Ursula's Reading (and Other) Adventures in 2016, Part 2

For anyone who hasn't read the introduction thread (or even if you have, because I intend to expand on that a little), here's me in a nutshell: My name is, indeed, Ursula. I am an American, and I have just (end of August 2016) moved from Italy to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I'm an artist and photographer, and the images I post will be my own unless I say otherwise. My husband is a mathematician, and it's his work that takes us to various places (who knew math was a means to traveling...). I have two kids at the beginning of their twenties - a daughter who is starting a graduate program at the University of Georgia, and a son who is studying International Affairs at CU Boulder in Colorado.

In my reading life, I like to read from the 1001 Books list, and I've started keeping track of some other lists, but more just so I can check things off them as I happen to read them than to specifically use them to choose reads. I usually read about 2/3 fiction and 1/3 nonfiction. Most of the nonfiction is taken in in the form of audiobooks - I listen to them while I draw. I have gone a couple of years of reading "blind", meaning that I don't read reviews, or the backs of books, or blurbs. I got kind of tired of knowing what was going to happen, or having preconceived opinions, or just reading yet another terrible summation of a story (they all start to sound the same after a while anyway). So how do I choose books? Well, although I don't read reviews, I do notice what gets mentioned, and I'll let myself glance at star ratings or that sort of thing. And sometimes I just browse the library's online catalog and pick something based on the cover.

I can't decide if I'm going to try to follow any sort of challenge related to topics or authors or anything ... I guess we'll all find out together!

(The photo is of the Duomo in Milan.)

Books Read in 2016

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░January░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓
The Secret History of Wonder Woman - finished Jan 7 (audio, 9h 5m) ☼☼☼☼
White Teeth - finished Jan 16 (464 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Breathing Lessons - finished Jan 22 (327 pages) ☼☼☼☼
After Hannibal - finished Jan 23 (250 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - finished Jan 25 (311 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Woman in Black - finished Jan 28 (164 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Family Romanov - finished Jan 28 (audio, 9h 23m) ☼☼☼
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? - finished Jan 29 (228 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2

Total books read in January: 8
January statistics and notes

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░February░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓
The Human Stain - finished Feb 6 (361 pages) ☼☼☼
Operation Paperclip - finished Feb 11 (audio, 19h 25m) ☼☼☼☼
The Surgeon's Mate - finished Feb 14 (382 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Between the World and Me - finished Feb 14 (audio, 3h 35m) ☼☼☼☼☼
Bridge of Sighs - finished Feb 18 (527 pages) ☼☼
The Help - finished Feb 21 (526 pages) ☼☼☼
I Remember You: A Ghost Story - finished Feb 24 (370 pages) ☼☼☼
1968: The Year That Rocked the World - finished Feb 28 (audio, 16h 16m) ☼☼☼☼
The Pure Gold Baby - abandoned (186 pages)

Total books read in February: 8
February statistics and notes

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓March▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░
The Art of Fielding - finished Mar 3 (512 pages) ☼☼☼☼
My Life on the Road - finished Mar 6 (audio, 9h 18m) ☼☼☼1/2
Sally Heathcote, Suffragette - finished Mar 8 (163 pages) ☼☼☼
Il Piccolo Principe - finished Mar 12 (143 pages) ☼☼☼
My Friend Dahmer - finished Mar 15 (221 pages) ☼☼☼☼
A Thousand Acres - finished Mar 15 (371 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Stoner - finished Mar 18 (278 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Girl on the Train - finished Mar 19 (323 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Nothing to Envy - finished Mar 23 (audio, 12h 30m) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Annapurna - finished Mar 27 (257 pages) ☼☼☼☼

Total books read in March: 10

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓April▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░
The Art of Crash Landing - finished Apr 1 (405 pages) ☼☼☼
Far from the Madding Crowd - finished Apr 9 (362 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The End of Your Life Book Club - finished Apr 13 (audio, 9h 37m) ☼☼1/2
Modern Romance - finished Apr 22 (audio, 6h 14m) ☼☼☼1/2
Silas Marner - finished Apr 22 (240 pages) ☼☼☼☼
My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love - finished Apr 25 (592 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
La ragazza di Bube - finished Apr 26 (259 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage - finished Apr 30 (315 pages) ☼☼☼

Total books read in April: 8

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓May▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

Old Filth - *abandoned* May 6 (122 pages)
A Little Life - finished May 9 (720 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
It Ended Badly - finished May 10 (audio, 8h 8m) ☼☼
Negroland: A Memoir - finished May 14 (audio, 7h 51m) ☼☼☼☼
World and Town - finished May 17 (386 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
An Officer and a Spy - finished May 22 (429 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl - finished May 24 (audio 6h 55m) ☼☼☼☼
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - finished May 29 (352 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2

Total books read in May: 7

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░June░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

My Antonia - finished Jun 10 (289 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Ugly Renaissance - finished Jun 14 (audio, 15h 51m) ☼☼☼
Finders Keepers - finished Jun 19 (448 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
David Copperfield - finished Jun 20 (960 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The Whistling Season - finished Jun 23 (345 pages) ☼☼☼
The Dog Stars - finished Jun 27 (319 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The World Without Us - finished Jun 30 (audio, 12h 4m) ☼☼☼☼

Total books read in June: 7
June statistics and notes

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░July░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

The Well of Loneliness - finished Jul 9 (447 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
Anywhere But Here - finished Jul 14 (535 pages) ☼☼
Soldier Girls - finished Jul 19 (audio, 15h 55m) ☼☼☼1/2
The Sympathizer - finished Jul 20 (371 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Log from the Sea of Cortez - finished Jul 29 (324 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Fingersmith - finished Jul 30 (511 pages) ☼☼☼☼
L'amica geniale - finished Jul 31 (400 pages) ☼☼☼☼

Total read in July: 7

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░August░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

Salt: A World History - finished Aug 10 (audio, 14h 3m) ☼☼☼1/2
How to Build a Girl - abandoned (89 pages)
Inherent Vice - finished Aug 12 (369 pages) ☼☼1/2
The Blazing World - finished Aug 15 (357 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Boxers - finished Aug 19 (328 pages) ☼☼☼
The Drowned World - finished Aug 27 (198 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Falls - finished Aug 28 (481 pages) ☼☼☼1/2

Total read in August: 6
August Stats

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓September▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

When the Emperor Was Divine - finished Sep 3 (141 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Little Red Chairs - finished Sep 10 (256 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Boys in the Boat - finished Sep 12 (404 pages) ☼☼☼☼
State of Wonder - finished Sep 15 (368 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum - finished Sep 20 (140 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Cement Garden - finished Sep 24 (160 pages)
Homegoing - finished Sep 25 (305 pages)
The Girl with All the Gifts - finished Sep 25 (407 pages)
July's People - finished Sep 29 (160 pages) ☼☼☼☼

Total read in September: 9

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░October░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

The Honeymoon - *abandoned* (127 pages)
The Dead Father - finished Oct 4 (177 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Things Fall Apart - finished Oct 10 (209 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Worst Journey in the World - finished Oct 16 (audio, 20h 6m) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Blue Highways - finished Oct 16 (429 pages) ☼☼☼☼
In Other Words - finished Oct 17 (233 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Brothers Karamazov - finished Oct 20 (701 pages)☼☼☼1/2
The Honorary Consul - finished Oct 24 (315 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Nights at the Circus - finished Oct 25 (295 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Ghost Map - finished Oct 27 (audio, 8h 38m) ☼☼

Total read in October: 9

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓November▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

Reckless - *abandoned* (audio, 1h 5m)
The Radetzky March - finished Nov 1 (319 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
The Mortifications - finished Nov 3 (309 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Clarissa Or the History of a Young Lady - finished Nov 6 (1534 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Telegraph Avenue - finished Nov 8 (465 pages) ☼☼1/2
Missoula - finished Nov 11 (audio, 11h 51m) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - finished Nov 14 (323 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Our Endless Numbered Days - finished Nov 19 (386 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Love Medicine - finished Nov 20 (367 pages) ☼☼☼
Dreams from Bunker Hill - finished Nov 22 (164 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
Ghettoside - finished Nov 22 (audio, 13h 24m) ☼☼☼☼
The Switch - finished Nov 26 (216 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Adventures of Augie March - finished Nov 28 (536 pages) ☼☼☼

Total read in November: 12
November Stats

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓December▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

Nightwood - finished Dec 4 (170 pages) ☼☼☼
City of Thieves - finished Dec 4 (258 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The Sense of an Ending - finished Dec 8 (163 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Blaming - finished Dec 12 (190 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Floating Opera - finished Dec 14 (252 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
March, Book One - finished Dec 15 (121 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Walk through Walls - finished Dec 16 (audio, 14h 56m) ☼☼☼☼
Dear Mr M - finished Dec 20 (400 pages) ☼☼☼
This Real Night - finished Dec 24 (265 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Zero K - finished Dec 24 (274 pages) ☼☼☼☼

Total pages read: 28738
Total time listened: 246h 10m

Fiction: 72
Nonfiction: 29

Male Authors: 56
Female Authors: 45

Settings for my fiction reading:

England, 1974-1992 •• Baltimore, 1980s •• Umbria, Italy, 1990s •• Czechoslovakia, 1970s •• England, early 1900s(?) •• Massachusetts, 1998 •• England and France, 1812 •• Thomaston, New York and Venice, Italy, 1960s-2000s •• Mississippi, 1962-1966 •• Iceland, 2010 •• Wisconsin, 2011 •• England, 1905-1918 •• The African desert, 1930s •• Iowa, 1979 •• Columbia, Missouri, 1910s-1950s •• London, 2013 •• Florida, 1980s-present day •• Wessex, England, 1870s •• Raveloe, England, early 1800s •• Stockholm and Malmo, Sweden, 2000s •• Tuscany, Italy, post-1945 •• England, mid-1800s •• Massachusetts, 2010 •• Paris, 1896-1906 •• Australia and Thailand, mostly 1940s-1970s •• Nebraska, late 1800s-early 1900s •• England, early-mid 1800s •• Montana, 1910 •• Colorado, unknown year •• England and Paris, 1920s •• Los Angeles and Wisconsin, 1960s and 1970s •• Vietnam and US, 1970s •• England, mid-1800s •• Naples, Italy, 1950s •• Los Angeles, 1970 •• New York, present day •• London, indeterminate future time •• Niagara Falls, 1950s and 1960s •• California and Utah, WWII •• Ireland, present day •• Brazil, present day •• Germany, 1970s •• England, 1970s •• Ghana and United States, 1700s to present day •• England, in the indeterminate future •• South Africa, in an alternate 1980s •• unknown place and time •• Nigeria, early 1800s •• Russia, mid-1800s •• Paraguay, 1970s •• St. Petersburg and Siberia, 1899 •• Austro-Hungarian empire, late 1800s-1914

And nonfiction:

Eastern US, late 19th-mid 20th century •• Russia, late 1800s-1917 •• New York and Connecticut, 2001-2009 •• Germany, WWII and United States, post-WWII •• United States, 2015 •• Around the world, 1968 •• India, 1960s and around the US, 20th century •• near Akron, Ohio, 1970-1975 •• North Korea, 1960s-2009 •• Nepal, 1950 •• New York, 2009 •• US, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Paris, 2013-2014 •• from Russia to the US, England, etc. throughout history •• Chicago, 1950s-present day •• Seattle, Olympia and Portland, 1990s-present •• Italy, 14th & 15th centuries •• around the world, present day and in a post-human future •• Indiana, Afghanistan and Iraq, 1990s-2013 •• Baja California, 1940 •• worldwide, Middle Ages-present •• China, 1900 •• Washington and Germany, 1930s •• Antarctica, 1910-1912 •• around the US, 1970s •• Italy, present day •• London, 1854

My map of reading:

Ursula has been to: Afghanistan, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Democratic Republic of the Congo, People's Republic of China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Germany, Egypt, Spain, Ethiopia, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Haiti, Ireland, India, Iran, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Latvia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Nepal, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United States, Vietnam, South Africa, Zimbabwe.

1001 Books Read:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Human Stain
The Art of Fielding
Il Piccolo Principe
Far from the Madding Crowd
Silas Marner
La ragazza di Bube
David Copperfield
The Well of Loneliness
Fingersmith
The Drowned World
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
The Cement Garden
July's People
The Dead Father
Things Fall Apart
The Brothers Karamazov
Nights at the Circus
The Honorary Consul
The Radetzky March

Oh my, first one in the door.

Exquisite photo at the top.

>5 sibylline: Welcome! And thank you!

I've been a little MIA because I'm in Croatia right now. I'll be going back home to Italy tomorrow.

>6 ursula:

Hello! Where in Croatia?

>7 LolaWalser: Dubrovnik. My husband had a conference here.

We're heading for Dubrovnik in June - it's been a long time since I was there (was Yugoslavia back then).

Love your new photo, and looking forward to your Hardy review as that has to be the next one of his I read.

Coool. How's the weather, any swimming? I don't suppose you'll have time to explore the surroundings--there are some gorgeous little towns all around. At the risk of sounding morbid, one place I'd never miss is the old cemetery in Cavtat--stunning view. Oh to hell with understatement. The most beautiful marine vista in the world! It made me wish I could park there for eternity, really.

Can't find pictures, alas, but the white structure on top (a mausoleum) marks the cemetery's position:



The view opens up beyond the cypresses like a door into another world. I don't have the words, really.

>9 AlisonY: That is a while, definitely! I'm enjoying the Hardy, should probably finish it soon as I get back into a routine.

>10 LolaWalser: Ah, we're leaving tomorrow afternoon. The weather has been really good, warm and sunny, until today. And maybe tomorrow it will be raining. There are so many places for great views ... helped by all the stairs you have to climb to get there. ;)

>11 ursula:

That's how we get our lithe panther figures... ;)

>12 LolaWalser: I believe it! On one of the first days, I said "everyone here must have buns of steel!" (and replacement knees...)

On one of the first days we were here, we actually went out to the abandoned hotels at Kupari for a little urban exploration. I had considered going out to Cavtat another day but just didn't get around to it. Who knows, maybe one day I'll make it back to the area. Stranger things have happened!

Where are you from?

I'm from Split. Who else would dare diss the Bay of Naples?! ;)

Haha, of course!

>1 ursula: Great photo.

Before I left, I had finished The Art of Crash Landing, which I find I don't have a lot to say about. It centers around a 30-year-old woman, Mattie, who has just left her boyfriend and is unhappily pregnant. She is not interested in being a mother at least partially because she still has a lot of baggage about the relationship she had with her own (deceased) mother, who was an alcoholic. At loose ends, she decides to finally stop ignoring the calls she's been receiving from her mother's hometown, which are about her grandmother's estate. She goes to see what it's all about and finds herself trying to decipher her mother's past. Mattie is sarcastic in the extreme, and makes no bones about the fact that she has a string of failed relationships of every sort: familial, romantic, friendship, in which she was the party in the wrong. She is surrounded by a cast of characters who mostly seem to want to hinder her in her efforts to find out more about her mother, for some strange reason.

Although this was a quick read and Mattie amused me a lot of the time (I can understand that she might irritate others), I just didn't really believe this book. It was all just ... too much. It's a first novel, though, and it showed some promise, so I wouldn't rule out trying something from the author in the future.

