10h 5m) - ♥♥
Jack Black e la nave dei ladri - finished Sep 3 (189 pages) - ♥♥♥
My Struggle: Book One - finished Sep 4 (441 pages) - ♥♥♥♥♥
Dead Wake - finished Sep 5 (audio, 13h 4m) - ♥♥♥
Junky - finished Sep 6 (256 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Basilica - finished Sep 11 (audio, 8h 13m) - ♥♥
The Portrait of a Lady - finished Sep 20 (658 pages) - ♥♥♥♥
Girl in a Band - finished Sep 21 (audio, 7h 14m) - ♥♥♥
The Fortune of War - finished Sep 22 (355 pages) - ♥♥♥1/2

Total Pages Read: 17941
Total Time Listened: 164h 37m

Male Authors: 44
Female Authors: 21

Fiction: 41
Nonfiction: 24

1001 List Books: 24


3ursula
Editado: Ago 8, 2015, 12:31 pm

Last year, I started keeping track of where the books I read are set. I don't have any specific plans to cover the globe, but I've enjoyed watching the map change as I make haphazard progress.

Map of Books Read

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com

2015
Portugal: The Book of Disquiet
India: Untouchable
Czech Republic: The Good Soldier Schweik
Zimbabwe (although never mentioned by name): We Need New Names

Covered in 2014:
Afghanistan
Australia
Canada
China
Colombia
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Egypt
Ethiopia
France
Germany
Greece
Haiti
Iran
Italy
Japan
Latvia
Mexico
Netherlands
Norway
Poland
Russia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
United States
Vietnam

4ursula
mayo 1, 2015, 7:50 am

The photo up top is actually from a previous trip to Padova, in September 2013. I haven't been out to take many photos so far this time since the light hasn't been great, so I figured I'd go with that one. That is the Prato della Valle, a piazza which has at the center a park that is a sort of island ringed by a canal and statues.

5kidzdoc
mayo 1, 2015, 8:41 am

I look forward to more photos and descriptions of Italy, ursula!

6mabith
mayo 1, 2015, 10:31 am

Congrats on the move!

7RidgewayGirl
mayo 1, 2015, 11:13 am

Enjoy Italy, Ursula!

8ursula
mayo 1, 2015, 2:23 pm

Thanks for the good wishes, everyone!

I am getting around, speaking broken and terrible Italian. Which isn't the end of the world since I've only been here for 48 hours. Although I can definitely understand a lot, my processing time for comprehension, then composing an appropriate response is very long and sometimes breaks down. Today, my husband and I were at a cafè - a waiter came by and took our order, then a few minutes later a waitress asked us for our order and all I could manage to blurt out was "già", which means "already." She got the point, though. :) After the fact, of course, I realized I knew the words for "we've already ordered"; I just get flustered in the moment. Practice, practice, practice.

9rebeccanyc
mayo 1, 2015, 8:16 pm

Wow! Moving to Italy sounds great!

10ursula
mayo 3, 2015, 11:17 am

>9 rebeccanyc: It's not too shabby, I have to admit. ;)

Now if only we could find an apartment. We thought we had one, but there are ... complications. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

I am not reading much at all. I guess that's not too surprising. For the first couple of days, reading was a sure way to put me to sleep - although I haven't been terribly jet-lagged, I've definitely felt more up for naps than usual. But at this rate, it's going to take me forever to get through Corelli's Mandolin.

11ursula
mayo 14, 2015, 4:50 am

Quick drive-by, I'm on internet at the library. You would not believe (or perhaps you would) the trials and tribulations involved in getting any sort of service started. I admit I expected it to be that way, but not quite to such a degree. Our current date to get internet service in our apartment: June 10.

But we have an apartment, so that's a plus. I finished Corelli's Mandolin and found the early going slow, then it was involving, and finally it was just melodramatic. Now I'm reading World War Z, speaking of melodramatic.

12FlorenceArt
mayo 15, 2015, 5:44 am

Congrats on getting an apartment. June 10? Wow. I didn't much care for Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I don't remember exactly but it was probably too melodramatic for my taste.

13AlisonY
mayo 15, 2015, 6:53 am

I don't think I know many people who have cared too much for Captain Corelli's Mandolin!

14ursula
mayo 16, 2015, 5:39 am

Oddly enough, it has a 3.94 (I think, my phone screen is tiny) rating so I guess someone liked it!

15japaul22
mayo 16, 2015, 7:09 am

I remember liking it, but I read it about 12 years ago and don't remember anything else about it!

16OscarWilde87
mayo 16, 2015, 3:16 pm

Congratulations on the move. The picture sure looks fantastic. I have to say that I love Italian food. Not in the sense of eating Italian food outside of Italy but rather eating it on vacation in Italy. Must be a pleasure to live there!

17ursula
mayo 22, 2015, 2:39 pm

Hallelujah! We have internet - after a brief scare when Vodafone changed our date from June 10 to ... June 29.

That was a dark day! And all joking aside, it's been a bit of a problem (understatement) not having anything but our phones to try to find out actual important things, like where to buy things, restaurant hours, bus routes and schedules, etc. Not to mention the Italian lessons and videos I'd been doing online. So today is a miraculous day!



These sculptures (or alien landing pods, maybe) are in front of the train station in Padova.

>15 japaul22: There were a few things I thought the book did well - one was the very different aspect of World War II for Italians. They were confused about their goals and leadership, and for good reason. So the early parts of the novel were suffused with a strange kind of melancholy and disillusionment that's unusual for books set during WWII. The other was a funny bit involving a British soldier who arrives on the scene in Greece with his only language experience being Ancient Greek he studied in school. The rendering of his language, and its gradual improvement, were well done.

>16 OscarWilde87: Thanks! I'm a little sensitive about the food thing at the moment because we haven't yet been able to cook for ourselves, since it's been sort of one unexpected roadblock after another the whole time. So, it's been endless restaurants, and it's very hard to find relatively economical ones that don't have essentially the same menu as every other one. Luckily, our apartment is in sort of the immigrant neighborhood, so we're now able to find a few more ethnic options.

I don't mean to complain, because I know no one cares about how hard your move to Italy has been. ;) And we're very nearly ready to start living a normal life, but it's been a long process.

I'll be back in a bit to update a little about the very small amounts of reading I've been doing.

18NanaCC
mayo 22, 2015, 3:07 pm

>17 ursula:. It sounds like a bit of an unexpected and somewhat unpleasant adventure. I'm glad that things are straightening out for you.

19ursula
mayo 22, 2015, 3:58 pm

Reading:

I read World War Z. Why? I had downloaded it onto the kindle because I thought it might be a non-taxing read for the trip. As usual, I didn't read much during travel (I have an amazing ability to sleep on planes), so I read it after arriving, for exactly the same reason. It seemed like something I could get through in my distracted state. And I did, but I didn't enjoy it at all. The interview conceit was a good way to enable the book to cover huge areas of the globe and different topics, but the interviewer himself was too invasive (after saying in the beginning that he was going to stay out of it as much as possible). He just spelled out stupid things like "<subject avoided the question> or "was evasive" or whatever. Why not just continue with the story, the reader can figure out if the guy answers the question or not, right? Plus, the end-notes were essentially useless. They were either for completely obvious things (thanks so much for the end note to tell me what PTSD stands for ...) or they were just dumb comments about made-up things. David Foster Wallace, you aren't. And finally, 9.8 out of 10 of the interviewees sounded like exactly the same person talking. And the .2 of the content was made up of stereotypical nods to wherever the person was supposed to be from.

I didn't like it, but I finished it because I wasn't able to concentrate at all and didn't want to ruin a perfectly good book that way.

Currently, I've got an Italian grammar book I'm working through. It was so fun to go to the bookstore and ask for a grammar book for foreigners! (not sarcastic at all, it was truly exciting)

In "real" reading, I'm about halfway through The Pursuit of Italy, which is really interesting. I'm particularly enjoying the parts I've recently read which are about the Risorgimento and unification. It makes me want to go back and read The Leopard now that I have a better grip on what was really happening, and perhaps a less idealistic view of it than is often taken in history. I also started The Steady Running of the Hour, which I picked out from the library's collection because I remember seeing the title somewhere. As it turns out, it has a storyline that involves the attempts to climb Mt. Everest in the 1920s, which is a funny coincidence since Everest and mountaineering are a couple of my weird interests. And finally, I've started reading my first book in Italian, which I picked up from the second-hand market in town last weekend. It's called Jack Black e la nave dei ladri (Jack Black and the Ship of Thieves), and it's for ages 9 and up. :) It's pretty challenging, which is unsurprising since I don't think I could currently hold a conversation with a 9-year-old, but I'm improving every day and the book is getting easier as I go.

20AlisonY
mayo 22, 2015, 4:34 pm

Enjoying hearing about your Italian adventure. Is this a permanent move?

21dchaikin
mayo 22, 2015, 4:37 pm

Yay for your internet! Reading about all your stressful stuff I'm still jealous of your experiences and impressed at your efforts to learn Italian.

Might be too late now, but now that you have read IJ, if you can find a cheat sheet on what the actual plot is/was, it will help you a great deal. I could never have figured anything out on my own. The hints to what is going on are hardly clear.

22dchaikin
mayo 22, 2015, 4:48 pm

For IJ spoilers, I think this was my main source, at least it was one of them:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

23dchaikin
mayo 22, 2015, 4:50 pm

24ursula
mayo 23, 2015, 3:06 am

>18 NanaCC: Honestly, it has been quite unpleasant at times. But now we have just one more really outstanding problem, which is that the stove in the apartment doesn't seem to be working. It's a big problem, since we'd really like to cook some food, but it's the last one so it doesn't feel nearly as overwhelming as it did when we were dealing with absolutely everything at once.

>20 AlisonY: Thanks! It's a year-long move at this point.

>21 dchaikin: Yeah, I know that it's going to be one of those things that I look back on and just sigh about all the issues. It was similar when we moved to Belgium a couple of years ago. We arrived in the middle of the city-wide festival so pretty much everything was closed and it was so difficult to find anything reliable about hours because people would just put up handwritten signs in their window that said things like "closed July 10-July 22". But we got through it, and we're getting through this.

Don't be impressed about my efforts to learn Italian - it's an absolute necessity! I am understanding a lot, but it's still hard to form sentences with any sort of speed or correctness. I can make myself understood, but I'll tell you one thing - language courses and books aren't really preparing you to do things like get the Italian equivalent of a social security number, talk to estate agents and landlords, explain problems with the water to said landlords, talk to plumbers, iron out problems with a Vodafone account over the phone, schedule deliveries ....