>16 baswood: Thanks! Sometimes it's worth it to be the weirdo wandering around in circles, staring at the ground with your camera in hand. :)

And yesterday I finished Far from the Madding Crowd. I have read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, but so long ago that I remember essentially nothing from it (I liked it, though). This was really, really good. The writing is really easy to get into - descriptive of the surroundings in a beautiful way, but not so much of it that you get sick of hearing about the fields and trees. The main story involves Bathsheba Everdene, who has taken over her uncle's farm on his death and instead of marrying someone or getting a man to run it for her, is doing it herself. As you can imagine, the presence of a woman on market days conducting business really stirs up the area and Bathsheba is constantly being watched, with everyone waiting for her to make a false step. I actually don't want to get into the plot anymore because for me, watching it unfold without knowing what was going to happen was really enjoyable. The characters are vivid and understandable, even when they're not likable.

>19 ursula: I'm thrilled that this was another epic piece of work from Hardy. Really looking forward to reading Far From the Madding Crowd soon.

>20 AlisonY: It really was a great read. I hope you enjoy it. It was an interesting companion while reading Clarissa.

>19 ursula: I loved Far from the Madding Crowd, and I absolutely agree with you about not wanting to spoil the plot. It was made into a movie last year, but I haven't seen it.

>22 cabegley: I think we will probably see the movie because it's become sort of a joke around here that we're watching everything Carey Mulligan has been in. (I just found out she was in the movie after I read the book.) We don't watch many movies, but somehow 3 of the last 4 have had her in them! (Inside Llewyn Davis, Drive, and The Great Gatsby)

I finished listening to The End of Your Life Book Club. It was fine, I guess. It's a memoir of a guy dealing with his mother's (long) death from pancreatic cancer. I couldn't relate to anyone in the book, and I had hoped for more actual thoughts on the things they read, but I'm not sure either he or his mother had that many thoughts.

Just ran across this list of 20 books with villain protagonists and I'm going to park it here for future reference.

>22 cabegley: I really liked the film Chris. I now have the book in the tbr pile, and am likely to pick it up soon.

Finished another audio book, Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari. (And I don't often/ever complain about touchstone issues but seriously, 50 titles come up and none of them are this one, most of them have neither word in the title. Pride and Prejudice and other titles that are undoubtedly published by Modern Library or something and are a "romance" but holy bejeesus, so annoying. It comes up if you add "An Investigation" after the title, but I don't see that anywhere on the book so I have no idea if that's the actual subtitle or not. Ugh.)

So, right, the book. He explores the pros and cons of trying to find people to date in the modern world of texting, online dating, Tinder, etc. Is more choice good, or bad? As might be expected, it's a little of both. We don't have to "settle" for someone we know, we can go out and meet people until we find someone who really seems to set the world on fire for us. On the other hand, that's a big expectation and we don't always give people much of a chance to do that. If it doesn't happen immediately, we might just move on to the next person. Ansari did actual research, focus groups, etc. and talked to experts on the topics he was exploring. So it's not just all one long joke. (Although there were definitely things in the book that were also explored on his show "Master of None.") If you find the topic interesting and you're looking for a considered but not completely involved look at it, this might be the book for you.

And if you like Aziz Ansari, you should definitely make him read it to you even though he calls you lazy and a lot of other names for it. :)

>23 ursula: Carey Mulligan is great! May I recommend An Education?

>28 wandering_star: I'm sure we'll get around to it eventually. :) I remember that was supposed to be a good one.

Here's a photo from Dubrovnik. It's taken from the city walls, looking out over the roofs. The Adriatic is just behind them but of course you can't see it from this angle.

Excellent!

Lovely shot!

Gorgeous picture.

Nicely framed

Great photo, Ursula!

That's beautiful. It looks like a painting.

Thanks, all of you! Sometimes the photos come out exactly as good as you hoped they would. (And sometimes they don't, of course. :))

In other news, I finished another book - La ragazza di Bube, or Bebo's Girl. It's off the 1001 Books list and since it is from Italy (and not written a long time ago), I decided to read it in Italian. It's the story of Mara, a teenager in 1945 Tuscany. Her brother was a partisan, or part of the Italian resistance to the Nazis and Fascists, and he was killed. His compatriot, Bube, comes to visit the family and begins a relationship with Mara. Sort of - they're both very young and sheltered and beyond awkward, so it's unclear a lot of the time if they even like each other very much. They certainly don't know each other well. But Bube has been involved in some trouble since the war and, pursued by the carabinieri, has to leave the country to wait out the passage of an amnesty which he hopes will clear him of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Mara goes to work for a family in another town and meets Stefano, a very different kind of young man. It's a typical story of uncertainty in relationships, but the backdrop is unique. Ultimately, it's about the little guys in larger movements - who they are, how they get persuaded to do things, and the consequences of those actions. In any group, whether it's the military, a gang, or whatever, the people on the bottom seem to fall into two categories: either they're idealists, true believers who may not realize those above them are more cynical, or they're not thinkers at all and don't consider what fallout may come from actions they and the group take.

Lovely pic! Can't wait to go there in June.

>38 AlisonY: How long are you staying?

>39 ursula: just a week, but can't wait. It's been a really intense year so far with work, so I'm ready for the break.

>40 AlisonY: A week is really more than enough time. Are you planning to do any day trips? I know that going to Montenegro or Bosnia is pretty popular.

>30 ursula:

Pretty!

>40 AlisonY:

Nice!

>41 ursula: probably not. My kids are still fairly young, so they will be dictating the pace (in other words limiting the sight seeing as much as they possibly can).

I had lost you! Good to catch up. All your photos are gorgeous.

>42 LolaWalser: Thanks!

>43 AlisonY: Ah yes, I remember vacationing with young children. Hope they like stairs!

>44 Nickelini: I lost myself for a bit too, I believe. And thanks for the kind words about the photos!

I finished The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. It's a graphic novel which takes Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage as the jumping-off point for the aforementioned adventures. He was the inventor of the first computer (though it never got built) and she was the author of the first programs (which therefore of course never got run). She was also Lord Byron's daughter and unsurprisingly was 1. a little weird and 2. raised in a completely bizarre way (her mother was afraid that she would turn out to be "poetical," which of course must have been what was wrong with Lord Byron). Babbage meanwhile seems like he was his own kind of weirdo. The first part of the book talks about the actual events in their lives, which I found fascinating. After that, the rest takes place in a "pocket universe" where things are entirely different - Babbage's computer actually gets built, and they interact with lots of people of their time with whom they only had brief interactions, including George Eliot and Lewis Carroll. Many footnotes ensue.

I dunno, I liked the part about their real lives and some of the episodes in the pocket universe, but once it got fictional, it often just felt like so much road to travel for those small amusements. If you like reading graphic novels that are totally fictional and whimsical, but which also feature long footnotes on actual mathematics, you might enjoy this one.

Interesting-looking book about pit bulls coming out next week (Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon), which I found in this article. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like my online library source has it in its catalog just yet.

>46 ursula: I found that book a bit underwhelming when I read it last year. It felt like a graphic novel and a non-fiction book had been smashed together but they each kept getting in the way of the other and it didn't fit together well for me.

>48 valkyrdeath: Yeah, it didn't seem too sure what it wanted to be. A flight of fantasy with a bunch of facts stuffed in is sort of a hard thing to pull off.

I was reading Old Filth, since Jane Gardam is an author for the British Author challenge this month (in the 75 Books group), and I seem to remember lots of positive comments about this book. I got 47% through, and I hated it. I kind of feel like I would need to be British, male and of a certain age to enjoy it at all. I know this isn't true, and I also enjoyed The Remains of the Day, which might on the surface seem to be that sort of book too, so I don't think that's really the problem, but it's kind of how I feel.

I hate this guy, I am bored to death by his life, and I cannot imagine anything that would redeem it for me. I thought about it hard, and even if the last 1/3 is absolutely unbelievably blow-your-doors-off amazing, I just am not interested in slogging through the sucking mud of the rest of it.

So, done. Abandoned. Not looking back.

>50 ursula: I was looking forward to that one. I hope I like it better :-(

>51 Nickelini: You probably will. I am a lone voice in the wilderness. :)

>52 ursula:

Stay strong! I'm on the pillar next to yours, staunchly guarding my dislike of Stoner against a sea of accolades. :)

>50 ursula: I liked Old Filth a lot, but I didn't like the other two books in the trilogy at all. So that sort of soured my opinion on Old Filth in hindsight.

I haven't read Old Filth but I gave up on the same author's The Queen Of The Tambourine, which I disliked enough to cross her off my to-read list despite all the glowing reviews.

>53 LolaWalser: :) I will maintain my fortitude!

>54 japaul22: Why were the other two books so displeasing to you? It has to be pretty powerful to retroactively change your opinion on the first one.

>55 wandering_star: What did you dislike about that one?

I finished reading A Little Life the day before yesterday. It was a long book, and sometimes a difficult one. We pick up the story of the main character, Jude, when he is in college. He is reticent to share anything at all about his past with his group of friends, and although it sets him apart from them, they still manage to accept him. Little by little, the story of the abuse that characterized Jude's early life is revealed to the reader. You follow him through his life as he struggles with the consequences of the abuse and the results of his coping mechanisms.

My thoughts: I always wanted to pick this book up again. Which is good when the book is over 700 pages long, or you're never going to get through it. I've skimmed some of the criticisms - that Jude and his friends are all ridiculously successful, that it's a story of unrelenting misery, that the friends are credulity-strainingly patient with Jude's idiosyncrasies, that no one reads like a real person. I think that it's not that unusual for a group of friends who go to a good university and who are all driven and talented, to be successful. I also think it's not that surprising that a group of people who are talented and driven would be friends with each other - like attracting like. It is a story with a lot of misery, that's true. But there's a lot more to it than that. It's about getting through awful things and coming out on the other side, damaged but functional (and what's functional may not be pretty, may not be the best way to deal with it ... but it may be impossible to strip those techniques away without doing more harm than good). It's about love - love in spite of extremely trying situations, and love in frameworks that are unexpected. His friends are overly patient, but they aren't always patient. My opinions about the last two complaints are sort of wrapped up with each other, because it's okay to me that the friends aren't fully fleshed out people. First, it's called A Little Life, not Little Lives. And secondly, they're seen through Jude's eyes, and his vision isn't exactly reliable.

It's not a perfect novel, but I am so glad I read it. It's not a book I would recommend to anyone though, not only because I realize that not everyone can tolerate reading about difficult subjects like sexual abuse and self-harm, but also because I think you have to have (or be open to) a certain amount of understanding about the thought processes of abuse survivors and how hard it is to overcome those.

>57 ursula: That is a nice description of the book. I really loved it but I agree with you that you can hardly recommend it to others. Besides, it gets a lot of negative attention as well, of being over the top. Sometimes I feel I have to defend why I liked it, most of the 700 pages.

Great thoughts on Little Life. I'm just catching up with your thread (actually threads- i was way behind). Love your pictures, especially the one on post 1 above. Seems your bucking the trend a bit with Stoner and Old Filth, good for you. And glad you chucked a book you weren't enjoying. Sometimes putting that book away can be such a great feeling.

Interesting to read your thoughts on A Little Life

>56 ursula: The trilogy is telling the same general story from 3 different points of view and the subsequent two voices I didn't enjoy. I didn't think it was all that revealing to hear the other sides (which it should have been) and was just plain bored through most of it. I tried hard to like books 2 and 3 because I did like Old Filth, but in the end I was left feeling like I must have given the first book more credit than it deserved after how I felt about the other two books. Many people around here loved the whole set, though, so I'm in the minority on that opinion!

>58 Simone2: Nice to hear from someone else who loved it. It's funny, the complaint about it being over the top. That was my problem with Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye when I read it 25 or so years ago, but I didn't feel the same about this one. I can think of some literary/plot reasons that might be, but I guess maybe it's also just about where I am in life, maybe. Hard to say.

>59 dchaikin: Thanks! Way behind is okay, it definitely happens. I think that maybe my lukewarm response to Stoner was partially due to the time in which I read it, but Old Filth was totally about the book. It's good to go against the flow every once in a while, it shows you're human. :) Mostly I feel a little bit of ... not exactly regret, but maybe self-recrimination when I put a book aside, but there are other times when it's so, so satisfying.

>60 baswood: Thanks! I felt a little like Simone mentioned, that I needed to defend my liking for it from some of the clamor of complaints.

>61 japaul22: Hm, sounds like you felt about the other two like I felt about the first one! I vaguely thought that opinion was more tilted toward loving the first one but not being a huge fan of the other two, but I admit that I don't really know since I only lightly skim reviews of books I haven't read if I look at them at all.

I listened to It Ended Badly, which is subtitled "Thirteen of the Worst Breakups in History." It's supposed to be a snarky take on love (or arranged marriages) ending in terrible ways, and maybe part self-help, like "hey, your breakup isn't that bad because it didn't end with a beheading, like poor Anne Boleyn." I like snarky humor, but there was not too much of it on display here. She thought she was being clever, I imagine, but most of it fell flat. Then there's the history. I get that she was being *hilarious* by saying that she got some info for one of the pieces from the Wikipedia page, but honestly, she might have been better off if she'd gotten all of her information there. At one point, she describes something that supposedly happened by saying "This is real, actual history, folks" ... and then cites Manchester's pretty much universally discredited A World Lit Only by Fire as her source. The modern-day relationship advice or comments appended to some of the essays is pretty hit or miss, not only in content but in whether or not she really even attempts to tie it in to real-world experiences. Also, she talks about the amazing love affair that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had - they were just so crazy in love, isn't it romantic how they were alcoholic and abusive to each other but couldn't stay away? Or, you know, toxic and co-dependent. I wouldn't exactly hold them up as the greatest love story of all time.

On the plus side, she does revile Norman Mailer and his disappointment that something like stabbing his wife would probably keep him out of consideration for the Nobel Prize.

I've realized that I have a much higher tolerance for finishing terrible books on audio because I'm always doing something useful while I'm listening to them, so it doesn't feel like such a waste of time and also because I can just tune them out for a bit when they annoy me too much.

I've finished a couple more books. First up is Negroland, which I found fascinating. It's a memoir of Margo Jefferson's life, mostly centered around her upbringing as part of the "talented tenth," the black upper class. It's a side of life I've never really considered or heard much about. There are so many interesting, thought-provoking topics - the guarding and display of their relative privilege, the absolute prohibition on behavior or associations that might seem "lower class", the emphasis on being the most perfect examples of their race they could possibly be. And then later, when Margo is older, finding herself considered the wrong type to be embraced by, or find her place in, the black power movement. Finally, there is a section on the result of expecting to be a paragon of good behavior - the depression that is never, never allowed to be given rein.

I didn't always enjoy her style - it's a little fragmented and choppy - but I was really engaged by the subject matter. It's possible it might be different or less jarring in print, too. I listened to the audio book.

Next was World and Town by Gish Jen. The story takes place in small-town Massachusetts, although the book begins with an intro section in Qufu, China, where the ancestors of the main narrator are buried. This narrator, Hattie Kong, is a woman in her 60s, half-Chinese, half-American. Her mother was a missionary who "went native," and Hattie wrestles with the lasting influences of being around that sort of faith in her youth and the impact of being part of two worlds, never quite fitting into either. Although she lived her early life in China, she was sent to live with relatives in the US around her high school years and has been there ever since. She's mourning the recent losses of her husband and her best friend, and she often imagines what they would say or how they would respond to situations.

And she feels like she could use some guidance as she gets new neighbors, a family of Cambodians who seem at a loss in their new world. She makes friends with the teenage daughter, Sophy, but soon Sophy has a competing influence in the form of a car that comes to take her to a local church. Meanwhile the rest of the family is resisting Hattie's attempts to be neighborly. Also, Hattie's old friend and colleague Carter is back in town, bringing up thoughts of her past. And finally, Hattie's acquaintance Ginny is battling with her estranged husband Everett, which spills over from the private to the public.

I liked a lot of things about this book, most of all Hattie's identity and voice. She knows she has been struggling to find her place in the world since the double loss she suffered. Hattie going batty is something she says to herself a lot, hoping it's not true. She embodies the older person who needs people but has a hard time connecting with them. What I liked least about the novel was the change in viewpoints - after hearing from Hattie, we get a section centered around Sophy, who uses the word "wack" like she's getting paid every time she utters it. I know teenage girls are often not the most lexically creative people, but it felt like lazy writing. I understand the desire to use Sophy's voice, but it didn't really work for me. And we also get a section from the point of view of Everett, which I felt like added very little to the story. I just wanted to rush through both of these and get back to Hattie.

Solid, but definitely knocked down a couple of notches by those sections not focused on Hattie.

>55 wandering_star: I don't really remember, unfortunately - I think it was that the humour just didn't work for me, which is one of the most difficult things to ignore when you're reading!

>65 ursula: Gish Jen's Typical American is great.

>66 wandering_star: I've always meant to read Typical American but never got around to it.

>64 ursula: I've nearly bought this a couple of times, your review has given it another nudge Ursula.

>68 Caroline_McElwee: Always happy to help! ;)

Enjoyed your A Little Life review (and also the others!). It's one of those books that's been festering on my wish list for a long time, which means i'm avoiding it but not admitting it to myself. I'm not sure you've entirely convinced me to go for it - seems a bit of a mixed bag.

>70 AlisonY: I didn't really find it a mixed bag, I loved reading it. I just wouldn't recommend it to anyone because it's definitely not suited for everyone, and I don't honestly know how to discern who would be the right audience for it. I addressed some of the common issues I saw that people had with it because when I read them, I thought they were all pretty easily countered. I think that if you're avoiding it though, that might be the right decision.

Recently I finished An Officer and a Spy, which is historical fiction about the Dreyfus Affair. I studied it in history, I read about it again in Proust (and reviewed Wikipedia articles to help out then), but I never really felt like I had a handle on the ins and outs of the case until I read this book. And yes, I know it's fiction, but it's at the very least got the basics down and doesn't change anything crazy. Sometimes you just really need to get involved in it as a story to have history make sense to you.

And this is one that definitely involved me in the story. It's told from the point of view of Colonel Georges Picquart, who became the head of the French intelligence department shortly after Dreyfus's conviction for treason. In that capacity, he started to wonder about the strength and truth of the case against Dreyfus and he worked to exonerate him and get to the bottom of the case. Of course, the French government didn't want to have to go back on their conviction, and they weren't happy about what Picquart managed to turn up. This created problems for Picquart, and he had to undergo some hardships of his own before finally managing to clear Dreyfus's name (and ultimately his own as well). I really sped through this book - turn-of-the-century Paris is clearly drawn, and so is the casual anti-Semitism that was widespread at the time, making it all too easy to pin the crime on the Jewish Dreyfus and extra difficult to get anyone to care that the conviction was unjust. I really enjoyed reading this book, simple as that.

I also finished listening to Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, a memoir by Carrie Brownstein. Before she was on Portlandia and Transparent, she was 1/3 of the band Sleater Kinney. I never really liked them much, and I think a lot of it has to do with exactly how she describes their music - harsh and difficult to fall into a rhythm with. It's never background music. I think if you were a fan of the band, you'd probably get more out of the book, but it's not a requirement to enjoyment, just an added layer. Brownstein talks about her upbringing, with an anorexic mother and a father who would much later come out as gay. (She and her sister tried to be the grown ups since her parents "had teenage problems".) She finds herself in music, sort of - she's still awkward in the rest of her life, but she throws herself into the band. Eventually though she suffers from too many anxiety-related illnesses (shingles is not an affliction for rock stars, she says) and Sleater Kinney disbands, which leaves her wondering who she is.

It's interesting both for who Brownstein is and who she isn't. She is a thoughtful, readerly person who likes to dissect experiences. She is not the type to write a memoir about a drug, alcohol and sex-filled time in a band, because that wasn't her experience. But she does talk frankly about the challenges in her life and that's interesting by itself. Be warned though: if you're looking for insight into her time on either of those tv shows, you will be disappointed. I believe she only namechecks each of them once, in completely unimportant asides.

>72 ursula: Thank you! I am in the middle of Guermantes Way right now and trying to decide how much I want to research the Dreyfus Affair. Since I have a terrible habit of tuning out history books and find wikipedia somewhat tedious, a novel is just what I need!

>74 ELiz_M: You are very welcome! I think I would have gotten much more out of the Dreyfus-related talk in Proust had I read this book first. I finally feel like I understand the twists and turns of the case. Hope it does the same for you!

>75 ursula: I've been considering reading Proust and have gone as far as buying a complete set of the books. It's going to happen in the next few years. So, An Officer and a Spy will help me understand parts of Proust? Any other suggestions of book to read first?

>76 japaul22: Yes, the Dreyfus affair is going on during some of the time Proust writes about and since there are a lot of people sitting around in parlors discussing the topics of the day, that comes up kind of a lot.

I can't think of anything else that would be a good idea to read about, really. I'll give it some more thought though and let you know if I come up with any others!

>77 ursula: Thanks! I'm only in the "summoning up the courage" phase so I have lots of time.

>78 japaul22: It's like a swimming pool, you have to just dive in. :) Or I guess you can wade ... the point is, you've gotta at least get your feet wet to find out it's not as bad as you think it will be. (That's as far as I can carry that metaphor.)

I have really, really been missing in action lately. I've read a few books, I took a trip to southern Italy, but other than those things I suppose there isn't much to report. The two books I finished were The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which I liked a lot, and My Antonia, which I liked but didn't love.

And here's a photo from southern Italy:

I visited the Abruzzo area pre-kids and really enjoyed it (although typical mountains - the weather was unkind). Also the lovely l'Aquila which was devastated by the terrible earthquake a few years ago. I really loved that whole area towards the south of Italy - it felt much more authentic Italy as there were way fewer visitors.

>81 AlisonY: This was considerably farther south than Abruzzo (which I haven't made it to, unfortunately) - this was in Basilicata. We were in the small section of the region that touches the Tyrrhenian Sea, sandwiched between Campania to the north and Calabria to the south.

I was talking to someone about how I think that Americans (I can't speak for the rest of the world ... I can barely speak for Americans ;)) have this image of Italy that is some sort of mix of the people of southern Italy living in the cities of northern Italy. They're really different places, driven partly by tourism and partly by the industries of each, historically and currently.

Yeah I would certainly not say any area of the country is less authentic >> it's just different regions with different lifestyles. Like trying to compare the regions of the US and claiming one was more "authentic American" than another.

>82 ursula:

this image of Italy that is some sort of mix of the people of southern Italy living in the cities of northern Italy.

Ha, that is so well observed! I may quote you some time. :)

I think the major reason for this image, among Americans, is that the vast majority of Italian immigrants to the US were from the South. It makes for some skewed expectations.

>81 AlisonY:, >82 ursula:, >83 .Monkey.:, >84 LolaWalser: Yeah, that's a good observation. My relatives in Toscana don't identify with southern Italians at all (well, with anyone, really, but especially southern).

Fantasy books and movies such as Under the Tuscan Sun don't help Americans form a realistic image either.

>83 .Monkey.: I think it depends. If you go to Vegas and see the strip and downtown, you might say it's not very authentically American compared to other places (except in the sense that it's oh-so-American to have bright lights and fake landmarks from around the world). If you visit the tourist-laden areas of Rome and then go somewhere else, it's quite likely you'll feel the same.

>84 LolaWalser: Thank you! I was surprised to learn recently that most of the immigrants to my area of California were from Sicily. I had no idea.

>85 Nickelini: My great-grandparents were from Toscana as well, but I have no idea how they or my Nonna or her siblings identified in the greater picture of Italy. Unfortunately, my Nonna was the youngest and didn't marry another Italian, so we weren't surrounded by any Italian community. And she died when I was 19 so there was no time to find anything out.

But I do know that here in Veneto, so many things are dismissed with a roll of the eyes and "well, in the south maybe..." Our language exchange partner abhors Naples and responds with a shudder every time I say I like it.

I haven't read or seen Under the Tuscan Sun but I've certainly gotten the idea. I'm pretty sure it would just make me yell.

>86 ursula: I have been to Rome, and to Firenze, and Venezia, and Napoli, and Amalfi. Rome has more hustle & bustle than the others, sure. But that doesn't make it, or those Italians who live there, remotely less authentic. Yes, they live in a big busy city, as opposed to the rural countryside. And? People who live in Chicago, NYC, Dallas, Atlanta, etc, do not have any less authentic an American experience just because they are in huge cities and I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find an American to say otherwise! Just because it is not the same experience as the rural farmer from Idaho, or the suburban family in Cleveland, or the fisherman on the coast... And Rome, is chock-full of the ancient history of the country, to boot! We don't hear about Italians who went conquering, it was Romans. It was, and is, a key piece of the country, of course it's not going to be a lazy little village nor the people who live there be sleepy villagers. Hell, would you hear someone say Paris was not authentic France? Paris is crazy busy! Nothing at all like a nice vineyard out in the country, hm, but which of those do people instantly think of when they think France?

Well, apparently this is something of a sore spot with me, American idealized notions of what the rest of the world ought to be based on goofy movies and postcard snapshots and whatnot. Sorry to rant/derail your thread! xD

>86 ursula:

But I do know that here in Veneto, so many things are dismissed with a roll of the eyes and "well, in the south maybe..." Our language exchange partner abhors Naples and responds with a shudder every time I say I like it.

There's lots of very acrimonious, even vicious, local-chauvinism in Italy... I saw it play out in a rare inversion recently here in the diaspora, with the post-2008 Italian immigrants from the "prosperous" northern Italy getting cold-shouldered and ostracised by the Southerners who have established themselves long before.

>88 LolaWalser: Quite true. And interesting to see it turned in the other direction.

In other news, I finished Finders Keepers, the second in Stephen King's mystery trilogy about the retired detective Bill Hodges. This time, a teenage boy finds a trunk full of money and the unpublished work of a much-admired author (sort of a combination between JD Salinger and John Updike) who was killed many years ago. Of course, the find doesn't come without consequences. Hodges and his unlikely cohorts from the first book (Mr. Mercedes) end up involved to help put things right, as much as is possible. King writes teenage boys really well, and Pete, the finder of the trunk, is definitely the most compelling character. I didn't like this one as much as the first one, and in fact the parts I liked the least involved the trio of characters from the last book, go figure. Still pretty enjoyable overall, though.

King - haven't tried him.

Going back a ways, enjoyed your takes on It ended badly (although I won't read it. I agree with your audio comment.), Negroland (which sounds fascinating), An officer and a spy (which is a history I could use), and Hunger Makes me a modern girl.

And another lovely photo in >80 ursula:.

>91 dchaikin: I am always surprised when someone says they have never read a Stephen King book. Especially now, when he's written in a number of different genres. Not that I think everyone necessarily should read something by him, just that he's become so ubiquitous that he seems hard to avoid.

I'm not sure if I should be more discerning on audio or if it's okay to finish more bad books that way. I guess I lean toward the latter because it's nonfiction and there is usually at least some information I can get out of even the bad ones. One thing that struck me about An Officer and a Spy was that the Dreyfus affair was actually quite a fascinating story. That somehow never came through in any of the factual accounts I'd read. I'll be honest, I thought it was confusing and pretty deadly boring. But it turns out to be the exact opposite when it's told well.

And thanks about the photo. The weather was cooler and cloudier than I'd hoped for but the fog did make for some lovely atmosphere! And it usually burned off for at least a period of the day.

Recently I finished The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, which I had attempted to start before but put down after only a couple of pages. The book is told in a very distinctive style and voice, and it just didn't mesh for me the first time around. An example:

"Everybody out for themselves, even to dealing death, and you come to a complete aloneness. You and the universe. The cold stars. Like these that are fading, silent as we walk. Believe in the possibility of connectedness and you get something else. A tattered union suit flying on a flagpole. Help asked and given. A smile across a dirt yard, a wave. Now the dawn not so lonely."

Hm. Yeah. But don't let it scare you off. The book takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape where (yawn) a virus has killed the majority of the population. The narrator, Hig, is a pilot who lives at an airport in Colorado along with his dog, Jasper, and another guy, Bangley. Bangley and Hig are odd bedfellows (not literal), which I suppose is what you get after the world ends. The plot is whatever it is, but the point of the novel is really about what humanity means, how much connection we need with other people and how adverse the circumstances have to be for us to cease searching for it, and how to measure loss when you've already experienced loss on a cosmic scale. I loved it.

You've made me want to take a second look at The Dog Stars.

>94 RidgewayGirl: Did you try it before or just haven't been interested?

Great review of Dog Stars. That quote would turn me off, but your review actually encourages me. It's a book I've wondered about, not knowing anything about, so it was also nice to learn about.

And, going back to >92 ursula:, I encourage you to abandon bad books so you have more time to find the good ones, even on audio. : )

>96 dchaikin: Yeah, I feel like it's important to know what you're getting into with the style. It really was not working for me when I tried it originally. But I've had it happen a few times like that, where you are thrown by the style at first but you just have to let go and let it wash over you to start appreciating it. Sometimes a Great Notion was another one of those for me, and Requiem for a Dream.

I know I probably should abandon even audio books, but it's so much harder to get hold of interesting ones at the library that I don't often have another one waiting to try. So I slog on. :)

I'm behind in posting about what I've read, too. So...

I listened to The World Without Us. I'm pretty sure everyone knows the deal with this book since it was in the news quite a bit when it came out, and they also did some sort of TV production based on it. But anyway, what would happen if people were to disappear from the earth suddenly? (I guess it turns out to be a sort of themed read with The Dog Stars, haha.) Would animals come back from the brink of extinction? Would non-native plants win out over indigenous ones? How long would man-made edifices continue to stand, and how would nature adapt, using and enveloping them? And what would happen with all our nuclear power plants and waste sites, our petroleum processing plants, our subway systems? Really interesting stuff, if a little unfocused at times.

And belatedly:

June Roundup of Reading:

This month, I read 0 physical books, 5 Kindle/ebooks, and listened to 2 audio books.
I read 2361 pages (not including my Clarissa reading) and listened to 27 hours, 55 minutes of audio.
My reading was 78% fiction and 28% nonfiction.
I read books by 6 men and 1 woman.
The earliest publication date was 1850 (David Copperfield), and the most recent was 2015 (Finders Keepers)

This month the male authors have again edged out the female in year-to-date totals. Current library percentages: 67.8% male/32.2% female.

Kind of a slow month in terms of books completed, but the page count is actually up over last month so it's not all bad. This is also the second month in a row where I didn't read a physical book. I have 2 remaining on my shelves, but I'm saving one or possibly both of them for whenever we move.

Best of the month: The Dog Stars. Worst: The Ugly Renaissance, which wasn't really bad, just wasn't written in a way that entirely worked for me.

>95 ursula: I've mistaken Peter Heller for Mark Helprin and was expecting something fantasy-like. I'm not sure why, though.

>97 ursula: yeah, I know what you mean. Some of the best books take a little patience and perseverance - which can be easier on audio. And also, it's easier to read outside your comfort zone on audio. You can get through books you might not actually like, but that have value of some sort.

>100 RidgewayGirl: Ah I see, well that would be jarring. :)

>101 dchaikin: I don't ever listen to fiction on audio. I know people swear by it, but it's not for me. If I'm listening to someone, I want them to be imparting information, not telling me a story. Although I guess with narrative nonfiction they're telling me a story, but still, the intent is different.