>22 dchaikin: This guy is clearly out of his mind. It's mentioned multiple times that DMZ was created in the '60s, well before Hal existed or Himself would have been creating anything. I haven't really looked at the second link yet; I want to get that other one out of my head first.

25RidgewayGirl
mayo 23, 2015, 4:32 am

Moving is a pain and moving to another country where you don't speak the language is amazingly stressful. And internet takes forever to get hooked up in Germany (my kids's school lets parents sit in the cafeteria and use the internet because it can take several weeks and you need internet!). Also, it's just difficult figuring out systems you know nothing about without any signposts along the way. Every workman who came to our house to do stuff spoke only Bavarian, an indecipherable dialect even when you know German.

Eventually everything will smooth itself out, although things will always come up. I need a new battery for my watch and it took me a good week to figure out how and where that is done. Now to get the watch to the place during opening hours. A year is really a very short span of time, so enjoy every minute of it! And if you plan to journey north of the Alps to Munich, let me know.

26ursula
mayo 23, 2015, 1:55 pm

>25 RidgewayGirl: Well, luckily Vodafone was sandbagging and installed well before their given date or I'm pretty sure I would have lost my mind, or my husband and I would have strangled each other. Just like you said, it's nearly impossible to figure things out without any sort of help accessible. I am glad that no one who came here spoke dialect exclusively, although some of the accents were difficult (thankful I'm not living in the south on that count though!).

Absolutely true that there will always be something that you just don't know where to go for. Before you find yourself in situations like that, it's hard to conceive of just how many things you understand how to do in your native country. It makes it hard to even guess how someplace else might handle it. A year is a short time, definitely, but I also feel a little spoiled because we only stayed in Belgium for 6 months so this is great! I'll definitely let you know if we end up in Munich at any point!

27baswood
mayo 24, 2015, 5:29 pm

Reading about your Italian adventure with interest. I moved to France some years ago now without speaking very much French. I discovered that while things are frustrating if you need to deal with things in a hurry and telephone conversations are a nightmare it really does not matter that much if you don't understand everything.

28dchaikin
mayo 25, 2015, 11:52 am

>24 ursula: he's not so out of his mind. : ) Seriously. If DFW had laid the plot out clearly, IJ becomes pinned as a silly scifi book, because the storyline is kind of silly (although DFW probably found it cool, or something like that). It's also not critical for the book, arguably not even important. So, he buried the plot (and maybe the editing undid many key clues and consistencies) and stuck with the characters. Piecing together the plot does bring out a lot, notably on Hal's psychology.

But, as far as the DMZ, or any other details, I have to admit, I no longer remember. Hopefully i'll read it again some time.

29ursula
mayo 25, 2015, 2:01 pm

>28 dchaikin: I guess what I mean is, if he got something like that so completely wrong, I'm not necessarily trusting the rest of his analysis. That's a pretty big part of the rabbit hole he went down, and it's just not supported at all by the text - in fact, it's directly contradicted several times.

In any event, though, the one regret my husband and I have about reading IJ when we did is that we read it together, marked up our books, and then had to leave those books on another continent - we probably would have re-read it in a few months with our eyes on different things.

30dchaikin
mayo 25, 2015, 2:36 pm

Good point. I'll keep that error in mind when thinking about sharing this more in the future.

31ursula
mayo 25, 2015, 2:57 pm

>30 dchaikin: On the other hand, I haven't really investigated what inconsistencies DFW himself may have admitted were in the text, since I know he did contradict himself a couple of times about whether or not the ending could be pieced together from what was actually in the novel. I've just been so busy with so many other things that I haven't delved into it in a way I would have if we'd read it at a time with less upheaval. :) But on the other hand, this book is going on my very short "will definitely re-read" list. It's just not something I do normally.

32dchaikin
mayo 25, 2015, 3:39 pm

In Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max quotes a letter DFW wrote to another author. The author, whose identity I've forgotten, says he felt there were inconsistencies. It's kind of vague. DFW complained to him that in the process of editing the book, which cut the length way down, it may have lost some important things and may not longer be "watertight" (I think that is the phrase he used). That might not mean much as DFW was a compulsive liar and would not have wanted to admit credit for any errors.

33dchaikin
mayo 25, 2015, 3:43 pm

Found the quote. He was writing David Markson, whose Wittgenstein's Mistress was a huge influence on DFW. Markson said there were parts he couldn't figure out. DFW wrote:

"About the holes and lacunae and etc., I bet you're right: the fucker's cut by 600 pages from the first version, and though many of the cuts (editor-inspired) made the thing better, it fucked up a certain watertightness that the mastodon-size first version had, I think."

34ursula
mayo 30, 2015, 1:02 am

>33 dchaikin: Hm. I had read a little bit about the back-and-forth between the editor and DFW. The editor seemed like a good one, I don't know that one could blame him for making things not come together in the end, you know? :) I don't know much about DFW - I intentionally didn't read about him while reading IJ because I wanted to avoid reading too much into the book in light of later events. I mean, I know the basic outlines, but not more

Interesting about Wittgenstein's Mistress. I know that is also on the 1001 books list, so I'll have to give it a shot in the near-ish future. (For the time being, it's more that I'll have to read what's available since there's not too much selection in English.) I'm looking forward to checking out an all-foreign-language bookstore in Venice, though.

35ursula
mayo 30, 2015, 1:19 am

Yesterday, I finished The Steady Running of the Hour. It had everything I should have liked - epigraphs from Wilfred Owen poems, World War I, mountain climbing, Mt. Everest, modern-day travels through European cities - and yet: ugh.

Our main character, Tristan, is a young American with a wanderlust and fascination for history. So it's perfect when he gets a mysterious call from a law firm in the UK telling him he may be the heir to an estate from the 1920s that is going to pass into trust unless he can prove he is a direct descendent. Tristan jets off to London to find out the details, and the basics are that it seems his great-grandmother may not have been the woman he thought it was, but instead her sister, who gave her illegitimate child to this sister to raise. The law firm has been digging, but they are now asking Tristan to try to find any information he can that links him to this woman, so he embarks on a mission that takes him around Europe, researching and asking questions.

Intercut with Tristan's sections are parts telling the story of Imogen (who is theoretically his *real* great-grandmother) and Ashley Walsingham, with whom she had a brief but intense affair. I was unsurprised to read in the author's acknowledgments that one of his influences was Vera Brittain, because I saw direct parallels between her stories in Testament of Youth and Imogen's story. This is where the bits and pieces of 80-year-old information that Tristan finds are fleshed out into a cohesive story. It's a good idea, and pretty well handled for most of the book. Tristan's part is weaker, but I assume that's because there isn't much to Tristan, really. He just follows clues and is something of a spectator in not only Imogen and Ashley's lives, but also his own.

But then it just gradually all goes pear-shaped. Major complaints: Imogen acts in a way that makes no sense at all, for her entire life. Ashley dies needlessly and rather boringly (not a spoiler, of course you go in knowing he's dead and how he died). In the present day, Tristan meets a woman and she also acts in ways that make no sense. Tristan is a cipher, which is sometimes useful but mostly just annoying because he has nothing to add to the story. The ending (by which I mean about the last 30 pages) are absolutely ridiculous. I don't mean the story is unbelievable, although some of it might be. I mean that it's as if a movie director built up to a big confrontation between two characters, then showed them seeing each other from a distance ... approaching ... opening their mouths ... and then cut to a sunny beach 6 months later where one character is talking to someone else and when asked says only: "Oh, that? No big deal." Roll credits.

36dchaikin
mayo 30, 2015, 1:17 pm

Yeah, this synopsis of The Steady Running of the hour has appeal. Too bad it didn't work.

37ursula
mayo 31, 2015, 3:32 am

>36 dchaikin: A decent portion of the book did work, which makes it even more frustrating, I think. It just didn't hold together over the length of the book. A shame.

38ursula
mayo 31, 2015, 3:38 am

In other news, my son is coming out to visit next month. Super excited about it - he's never been to Europe before. I had such a good time with my daughter in Belgium (and surrounding countries) in 2013. He wasn't able to come out then, so it's nice to be able to do this with him now. We're going to do a video chat this evening to figure out what he wants from his time here. This will be the first trip he's taken with me where he was old enough to be the guiding force, instead of me. The last time we did a trip together was in 2009, when he was 14. Plus, it was in the US so a lot more familiar ground than he'll be on here.

39ursula
Jun 1, 2015, 2:30 pm

Here are some very abbreviated May statistics!

This month, I read 3 books.
I read 1 physical books and 2 Kindle books.
Books were by 3 distinct authors, all men.
My reading totaled 1225 pages.
The earliest work was from 1994 (Corelli's Mandolin), and the most recent from 2014 (The Steady Running of the Hour).
My reading was 100% fiction.
I read 1 book from the 1001 Books list.

On the non-reading front, this month I ran just 6.0 km, but even without tracking anywhere near all my walking, I covered 90.9 km (56 miles) that way.

40ursula
Jun 5, 2015, 1:04 pm



I took the train to Venice for a few hours yesterday. It was hot, and crowded, and I got a million mosquito bites (to add to the million I've already gotten at home). But, you know, it was an okay day anyway. I'll be going back there within a couple of weeks when my son comes to visit as well.

On the reading front, I finished listening to the audio version of Not My Father's Son, which I've seen around the threads somewhat recently. It was okay. People seem to think it's better than just okay, so it might just be me. And while I'm voicing unpopular opinions, I'll also add that Scottish accents don't do a thing for me. :)

41RidgewayGirl
Jun 5, 2015, 1:55 pm

Have fun exploring with your son. It'll be a blast!

In my experience, Venice is best in late fall or early spring. While there are still tourists, there are fewer of them and it's also not too hot. Since you're so conveniently located, you can visit more than once or twice!

42mabith
Jun 5, 2015, 2:13 pm

I think memoirs like Not My Father's Son are largely written because the person has something about their life or past that they need out in the open in order to really let go of the trauma. For a celebrity whose life is highly public releasing it to the public works. Likewise I think people who especially like them are those with some similarly big aspect of their past (whether they are open about it or not) or people who are intimate with someone who has that issue.

43ursula
Jun 5, 2015, 2:56 pm

>41 RidgewayGirl: Yes, I've been there in both September and November. It's rather hotter than usual right now anyway - it's been about 33C every day and humid. Sticky and unpleasant all the way around, and I'm normally a fan of hot weather!

>42 mabith: I could relate to his childhood, but I didn't feel like he had anything of particular interest to say about it. I'm sure it was cathartic for him, and I can certainly appreciate that aspect of it. For me, it just didn't resonate.

44ursula
Jun 7, 2015, 8:18 am

Today I finished Ethan Frome, a vivid illustration of "be careful what you wish for."