I'm generally the same way. I want NPR as an audiobook. But sometimes fiction has worked for me really nicely.

Trying to catch up a bit.



The Well of Loneliness was published in 1928, and it now proclaims on the cover that it is "the 1920s classic of lesbian fiction". I didn't know what to expect, although whatever it was, it wasn't this book. I expected it to be more dated, more locked in its time. And while there were definitely things that tied it to its time period, like calling homosexuals "inverts", and some ideas about gender identity and sexual orientation, a good amount of it was very similar to today. Let me back up for a second and cover a few basics - the main character is Stephen, who is born to parents who were convinced they were having a boy; when she turned out to be a girl, they went ahead with the name anyway. She is a tomboy, and between that and some of her childhood attachments, her father suspects she is a lesbian. Her mother has no idea. Stephen grows up lonely and confused, and comes to adulthood without knowing what precisely is different about her.

So what I mean when I say that parts of the book are very similar to today is that for example, the scene where Stephen comes out is unfortunately all too like a conversation that is happening somewhere in the world right at this very moment. Almost a hundred years later and still, someone is hearing they are an abomination, an offense against god, and that the loved one they are coming out to would rather see them dead than gay. I found it a powerful scene because of that. I saw some other reviewers saying the book was full of stereotypes and melodrama, but I think the former is a product of the time and/or an attempt to make the subject matter more palatable to an audience of that time, and the latter is not a problem to me. Also, there are some great, empathetic passages about dog behavior and psychology.

Quote: "I would rather see you dead at my feet than standing before me with this thing upon you - this unspeakable outrage that you call love ...."

>103 dchaikin: I am a little jealous when I read about people having such great experiences with fiction audio books, I admit! But I guess I should be glad it narrows my choices somewhat, so that I don't feel overwhelmed trying to balance fiction and non.

Interesting about The Well of Loneliness

on audiobooks, you can always try books outside of your comfort zone, if you like, especially in they are free library books. With fiction, there are some things that work for me - straight-forward language, maybe even a bit formal, can work. Purple prose, or anything close, is out. And dramatic readers are out. Subtlety is out too. It's just kind of trial and error as to what works. And some fiction does read like nonfiction. But, that's only if you really want to try fiction. Nothing wrong with nonfiction.

Enjoyed your review of The well of loneliness It is not easy to understand how difficult it must have been to write that novel back in the 1920's

It's been a while, sorry about that. Things have been ... busy, I guess.

I'm going to throw in some comments on books I've finished recently to bring things back up to date.



The Sympathizer. This was the Pulitzer winner last year. It's about a Vietnamese double agent who is living in the US as a refugee following the end of the Vietnam War. The book takes the form of his written confession to a mysterious commissar. I liked this one. It challenged a lot of the accepted story of Vietnam and the refugees. Of course we know that response to US intervention was mixed, and that refugees had to have complicated feelings about making the US their new homes. But by using a narrator who would have preferred (and would still work for) the other outcome, it gives the author the freedom to really run with the negative side. And as a bonus, the plot and descriptions surrounding the making of the movie which is the fictional version of Apocalypse Now are both hilarious and head-in-the-hands recognizable about the treatment of minorities in general and the Vietnamese in particular.



The Log from the Sea of Cortez. I see that it is the 7th book I've read by Steinbeck. In the introduction, it quoted something said about the book in 1958: it "stands to his work very much as Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa stand to that of Hemingway." The idea being that the topic is really just what provides a window into the author's opinions about people and the world. I enjoyed Death in the Afternoon very much, and I enjoyed this one as well. Steinbeck goes off on a marine-animal-collecting trip with Doc Ricketts among others around Baja California. You can get so much out of this book - information about marine animals, the climate and geography of coastal Mexico and Baja California, a peek at various Mexican towns, an impression of the Mexican Indians, how to run a collecting expedition (including all the mistakes it's possible to make), what it's like being on a boat for a couple of weeks with other people and their idiosyncracies ... all that and more.

And while he observes mildly that life in Mexico or for the Indians seems somewhat simpler, he doesn't romanticize it, either, not falling into the trap of the "noble savage" or "noble poor." But interestingly, he also doesn't fall on the other side, demonizing our lives. He says more than once that things are different - not better, not worse, just different. And at the end of the book is a section about Ed Ricketts, which was just a great finisher for the whole thing.

Quote: "It is said so often and in such ignorance that Mexicans are contented, happy people. "They don't want anything." This, of course, is not a description of the happiness of Mexicans, but of the unhappiness of the person who says it. For Americans, and probably all northern peoples, are all masses of wants growing out of inner insecurity. The great drive of our people stems from insecurity."



Fingersmith. I'll just jump to the end and say that I ended up liking this one. I was not crazy about the first section, and I felt that the voice was a little too modern for the mid-1800s in England. But then the point of view changed and things started coming together for me. The story involves Sue, a thief (although it's kind of weird that she's supposed to be good at thieving since we don't see or hear about her doing much of it...) who was brought up by a surrogate mother, Mrs. Sucksby, after Sue's own mother was hanged as a murderess. Sue goes with one of their group of swindlers, "Gentleman", to run a scam on a young heiress he wants to marry.

Well, the story was a lot more complicated than I originally thought it was going to be, and maybe occasionally it was too complicated by half, but I still enjoyed the ride. There were times after the point of view switch where you wonder why you are reading the same conversation essentially verbatim from the first section without getting a whole different take on it, but maybe I'm feeling tolerant about that because I'm currently 2/3 of the way through Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, which would quite literally be half the size without all the repeating of conversations and events.

I read this now because I saw that Park Chan-wook has adapted the novel into a movie called The Handmaiden with a setting change to Korea under Japanese rule, and I'm interested in seeing it eventually.

>106 dchaikin: Yeah, dramatic readers .... I tried (maybe accidentally, I can't remember) one of those multiple-narrator, dramatic readings of a book once - for about 10 minutes. I just couldn't handle it. I guess I am not the audience for radio plays. :)

>107 baswood: I think that's a good point, and it's hard to keep that sort of thing in mind for a modern reader.

We found out yesterday that we will be moving from Padova to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

Our flight leaves on August 23. It's going to be a whirlwind.

>110 ursula: goodness - that's a quick 'all change'! Hope the move goes well.

I love that quote from A Log from the Sea of Cortez. Magnificent.

Enjoyed your latest three reviews, but feel bad you have to make your move so suddenly from Italy. Wish you well with all that.

Wow, that's sudden.

The UP! Beautiful area of the state but pretty different from Italy!

Wow, that is short notice!

Safe and happy moving Ursula.

>111 AlisonY: It is indeed a quick change! So far, so good, aside from a constant somewhat-low level of panic.

>112 dchaikin: It's a good one. There were lots to choose from - I really enjoyed Steinbeck's thoughts on the people and places he saw.

At most we were going to be here for 6 more weeks, so it would have been somewhat sudden no matter what, but yeah this is on the extreme end. The provost said "It would be perfect if you could be here for the orientation on the 22nd, but it's not really necessary." Thank goodness, because there is no way we could have made that!

>113 Nickelini: Yep. Seems like in academia it either takes 6 months or 6 days.

I didn't know there was a film adaptation. And the setting sounds intriguing. I'll have to look out for The Handmaiden.

As for the move -- good luck! I wish you calm and patience. Being just on the other end of an international move (now living in a land of boxes as we figure out where everything will go in a differently shaped house) I know what it's like! My only advice is to pack any books yourself. Some movers are great, some have no idea and it's easier to not arrive to find dozens of broken spines. And enjoy your new home!

While bringing wine back is a complicated endeavor, we did bring back a case of good olive oil and I'm so pleased we did.

>114 japaul22: Never been there! Either to the UP or to Michigan at all - neither of us has. It will be interesting.

>115 FlorenceArt: Short notice, yes! But that's okay - it's crazy right now but it will get done and before we even know it we will be in Michigan.

>116 Caroline_McElwee: Thank you very much, Caroline!

>118 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for the calm and patience wishes - I am lacking in those on the best days so it's much appreciated. As for the rest, well, it's not that kind of move. We have no dishes, kitchenware, furniture or really even books (I think between the two of us we have about 10). Everything goes into 3 suitcases and off we go. It's a matter of paring down things we accumulated here and things we brought that have outlived their usefulness.

Oh, that sounds so much easier. Tell your dog he will love the Upper Peninsula.

>121 RidgewayGirl: I wouldn't say it's easier, but it's certainly different.

The dog will totally love the UP. She loved Denver -- she likes hikes, water, and snow. And as a bonus, hates heat so this will be close to her ideal spot. Too cold in the winter, but otherwise perfect. We'll have to see if she can be coerced into wearing some of those snow booties.

What kind of dog? Even our small dog loves the snow and can be out when it's quite cold (not the coldest Michigan days, but most of the winter). The main problem we've found in the winter is when people salt the sidewalks because that really hurts his paws.

>123 japaul22: She's an Australian Cattle Dog. She had problems in Denver with the salt as well, it would freeze her paws. She has a double coat so she can go out in pretty much anything but yeah, her paws are the problem.

Well, we're here. We had a whole adventure getting here - changed flights, long layover, different landing city than we'd originally planned on, 8+ hours of driving after touching down in the US, deciding to stay in a place 15 mins after seeing it, etc. But we're here, have a place to live, husband starts teaching Monday, and things are okay. Still a ton of things to do to get ourselves settled, but we're starting to knock a couple of things off the list (we have a bed, yay!).

I'm way behind on posting about books so I'll be back to do that somewhat soon. We don't have our own wifi yet so we're sort of "borrowing" from someone and it's not always available.

Yay indeed. Glad you have reached your new destination. I look forward to reading of your adventures Ursula.

I've just caught up, and read about your move. Three suitcases. My goodness. I guess that does make it easier. I'm such a terrible packer, I have trouble packing for vacation. :). Enjoy your new adventure.

>126 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks! I was essentially immediately brought down by some sort of illness (I think this has happened every single time we've returned from Europe - never in the other direction though) so adventures will be slightly delayed! I'm hoping to leave the house tomorrow and actually get a bit of a look around the town.

>127 NanaCC: I really don't know if it makes it easier. It makes for hard decisions about what can be kept and a testing of the weight limits set by the airlines. My daughter also has a terrible time packing for absolutely anything - I'm sure she would be a wreck trying to do this. (Not saying that I'm the picture of calm and relaxation, but I don't pack, unpack and re-pack.) And thank you!

Catching up a bit on books I've read:



L'amica geniale

It was great to be able to read this in Italian, and to picture the places in Naples. The very beginning drew me in, but the early-to-mid-childhood part of the story was not that exciting to me. Things picked up again though when Lila/Lina and Lenù got a little older and their paths started to diverge. And the very end was a real kicker, making me look forward to the rest of the series.



How to Build a Girl

Since I've been trying to balance my reading in terms of male/female authors, and since I have a few male authors in my immediate future, I picked up How to Build a Girl from the library. It seemed like it should be pretty breezy and easy to get through, which would balance the Dostoevsky and Pynchon I'm currently reading.

It's about a sort of "nothing" teenager whose family has some issues (her father is on disability, her mother has become distant after the birth of twins, Johanna (the narrator) ends up taking care of her little brother all of the time, she is fat and unattractive). Teenagers aren't my favorite thing to read about, but shortly Johanna decides to reinvent herself with a new image so I stuck with it. Well, at about 25% in, I looked up reviews for the book and there was a pretty consistent theme running through them about how the first part was hilariously, laugh-out-loud funny, and then after a while the story was just a little over the top. Considering that I had barely cracked a smile up to that point in the book and most of my facial workout consisted of eye-rolling, I abandoned it.



Inherent Vice

Next up, I read Inherent Vice. In 2014, I read The Crying of Lot 49, and that left me with the thought: "What did I just read?" But in spite of that, I felt like I got something out of it. I felt challenged by its determination to draw the reader into a web of conspiracy theories. I felt probably just as disoriented with Inherent Vice, but I didn't feel that same pull.

It's a sort of mystery novel, kind of like if you set the hard-boiled detective stories of the 30s and 40s in the hippie era instead. Well, actually it's exactly like that. The main character, Doc, is your PI but instead of a whiskey bottle in every drawer, he's got a joint in every pocket. He has his share of dames - er, groovy chicks - who wander in his door and want various things. He gets used by the good and bad guys, knocked out once or twice, involved in a gun fight - you get the idea. It sounds like it should have been fun, but it really wasn't. And I know it's Pynchon's things to give his characters ridiculous names, but I just really couldn't deal with these, and you'd think the characters would stick with me because of those names, but I just couldn't seem to keep anyone straight. Probably because I didn't care about any of them. (Seriously - Buddy Tubeside, Sauncho Smilax, Agent Flatweed, Japonica Fenway ... I'm exhausted just thinking about it.)

I read this because my husband and I were interested in seeing the movie. I am now simultaneously less and more interested to see it, however that might be possible.



The Blazing World

This deserves so much more said about it but I read it in the run-up to the move and so I guess it gets short shrift. It's about Harriet (Harry) Burden, an artist who was married to an art dealer. She feels like women in general and she in particular don't get the same attention that men do, so she decides to start showing her work as a man. The whole book takes place after her death and is put together through interviews, excerpts from her various notebooks, and written statements from other people in her life. It's kind of like a mockumentary in print form.

I thought it was going to go in a slightly different direction than it did, and I was a bit disappointed by that, but I have to give it a high rating just based on how much I wanted to keep reading it all the time. It reminded me a bit of House of Leaves in terms of how involved it was in creating a full sense of reality.

I really loved The Blazing World. It was one of those books that I found challenging to read, but I still think about it and find the whole premise and layout of the book interesting.

>129 ursula: Thanks for the review! She is a hit or miss author for me and from your review, I think this will be one of the hits.

Glad you have been softening your move with some light reading...

You're not encouraging me toward Inherent Vice. I picked up Vineland a while back, and read a bit. I thought it was nice...but I haven't been able to motivate myself to go back to it. I did really enjoy the books of his I have read.

Wish you well on settling in.

>129 ursula: >130 japaul22: I do have The Blazing World somewhere, and generally like Hustvedt. I like her essays too.

>130 japaul22: I just wanted to get back to it all the time, and it's pretty rare that I feel that way about a book. I tend to read a number of books at the same time and pick them up and put them down more or less in rotation. I kept picking up The Blazing World instead of other things. :)

>131 ELiz_M: Interesting. I'm really looking forward to reading more of her books eventually.

>132 dchaikin: Right? And a little bit before the move, I started The Brothers Karamazov. That sounds insane, so let me explain - I thought we would have between 3 and 6 weeks left in Italy, and it was the last of my paper books (that I hadn't purchased there and was intending to bring home). So I figured I could finish it before the move and get rid of it. And then about 5 days later I found out we were moving ASAP! Reading 80+ pages a day of Russian lit didn't sound possible (let alone a good time) ... so I ended up packing it and bringing it here. I'm working on it now.

Sorry to discourage you from Inherent Vice! It's possible that I'm just entirely the wrong reader for that one. My only experience of Pynchon is The Crying of Lot 49 and there were similarities - crazy involved conspiracy, stupidly-named characters, drugs, etc., but I felt like this one lacked the depth (or seeming depth, since I can't say I really plumbed Lot 49 to know for sure that it wasn't all show) of the other.

>133 Caroline_McElwee: I've heard good things, I will get around to another of her books one day. I'm usually pretty slow to return to an author, although there are exceptions.

I haven't gotten out much since we got here because I've been sick, but here's a photo from a couple of days ago.



The view at sunset from our house. There's a Seventh Day Adventist Church across the street, and that road coming toward you is one of the town's main drags. The university my husband teaches at is just down that street on the right side.