I guess I also never said anything about The Pursuit of Italy, which I finished on the first. I wouldn't recommend it as a first book about Italy's history and idiosyncrasies, because it's not that well organized and sort of jumps all over the place. However, if you have some background from other books and you're interested in a more meandering look at the country, you might find this one interesting. I'm getting a more rounded picture of events and attitudes after reading so many books on the country. This one was particularly frank about motives for creating the country of Italy and the lack of military success enjoyed by the Italians before, during and since unification.

45ursula
Jun 22, 2015, 9:48 am

I finished a book! Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. I enjoyed it, though I probably would have enjoyed it more if I knew more about the Spanish Civil War. Although I guess I could also now go back and read the introduction. (I hate reading those first, but it means that sometimes I forget about them when I finish a book.)

It's been so busy around here - first preparing for my son to arrive for his visit, then he got here and it was all go-go-go, and now he's in Germany for a few days with his cousins, and comes back on the 24th or 25th. Then we're off to Prague together!

We visited San Marino, a tiny country completely surrounded by Italy, for about 24 hours. It was beautiful, and I will definitely get back there another time.

46Helenliz
Jun 22, 2015, 3:53 pm

I'm going to be following your thread with some interest, not just because of what you're reading. We're planning our first overseas holiday in best part of 20 years. Northern Italy, here we come. Probably spring, as the husband doesn't deal with heat at all well - unlike me, who doesn't own any shorts as it never gets warm enough in the UK to shed the leg coverings. I'll be hoovering up location ideas for the next few months.

47AlisonY
Jun 22, 2015, 5:37 pm

Helen, take a look at Cinque Terre. I've not been there myself, but these beautiful villages on the NW coast are on my wish list.

Ursula - have you got to that area yet?

48ursula
Jun 23, 2015, 12:37 am

>46 Helenliz: Have you narrowed down Northern Italy at all? How long are you thinking you might come for?

>47 AlisonY: I haven't made it to that side of Italy yet, no.

49Helenliz
Jun 23, 2015, 2:31 am

Ursula, probably a fortnight and not really. He's a Ferrari fan, so I suspect that might be on the agenda. I've been to the north east twice, with work, and it's always looked lovely, but never had time to see very much. Flew into Bergamo, and had time to have dinner, but not explore the town. He was slightly miffed that I was going to Venice (that romantic city) with another man, so that's been suggested (we didn't really, we flew into Treviso). And Florence has been mentioned. I suspect we could occupy several weeks without any difficulty at all.

50rebeccanyc
Jun 23, 2015, 7:53 am

Have a great trip!

51ursula
Jun 24, 2015, 3:26 am

I haven't liked anything I've read in recent memory. It's probably mostly me, not the books, I imagine. I've been distracted, of course. Anyway, I finished The Night Watch yesterday and it was okay, although I pretty much hated the beginning and just slogged through it. There was so much needless withholding of information just to create drama. Plus, I hated some of the amateurish storytelling techniques - like a character saying "That reminds me of Felicity Whomever", followed by an expositionary paragraph that begins "Felicity Whomever had been a woman who..." and all I could do was roll my eyes and say "seriously?!"

52ursula
Jun 24, 2015, 3:41 am

>49 Helenliz: Ah, I see that the Ferrari HQ/museum is near Modena. That's where our landlords live, although we haven't been there so far. I agree that it's easy to occupy a lot of time, and hard to narrow down the choices. I was thinking my son and I might take a peek at Florence, but the time has just gotten away so we're only going to see Milan. I'll get around to Florence another time, probably not during the summer.

I haven't had a chance to get around too much so far - I have gone through Rimini, a beach town on the Adriatic, on the way to San Marino but only saw it out the window. I'll go back there soon though, hopefully. In previous visits, I went to Vicenza and Verona. I really want to get out to Trieste, which looks amazing.

>50 rebeccanyc: Thanks! We leave the day after tomorrow for Prague, and then it'll be time for Milan, then back home.

53Poquette
Jun 25, 2015, 4:29 pm

Enjoying catching up on your thread and your adventures settling into northern Italy. All of these places you are mentioning are coincidentally at the forefront of my mind because I am currently reading a Renaissance biography about the d'Este family of Ferrara, the Sforzas of Milan, the Gonzagas of Mantua, the Montefeltros of Urbino, and the list goes on. What fun to be right there where all my vicarious action is taking place!  ;-)

54ursula
Jul 2, 2015, 12:49 pm

>53 Poquette: I have been following along with your thread and noted what you've been reading about. I have read some less-specific histories of Italy and have had a passing acquaintance with those families and places as well. :) I've only traveled through Ferrara a couple of weeks ago (looked nice out the train window), but I did spend 24 hours in Milan a couple of days ago and visited the Castello Sforzesco.

55Poquette
Jul 2, 2015, 4:13 pm

>54 ursula: Sadly I missed Milan when I traveled around Italy many years ago. Ironically, my flight was supposed to land in Milan, but the airport was fogged in and we were diverted to Genoa. So I began my sojourn there, went to Pisa, on to Florence, to Venice, and points south. Anyway, I envy your trip to Castello Sforzesco. What a treat for you!

56ursula
Editado: Jul 3, 2015, 8:48 am

I am reading Gone Girl after having watched the movie on the plane over here. Hollywood definitely got one thing right in the casting department. Nick (Ben Affleck in the movie, in case you've been living under a rock) describes himself thus: "I have a face you want to punch: I'm a working-class Irish kid trapped in the body of a total trust-fund douchebag. I smile a lot to make up for my face, but this only sometimes works."

57ursula
Jul 3, 2015, 3:00 pm

June stats ...

This month, I read 5 books.
I read 2 physical books 2 Kindle books and listened to 1 audio book.
Books were by 5 distinct authors, 3 men and 2 women.
My reading totaled 1350 pages and 6 hours, 28 minutes of listening time.
The earliest work was from 1911 (Ethan Frome), and the most recent from 2014 (Not My Father's Son).
My reading was 33% fiction and 67% non-fiction.
I read 1 book from the 1001 Books list.

No running to speak of, really, but a lot of running around. I went to San Marino, Venice twice, Prague for 4 days, Milan for one.

58ursula
Jul 8, 2015, 12:05 pm

So many photos to go through - there was too much traveling and not enough relaxing to be able to get through anything much. Slowly I'm making progress though.

And now my husband's gone again, off to Ottawa and Albany, NY for 10 days. After that, I think we both get to be in the same country for a while, which will be nice.

Here's a view of Prague by night for now:



I mentioned earlier that I'd picked up The Good Soldier Schweik in Venice, just because it was on the 1001 Books list, and it ended up traveling with me to Prague and turned out to be very appropriate reading since it's by a Czech author and makes references to places in Prague that I was then able to actually understand.

59dchaikin
Jul 8, 2015, 3:39 pm

Curious about The Good Soldier Schweik - which I always see written as Svejk. And Prague looks lovely.

60ursula
Jul 8, 2015, 4:14 pm

>59 dchaikin: Yeah, the original is Svejk, but it was sometimes English-ified to Schweik. And since my copy is from 1963, it's unsurprising they are using that version of the name. I'm closing in on the end of the book and hopefully I'll be able to collect some thoughts about it afterward. It's been months since I did even a pseudo-review of a book.

Prague is indeed lovely, although apparently a bit like the Vegas of Europe - roving bands of bachelor parties and other guys'-weekend types were everywhere.

61RidgewayGirl
Jul 9, 2015, 12:57 am

Prague is amazing, isn't it? I've only been in Spring and Winter - was is crowded? Concerning The Good Soldier Schweik, there is a cafe named that in Prague that I wandered by the last time I was there. I wasn't able to go in as I was with a few people and we were on our way somewhere, but the outside was covered with illustrations from the book.

62ursula
Jul 9, 2015, 1:08 am

>61 RidgewayGirl: The restaurant is something of a chain - there were at least two in different parts of the city. The inside is also full of illustrations. (I couldn't resist going in, of course.)

63RidgewayGirl
Jul 9, 2015, 3:34 am

Ha! Of course. There were two ten year old boys with us last time, so I was busy emphasizing the Golem and lurid tales of defenestrations.

64FlorenceArt
Jul 9, 2015, 4:52 am

The Good Soldier Svejk sounds fascinating, I have added it to my wishlist. Apparently in French it is (or was) spelled Chveik, or possibly Chvéïk.

65ursula
Jul 9, 2015, 9:02 am

>63 RidgewayGirl: I was with my 19-year-old son. He was willing to go in anywhere (even book-related places) if they were serving beer.

>64 FlorenceArt: It is sort of like Catch-22 with a more good-natured protagonist. Though just as cynical in its way. I suspect the spellings were changed to let people in various languages have an idea of how to say the name. I think most people wouldn't really know what to make of Svejk. I sure didn't.

66FlorenceArt
Jul 9, 2015, 9:06 am

>65 ursula: Actually, I have to confess I never read Catch-22! I suppose I should, some day.

67ursula
Jul 11, 2015, 2:49 am

Well, The Good Soldier Schweik (or Svejk) - what to say? When we're introduced to him, World War I is on and everyone is supposed to be rushing to fight for the glory of the fatherland. Austria-Hungary, that is. We learn that our friend Schweik was diagnosed as feeble-minded the last time he was in the army, and he will proudly proclaim that, or alternatively, "I'm an idiot." At first, he seems like he is indeed an idiot, but after a few of his escapades, we start to wonder if maybe there is a method to his madness. Czechs had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for quite a while at that time, and it was all about to end, as it turns out, but the book points up the apathy, distaste and general confusion about why the Czechs should particularly care what happens to that empire, let alone why they should want to die for it. Schweik has no interest in dying, particularly for people who impose a language the Czechs are almost universally described to speak in a broken manner, and who clearly don't know much about Czech people.

It took me a bit to settle into the book, but once I started to see the development of Schweik's character, it went along pretty quickly. I was reminded quite a bit of Catch-22, in the sense that both books will make you laugh, realize that perhaps it's not really something to laugh at, and then realize that there's nothing much to do but laugh in some situations.

Quote: "Lieut. Jindrich Lukash was a typical regular army officer of the ramshackle Austrian monarchy. ... In company he spoke German, he wrote German, but he read Czech books, and when he was giving a course of instruction to a group of volunteer officers, all of them Czechs, he would say to them in a confidential tone, 'I'm a Czech just the same as you are. There's no harm in it, but nobody need know about it.'"

68ursula
Jul 11, 2015, 2:50 am

>66 FlorenceArt: It pains me to say it, because it's one of my favorite books of all time, but it's not a book for everyone. When I first read it (sophomore year of high school; I was 14), I told my English teacher that it was the best book ever and he just stared at me for a while, then he said, "Ursula, you're far too young to be a cynic."

69ursula
Jul 12, 2015, 2:41 am

I finished The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which I didn't realize was a YA novel. But it really makes no difference, because I think it's a great book no matter the category. It's a semi-autobiographical novel about a Spokane Indian boy who is on the bottom of the totem pole (his words!) on his reservation, and takes the brave step to go to a white high school. The book is frank, relatable, and holds your attention.

70RidgewayGirl
Jul 12, 2015, 7:26 am

>69 ursula: It's also the book that is most often challenged in the US school system. Alexie regards it all with a wry sense of humor.

71dchaikin
Jul 12, 2015, 8:21 am

Great book! I listened on audio where Alexie reads it himself in a slightly Native American cadence to great affect.

72ursula
Jul 12, 2015, 12:02 pm

>70 RidgewayGirl: There was an interview at the back of the book in which Alexie commented that he figured that made it the most powerful book in the country. :)

>71 dchaikin: I have a friend in Seattle who went to see him speak and said that it was a really great experience.

73ursula
Jul 13, 2015, 11:33 am

This was also part of our visit to Prague:

74dchaikin
Jul 14, 2015, 3:21 pm

Cool...but what is it? (Nice picture, by the way)

75Helenliz
Jul 14, 2015, 4:04 pm

Green fairy. Used to be thought hallucinogenic - or may be that's just the presentation. That's a quite amazing dispenser.

I'm tempted to try it, but I don't like aniseed and the though of drinking something that smells of germoline (both contain wormwood) sort of puts me off.

76ursula
Jul 14, 2015, 4:19 pm

>74 dchaikin: Absinthe! Well, the showy part is actually just water (and dry ice to make it interesting). The water is dripping onto the sugar cubes which are on the slotted spoons over the glasses.

>75 Helenliz: There are a lot of myths and stories surrounding it, you're right. Apparently there is a lot of dissent about whether the people drinking it were crazy anyway, or the things used to make it green were having an effect on people, or what. Thujone can cause problems for humans in high doses, but there isn't actually that much in absinthe. I didn't really notice a smell ... I was nervous that it would taste licorice-y, and I really hate licorice, but it didn't.

77AlisonY
Jul 15, 2015, 6:03 am

Great picture! What sort of an evening did you have after drinking it, lol?

78FlorenceArt
Jul 15, 2015, 8:00 am

I've been reading the fascinating Wikipedia article on absinthe. It has a very interesting history!

79ursula
Jul 15, 2015, 12:49 pm

>77 AlisonY: We had a good time! I didn't feel any strange effects, but my son said he had weird dreams all night. After skimming a bit of the Wikipedia article though (thanks for mentioning it, >78 FlorenceArt:!), I will say that what I was thinking was a "not-drunk" feeling was probably the "lucid drunk" feeling they describe. I mean, we only had 2, but one would think that I would have felt it in some way and I just didn't seem to. I suspect that's why: I was expecting the normal sort of tipsy feeling and I didn't get that at all.

Maybe my son thinks I'm slightly cooler now. Ha.

80ursula
Jul 15, 2015, 12:55 pm

In other news, I finished reading The Postman Always Rings Twice. Spoiler alert: there is no postman! Anyway, it's a short, fast-moving crime novel and I'm not surprised to hear that it was considered shocking in its day. The sex is tinged with violence in a more overt way than usual, for one thing. You know the deal - guy falls in lust with woman at first sight, they decide to off her husband, and things go all pear-shaped from there. I'm interested in checking out one of the movie versions eventually.

81rebeccanyc
Jul 15, 2015, 4:01 pm

>80 ursula: Definitely see the original movie version; it was so much sexier because it left everything to the imagination. I did see the remake, and didn't like it.

82ursula
Jul 17, 2015, 4:40 am

>81 rebeccanyc: I was leaning at that one; I don't think I've ever actually watched a movie with Lana Turner in it before.

83ursula
Jul 18, 2015, 2:14 am

Venting: Ugggghhhh. My husband is coming home today from a couple of conferences he was attending in Canada and New York. So he was supposed to fly out of Albany, a little jump to Philadelphia, and then direct from there to Venice, arriving at 9 AM. However, there was some sort of snafu with the short-run planes and so his flight out of Albany was going to be delayed to the point that he would miss his connection in Philadelphia. Solution: put him in a cab to JFK and fly out of there, leaving at 9 PM and arriving in Venice at 11:20 AM. Okay, that's workable. I go to bed. In the middle of the night I get a couple of messages from him saying that things have changed again and now he will have an unexpected layover at Charles deGaulle for 3 hours, and not arrive in Venice until 5:15 PM. I can't even figure out what they did there, but he did say that he had to fight to have them not just put him in a hotel in NY for the night.

I don't usually complain beyond the usual about air travel - it is what it is, and although we've had our bags misplaced on almost every international flight, we've missed a connection before, and we have run through more airports than I can count to make the rest, but whatever, it's all part of things. But this is turning into a ridiculously long production. The only thing I saw before I went to bed was that JFK was experiencing some delays due to "VIP movement," which kept things pretty much stopped for about half an hour (thanks, Obama). But that shouldn't have turned a direct flight into a layover in Paris. Guess I'll have to wait till he gets home to hear the whole story.

84baswood
Jul 20, 2015, 6:04 am

Keep cool

85AnnieMod
Jul 20, 2015, 3:12 pm

>83 ursula:

Actually, if there are delays like that, the direct flight may end up on a different aircraft or need different crew (because of how many hours crews can be on the clock) or get delayed way too much. And if there is an earlier flight that changed because of all that, people may need to be bumped out from that flight even with confirmed tickets - it all depends on priorities, planning and attempts to not have someone stuck for 24+ hours if possible (ask me how I saw Paris for the first time 9 years ago:) ). So even 30 minutes delay across the board on a major airport will cause a lot of moving pieces to just fall on the floor.

Oh well - he will get there. Hopefully he has a good book/set of movies with him and is not too bored.

86ursula
Jul 21, 2015, 1:45 am

>85 AnnieMod: Oh yeah, I know how 30 minutes can make a mess of things, trust me.

But it wasn't actually that, as it turns out. They put him in a cab from Albany to NYC (at 5 pm on a Friday ... you can imagine what a good idea that was) to catch a Delta flight at 9 PM. However, they got there too late for that flight, so US Airways wanted to put him up in a hotel for the night. He refused, so they got him on a United flight going to Charles DeGaulle, with a 3 hour layover there and then an Air France flight home.

Total disaster. I mean, not a total disaster because he did in fact get here, but about 12 hours later than originally expected (because of course in addition to all of that, once he got to the train station, the trains were all running 30+ minutes behind - welcome back to Italy!).

87RidgewayGirl
Jul 21, 2015, 4:11 am

Travel is always an adventure. And air travel now requires both sandwich sized zip-loc baggies and a zen mind. I hope your husband has had time to relax after his adventure.

88AnnieMod
Jul 21, 2015, 5:07 am

>86 ursula: Well - it sounds like US Airways did all they could -- including putting him on flights out of the alliance. Which does not happen that often. Someone miscalculated with the taxi I guess and it snowballed from there but at least they tried. Oh well - as long as he made it, all is good. :)

89ursula
Jul 25, 2015, 12:55 am

I finished Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, which took me exactly a month to read. It was a good book, things were just scattered and I had a hard time concentrating. Which is a shame, because it deserved more attention. I'm always surprised when a book from the 1700s is readable, and this one definitely was. Diderot was a big fan of Laurence Sterne, and I'm glad I'd already read Tristram Shandy before this one. It's really interesting to me how much playing with the format of the novel was being done so long ago - interruptions in the narrative, the author inserting himself and speaking directly to the reader, things like that.

90ursula
Jul 25, 2015, 2:42 am



Another photo? Don't mind if I do! Inside the crypt at the Milan Duomo.

91ursula
Jul 30, 2015, 7:38 am

A couple of days ago, I finished listening to Dr. Mutter's Marvels, which is about an American surgeon who transformed a lot of the thinking surrounding medicine and surgery in the mid-19th-century United States. His early life was full of tragedy, with both parents dying when Thomas was still a child. He became the ward of a man who chose not to take any sort of active role in his rearing, though he did pay the bills for him (somewhat reluctantly at times, since young Thomas had a strange interest in being dressed to the nines). Eventually, Mutter goes to Europe to learn from the best doctors in the world and discovers the new techniques of plastic surgery, which helps him determine his calling. He will help the hopeless and those called monsters (by the medical profession as well as the rest of the world). He turns out to be not only a brilliant surgeon, but an effective and interesting teacher. Additionally, he introduces the concept of empathy to a field that up to that point seriously lacked that quality.

The subject matter was interesting, and the techniques and ideas Mutter used were ground-breaking, but I still would only describe the book as "okay." The author seemed far too infatuated with her subject, which led to repetition and a frankly boring section near the end in which she listed students Mutter had taught who went on to do good things themselves. That part reminded me of the endless "begat"s in the Bible. It's good to like your subject, but it's not good to worship them, because it means you have a hard time figuring out what to leave out.

(The title comes from Dr. Mutter's personal collection of medical oddities, which is mentioned at the beginning and the end of the book, but not much in between except to say that it was "extensive." But I guess that title will draw a reader in better than Dr. Mutter's Skin Flap Surgery or the like!)

92kidzdoc
Jul 30, 2015, 11:32 am

Argh. Your husband's journey from Albany to Italy sounds nightmarish. If it was me I would have considered taking an Amtrak train from Albany to Penn Station, then hopping on an LIRR (Long Island Railroad) train from there to Jamaica (the station, not the country), and taking the AirTrain from Jamaica to JFK. I think that would have been quicker than taking a taxi into the teeth of a Friday rush hour in NYC, but I'm not sure.

I seem to have liked Dr. Mütter's Marvels more than you did, but I agree with you that Aptowicz was clearly smitten with her subject! If you ever find yourself in Philadelphia I would highly recommend a visit to the Mütter Museum.

93dchaikin
Jul 30, 2015, 9:46 pm

Mütter's story sounds fascinating. It seems to have been a great era to be an American doctor. Too bad the book was mixed.

94ursula
Jul 31, 2015, 1:11 am

>92 kidzdoc: It was crazy nightmarish! If he'd known better, he probably could have found a better way on his own, but he'd never been to NY before. I mean, several of our international flights have been in or out of JFK, but he's never set foot outside the airport before. So he's missing that killer instinct that people around there have to tell taxi drivers and other people in charge of transportation their own best idea of how to get somewhere. ;) As it was, I guess there were a total of 7 people who were trying to catch various international connections, and only 2 of them made it to their original flights. My husband flew on a different one, and the rest stayed overnight.