Beautiful sunset Ursula. Hope you are feeling better, and will be out exploring soon.

>128 ursula: I was essentially immediately brought down by some sort of illness (I think this has happened every single time we've returned from Europe - never in the other direction though)

Hmmmm. When I've gone through this I always took it as a sign to get back to Europe, asap. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. North America is just so . . . . not Europe.

>137 Nickelini: If only! My husband has to find another job there. It's just so strange that it's never happened in the other direction, and there's the same amount (or more) of stress and things to do, cleaning, finding apartments, etc. Go figure.

Catching up again on the reading, hopefully.



Boxers

This graphic novel didn't entirely do it for me. It was an interesting telling of the story of the 1900 Boxer Revolution in China, complete with gods helping the crusaders to get the foreign devils out of their country. I do think it was nice to see the story so thoroughly from the Chinese point of view, but it just didn't grab me and make me care. I know that Yang wrote a sequel from the point of view of the missionaries, called Saints. I will probably eventually read it just for completeness' sake.



The Drowned World

This is a dystopian novel which takes place in a world which has undergone severe climate change, not due to man's actions, but due to changes in the sun. The earth has rapidly heated up from the equator out, and the jungles and water are taking over. Civilization is hovering near the poles. The main character, Dr. Robert Kerans, is part of a scientific group that goes around studying various places that have been deserted. He doesn't normally even know what former city they're navigating their boats over, but one of his fellow expedition members tells him this one is London. I feel like there were some really interesting ideas here, and they were executed reasonably well, but Ballard always seems to keep a reader at a certain distance from his characters. (This is the 3rd novel of his I've read.) However, I am completely in love with his vocabulary and his deployment of words.



The Falls

I feel like Joyce Carol Oates wants to write about all the things. I know she is prolific, but even within one novel she seems loathe to leave anything out. It was all pretty easy to get through - I never really felt like I was slogging through the prose - but I did wonder where on earth she was going a good amount of the time. It starts out about Ariah, whose husband throws himself over Niagara Falls the day after their wedding, but it spirals from there. Ariah takes a back seat for a good chunk of the book and it becomes about the Love Canal litigation, then about Ariah's children, then about people Ariah's children know .... It's as if Oates knows exactly who all her characters are and all the details of their lives, which is great, but she wants to share them with the reader. All of them. I just felt like the book careened around aimlessly and in the end, didn't amount to anything. I still gave it an average rating because I didn't feel like giving it up, I just wished she'd focus a little.

>135 ursula: What a beautiful picture. I always am so fascinated by the American South. I hope you'll have a good time there before returning to Europe :-)

>140 Simone2: Thank you! But I'm nowhere near the American South - I'm on the Canadian border in Michigan. So far I'm enjoying it but yeah, wouldn't turn down a return to Europe!

>141 ursula: Aarch, I am mixing you up with sombody else here who moved to the Carolinas lately. How stupid. The church just fit the picture. I am sorry. Still wishing you a good time though!

>142 Simone2: No problem! Yeah, RidgewayGirl recently moved back to South Carolina from Germany. It's not stupid, it's confusing to have two people who were living in Europe coming back in a relatively short amount of time! I think the churches are similar in small towns in most of the country, although I can't say for sure - I've never really been to the south. My daughter lives there now (in Georgia for graduate school) so maybe I'll get to visit and check it out! :)

>139 ursula: I too liked The Drowned World, and images float through my mind from time to time, but Ballard is never a comforting read Ursula. I agree, great writing though.

>144 Caroline_McElwee: I dove right in with Ballard, reading Crash first. I've been intrigued ever since.

>145 ursula: >144 Caroline_McElwee: He certainly writes stories that stick with you. I read The Drowned World and Super-Cannes and although I did not even like them that much, I do remember them vividly!

I haven't had much time and opportunity to connect to LT this year or comment on your thread, but there's a lot I like, quite similar reading interests, and a lot to see (photos) and learn (from your various other readings and comments).

I read When the Emperor Was Divine, which is a novel about Japanese internment during World War II. It centers on a woman and her two children. The father of the family has already been taken somewhere, and now it's time for all Japanese to report to camps. No one in the book has a name, to underscore the universality of the story. That could have felt like a gimmick, but it was done skillfully nad never detracted from the ability to connect with the characters. The book is so short, and the prose is so spare, but it packs a punch.

Quote: "The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window. He had not given the tortoise a name but he had scratched his family's identification number into its shell with the tip of his mother's nail file."

>146 Simone2: True - I think "vivid" really works as a description for his writing and stories. I would hesitate to recommend his books to just about anyone, but I think they are definitely worth reading - if that makes sense.

>147 edwinbcn: Thanks for the visit and the kind words! I know you have a hard time with LT due to net restrictions - it's always good to see you around and catch up with you though. I'll head over and see what you've been reading as well.

Well, this is an interesting article on the vagaries of the English language: English Is Not Normal.

It gave me some insight into a few things I had a hard time explaining coherently to our language exchange partner in Padova, particularly the idea of one word being more "formal" than another.

>150 ursula: Wonderful summary of the history of the English language! I'm a little skeptical about the "English is weird" part, but then the author seems to know what he's talking about, certainly more than I do about this subject.

Still, I'm guessing that you could take any language and pick several things unusual about it. Maybe not as many as he found about English, I don't know. What is "normal" for a language anyway? English does have a very rich history, but is it so different from many other European languages? French also was formed from many influences, mainly Latin, but also Celtic (Gaul) and whatever the various invaders were speaking (Frankish?), not to forget the languages of colonized people, mainly Algerian Arabic. And the trend to form new words from Greek (or Latin, or combined Greek and Latin roots) was shared by most European languages, in fact many of these newly constructed words are virtually identical in many languages. Photography, which he cites, is a good example: FR photographie, DE Fotografie, ES, IT and PT fotografia...

Also, I think all languages have different ways of saying the same thing, that are suitable for different contexts (more or less formal). Although I don't think that French has three different words for Royal :-)

>150 ursula: That's so interesting. I read about the different formalities of word choices from a Canadian crime novel -- the protagonist was a lawyer who learned English as an adult and so was focused on when he should use the more formal word or the more down-to-earth choice. It's a fascinating subject.

>151 FlorenceArt: I think that the part that makes English "weird" at least in part is that although other languages incorporate words from different places, they tend to have rules for how they deal with them. In Italian, foreign words don't get pluralized - singular "lo sport", plural "gli sport", singular "il film" plural "i film". When foreign words are used as verbs, they conjugate the same way as Italian verbs - taggare is borrowed from English but it conjugates like any other -are verb.

In English, sometimes we pluralize foreign words (cappuccino, cappuccinos) and sometimes we don't (sushi). And our conjugation, as pointed out in that video, doesn't exist except in the third person. Which, maybe you can argue is just our conjugation system - except that we apparently used to have more and just gave up. I don't know of other languages that have just thrown their hands up and said "eh, forget that whole conjugation thing".

And I agree that all languages have synonyms that might have slightly different connotations or be more literary or whatever (Italian has so. many. words.), but it's more a matter of preference which one people seem to use. But lots of words in English don't seem to have different connotations except that they come across more formally.

>152 RidgewayGirl: It can really make a difference! Like I said, I was at a loss to explain the difference sometimes. And now of course all the examples are long gone from my memory. But it came up kind of a lot because there are tons of words in English that appear very similar to their Italian counterparts - except that they're either formal or just rarely used. Those words always seemed better to him than the synonyms that looked totally different, of course, but I had to tell him so many times that some of those words wouldn't even be understood! It always amused me that on the tram, there were signs saying that when standing you should use the "apposite" handhold. I'm pretty sure most Americans would not recognize that word, but it's an exact translation of the Italian "apposito".

Constantly trying to keep afloat on posting about books, and failing.... :)



The Boys in the Boat

Non-fiction about rowing and the 1936 Olympics. I learned a ton about rowing, which I always somehow thought was sort of an upper-class, East coast sort of thing to do. And that's part of where the tension of this book comes from, in fact, because the eastern teams were mostly dominant (except for the rising star of Berkeley) and the Seattle team that is the focus of the book were decidedly not the stereotypical image of rowers. The main character in the book, Joe Rantz, was raised in poverty and abandoned by his family when he was in high school. Not exactly the genteel, sweater-over-the-shoulder life I imagined.

It's a good story made I suppose more interesting because of beating the Nazis, but really the Nazi backdrop was the least fascinating part of the book for me. Except for the descriptions of Leni Riefenstahl's filming of the Olympics, which I've never seen but am curious about now. I never would have guessed that descriptions of a sport I knew nothing about could be not only enthralling but also cast a philosophical light on sports and life, but that's exactly what happened. Good stuff.

I guess I got a little ahead of myself there and skipped a book.



The Little Red Chairs

Well, this was an interesting book. A stranger ingratiates himself into a small Irish town, but soon it turns out not only is he not who he seems, he may be the very incarnation of evil. The implications of his past life and his time in the Irish town are far-reaching in ways both big and small. This book pretty much never went where I thought it was going to, which was interesting. I will be thinking about it for a long time to come, I suspect. There's a lot of commentary on people and the world that one could unpack if one were so inclined. Also, the last line is one of the best ones I can remember reading.

I've got The Little Red Chairs on the list of books I want to read. I'll have to get to it soon.

How's life on the UP?

>153 ursula: I can sympathize with your Italian exchange partner. He recognized a perfectly ordinary, everyday Italian word and had trouble accepting that in English, it's an imported word, and therefore in effect not the same word at all. There was already an English word for the meaning and use of the equivalent Italian word, so in English the imported word occupied a different niche, with a different level of formality and also frequently a different meaning. In French, we call these words faux amis. I could give you a list of words that, when you hear them used by French people, you should not assume they mean what they mean in English. And it's very difficult to avoid this kind of mistake, even when you're aware of it, because the English usage feels unnatural or just plain wrong. It took me years to accept that the phrase "to trust implicitly" is not incorrect usage, it's just an English usage and not a French one.

>157 FlorenceArt: It's not exactly a false friend in my understanding of that term ... those are words like "attualmente" (which means "currently") and "actually", or "camera" (room) and "camera", "attendere" (to wait) and "attend". In this case, "apposite" has the correct meaning, or close enough, but it's a word that fell out of favor long ago and like I said, I'm sure most English speakers wouldn't even know what it means.

>155 ursula: I agree, this was an excellent and thought provoking novel Ursula. O'Brien's writing feels easy, but there are layers and depths.

>159 Caroline_McElwee: The best ones make it look easy, I think. And it is also easy to read, except when it isn't. There is a scene of violence in there that I think is a testament to how good her writing is because it affected me like no other violence in a book has that I can remember. I will not get that out of my head for a long while, even though the scene itself is relatively short. I think it has to do with how well she handled the events preceding it.

>155 ursula: This book has been on my radar for a while but after reading your review I am sure I have to read it.

>161 Simone2: I would definitely recommend it. She has a talent for making you think you're reading something small and then realize how many big implications there really are.

State of Wonder

My daughter read this book before her trip to the Galapagos a couple of years ago, and then recommended it to me, and now I've finally gotten around to it. I don't know if it was coincidence or if someone recommended the book to her, but the anti-malarial drug my daughter was taking features in this novel about pharmaceutical researchers in the Amazon. The main character is Marina, a half Indian (eastern, not native), half white woman working for big pharma. Her officemate was sent off to Brazil to check up on a researcher who has been refusing to provide updates on her work. One day the company receives notice that Anders (the officemate) has died and been buried in Brazil. Marina is guilted into going down to find out what really happened. The wild and vivid dreams that the anti-malarials give her form a decently large part of the narrative.

Okay, this book had flaws. Every time they mentioned Marina's age (in her early 40s), I practically did a double take because she seemed so much younger than that due to her naivete and often, a seeming inability to take care of herself. The storyline surrounding the research is only believable if you don't poke at it. Some of the turns of events follow logic that is feather-light. But it was still overall an enjoyable read. I understand that the story is meant to parallel Heart of Darkness; I just don't remember if Marlow was hopelessly naïve. There are interesting questions here about outside influence, the modern world, drug companies and their bottom lines, but you aren't really hit over the head with them. I liked the book well enough (except for one event that happened at the end which really irritated me) and rated it accordingly, but I wouldn't call it "good" in any sort of literary sense.

Hmmm,when the age doesn't seem to fit the character, it can be very frustrating, but then some people are like that in real life, tricky. I realise I do have this novel somewhere, I had thought I only have Bel Canto which is also tbr.

Btw, how are you settling into your new location/home Ursula?

>164 Caroline_McElwee: It's true that there are all kinds of people in real life ... I think in some ways we expect higher standards in fiction. If they're going to be a particular way, we tend to want some insight into why they are that way so that it comes across as more realistic. But I do agree that sometimes people "just are." It's one of the things that bothers me about movies where they make foreign actors do an American accent even if there's no particular reason why they need one. It's not like I don't come across people with accents every single day!

Well, I guess I don't anymore. When we went over to the Canadian side with one of my husband's colleagues, she commented that you could hear "3 different languages sometimes!" while you're there. I had to kind of sigh because in the bay area of California, hearing foreign languages was not even noteworthy.

Anyway, about settling in: I'm working on it. I like the town, but the weather is a little difficult. It's hard to go from summer in Italy to ... whatever this is here. It's cloudy a lot (someone at a gathering the other night told me this area gets something like 60 days per year that are classified as sunny), and it's cold. I mean, around 4 pm it has often been pretty nice (around 70F/20C) but it's cold in the mornings and up until then, and I think the days of those temperatures are gone for the year now anyway. We're starting to find our way with the people - we're kind of anomalies because we don't like to camp and we think 5 PM is too early for dinner. :)

On the plus side, we got gym memberships (hard to beat him being free at the university gym and me paying $30/year), and I ran my first-ever race over the weekend. The dog likes having grassy areas to explore again. People are super-nice about giving us rides to things when we need them (we don't have a car). My husband's job is going well.

I have been terribly, terribly remiss in updating this thread and I'm sorry! I've been a little sucked in to Litsy recently, which has contributed. But overall I think it's a bit about the gloom that seems to prevail weather-wise. I need a good lamp posthaste.

I will post a bunch of thoughts about the books I've read in the last month and attempt to get caught up again.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

This is a book from the 1001 Books list. I've previously read another book by Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, which I liked quite a lot. Where that book is dense and layered, this book is conversational and laced with extreme sarcasm. We're told in the very beginning that Katharina has murdered a reporter, and then the book goes back to try to figure out why that might have happened. I won't say much about the plot (which is pretty straightforward), but just that the way he handles the storytelling is really fun. It's a look at how some news outlets will sensationalize, cherry-pick or twist quotes from people, follow and harass tertiary players, and much more, all in the name of telling the most exciting version of a story to their readers.

The disclaimer at the beginning says something along the lines of how the people and places are fictional, and any resemblance to the German newspaper Bild is not intentional, but unavoidable. (Which I found kind of hilarious.)

It's a super short book without a wasted word that, although it was written in the 1970s, still has a lot of resonance and relevance today.



The Cement Garden

Years ago, when I read Atonement and didn't much care for it, a coworker at the bookstore recommended The Cement Garden as an alternative McEwan I might like. I filed that away in my brain, and read Amsterdam last year (which I hated). Finally now I've gotten around to this one.

Do you ever read a book that someone recommended to you and wonder what on earth that recommendation says about what they think you might enjoy? Or who they are? This is that book.

It's told from the point of view of a teenage boy with 3 siblings. Their father dies, and then their mother gets sick and the kids are pretty much left to their own devices to be the adults or whatever else they want to be. It gets weirder and more disturbing as you go on and I think that's best left to the reader to discover on their own, although if you're curious I'm sure the tags for the book will give you some guidance. For a while (about half of this short novel), I was sighing and thinking "yep, McEwan is just not for me". And then somewhere I got drawn in. Not "enjoying" it exactly, but morbidly fascinated would probably be a good description. What an odd book. And finally a McEwan that I can give a positive review to.

Not for the faint of heart for reasons both mortal and sexual, but fans of Cormac McCarthy (of which I am not one) would probably like this one. Or people who appreciated JG Ballard's Crash, which I did.

Sorry to hear you're having gloomy weather. Have you looked at the lamps they make for people with SAD (seasonal affective disorder)? I know many people in the Great Lakes region that use them during the winter.

>168 japaul22: Thanks. I haven't, because the main problem isn't really the weather exactly - it's that I can't work when the light is awful. I am an artist and I need light. So I have a lamp in mind that I need which gives good, daylight-like light, but I haven't been able to budget for it yet. It may accomplish the same thing as a SAD light, but it's more that I get down when I can't work.

I've definitely had several people here tell me that they suffer from SAD, though. One of them used to live and work in the Arctic Circle in Canada and says that permanently affected his mood in winter.

I have a SAD light because I used to live and work in places with only north facing windows. Now I live and work in better light and don't need it even during our very rainy winters. But I use it for doing crafts and as a task light for painting. It's fabulous. I've had it for years and it was very expensive, but I think they've come down in price.

In Northern Ireland the weather is regularly gloomy, and most frustrating of all the weather pattern has changed so that now the summer is one of the wettest and miserable times of the year. There is a lot of grey sky in this country. I've never tried a SAD light - do you really feel they make a difference?

>167 ursula: I loved The Cement Garden for all it's utter weirdness and the horror that comes with the everydayness of the kids' attitudes under the circumstances. So don't give up on McEwan - Atonement disappointed me, but Enduring Love and On Chesil Beach I also loved.

>171 AlisonY: I do believe in SAD lights if used correctly (in the morning only, for a short period, at the right angles, etc.). I once used mine for about 6 hours when I had to get a craft project done for a big event, and it made me so wired and jittery, I couldn't sleep that night. It was as if I'd downed a whole pot of coffee. But if you use it right, that doesn't happen.

Before making the big investment, I think someone should make a real try at getting outside every day for 30 min to an hour and going for a walk. Even if it's not sunny, I think that's better than an electric light. And it's free. If you can walk in nature, that's even better. The Japanese are on to something with "Shinrin-yoku" (forest bathing) --their word for walking through forests to renew yourself. But that's not possible for lots of people.

Funny you mention the summer gloom. When we were in London in 2009, there was a heat wave (32 degrees! Horrors. To hear the people on the news, you'd have thought the world was coming to an end). The weather map on the news showed the only place to cool off was Northern Ireland. I hope it's easy for you to travel on sunny holidays at least.

Re: Cement Garden: I was surprised to see that I gave this book only 3 stars. I remember liking it, although I don't remember much about it, although I know there was something very disturbing about it.

I get out for at least an hour every day, walking the dog or just walking to go places (we don't have a car), so I absorb as much light as I can. But like I said, although I prefer sunny days, I think it's just the fact that I don't have adequate/correct light for working. I hope to rectify that as soon as I can.

About The Cement Garden and McEwan - I can't give up on him because there are still several of his books on the 1001 books list. :) But he may just be an author who is more miss than hit for me, we'll see.

Homegoing

This is a book whose time span would be characterized as "sweeping" - from the 1700s in Ghana to the present day. But while the word "epic" often follows that adjective, in this case it doesn't apply. Can you have sweeping vignettes? At the front of the book is a family tree, which is helpful as the reader gets a grasp on the structure of the book. It follows two separate lines of the same family, descending from two daughters who were separated and never knew each other. One married a white man and stayed in her country, while the other was sold as a slave and went to the United States. Each chapter provides a brief look at the life of that generation - always rooted in the events of the day, but never in a ham-handed, Forrest Gump kind of way. These are everyday people in everyday situations, but those situations are shaped by the larger forces at work.

Some chapters are particularly heartbreaking, and some are educational (I didn't know much about the history of Ghana), but all of them are well-realized and give a sense of immediacy to the story. Sometimes you're left wanting to know more, what happened before the time we happen upon a character's life, or where it goes after we leave them, but the quote "Always leave them wanting more" exists for a reason, and I think this book is a powerful affirmation of that bit of wisdom.



The Girl with All the Gifts

I read this one because I watched the trailer for the movie and it looked intriguing. It would be a good read for October, since the subject matter is pretty horror-movie-tastic. I think this one benefits from whatever amount of mystery can be maintained - not because the plot would suffer with the knowing, but because it's much more fun to watch it unfurl. Suffice it to say that the story revolves around Melanie, a little girl, and one of her favorite teachers, Miss Justineau. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that things are not quite what they seem, and this is not taking place in our current world. I am not at all surprised this is being made into a movie because it is one of those books, like Fight Club, that is just written cinematically. It's impossible not to visualize what's going on with the way things are described.

It's not great literature, but it was fun. It had some terrific moments, and the ending was well done.

>172 Nickelini: yes, Northern Ireland is always a place you can come to "cool off"! I actually don't mind cool weather, but I do hate grey skies and we get a lot of that.

I agree that natural light is preferable, and I believe in a good supplement of vitamin D too, especially in the winter.

Sympathizing about the lack of good daylight light indoors. As winter comes on, those hours are diminishing rapidly and so sadly there will be less time for the work that requires it. I guess the upside is that there will be more reading time.

>172 Nickelini: Got a smile about the effects of your light. I have an OTT light for working, sadly packed up right now, but I will remember your experience when I get it out again!

Off for that daylight walk.

>175 AlisonY: I think the weather here has a lot in common with Northern Ireland.

>176 SassyLassy: The shortening of the days is of course problematic as well but the constant cloud cover makes the "days" sort of useless anyway.

I am ordering my lamp ASAP, although ironically today was truly sunny and it lasted all day long. (And I got a lot of work done.)

And here's a book I abandoned - The Honeymoon. This bit of historical fiction, about George Eliot, sounded really interesting. It takes place mostly on her honeymoon (go figure) with her second husband, but features flashbacks and musings about the rest of her life. It's clear the author did a lot of research, and apparently lots of the thoughts and dialogue come directly from writings of Eliot's, for added authenticity. But the rest of the writing - oh dear.

"She was a rebellious, difficult child, the youngest now, wanting attention, too much for her mother, but her father loved her."

"She would have an essay in the Westminster Review! All the great thinkers had been published there, John Stuart Mill, who'd also been the editor, and Carlyle."

And I know sex is notoriously difficult to write, but seriously?

"He went fast, like a bee dipping its tongue into one flower before flying quickly off to another. But it pleased her, in spite of herself."

At 33%, the honeymoon was thoroughly over.



The Dead Father

This book is on the 1001 Books list. It is a postmodern fable of sorts. The dead father in the title is some sort of leader, or I suppose former leader, who is quite large (his measurement is given in cubits), has a mechanical leg, and is being dragged across an unknown landscape by a team of men with ropes and chains attached to him. But in spite of being dead, he talks and occasionally slips his ropes and goes off to cause havoc in the countryside. Confused already? Welcome to postmodernism. Interspersed with the more linear account of the transport of the dead father are conversations between the two girls who are accompanying him, which if there is some rhyme or reason to the structure of these conversations, it escaped me (and not from lack of trying - if you read every other sentence does it make sense? Eliminate the repetition? Read backwards? Nope.). But one thing that was clear about it is that one of its themes is about fatherhood as a concept: although your father might be physically dead, does his control and influence over you ever really die? Is it necessary for some sort of role reversal to take place to enable you to become a true adult? Are you always just chipping away at his authority so that you can eventually take over? An intriguing book, but definitely weird and not for everyone.

I sort of fell off the face of the thread for a while, my apologies! I'll try to finish this one out so that I can start 2017's group with a clear conscience! Let's get into the way-back machine and see what I read in the last month and a half!



Things Fall Apart

I'm so glad I finally got around to this one. It centers around Okonkwo, a member of the Igbo tribe in what is now Nigeria. The book takes place during the beginning of colonialism but isn't really focused on the clash between European and African culture. It's more concerned with the changes that were already taking place in African culture, partially due to contact with the white man (both direct and indirect), but also just due to the passage of time. Okonkwo is a man whose mind is firmly in previous generations but unwilling to consider himself an anachronism. It's a universal theme set in an unfamiliar time and place. There is more going on personally with Okonkwo than just being a symbol of changing times, and it's valuable to look at what is going on around him, how everyone else behaves, to see that he does not represent all of the Igbo. I really enjoyed it, and it gave me a lot to think about in terms of preservation of culture as well as the meeting of different cultures.

(1001 Book)

A few non-fiction reads....



The Worst Journey in the World

If you know anything about me, you probably know that I love exploration and mountaineering books. This one is the tale of the Scott polar expedition of 1910-12, told by the youngest member of the expedition, a biologist who was 25 at the time. Scott and his men spent 3 years in Antarctica, only to be ultimately beaten to the Pole by Amundsen and the Norwegians. Scott and 4 other men made it to the Pole after Amundsen, but they all died on the return journey. The author, Cherry-Garrard, was not a member of that expedition and the "worst journey" refers to a different one that he and a few others undertook - a winter outing to gather information on nesting emperor penguins. The author draws liberally on not only his own diary and recollections, but Scott's expedition journal and the journals kept by other men. He manages to produce a cohesive view of everything that happened, and everything that went wrong. If you're interested in the topic, it's a fascinating look at among other things, the role personality and luck played in the final outcome.



Blue Highways

And now a travel narrative of an entirely different type. In the late '70s, William Least Heat Moon was at loose ends with a relationship ending and not much else going on, so he decided to hop into a camper and drive around the US on the "blue highways" (the interstates are red on a road atlas, the smaller highways are blue) and see what was out there. He was looking for the parts of life that seemed to be disappearing as interstates have people driving at high speed past more and more places, and chains conspire to make every city look exactly the same. He drives, and he stops wherever it strikes his fancy. He talks to people about their lives, the history of the area, themselves. He goes to diners, rated by how many calendars they have hanging on their walls (more=better food, he finds). Some things that he was sure were disappearing are still with us today - the more things change, the more they stay the same - and some are truly extinct. It's a lovely view on a good part of the US.



In Other Words

Jhumpa Lahiri has always felt a little detached from her "native" languages, thanks to being raised speaking Bengali with her immigrant parents, and speaking English in the rest of her daily life in the US. She never felt as if she fully had a place in either. And from there, she found a love for the Italian language and decided to do something totally crazy - immerse herself in it. She read exclusively in Italian to prep herself for a (temporary) move to Italy, and started writing exclusively in it as well.

The book talks about her journey in learning Italian, her thoughts about her own sense of displacement, her struggles with fame that came from winning the Pulitzer. The book also contains a couple of stories she wrote in Italian. The English edition features the Italian and English versions of the book on facing pages, which is an interesting choice, and fortuitous for me because it meant it was a rare case where I was able to find a book in Italian in the US. :) I enjoyed most of the book, although I think that her sense of searching comes through clearly and because it doesn't seem like something she has resolved, the book doesn't end with any sort of conclusion either. It's the log of an experiment, perhaps an ongoing one. But wow, could I relate to a lot of her thoughts on learning a language and the importance of abandoning the feeling of safety to just throw yourself into it.

She didn't translate the book herself, and her Italian is not terribly literary, so I'm not sure how it is reading the translated version.

The Brothers Karamazov

I started this one a few weeks before I was expecting to leave Italy. Then the date was moved up suddenly and I knew there was no way I was going to finish it before we moved, so I'd have to take it with me. It wasn't exactly the steady reading experience I'd hoped to tackle this one with, but what can you do?

Sometimes I really liked it. Sometimes I wondered why we were still talking about the ins and outs of religion. Sometimes it got sort of exciting but at the most exciting moment, I was disappointed to realize there wasn't enough book left for that to really turn into anything.

Basically, Russian philosophical novels are not exactly my genre, so I'll say I appreciate its value and interest but I'm glad to be done with it.



Nights at the Circus

Our story centers around a woman, Fevvers, (Sophie by birth but Fevvers for reasons I'm about to reveal) who is the darling of the circus - an aerialist who has wings. Jack Walser, a reporter, has come to interview her and get to the bottom of this whole "wings" thing. Is she a scammer? A freak? They sit up late one night; really late, because there seems to be something wrong with time all of a sudden, with Big Ben seeming to lose track. Fevvers provides much explanation, but Walser isn't sure how to take it all. After the interview, their paths cross again and things get seriously weird. And since it's already been made clear we're dealing with magical realism, there's a lot of leeway in how weird seriously weird can be.

I have previously read The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, which I would characterize as "mind-blowingly weird", so this was actually a pleasant step back from that. It was also a less overtly political book (although there are definitely aspects to be read politically). I enjoyed it quite a bit.



The Honorary Consul

Our main character is Dr. Plarr, who is living in a provincial town in northern Argentina. He is half British, half Paraguayan, but has been living in Argentina since some time in his childhood, when he and his mother left Paraguay after his father is detained as a political prisoner. Plarr has never heard from his father since and has no idea of his fate. Meanwhile, the Consul of the title is Charlie Fortnum, sort-of friend of Dr. Plarr and a functional alcoholic who has made a problematic marriage to a former prostitute. He is kidnapped by Paraguayan rebels by accident (they were trying for the American Ambassador). The rebels are known to Plarr and thus, he has some moral deliberations to do regarding Fortnum's fate. It's actually quite a bit morally murkier than that, but I won't get into it to avoid spoiling too much of the plot.

This was a good book overall - it's got a lot of meat to chew on regarding hard choices, getting yourself in over your head, and whether the ends justifies the means. Based just on that, I would definitely recommend it. However, the portrayal of women was limited and what was there was flat. There are only 3 women in the book - the aforementioned prostitute-turned-wife, Plarr's mother, who he does not like at all and is depicted as being strangely addicted to eating sweets at Buenos Aires tea rooms, and the wife of one of the Paraguayan kidnappers, who doesn't have enough of a personality of her own to mention, except that she does a fair amount of talking in some of the scenes. She just doesn't reveal any discernible character in those scenes.

Recommended with a grain or two of salt.

More fiction...



The Radetzky March

The story is about three male generations of a family, the Trottas. They see their fortunes rise in Austria-Hungary, but by the third generation, their lives and the lives of everyone around them are on the cusp of changing as World War I and the end of the Habsburg Empire looms. The tone is melancholy, but I'm not sure that it's really so sad about the end of the empire as for the end of the empire that it seemed to be - everything was obviously not rosy for the many different peoples subsumed by Austria-Hungary, and the Trottas are of Slovenian origin although they consider themselves thoroughly Austrian.

The writing is just terrific, managing to be straightforward, evocative, wise and slyly humorous at various times. I really enjoyed this book. It took me a bit to get into it, probably 30-40 pages, but then I was hooked.

(on the 1001 books list)



The Mortifications

I got this through LT Early Reviewers. It's about a family torn apart when the mother takes the two children and heads to the US, leaving her husband behind with his dreams of revolution. The children are now grown - Ulises and Isabel, twins - and living with their mother in Hartford, Connecticut. Ulises is a bit at loose ends, while Isabel thinks she has found her calling in the church and helping people die (not in the Kevorkian sense, but in the comforting sense). The mother, Soledad, has moved on with a Dutch immigrant, Willem ... or has she?