As for the Mutter book, I was probably extra hard on it because I listened to it. I seem to be very sensitive to repetition in an audio book.

>93 dchaikin: As I said above, I think I'm overly sensitive to certain thing in audio. Repetition is big because I'm always thinking "didn't I already hear this phrasing!?" and I'm probably a little more prone to thinking something is going on and on in a part that's not overly fascinating. In print, at least I can skim.

Honestly, I think that era was probably a terrible time to be a doctor if you had any sort of a modernist, ahead-of-your-time sensibility like Mutter did. He and a few other doctors insisted on cleanliness in the operating room, wondering if doctors had something to do with the spread of certain diseases, and they were vilified. The doctors used to go around in jackets that looked more like their profession was butcher than surgeon. Can you imagine seeing a blood-covered doctor walk in to get to work on you? Yikes. But on the positive side, discoveries of new techniques were coming quickly and you could see that you were making a real difference in the quality of people's lives.

95ursula
Ago 1, 2015, 5:48 am

July roundup ...

This month, I read 7 books.
I read 2 physical books 4 Kindle books and listened to 1 audio book.
Books were by 5 distinct authors, 5 men and 2 women.
My reading totaled 1575 pages and 8 hours, 54 minutes of listening time.
The earliest work was from 1796 (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master), and the most recent from 2014 (Dr. Mutter's Marvels).
My reading was 72% fiction and 28% non-fiction.
I read 3 books from the 1001 Books list.

I just got back into running the last week and a half of July, so it's a low total, but at least I'm getting back in the habit! 18.5 km run.

At the close of my third month in Italy, I feel like I'm finally finding time to read again and also settling in in a more general sense. The worst thing about July was the unrelenting, unusually hot temperatures. It looks like we have another stretch of that coming up in about a week, but hopefully it will not persist for nearly as long.

96ursula
Ago 4, 2015, 7:11 am

I finished The Moor's Last Sigh, which was my first Rushdie. I remember trying to read The Satanic Verses shortly after it came out and there was all the brouhaha, but that would make me about 18, and it was far beyond me at the time. This one is about generations of an Indian family, generations of iterations of Indian rule, the role of cultural and ethnic outsiders in various societies, and outsiders (voluntary and otherwise) of many other varieties. And art. And love. And whether or not you can know another person. And how our parents can influence us in so many ways, often far different than their intentions.

"Dense" doesn't really begin to describe Rushdie's writing - the allusions came fast and furious, the references to historical events and personages, to mythology, to religion, and I'm sure to many other things that went flying right over my head. But even while being sure it would be essentially impossible for me to really understand the book in total, I enjoyed the experience of reading it. My head was spinning at times, but it wasn't an unpleasant dizziness.

97ursula
Editado: Ago 5, 2015, 7:47 am

Okay, I just can't with Where'd You Go, Bernadette?. I hate Bernadette, and I am suspicious of the author now. Is it supposed to be funny or charming or clever that Bernadette would say the following to her virtual assistant in India (who she pays $.75 an hour to essentially run her life): "Could you make dinner reservations for us on Thanksgiving? You can call up the Washington Athletic Club and get us something for 7 PM for three. You are able to place calls, aren't you? Of course, what am I thinking? That's all you people do now."

She also charmingly says "you bet your bindi" and expresses a desire to get out of something by wishing a Chechen rebel would shoot her in the back. Oh, how droll.

98rebeccanyc
Ago 5, 2015, 7:45 am

I gave away my copy of Where'd You Go, Bernadette after I sped through it just so I say I read it! (And it's very unusual for me to give a book away.)

As I said when I read it "Afterwards I felt like I had gulped down a big bowl of candy instead of a nutritious meal."

99Helenliz
Ago 5, 2015, 9:21 am

You're not alone. It was not a pleasant reading experience and I pity the poor child with those parents. Fortunately I had only borrowed it from the library, so removal of the book from my collection was easily accomplished.

100ursula
Ago 5, 2015, 9:30 am

>98 rebeccanyc: I'll go one step farther: I feel like that bowl of candy was Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans and they were mostly vomit and earwax. (Sorry, I know that's vivid.)

>99 Helenliz: Good to hear. I paged through the reviews but there were few bad ones. This is also a Kindle library loan for me.

101ursula
Ago 8, 2015, 1:31 pm

Today I finished We Need New Names. Overall, I liked it a lot. The story of Darling, who is a ten-year-old girl in an unnamed country that seems to be Zimbabwe, can be sad and funny and trivial and profound. The novel reads like a series of interconnected stories; although Darling is (essentially) always our narrator, and time progresses in a linear fashion, the chapters are really more like snapshots of her life than a movie. Eventually she gets a little older and goes to America to live with her aunt in Michigan, and the focus shifts to trying to fit in, something Darling has not had to previously do. In this part is the single chapter that is not narrated by Darling - it's told from a collective immigrant point of view - an unnamed "we" who tell of their struggles to integrate, to work, to connect with home when they don't have documents and can't leave the US. I felt like that chapter was unsuccessful, although I can understand why Bulawayo would have wanted to find a way to include a broader experience than she'd be able to through Darling's teenage viewpoint.

Unusually for me, I went through the book in just a few days (I read fast, but I like to draw the experience out instead of rushing through something. That's why I read multiple books at the same time.), and enjoyed it. The descriptions were vivid and I'm sure at least some of them will stick with me.

102ursula
Ago 16, 2015, 7:17 am

Where does the time go?

I finished my audio book of American Lion, about Andrew Jackson. I agree with some other reviewers that not enough time and detail is spent on Jackson's policy of Indian relocation. Also, there seems to be an effort to make it seem as if Jackson was not completely racist because he paid some lip service to a tiny bit of racial equality at the end of his life. But he didn't free his slaves, in life or by his will (George Washington did), and he seemed to take the same attitude to blacks and to Indians - paternalistic and condescending. Don't get me wrong; he was paternalistic in his views on the role of the president to the nation in general - he was the father, entrusted with the responsibility to provide for the people. But he also believed that the people were the ones who entrusted him with that role, that he was there to carry out the will of the people as he saw it - while blacks and Indians had no such say in their affairs. On the other hand, Jackson was a much more savvy politician than I think he has previously gotten credit for (at least when I was in high school). The book was well-written and didn't drag, which is good because it would take a special sort of talent to make the story drag with as many colorful characters and events as there were during those times.

I also finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which I was not expecting to enjoy at all. As far as I know, I'm not a huge fan of the Bronte sisters - my previous experiences were in trying and failing to get through Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I really liked this one, though. I saw something that called it "one of the first sustained feminist novels", and it was interesting to look at it in that context, in addition to just enjoying the story. Oh right, the story: mysterious widow shows up with her young son in the town of our narrator, Gilbert Markham, and they are drawn to each other. But the townspeople simply will not stop gossiping about her, and she refuses to tell anyone the truth of her life when slandered. Misunderstandings ensue, truth is revealed, etc. I liked the style in which the story was told - first in long letters by Gilbert, then in the widow's diary. I enjoyed the twists and turns of the tale. I enjoyed that Gilbert was honestly sort of insufferable at times. I liked that the widow was not unbelievably or one-dimensionally good. She was a product of her times and tried to do what was expected of her, but at some point it just became untenable and she had to do what she thought was right, no matter the consequences.

103Cait86
Ago 16, 2015, 8:08 am

>102 ursula: Great comments on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall! I am definitely a Bronte fan - Wuthering Heights is one of my favourite books - but I've never read anything by Anne. I'll have to give this one a try, as I really enjoy novels written in letters and diary entries.

104ELiz_M
Ago 16, 2015, 8:13 am

105ursula
Ago 16, 2015, 12:43 pm

>103 Cait86: I hope you enjoy it! Hoping it's not one of those cases where we are on opposite sides of some sort of divide in tastes. :)

>104 ELiz_M: Of course I would like Anne.

106FlorenceArt
Ago 16, 2015, 3:58 pm

I read Wuthering Heights ages ago and don't remember much about it, and Jane Eyre relatively recently and found it a bit too emotional and mystical (that's what my very short LT review says anyway). Based on your review and that comic, I think I should try Anne Brontë.

107Helenliz
Ago 16, 2015, 4:25 pm

I will be reading Wuthering Heights next month, it's book club book. Read Jane Eyre & Shirley (both by Charlotte) in the last year or so, I found Jane better than Shirley. I'm trying to come to each one with an open mind.

108ursula
Ago 17, 2015, 3:14 am

>106 FlorenceArt: I am a bit curious now to see what I'll think of the other sisters' work. It has been a very long time since I attempted those books. I'll be interested to see your opinion of Anne when/if you get around to her!

>107 Helenliz: I definitely didn't approach this one with a totally open mind ... there was a bit of residual dread just from remembering how bored/annoyed I was with the others. But I think I'll be able to tackle both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre with a bit more optimism when it gets to be time for that.

109Cait86
Ago 17, 2015, 11:39 am

>106 FlorenceArt: >107 Helenliz: >108 ursula: The thing with Wuthering Heights is to just get through the first three or four chapters, which are rather dull and not the best at setting up the story. One Nelly starts telling the story of Catherine and Heathcliff, things get MUCH better!

110RidgewayGirl
Ago 17, 2015, 11:47 am

Anne is my favorite Bronte, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is my favorite Victorian novel.

111ursula
Ago 18, 2015, 11:03 am

>109 Cait86: I think I'm probably better equipped to get through that first section now than when I first tried it.

>110 RidgewayGirl: Nice! It'll be hard for another one to live up to Wildfell Hall for me, I suspect.

112ursula
Ago 22, 2015, 4:01 pm

I finished Lonesome Dove. I gave it 4 stars, but that was probably a little generous. I liked a lot of the things he did - I appreciate that the story reads like life, with all of its unanswered questions, unspoken words, missed opportunities, small moments, and deaths that take us by surprise. But I was bored sometimes, and I didn't really enjoy the characterization of the Native Americans. I mean, I know it's a western and the cowboys will have a certain point of view, but it seemed like there could have been some other sort of interaction even if it didn't really change the characters' opinions.

113NanaCC
Ago 22, 2015, 4:15 pm

I really enjoyed Lonesome Dove when I read it years ago, and I've enjoyed several of McMurtry's other books.

114ursula
Ago 22, 2015, 4:42 pm

I read The Last Picture Show (I was going to say "a year or two ago" but I see that it was actually in 2010!) and I enjoyed it. That's the only other McMurtry I've read.

115NanaCC
Ago 22, 2015, 4:47 pm

Did you ever see the film of The Last Picture Show? It was quite wonderful.

116ursula
Ago 23, 2015, 1:26 am

I haven't, although I knew it was supposed to be good.

117FlorenceArt
Ago 23, 2015, 9:08 am

I loved Lonesome Dove, but it was at least 15 years ago and I couldn't tell you much more. I was very disappointed by the next book though, Streets of Laredo.

118ursula
Ago 23, 2015, 9:49 am

>117 FlorenceArt: I knew there was a sequel, so I was surprised that Gus died, and really that pretty much everyone of interest died. Call was pretty useless at the end as well, so who does the sequel focus on? I've seen comments of disappointment about it, so I don't have any plans to read it (I'm not much for sequels anyway).

119ursula
Ago 24, 2015, 12:57 am

I finished listening to My Life in Middlemarch. I think it's an interesting concept, to discuss a book as seen through the lens of your life, or how it's been your companion through different stages, changing with your own perceptions. But that is only a small part of the book, really. Mead talks about where she was in her life when she read and re-read Middlemarch and what new perspective she gained on the book and herself. That stuff is interesting - does Middlemarch really have anything to say about raising stepchildren? Not exactly, but reading with that going on in your own life, you can glean some life lessons on becoming family and similar themes. The rest of the book is pretty much just about George Eliot's life. I imagine if you've picked up this book, you're not really in it for a biography of George Eliot, so that might be a bit of a disappointment. For me, I was surprised but not really let down since I didn't know a thing about her. If you do, it's going to be going over old ground I'm sure. I thought there was a bit too much about Eliot's other books - what on earth are musings about the places of our childhood and The Mill on the Floss or whatever Mead was on about with Daniel Deronda doing in here? I thought this was about Middlemarch?

In sum, it wasn't quite what I was expecting, and it wasn't quite successful at being something else, but it was a pleasant audio listen and fit my needs for the moment.

120ursula
Ago 24, 2015, 1:01 am

I've been looking back through and processing photos from my trip to Naples in 2013 (yes, I actually never got around to processing a lot of photos) because we'll be heading back that direction next month and I'm super excited. We won't be staying in Naples itself this time, but in Caserta, which has a big palace and an old city to explore. I'm looking forward to it, but also hoping I can manage to get into Naples for a day because I really loved that city.

This is Vesuvius, obviously.

121RidgewayGirl
Ago 24, 2015, 1:58 am

I'll be in Naples in November for a long weekend. I'm looking forward to it, although I suspect that it will be all Pompeii all the time, given that it's a trip for my husband's birthday. I'd like to think I have the self-control to save the final book in Elena Ferrante's series for that trip, but who am I trying to kid?

122ursula
Ago 24, 2015, 6:20 am

>121 RidgewayGirl: Are you going to visit Herculaneum as well? I didn't go there, but I understand it's better-preserved than Pompeii. And probably less confused and disorganized, although I suppose that part isn't necessarily the case!

123RidgewayGirl
Ago 24, 2015, 6:23 am

I don't know, yet. But that does sound like a good idea.

124rebeccanyc
Ago 24, 2015, 7:19 am

>120 ursula: Great photo!

125ursula
Ago 24, 2015, 2:03 pm

>124 rebeccanyc: Thank you!

Today I also finished The Secret History. When my daughter was visiting me in Gent, we were shopping at the English Bookshop, and I picked that book off the shelf as a possibility for her. I said, "I have no idea what it's about, but it's on the 1001 Books list and I think people like it." She read the back, thought it sounded interesting, and took it home with her. I didn't want to know anything about it. I believe she ended up reading the whole thing (and it's not a short book!) on the plane back to the US. Fast forward to last week, when we were Skyping and she said she had just re-read it (we are so different; she re-reads a lot), but she couldn't tell me what she wanted to say about it really because I hadn't read it yet. So I checked the ebook out of the library and started on it.

It turns out that the book is set at a college in Vermont at an unspecified time. (I spent a while puzzling over it and settled on the late 80s or early 90s - I see now that the book was published in 1992 so I'm sure it was just supposed to be a contemporary setting at the time, and wouldn't have caused anyone any sort of confusion had they been reading it then.) The narrator, Richard, is a kid from California who really wants to fit in but seems destined to be an outsider. Then he meets a small group of students studying Greek in an intensive fashion with an eccentric professor named Julian. It's told from some point in the future, so we find out immediately that one of them will die and the rest are somehow involved. Exactly how and the ramifications that come from their involvement are slowly unspooled over the course of the book. "Slowly" is probably the operative word here. It's not a fast-moving book much of the time, but it is rich in atmosphere. I thought I knew how things were going to happen, what twists and turns were coming, but I was mostly wrong. I'm not sure if I like some of the choices the author made, but I think I can see why she went the directions she did.

None of the characters are particularly likeable, and several of them aren't even particularly sharply drawn, I don't think, but that might be part of the point - how well do you really know people? And sometimes you end up throwing in your lot with people on impulse, and then you're just stuck with them, even if you start to realize they might be extremely unpleasant. I'm going to give this one some more thought, and also finally talk to my daughter and see what her opinions are.

126AlisonY
Ago 24, 2015, 4:19 pm

>125 ursula: interesting reading your review, as The Secret History was a book I attempted to read three times and then finally gave up on this year. I just couldn't get into it - I disliked the characters and the plot was going way too slowly for me.

I'm sure I missed some excellent plot twists and turns though. Maybe I'll give it a fourth go some year...

127dchaikin
Ago 24, 2015, 9:53 pm

>120 ursula: Such a nice picture.

I wonder, since I haven't read Middlemarch or anything else by Eliot, if I would like My Life in Middlemarch. And interesting about The Secret History

I'm catching up, so also enjoyed your thoughts on Amercan Lion, the Brontes and other things.

128ursula
Editado: Ago 25, 2015, 5:53 am

>127 dchaikin: Thank you!

I think it depends on how you feel about hearing the details of a plot before you read the book. I tried to ignore as much as I could of what I heard about Eliot's other books because I want to read them as unspoiled as possible. On the other hand, if you don't mind, just reading the Wikipedia summary or whatever would get you to a point where you'd understand what the author was getting at when she refers to plot points, and it might actually make it easier reading Middlemarch later. I know some people have a hard time with it, although I didn't.

129RidgewayGirl
Ago 25, 2015, 4:39 am

I remember reading The Secret History and finding it compulsively readable, but not liking it very much. On the other hand, I loved The Goldfinch. Tartt does have a way of keeping people reading, despite the length of her novels.

130ursula
Ago 26, 2015, 2:52 am

>129 RidgewayGirl: I can definitely see having that reaction to it. Honestly, I don't know if I liked it either. I gave it 4 stars because it was oddly compelling most of the time, but I'm honestly not sure at all about that rating. My daughter and I are trying to figure out a time to have a Skype session about it.

131ursula
Ago 26, 2015, 12:04 pm

Finished another one: The Trial by Franz Kafka. Sometimes it was interesting, sometimes it was boring. But it was pretty much always imbued with feelings of confusion and dread. After reading this, I feel pretty confident that I've been right to describe Italian bureaucracy as Kafkaesque. We rarely know what we're really supposed to do or why, every person we talk to tells us something different, and we're pretty sure it's all pointless anyway.

132mabith
Ago 30, 2015, 10:34 pm

I suppose My Life with George Eliot just sounds less snappy than My Life in Middlemarch. I'll have to think about that one. I've only read The Mill on the Floss, but enjoyed it and plan to read the rest of Eliot's work.

133ursula
Ago 31, 2015, 8:05 am

>132 mabith: Indeed, those snappier titles have got to win! She talks a lot about The Mill on the Floss, seemingly almost as much as about Middlemarch. I think I'd say this would be better after Middlemarch, unless you find yourself slogging through that one and need some encouragement, maybe.

134ursula
Ago 31, 2015, 8:13 am

All about August ...

This month, I read 8 books.
I read 1 physical book, 5 Kindle books and listened to 2 audio books.
Books were by 8 distinct authors, 4 men and 4 women.
My reading totaled 2976 pages (including the 175 I read before abandoning Where'd You Go Bernadette?)and 26 hours, 54 minutes of listening time.
The earliest work was from 1848 (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), and the most recent from 2014 (My Life in Middlemarch).
My reading was 75% fiction and 25% non-fiction.
I read 4 books from the 1001 Books list.

Still working on getting back to a decent amount of running, but I did 43.3 km this month.

135ursula
Sep 1, 2015, 8:53 am

Finished The Bat by Jo Nesbo. Here's the thing - I picked it up from the library collection because I've heard his name bandied about, people saying they like his series of mysteries starring Harry Hole. And this is apparently the first one, so let's check it out, shall we? I start reading, and it's kind of funny that this book involves our Norwegian detective spending his mystery-solving time in Australia, but okay. I'm getting some interesting Australian facts fed to me/Harry by some Aboriginal characters, and that's kind of entertaining. Harry clearly has some issues, but they're only being referred to obliquely, not hitting me over the head. And then things get sort of stupid in an action-movie kind of way, and then angsty, and then even more stupid, and the angst ratchets up another notch ... and I go looking at some reviews to see if I'm just totally missing some sort of charm here. This is how I find out that this is indeed the first book in the series, but it wasn't translated into English until well after later ones. In other words, this is not the book that enthralled English-language readers. And in fact, a fair number of reviewers who have read the rest of the series are expressing their disappointment with this one.

And that is unsurprising, because this book is best summed up with a single word: ludicrous. Seriously. About 98% of the events in this book are patently ridiculous, even for a mystery novel. It's like some sort of cheesy 1970s Bond movie meets every horrible big budget Hollywood action blockbuster. Harry is a completely uninteresting train wreck, the women are paper-thin characters, and do not even get me started on the ending.

136NanaCC
Sep 1, 2015, 9:00 am

>135 ursula: Well, thank you for saving me from that one. :)

137RidgewayGirl
Sep 1, 2015, 9:40 am

And that is why I prefer to begin mystery or crime series somewhere in the middle.

138RidgewayGirl
Sep 1, 2015, 9:41 am

And that is why I prefer to begin mystery/crime series somewhere in the middle.

139ursula
Sep 2, 2015, 11:31 am

>136 NanaCC: My pleasure, haha.

>137 RidgewayGirl:, >138 RidgewayGirl: Obviously you feel strongly about this. ;)

140ursula
Sep 3, 2015, 3:16 am

I finished listening to Blood, Bones & Butter, the subtitle of which is "The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef." It should have been "The Incidental Education of an Insufferable Chef." I get it: cooks are crazy. Everyone knows this. And Gabrielle Hamilton, the author of this book, is no exception. She had a neglectful upbringing, found out that she could work in kitchens even if it wasn't what she really wanted to do, and spent time in NY getting in all kinds of trouble, like many restaurant workers do. Then she took a left turn and decided she wanted to do something more "important" and went and got an MFA in creative writing, and then ended up back in the restaurant business. This sounds kind of interesting, but this lady -- oh, this lady. She is a piece of work. I don't mind, or even prefer, a memoir that isn't strictly about the work. What else goes on in our lives often has a lot to do with how we end up where we are, so I am perfectly fine with personal life mixed in liberally. But when I finish the book and I'm not even sure what her successful New York restaurant is like, aside from small and that it serves brunch, I don't think it's a really successful book about a restauranteur.