There are a lot of interesting ideas at play here, about escaping vs. fleeing, settling vs. making the best of things and other such fine distinctions. But the story is told in a way that makes it hard to really connect with the characters. And the names are so on-the-nose: yes, the names are relatively common ones but seriously - Soledad (solitude/loneliness), Ulises (he does in fact go on a sort of odyssey), their last name is Encarnación (incarnation/personification). This book was okay, and it had its moments, but I really wanted to read the other book, the one that could have been written from these ideas.



Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady

I did it, I read all 35464987654654 pages of this thing! Kind of, I know my eyes just went over words in a few parts. But luckily since in an epistolary novel you can usually expect to have the same events talked about for weeks or months and told from varying points of view, you don't need to get it the first time and you can catch up! (I might be a little loopy after reading this thing for the whole year.)

Clarissa is a young lady. Lovelace is a rake who wants to marry her. Solmes is a big old bore who also wants to marry her. Clarissa doesn't want to marry anyone but her family is not having any of it and assumes she must be turning down Solmes because she's got the hots for Lovelace and his devilish charms. Clarissa insists she just wants permission to "live single" (she would have been a riot on the tv show "Living Single", let me tell you) but no one is going to give in and her family locks her up until she agrees to marry Solmes. Lovelace employs some trickery to spirit her out of the house against her will and the next mumblemumble pages are all about what happens to her once she's under his power.

Spoiler: mostly what happens is that she finds the time, paper, ink, and wrist strength to write absolute reams of letters.

When she's not writing, her best friend Miss Howe is, or Lovelace is, or his friend Belford is, or a variety of other tangentially related people are. There is a veritable flurry of letters exchanged over the 9 months of real time in the book which took me 11 months to read.

And then after everything, there's a whole wrap-up of what happened to all the characters you've forgotten and never cared about in the first place, just to make sure there isn't anyone out their going "yes but what ever happened to Clarissa's sister's maid, who we haven't heard anything from since April?" And after that, there's a whole justification from the author replying to letters from people who were reading it as it was released serially and got seriously involved in the story (entertainment being hard to come by in the 1740s). He explains in fine detail his reasons for every end of every character for any idiot who might have missed his moralizing lessons. I will say I skimmed this, although what I really did was read a little, skim a little more, and then flip Kindle pages until I gave up and called it done. It's not part of the book, I don't have to read it!

How do I feel now? Better than all the people out there who haven't read Clarissa? I'm not sure. Maybe. Maybe worse, because I could have read a summary on Wikipedia and a few excerpts and probably been just as edified without having to read about the "dear creature" and "charming creature" and "most virtuous of her sex" for nearly an entire year of my life.

I also feel like it might be a good thing that letter-writing has died out?

I kid.

I enjoyed a decent amount of it, and felt like a volume or two (out of nine) were really exciting. For a while I wondered if leopards were going to change their spots, so to speak, but Richardson had never seen a leopard so you can draw your own conclusions on that front. I think that if your main character is going to die after spending 3 volumes talking about how she's going to die, then your book should end pretty shortly thereafter, but obviously Richardson didn't agree.

Also, if you have read it or know the plot or are never going to read it and don't care if you know the plot or are a masochist and intend to read it even if you know the plot, here's an interesting article about the book and its place in women's cultural history.

(on the 1001 books list)

You've made it! Clarissa! Why did you choose to read it, I wonder, there being so many 1001 books which seem more attractive and with a lot less pages?

>183 Simone2: For the past several years I've tackled one large project from the 1001 books list. I did In Search of Lost Time as a year-long project in 2014, and then my husband and I read Infinite Jest together over the course of three months in 2015. This year it was Clarissa.

Hi! Back in Kansas, Toto? :) (I seem to have lost track of this thread for a while...)

Your post on Clarissa and the article you link resonates with something I thought as I was reading recently Romain Gary's Les enchanteurs (The enchanters). This is a book from mid-sixties when Gary was a popular author generally seen as an "expert" on love, question of sex and sentiment. In it he (among other things), mocks women who have been mentally unsettled by rape, specifically he remarks that well-born ladies in particular feel an obligation to go insane after rape--with clear implication that such women must be feigning (presumably because women, as everyone knows, secretly desire rape, so can't, technically, be "raped" at all.)

What strikes me, thinking back to Richardson, is the difference between the attitudes of an 18th century writer and a "hip" (as was once) Freudianist. IIRC, Clarissa is middle class, not noble, and although she is privileged enough to develop delicacies and sensibilities unobtainable or impractical for the lower classes, Richardson doesn't tie her response to the outrages Lovelace commits on her to her class, or her "nature" as a woman, but her character. She does die because she can't live with what was done to her. Revenge doesn't interest her, she doesn't die to "spite" anyone, she dies because her humanity has been horribly insulted.

I hope I'm not misremembering (too much), but this is why Richardson struck me as amazing and important, and "modern", incredibly modern (more so than the whole lot of writers of Gary's ilk). Clarissa is the first female character who cares about the independence and dignity of her person, as a human being. She wants her choices to be respected because they are hers, not because she is someone's daughter/lover/betrothed etc. Shakespeare doesn't have a character like that. The Greeks and Romans don't. Anyone?

It's a doorstopper, but Clarissa pretty much blew me away, way back when...

>184 ursula: Good idea. We'll have to read them sooner or later so one a year seems smart. Which one will be your 2017 read?

>185 LolaWalser: I hate leaving things unfinished! And I would have regretted just abandoning my thread to move on to the next shiny year. (I know, because I've done it *mumblemumble* times before.)

Hm, that's unfortunate to hear about Gary. I absolutely fell in love with The Roots of Heaven when I read it. I can separate author from work, but assuming these are his actual personal opinions (which it sounds like from what you said), I am kind of sad about it.

I went into Clarissa like I do everything else - knowing next to nothing about it. So I was surprised at her portrayal in the beginning as a spirited, independent woman, and considering the time period in which it was written, I really wasn't sure how I was supposed to react to that. And when the rape occurred, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be reading that as a punishment for her previous behavior or as a terrible and unfair thing that happened to her. It was interesting to read the article and see that his point was as progressive as it seemed like it was, and I didn't need to try to retroactively put some filter over it for the 18th century. Although the fact that Clarissa had to be so saintly to get that point across to his contemporary readers does explain a lot of what made me want to scream.

Aside from a brief bout of temporary insanity, Clarissa is calm, rational, and adamant about her own humanity the entire time. Which I do realize is pretty revolutionary for that time period.

Shakespeare doesn't have a character like that. The Greeks and Romans don't. Anyone?

I'm definitely not well-read enough to even hazard a guess, but I imagine it would be a pretty rare tack to take with a female character, unfortunately.

>186 Simone2: Exactly. I'm not sure what my 2017 project will be. I might do either Dos Passos' USA trilogy or Mishima's Sea of Fertility tetralogy.

>187 ursula:

Yes, Clarissa's virtue had to be endlessly harped on in order to make it 100% clear, obvious, unassailable, that she didn't "deserve" what happened, that she didn't "bring it on herself". Such were the times, and Richardson was truly doing something revolutionary.

I like Gary less with every book of his I read and I certainly wouldn't recommend Les enchanteurs to anyone who wanted to remain a fan, assuming treatment of women and musings on things sexual could affect that. The remark I mention is the least of it, the central sexual relationship is absolutely dreadful and, as far as I can tell, totally informed by Gary's own beliefs about sex.

I also despised Les clowns lyriques, the worst love story ever--unbelievably cloyingly sentimental with a ridiculous "Gary Stu" male protagonist, stereotypical femme fatale whom true insta-luv turns from frigid into volcanic, and the affair doomed to last but a few days by the looming war to which, for reasons of melodrama, our superannuated (closer to fifty than forty--he's 25 years older than the ex-frigid woman but nobody even notices) and one-armed hero must go, for he's a hero and everybody, it seems, needs him to win the war. Had it been written by a woman, it would have been derided up and down as most wretched empty-headed chicklit.

Examples like that abound in French literature, about which I have a huge grudge for various reasons. Not to worry, hate-reading keeps my complexion clear and eyes bright! :)

Your struggle to read Clarissa came across in your review, well done for finishing it and then asking yourself why you read it. The answer to that question of course is "because it was there"

A couple of non-fiction reads...



The Ghost Map

The subject here is the cholera outbreak that hit London in the mid-1800s and the science that eventually discovered its cause. The subtitle is "The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World", which is both overblown and ridiculous. But it explains a little bit about what went wrong here.

I can imagine that you're an author and you have a pretty good and interesting idea for a book - the aforementioned cholera outbreak - and the way that investigative science won out over superstitious theories about the spread of diseases. And your publisher says "hmm, that's good ... let's see, what will the subtitle be?" *spouts out the nonsense about the most terrifying epidemic*

You start, "Well, I don't know about that ... I mean, there's that whole 1666 thing... That was 100,000 people vs. 127 people. If I had to guess, that was maybe more terrifying?"

The publisher shushes you. "Okay, now maybe we could add something more to it? That's not going to make enough of a book." *finishes off the rest of the above subtitle*

"Er, well. I can cover how it changed science, since it marks a win over the people who thought disease was spread by miasma, so that's good. And then since there was a map that helped show how the disease radiated out from a contaminated water supply in a neighborhood, maybe I can talk about modern maps that are being used today on a neighborhood level. Like Yelp, or school rating sites. I mean, it's not exactly related to poop in a water supply, but ...."

Publisher: "Oh, good idea. Start out talking a lot about poop and how much of it there was in Victorian England and how they got rid of it. Or didn't. And occasionally among all the "excretions", "waste," and other euphemisms, be sure to throw in "dog shit" here and there."

"..."

Publisher: "Anyway, what have you got for changing cities and the modern world?"

"Hm. You might think that epidemics like this would keep us out of cities, but we still live in them? And they're actually really green? And people in cities have fewer children? I don't know where I'm going with this, but ...."

Publisher: "Perfect."

"And the modern world, well, I guess that the modern world makes me think of nuclear weapons and terrorism..."

Publisher: "What the holy hell does that have to do with a 19th century cholera outbreak?"

"I can talk about it for a good 20 pages and it'll probably take me another 10 to make any sort of tenuous connection at all."

Publisher: "Go for it."



Missoula

This account of the handling of sexual assaults at the University of Montana will make you angry. Even if so much of it is what you already know - turning cases around on the victim, sports talent meaning perpetrators get a lot more leeway, the invasive nature of rape investigations, the difficulty of prosecuting a rape case - it will still make you angry. Why is it that if you say you've been mugged, no one will question the reality of it, but if you say you've been raped, you get nothing but questions and challenges?

Here it all ended up in investigations by the Department of Justice, though. On the other hand, Missoula was far from alone - I think it said that more than 90 universities ended up under investigation for their handling of rape cases. Which just makes it all the worse, of course. It was good to hear Krakauer's reason for taking on this tough subject: he found out that a friend of the family had been raped years previously and it started him down the path of discovery of how often the crime goes unreported and how terribly victims are often treated. Good for him for following that line of inquiry and bringing one microcosm out into the open so that hopefully others will learn something from it.

>188 LolaWalser: I had to be honest about the reading experience, but I do also have a lot of retrospective admiration for Clarissa because of that context. These sorts of insights are why I soldier on sometimes, even for an entire year.

That Gary novel sounds terrible. And that was even before I got to the part where the hero had one arm.

hate-reading keeps my complexion clear and eyes bright!

You have truly found the fountain of youth!

>189 baswood: It's funny, because I didn't hate it the entire time. My biggest struggles were the melodrama, which is of course pretty typical, and not knowing how a reader of Richardson's time would have interpreted things. I became aware that people then would not have viewed Clarissa's endlessly sainted behavior as annoying, and that the overblown praise of her by every single person was not meant to be read with any sarcasm. Perhaps obviously to others, but it's sometimes really hard to take off the modern blinders.

And as for "because it was there," absolutely! I'm never going to climb Everest, but I bet most summiters will also never read Clarissa!

Regarding Missoula; I suspect some of the reason that this book received the attention it did is that it was written by mountain-climbing manly man, Jon Krakauer. I think that the same book, written by, say, Lindy West or Roxane Gay, would have gotten a much more muted reception. And the current reactions to the rape allegations at the University of Minnesota don't give me much hope that things are changing. It seems we still think it's much, much worse for a man to be accused of rape than it is for a woman to actually be raped. And we've enshrined our acceptance of sexual assault in our most recent election.

>192 RidgewayGirl: I don't doubt that it's true that it received more attention because of Krakauer. It's obviously not ideal, but at the same time there are also a couple of other things at play, which is, if the manly man is willing to write a serious book about rape, that's a step that probably wouldn't have been taken in the past, and if a man can use his privilege to get that attention directed at something actually useful, that's a positive. Which in no way is meant to say "hey, thanks guy for writing that because I'm sure no woman could have!" I just think that if the choice is between a book that doesn't get published and one that does, it's at least something to have the book. There's a whole separate (and important) battle there about getting people to pick up a book on a tough subject that is written by a woman, or a *gasp* vocal feminist.

I don't know a thing about the current Minnesota situation. A quick google tells me that apparently it involves a boycott to get a rapist reinstated on the team. My husband and I have recently had some conversations around the whole topic, and one of those conversations was about the incredible resentment that people have about a rapist being named and a victim being allowed to remain anonymous. The whole concept that that is some sort of above-and-beyond, ridiculous "special treatment", well, I am out of words. But yes, the whole thing with the election is a move in a horrifying direction. It took me a while to figure out why I was so angry and sick about the whole thing (not saying that racism, misogyny etc shouldn't make one either of those things, but my reaction was beyond the pale for me), and I realized it was because it was viscerally feeling the same as talking to someone about sexual abuse or rape - that feeling of people trying to explain away or reinterpret things so that you start to feel like you're crazy. I have felt gaslighted by every single person who talked about Trump's "lewd words" - it's not about the stupid words he used! Well anyway - preacher, choir, I know.

Fiction again ...



Telegraph Avenue

Barf.

I didn't like this at all. It's like Chabon channeling Pynchon channeling Tarantino channeling Elmore Leonard. Aren't we so very clever?

Two guys own a record store in Berkeley - one is black, one is Jewish. Their wives are also partners as midwives. The black guy, Archy, has a dad he doesn't talk to who was in blaxploitation movies in the 70s and a son he sort of knew about who appears in his life suddenly. There's a huge cast of characters, all of whom have nicknames and quirks. I get it, Berkeley is quirky - trust me, I lived near there and spent enough time there, I know it's true to an extent - but it's just exhausting to read. Everyone makes constant cultural references, which again, I used to work in a record store, I know it's a job hazard to a certain extent. There are plots within plots within subplots. There's a parrot, a blimp, a white lawyer who likes to talk like a black guy from the hood, a gay teenager in a sexual relationship with a straight teenager, a funeral director/city councilman whose character is straight out of some comic book .... It's all so wacky! And zany! And snappy!

It all just fell totally flat for me. I wasn't crazy about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay but I thought it was okay. This was not okay.

PS. The record store I worked for was based in Berkeley and owned by a guy who I'm sure had an influence on the character of the Jewish owner of the store in the book. There is no way you can live in Berkeley and not be familiar with the guy, and calling him a character is putting it mildly. I worked more closely with him than probably anyone else who wasn't in the main inner circle and I definitely saw echoes of him in Nat Jaffe.



Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Short stories are not my thing. I often find them unsatisfying. So I picked up this collection by Alice Munro with a little trepidation, but I didn't need to worry. I feel like most of these stories were a little longer than I normally think of short stories, which is maybe part of the reason they felt fully developed to me. The other reason is probably due to Munro's skill. As the title implies, they're stories about relationships of all kinds. In the title story, two young girls get involved in the correspondence between a couple of adults with surprising results. One of my other favorites was about a man whose wife has Alzheimer's, and he has to protect her interests in an unexpected way. These are quiet but compelling stories and I enjoyed them a lot.