Instead, here's what I know about Gabrielle Hamilton: she hates women who shop at farmer's markets. She had lesbian relationships until she married an Italian guy. She is terrible at relationships - she had an affair with said Italian guy while dating a woman, who she broke up with by informing her she was getting married. She married the Italian so he could get a green card. (Although ultimately who is in that marriage for more than that, and who is most disappointed by the whole thing, and who is more at fault and why are we still talking about it is all up for debate.) She thinks people who let their kids cry it out are miserable excuses for human beings, but she will yell "things I'm not proud of" at her fussy toddlers in the car when she's hungry. She is a chef, but cannot correctly pronounce "turmeric" or "pho." She also has a habit of pronouncing "a" like "ay," including at the beginning of the word "another," so that I felt like she was reading to a particularly slow 4-year-old. I mean really - who says "ay" person and then "ay"nother?!

I suppose the bottom line is, I did not like this woman, and I felt like the book focused on all the wrong things in all the wrong ways. I wish she had stuck to cooking and skipped the MFA.

141rebeccanyc
Sep 3, 2015, 8:16 am

>140 ursula: "The Incidental Education of an Insufferable Chef."

Love it!

142RidgewayGirl
Sep 3, 2015, 10:30 am

...she hates women who shop at farmer's markets.

I have to ask: why? And why is she fine with men shopping at farmer's markets?

143ursula
Sep 3, 2015, 11:09 am

>141 rebeccanyc: Thanks! :)

>142 RidgewayGirl: Well, she doesn't mention men at the farmer's market. But she hates the women because they are there buying their organic broccoli and single flower, "artfully arranged" in a bag.

144dchaikin
Sep 3, 2015, 10:07 pm

145ursula
Sep 4, 2015, 5:29 am

I did it! I finished my first book in Italian. And okay, it was for ages 9 and up, and I took a few months reading it. (Not quite as long as it is recorded, because I took about a month off from reading it for a variety of reasons.) But I read the whole thing, out loud to myself, and I understood it (with liberal help from my dictionary). It was Jack Black e la nave dei ladri, or Jack Black and the Ship of Thieves. It was a good adventure story that had pretty much everything thrown into it - a dirigible, airplanes, a bomb, a ship (of thieves), a sea monster, the Arctic Ocean, an indestructible mechanical warship, volcanoes ... you get the idea. And it also had one gruesome death that I thought might be a bit much for the age group - a lackey of the bad guy jumps into the ocean to try to swim to a ship - but the ocean is super-heated from the volcanic explosion and well, it doesn't end prettily. Yikes.

I learned a lot of nautical language, which I probably won't need in day-to-day life, but vocabulary is vocabulary. I'm ready to tackle another one, I just have to figure out what it will be.

146ursula
Sep 4, 2015, 5:29 am

147NanaCC
Sep 4, 2015, 7:29 am

>145 ursula: Nicely done!

148ursula
Sep 4, 2015, 9:55 am

>147 NanaCC: Thanks so much! I am stupidly proud of myself. (The husband says, "there's nothing stupid about it, that's not easy to do!" but I can't seem to really surmount the fact that it's just a children's book.)

149ursula
Editado: Sep 4, 2015, 12:00 pm

Another book down: My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Well, as usual I didn't know a thing about the book going in. Still, it was easy to quickly make a connection between this book of semi-fiction (autobiographical fiction? fictionalized memoir? barely-fiction? more-fiction-than-you-might-think?) and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and not just because Knausgaard's effort is apparently stretched out over six volumes as well. There's the same sort of details of place and action that make it like watching the scene unfold, the same digressions and jumps in time and circumstance, only to come back to the original story pages later (or not at all). We spend the first half of the book following along with scenes from Karl Ove's childhood, mostly in adolescence, and the second half with the adult Karl Ove in the aftermath of his father's death. But the adult creeps into the childhood narrative as well - we're never left to completely immerse ourselves in that period of his life because grown-up Karl Ove is there as well, a writer who has left Norway and lives in Sweden, is on his second marriage, has small children, and inserts his musings on both his young self and his current life. And then in the second part, we are completely present with the adult as he finds out his father has died and goes with his brother to arrange the funeral and find out what he can do for his grandmother.

This part was harrowing for me personally - the descriptions are so detailed of what it's like to be in the house of an alcoholic who has drunk himself to death that if you've had that experience (or just the experience of being in the house of a family member who has long given in to their alcoholism), you may feel claustrophobic and not be able to help reliving it. And that's not a negative comment in any way; I can't say I "enjoyed" this feeling of recognition, but I was a bit in awe of it.

It's not for everyone, I can tell that. Much like Proust, Knausgaard describes everything. For example, making dinner: "Yngve folded up the two grocery bags and put them in the bottom drawer. The margarine was sizzling in the pan. The jet from the tap was broken by the potatoes I was holding beneath it, and the water that ran down the sides of the sink was not powerful enough to remove all the soil from the tubers and so formed a layer of mud around the plughole until the potatoes were clean and I removed them from the jet, which then swept everything with it in a second, to reveal once again the spotless, gleaming metal base." Okay, so that's actually just the preparing to make dinner - you get the idea.

Anyway, I loved it, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest. I can already tell that Karl Ove is not going to be the kind of guy I would want to hang out with, not least because he is the type of guy to name his book(s) My Struggle, or Min Kamp in Norwegian - which is Mein Kampf in German (and not the title the German translation has used). But hey, I don't have to want to physically hang out with the guy to want to hang out in his head for the duration of these books.

150RidgewayGirl
Sep 4, 2015, 10:41 am

The Knausgaard books just look so dour and daunting, but everyone who has read them thinks they are wonderful.

151japaul22
Sep 4, 2015, 11:47 am

>150 RidgewayGirl: I feel that way too. I'm still very on the fence. I've requested the first one from the library twice now and not checked it out when it became available!

152AlisonY
Editado: Sep 4, 2015, 1:27 pm

>149 ursula: I loved My struggle: Book One as well. But he's one of the those authors where I need to take a breathing space before I attempt the even heftier Book 2 (which is supposed to be weaker than Book 1 and Book 3, but who knows).

153wandering_star
Sep 4, 2015, 3:42 pm

You should post your review of Blood, Bones and Butter! It would certainly get a thumb from me...

154rebeccanyc
Editado: Sep 4, 2015, 5:43 pm

>150 RidgewayGirl: My thinking exactly. Plus, I can't get over that he called the books My Struggle, which is the translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

155dchaikin
Sep 4, 2015, 10:23 pm

Congrats on finishing both books. I had no idea that My Struggle was six volumes. As bothered as I am by the title, I'm quite fascinated by your comments.

156ursula
Sep 5, 2015, 12:45 am

>150 RidgewayGirl:, 151 I think this might be one of those situations where going in with no previous knowledge was definitely to my advantage (and perhaps also reading on Kindle). I had no impression of the book at all and wasn't affected by its size.

>152 AlisonY: I pretty always take a break before reading more of an author (often for years), so I'm not sure when I'll get to the second one. But on the other hand, the temptation is there to treat this a bit like I did Proust and read it steadily. On the other other hand, only up to book 4 has been published in English so far.

>153 wandering_star: Done, and thanks!

>154 rebeccanyc: I see this on his Wikipedia page: "The title of the series, of both the English translation and the original Norwegian, is a translation of “Mein Kampf” and is thus a clear reference to Hitler. In an essay for the New Yorker’s website, Evan Hughes explains how Knausgård, in interviews, “has argued that a frightening characteristic that connects Mein Kampf to the writings of Anders Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Utøya massacre, is that in the mind behind both texts there seems to be an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ but no ‘you,’ reflecting a dangerous blindness that allowed an otherwise impossible evil.”3 The sixth book of the series includes a meditation on the Breivik attacks."

It's an interesting perspective for someone who's spending 6 books focusing on "I" and "we."

>155 dchaikin: Thanks! I found it completely compelling. Although I was reading multiple books at the same time, that was the one I always wanted to pick up, and it felt like a reward to read it.

157rebeccanyc
Sep 5, 2015, 8:32 am

>156 ursula: Very interesting.

158FlorenceArt
Sep 5, 2015, 1:07 pm

Thank you for the review of My Struggle, and the great discussion. I agree with >150 RidgewayGirl: it seems it should be the most boring of books, and yet very few reviewers seem to feel that way. I'll have to give it a try one of these days.

159ursula
Sep 5, 2015, 1:24 pm

I finished listening to Dead Wake. I loved Devil in the White City, but I've never found another of Larson's books to capture that same magic. I got through In the Garden of Beasts, but I had problems with it, and I just couldn't get into Thunderstruck. I love stories about ships and disasters and ship disasters though, so it seemed like this book about the sinking of the Lusitania would be the one to grab me. And there were definitely parts of it that held my attention well. Pretty much everything that was actually about the journey of the Lusitania was interesting. I liked the way Larson switched back and forth between the Lusitania and U20, the submarine that would sink it. The parts about British intelligence and what they knew from intercepted German radio transmissions and what their strategy was were okay, maybe better than okay if that sort of thing is an area of interest for you. Two things really bothered me though: 1. how much extraneous information Larson threw in (no one needs a whole section on what was in the newspaper the day the ship sailed, including random headlines, stories, sales, and ads), and 2. the draggy end where World War I is wrapped up and whatever. I don't even know, I was barely listening. Oh, there was actually a third thing: Woodrow Wilson's love life. I know almost as much about Wilson's relationship with his second wife and his love of golf as I do about the sinking of the Lusitania.

It probably would be better in print, where it's easier to skim. On the other hand, audio was nice for listening to Larson's description of the film of the Lusitania leaving New York while watching the film on YouTube. Isn't technology great? :)

160ursula
Sep 5, 2015, 1:50 pm

>158 FlorenceArt: My pleasure! It's certainly been interesting for me. I really wasn't sure if I was going to be an outlier with my opinion about the book. I can understand trepidation at approaching it though.

161ursula
Sep 7, 2015, 7:09 am

Yesterday I finished Junky. It was my first experience reading Burroughs. The book was ... well, I guess what you'd expect from an addict "telling it like it is." It had some interesting insights and glimpses into the day-to-day life and surroundings of a junkie, and it had a fair number of completely erroneous statements and wishful thinking. It was odd to realize the last part was written around when Burroughs accidentally shot his wife, although no mention of that is in the book and in fact very few mentions of the wife or his children are in there at all (and he'd wanted her excised completely). I had recently read up on the incident, which happened in Mexico - although there are conflicting accounts (many conflicting accounts), it seems that Burroughs made some sort of misguided attempt to shoot a glass off her head which instead ended up killing her. In a case of extreme euphemism, Ginsberg's preface to one of the editions of the books mentions her "untimely death as the result of a drinking accident." Mistakenly downing a glass of Dran-O instead of vodka is maybe a drinking accident - getting shot by your husband (who may not have actually been drunk at the time) is not quite the same.

But anyway. The book stands as a look into a specific time and culture.

162dchaikin
Sep 7, 2015, 8:17 am

I've wondered about this book. Burroughs is a curiosity.

163ELiz_M
Sep 7, 2015, 8:54 am

>161 ursula:, >162 dchaikin: This American Life almost got me interested in Burroughs with their re-broadcast of a BBC Radio documentary marking what would have been Burrough's 100th birthday:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/546/burroughs-101
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03v9p0x

164dchaikin
Sep 7, 2015, 9:27 am

>163 ELiz_M: Thanks. I read through it a bit and it seems terrific. I'll have to find time to listen to the whole hour.

165ursula
Sep 8, 2015, 5:36 am

>162 dchaikin: He is. And I've wondered about the veneration of him and his contemporaries, considering the absolutely miserable human beings they seemed to be. (And I'm not saying that you can't be both a miserable human being and a great writer, obviously. But so much of what they wrote was autobiographical, and people seem to take life lessons from them, and it is baffling to me.) So I figured it was about time to experience some of it first-hand.

>163 ELiz_M: Thanks for the link, I'll have to check that out.

166mabith
Sep 8, 2015, 10:04 am

I've always assumed part of the veneration for Burroughs came from just being impressed with how long he stayed alive (what with the drug habits). I read a bunch of his novels as a teenager, and haven't really felt the need to go back.

167ursula
Sep 8, 2015, 12:51 pm

>166 mabith: That's certainly part of it. But hey, he predicted it in Junky - he was sure heroin prolonged life. I am guessing he is like the friend's grandpa who smoked a pack a day and lived to be 105.

168mabith
Sep 8, 2015, 4:05 pm

Perhaps they are just superhumans who would have lived to 150 sans drugs. I do have a pleasure in the exceptionally long-lived who, in interviews, say it's all down to eating bacon every day, drinking whiskey or having a lot of sex (of course they're balanced out by others who ascribe it to abstaining from alcohol, sex, red meat etc...).

169ursula
Sep 8, 2015, 4:37 pm

That's exactly what I meant. Every time there's anything about smoking, drinking, whatever, someone always has a relative or friend's relative who lived to be xx age while indulging in the vice in question. It's just the exception that proves the rule.

My husband's best friend growing up is a junkie - it does not appear he will live to be anything near Burroughs' age. And that's not to take it lightly - just that Burroughs' opinions on his life choices don't read appreciably different than those of your average user who dies young, spouting the same platitudes (and usually knowing better deep down).

170ursula
Sep 9, 2015, 8:45 am

>163 ELiz_M: I listened to the program today. I pretty much have the same opinions now that I did going in, but I found Will Self's comments about Burroughs rather in line with my own, particularly as regards the death of his wife, and the role of the people around him in enabling him. I can see respecting him for having lived unapologetically as a gay man and as an iconoclastic writer. But wow, I had trouble listening to the part about how much he loved cats with the recent read of Junky still fresh in my mind. In it he describes beating up on a cat and holding it under water until his wife stopped him, and a friend comments about how Burroughs would hit the cat when he was on heroin. Cat lover, my ass.

In other news, I'm listening to Basilica about the building of St. Peter's basilica in Rome, and boy is the narrator driving me up a wall with her terrible Italian pronunciation. You don't have to be an expert, but at least get the emphasis right. She mispronounces De Medici and Delle Rovere every single time (and unfortunately they're mentioned a lot), along with Modena, fabbrica, and essere among others. It's painful.

171ursula
Sep 9, 2015, 8:53 am

And just to lighten things up, here's a photo of our dog waiting for the train at the station in Vicenza.

172dchaikin
Sep 9, 2015, 12:19 pm

Cute pup.

(Re Bascillica - Probably if I were listening I would assume the narrator had it right and whatever I had in mind was wrong. Still not used to Van Gogh no sounding like "van go" like I had always assumed the first 40 years of my life. Anyway, cool you do know the correct pronunciation. )

173RidgewayGirl
Sep 9, 2015, 1:26 pm

You have a cattledog!

174ursula
Sep 9, 2015, 2:10 pm

>172 dchaikin: Thanks! I always assume people are pronouncing things right on audiobooks, too. And I certainly wouldn't know in French or German or Russian or whatever if someone is screwing it all up. But this is really annoying. :) Also, with something like Van Gogh, I get that that's not how to pronounce it, but it's been the accepted English-ified way for so long ... I don't know, it feels kind of different to me.

>173 RidgewayGirl: I do! Good job recognizing the breed, a lot of people aren't terribly familiar with them. Plenty of people ask if she's really old. :)

175ursula
Sep 12, 2015, 12:43 am

Finished Basilica and basically have no reaction whatsoever. It was a little meandering, seemed a little excessively pro-Church, and just overall didn't grab me. As I mentioned above, audio was a terrible choice for me with the awful mispronunciations, so that didn't help. A big shrug sums up my reaction to this. On the plus side though, I learned who Via Bramante, a street near my house, is named for. :)

176OscarWilde87
Sep 12, 2015, 5:26 pm

While I love your book posts, I also enjoy your photos quite a lot!

177ursula
Sep 13, 2015, 3:41 am

>176 OscarWilde87: Thanks so much! I will continue to post them. :) Yesterday we went to Ferrara, so I'll have a couple to share from there.

178ursula
Sep 17, 2015, 2:44 am

I promised a photo from Ferrara, so here we go:



Savonarola, in all his dramatic preaching glory. This statue sits on the grounds of the Castello Estense.

I'm currently in Caserta (outside of Naples), so it'll probably take me a bit to get around to other Ferrara photos.

179RidgewayGirl
Sep 17, 2015, 4:26 am

I had a cattledog the first time I lived in Germany (the 1990's) and the only people who recognized her breed were a group of Australian tourists, although I was once lectured on having a fat dog (she was not fat, just somewhat stocky). My favorite breed! My last dog was a cattledog/pit bull mix. She was odd looking, but a wonderful, wonderful family dog.

180ursula
Sep 17, 2015, 11:56 am

>179 RidgewayGirl: We've had plenty of "she doesn't miss many meals, does she?" types of comments. We did let her get a little extra weight while we were in California, but we fixed it as soon as we noticed. But she gets those comments no matter her weight. The breed just tends to look stocky, with the bigger chest - and ours is on the short side, so I think that makes people see her as heavier than she is. We've had one person recognize the breed here, and several people say she looks like a wolf (?).

Cattle dogs are great, but super energetic. It's only recently that my husband hasn't had to walk her 4 times a day - now he can get away with 3. *sigh*

She is crazy about people but not such a big fan of other dogs. Luckily people in Italy really love dogs, overall, and aren't too concerned by doggie behaviors most of the time, which is nice. When we had people working on the apartment, she tried to nip at them anytime they wanted to leave (of course, she wanted to herd them back into the apartment). I explained, and they just laughed and warned me every time they were going to go out. And then when the second group of guys came, I started to explain and they said the first ones had already let them know what to expect, haha.

181ursula
Sep 21, 2015, 3:05 am

On the train back from Caserta, I finished The Portrait of a Lady. I liked it. I have seen a lot of people complain about James, and I can understand why in some ways - he does take a while to get anywhere - but I enjoyed his writing. I also read in the afterword that the book was serialized, so I guess it's not surprising if he sometimes took a while to figure out where he was going with something. Isabel Archer, the lady in question, was a bit flat at first, and I had to avoid trying to put my modern sensibilities on her (if I had been given a large fortune, nothing would have induced me to quit traveling!). But over time and circumstances, her character filled out, and as I said, I enjoyed the journey. I was under the impression I knew how it was going to end because I thought I remembered from reading The Master, but I guess I was confusing it with another novel or the real-life inspiration in James' life or something.

182FlorenceArt
Sep 21, 2015, 4:05 am

I gave up on The Portrait of a Lady, it was boring me. Glad you enjoyed it though!

183baswood
Sep 21, 2015, 5:42 pm

My book club has chosen Portrait of a Lady for it's next read and so I will be patient with it after reading your review.

184ursula
Sep 22, 2015, 1:59 pm

>182 FlorenceArt: I have heard that a lot. ;)

>183 baswood: It is a book that requires patience, definitely. Not everyone has felt rewarded for that patience, but I'll be curious what you think.

185ursula
Sep 22, 2015, 2:11 pm

Yesterday I finished listening to Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. Their music was never really my thing, but my husband is a huge fan. Anyway, she talks about her life in bands and out of them (she started out as a visual artist). She also talks about her relationship with her bandmate Thurston Moore, and the dissolution of their 27-year marriage, which is quite recent. I guess she has said some not-very-nice things about Moore in interviews, but I didn't think she was excessively hard on him in the book. I mean, she is pretty straightforward about the fact that he started cheating on her and then kept saying he would stop or had stopped, and then was found to be lying until she finally told him she was done.

She's not super rock-n-roll in the typical way, with a memoir full of crazy drug stories and whatever else. She doesn't seem to have been terribly interested in all of that, and she and Moore married pretty young. She does have a lot to say about the music scene as well as the NY art scene, and a bit about how to raise a child when both parents are touring musicians. She also talks at length about her older brother, who is schizophrenic, and the impact he had on her life. She seems really normal, although with an artist's view on everything.

You probably already know if you're interested in reading this one, so let that be your guide.

186ursula
Sep 23, 2015, 3:50 pm

Last night I finished The Fortune of War, book #6 in the Aubrey-Maturin series. It was a bit different because about 90% of it takes place on land. Also, instead of the French being the enemy, it's the Americans since the War of 1812 is going on. Aubrey is taken prisoner by the Americans and has to wait for a prisoner exchange, cooped up in an asylum. Although different in tenor than previous volumes, it was fun in its way, and I'm anxious to see where Stephen Maturin goes next as he's on the cusp of a potentially huge change in his life. Lucky Jack continues to be himself, which means he's by turns charming, ridiculous and frustrating. Not the best book in the series so far, but pretty good.
Este tema fue continuado por Ursula's Words and Images, 2015 (3).