Our Endless Numbered Days

I'm never sure whether it's better for a book to be mediocre all the way through, or intriguing and then disappointing in the end.

This one was the latter for me. It's about Peggy, whose father is a survivalist in England. When she's 8 years old, he takes her off to a remote location to presumably wait for the end of the world. We know she comes back because some chapters are told by her at age 17, and she's back home with her mother. There are a lot of terrifically described locations and events, but I felt like the end just didn't live up to the promise of the beginning and instead relied on a rather hackneyed storyline that disappointed after an original premise. It wasn't enough for me to dislike the book, but I do feel a little sad for the amazing novel it could have been. Maybe her next one will live up to the promise shown here.

Hi, just catching up. So many good books you've read. You got me especially interested in The Honorary Consul which went right on my wishlist.

>195 OscarWilde87: It's been a pretty good year, I think. Still more to post here, and hopefully a couple more to finish by year's end! That was my first Greene, and I'm looking forward to more.

>194 ursula: Yikes. I think I'll give away my copy of Telegraph Avenue. Thanks for taking one for the team, Ursula.

>197 kidzdoc: I guess it appeals to some people, but I suspect you might not be one of them. I kind of feel bad at the idea that you'd toss it, but on the other hand, I know you have a lot of better books out there to be read. :)

Love Medicine

I thought I was really going to enjoy this one. I had an old coworker who loved Erdrich's books, and I believe she really liked this one. It's also on the 1001 Books list. Anyway, it's a family saga about Chippewa Native Americans living in North Dakota. The chapters go through the generations, skipping between families which are interconnected. I found it hard to keep track of who was who and how they were connected to each other. And even once I got it mostly down (embarrassingly late in the book), I only connected to a few of the characters so I was sorry when the book moved on to others.

It's hard to judge this book because it was originally published in 1984, then Erdrich expanded and "resequenced" it in 1993 (this is the version I read), and then apparently revised it yet again in 2009. I feel like maybe I would have liked the earlier version better because this one felt overly long. So, although I'm giving it three stars and consider it "okay", I'm disappointed.



Dreams from Bunker Hill

I loved this one. John Fante wrote four books featuring the character Arturo Bandini, who was essentially his alter ego. Bandini is from Colorado, living in LA in the '30s trying to be a writer. He is a great, lovable character, and unintentionally, tragically hilarious. He drinks too much, doesn't understand women, is convinced he is a literary genius but has a hard time getting anything published. He falls into situations and then ruins them somehow, picks himself back up and falls into the next thing. He is that friend of yours with the great stories that you just shake your head about.

This is actually the last of the stories, and I've previously read Ask the Dust, which is the third. I'll go back and read the first two one day when I can find them. I doubt it matters all that much if you read them in order since they're pretty episodic. And even if it does, they're all slim books (this one was 164 pages), so they could be re-read together in the proper order easily.

Have enjoyed catching up on your thread - hope you are well settled in your new home.

>200 AlisonY: Thanks for coming and catching up. I'm still working on it myself. :)

We are relatively settled into the new place. Buried under snow and more snow. And then more snow. And some more.

>201 ursula: Oh the joys of living on the Great Lakes. I feel your (shovelling) pain.

>202 SassyLassy: No one here seems to shovel. I mean, we don't have to deal with the driveway because 1. we don't have a car and 2. it's shared with the neighbors, and they have someone who comes and plows it. But the sidewalks in town essentially don't get cleared.

The Switch

Here's a funny story about this book:

I started reading it, and after a very short while, I felt like I knew what was going to happen. And then after a little bit longer, I was sure I knew what was going to happen. And not big plot points, but small moments like "he's going to be holding the tennis racket and they're going to meet each other in the doorway". So I looked up the book to see if it had been published under another title. Nope. I kept reading, and had more moments like that. I looked it up again, to see if it had been made into a movie. Yep, Life of Crime, with Tim Robbins and Jennifer Aniston. Didn't look familiar. I went on, and I seriously knew where every plot point was going. So I watched the trailer for the movie. Now it looked a little familiar, but I wasn't sure so I called Morgan in and asked him, "Did we watch this movie?" Answer: yep.

The moral of the story is that in spite of only seeing at most 10 movies a year, I still can't remember what I've seen. And another note? Elmore Leonard books require very little adaptation to the screen (also true reading Out of Sight, in which I think the ending was the only thing really changed, and that only slightly).

The book is a caper comedy (dark comedy though, which Elmore Leonard excels at), and features characters from Rum Punch (made into Jackie Brown by Tarantino), Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara. Ordell and Louis decide to kidnap a rich man's wife, but as it turns out, he's not all that interested in getting her back. Because this is a Leonard book, twists and turns and odd moments ensue. Lots of fun, like all of his books.



The Adventures of Augie March

Like David Copperfield, Augie March tells the reader the detailed story of much of his life. So much in a story like this depends on the writing, since you know that while there will be events, it's not really going to be a plot-driven novel. For me, I just didn't connect to Bellow's writing and therefore also didn't connect to Augie. Or it could have been the other way around - Augie wasn't compelling enough for me to get past the writing. It was just dense and tangled and used odd words in odd ways, and it was slow going at times. And this was written in the 1950s, not the 1700s!

Augie grows up in Chicago, and he seems to always find himself falling into someone's plot or scheme, or kicking around at loose ends left to his own devices. Near the end, things got moderately interesting in his life and I enjoyed the last third a lot more than the rest, but I suppose that's faint praise since the first two-thirds exist.

I'm not saying it might not appeal to certain readers, it just didn't to me.



Nightwood

The introduction is by TS Eliot, and he says in it that only those who appreciate poetry will appreciate the book. As a sample size of one, I think he's right. I don't much like poetry, and I didn't really enjoy this book. And that was a huge disappointment to me because I'd been looking forward to reading it for some reason (maybe vague statements from others reading the 1001 list (since I don't read reviews)? Maybe some vague idea that it was subversive and interestingly written? I have no real idea.

Anyway, a woman named Robin is sort of the main character, although I think we really only see her speak once - she's always described by the other people in her life. She marries a man who is pretending to be a baron, has a child with him, and then leaves him for a woman. But she doesn't really settle down, and in fact she seems incapable of settling down or caring what unhappiness she brings to everyone she gets involved with. But like I said, we don't really hear from her directly and in fact much of the book is a certain Dr. O'Connor monologuing about her, his own issues, the problems with society, and general randomness. I thought the writing was melodramatic and sometimes just downright weird.

I appreciate that it's probably a landmark book in queer literature (it was published in 1936), and I appreciate that, but I didn't much enjoy reading it. I imagine it would be a good book to read in a class though, to help one penetrate the labyrinthine dialogue.

I agree with your review of Nightwood, I didn't enjoy the read either, but I love poetry.

>203 ursula: That's interesting about the sidewalks. Does no one else use them? In Germany, the homeowners were required to keep the sidewalks clear. It made for unevenly cleared walkways, as some took it much more seriously than others, but at least they were all shoveled.

>203 ursula: >206 RidgewayGirl: I was thinking the same thing. Here, many municipalities have sidewalk plows. In other places the homeowner, landlord, or business owner is required to have the sidewalks clear by a certain number of hours after a storm. Is the Michigan example a result of low taxes, or of people not wanting to be told what to do, or what? Do businesses and community centres suffer as a result of people not wishing to navigate the snow?

>204 ursula: Liked your story about the movie and the book.
I also had the same experience reading Augie March as you did.

>206 RidgewayGirl:, >207 SassyLassy: In Denver, it was the same way. It was required for the homeowner to clear their sidewalks within a few hours of snow stopping. Here, there doesn't seem to be any requirement. I did a little googling about Michigan and came up with an article about a different city, Grand Rapids, in which homeowners have 24 hours to clear the sidewalks and they had thousands of complaints of people not doing it. Here, they do have sidewalk plows. The major north-south street gets its sidewalks plowed regularly (I never see them but the snow is not usually more than a few inches deep on that street). We live on the major east-west street, and they seem to plow the sidewalk here about once every week and a half or so. We have already had many, many days where snow is 8-10 inches deep on the sidewalks here. That's because the street plows come and dump all the snow from the street onto the sidewalk. Considering that they might come through 5-10 times a day and we won't see a sidewalk plow for a week or more ... well. And we live kitty-corner from the university! (The side directly across from the university doesn't even have a sidewalk.)

And then there's a large staircase leading into the center of town. On one side, the steps get shoveled (by inmates, as my husband found out the other day). On the other side, it's just a big snowy hill with stairs buried somewhere underneath it. Sounds safe, right? I'm starting to understand why when people found out we wouldn't have a car, they said "well of course in the winter you'll have to walk on the streets."

I think it's so hard to say whether or not any businesses suffer because the small downtown area stays relatively clear (although you do have to navigate 2+ foot tall banks of snow to get from the sidewalk into the street), and because so much of the town is closed in the winter anyway. The museums are all closed until May, a good number of shops are, and even a number of restaurants only operate from May-October.

I was sure I had read the adventures of Augie March fairly recently, but LT is telling me I hadn't.

We watch a lot of movies and almost as soon as the film starts Lynn will say "we have seen this" I can never remember and so we usually carry on watching and then right near the end I will realise we have seen it before.

>208 ursula: Wow, that's some snow! We have sidewalk clearing laws here in Vancouver, but at least half the people ignore them, and it's not enforced to my knowledge. But then we don't get snow every winter, so I'll bet a lot of people don't even own a shovel.

>207 SassyLassy: I keep seeing people say they felt the same about Augie March and I have to wonder if anyone had a positive experience with it, and if so, who they are.

>209 baswood: Maybe it was another Bellow?

I feel like that was really the first time that's happened to me. I often can't recall exact plot points or whatever from movies or books, but it's rare for me to not remember the particular grouping of actors. It was totally weird. I love that sometimes neither of you can recall if you've seen something before!

>210 Nickelini: This is what the main street in downtown looked like on the 18th - we've had a few more storms since then.

City of Thieves

A long time ago, I watched the movie The 25th Hour, directed by Spike Lee and starring Edward Norton. I really liked it, and later ran across the book, which was written by David Benioff. I didn't read it, but I made a note of his name to look for something else by him. Then he put out When the Nines Roll Over, but it was short stories, which are just not my thing. So I didn't read that one either. Then came City of Thieves and I told myself that one, I would read.

It was published in 2008, and here it is 2016, and now he's probably best known for being the showrunner of Game of Thrones, but I finally fulfilled my desire to read something he's written.

It's a good one. The story takes place during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II. Two teenage boys are picked up by the Russian army for infractions that should mean their deaths, but they are taken in to see a colonel and he has a deal for them. The deal is: find him a dozen eggs and they can live. Fail, and well, they will either die at the hands of the army or by starvation or cold, or in a German bombing raid, or ... there are a thousand ways to die in Leningrad.

Benioff expertly steers between the comedic, the banal, the universal and the tragic. It's not quite "I laughed, I cried," but it's pretty close. My only (minor) complaint is that I felt like everything came together a bit too neatly, but on the other hand, that fact is also very satisfying.



The Sense of an Ending

This is an interesting, simple and yet intricate book. It's told by Tony when he's in his 60's, looking back on a period in his life, mostly when he was in college. I don't want to give away anything about the plot (although the first sentence gave me a feeling about what one topic was going to be), and it's hard to talk about much of it without doing that, so I'll just say that the themes are interesting. Present-day Tony has moved on from the events in his past, but maybe that's due mostly to a combination of misunderstanding and forgetting. It's an interesting idea, getting a chance so many years later to really try to remember and then to have those memories re-framed and gaps filled in by knowledge you either couldn't have had or missed out on. The novel ends on an unresolved note, like life - where does Tony go from here? We're left to guess. I enjoyed it, and have spent some time thinking about it since I finished, which I consider a good sign.



Blaming

The plot is simple: A British couple are on vacation on a cruise when the husband dies in Istanbul. The wife, Amy, has to death with arrangements in a foreign country. She is assisted by Martha, an American that Amy and her husband met on board the ship. Amy has no idea why Martha is so insistent on helping her - they barely know each other, and if she's being honest, Amy doesn't much like Martha. Their relationship, such as it is, continues once both of them are back in England (Martha is a writer who loves all things English).

The people in this book have no idea how to interact with others. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's cringe-worthy, at least once it's downright tragic, and I doubt you'll really warm up to any of them entirely. But there is something compelling anyway.

Just saying Hi, and that I have finally caught up with your thread, after being many many posts behind. There is a copy of City of Thieves in the house, which at one point I thought I should read, although I had forgotten about it. Enjoyed your commentary and this pretty impressive pile of books you have gone through.

>213 dchaikin: Thanks for stopping in. :) I read people's threads, but I forget to comment or I get distracted. Plus, with not really reading reviews for books I intend to read .... I don't always have a lot to contribute! I think you should read City of Thieves! There are a couple of scenes that will stick with me for a long, long time.

I still have a few straggling books to post here, but I think I'm only going to finish reading two more books by the end of the year, which will bring my total to 103. Not the best year I've ever had, but not too shabby. Probably particularly considering the international move and all.

Nonfiction ...



Ghettoside

This non-fiction book follows homicide detectives in South Central LA (which no longer exists, by the way - the city renamed it South Los Angeles to try to distance it from the violence that had become synonymous with that name). This is after "the big years", when murders hit all-time highs in the area, but death is still all too commonplace. The main case on which the book focuses is the murder of a boy, Bryant Tonelle, whose father happens to be a police officer. This is an unusual case for the simple reason that unlike most officers, Tonelle actually lived in one of the districts in which he worked. Mostly they live outside of the area, in Orange County or other suburbs.

For a while I debated how I felt about the book being centered on the cops, who are often not black, and usually only visitors to the neighborhoods they police. It seemed like it could really veer into "great white savior" territory, especially because one of the main officers involved is John Skaggs, described as a typical blond California surfer type. However, great care is taken to give real lives to the people who live in South LA, to the victims, to the perpetrators. And in a lot of ways, it's as important to show that it's possible to do the job of law enforcement effectively in a neighborhood when you're not the same as its inhabitants. Or maybe it's better to say that it's possible to care enough to do the job effectively.

One of the interesting points that was repeated a lot in the book is that gang violence isn't the problem, it's the result of a problem which can be stated as "this is what happens when the State doesn't have a monopoly on violence". Which sounds awful, but makes a lot of sense. The vacuum created by infrequent enforcement for violent acts leads to the people attempting to police themselves, which leads to gangs, which leads to more violence. And maybe you're thinking, "but wait, blacks are in prison in much larger numbers than whites, and I thought that was due to overzealous enforcement against them, so how can it be lax here?" I thought that too, but it seems to be the case that the skin color of the victim matters more than the skin color of the assailant as far as prosecution goes. So black-on-black violence in places like this is under-investigated. And as you find out in the book, it takes a lot of investigation even though often when the officers ask who killed someone, the answer is "everybody knows." Everybody knows, but getting them to talk requires that the witness trust the justice system more than they trust the Wild West system of the gangs.



March, Book One

One of the advantages to having a small library is that sometimes you're surprised by what's just sitting around with no takers. In this case, it was all three parts of this graphic memoir* by John Lewis. I admit to not knowing much about him personally, so I imagine I will learn a lot. This small first volume focuses on his schooling and the beginning of his involvement in the civil rights movement. It's a pretty basic overview of the lunch counter sit-ins and positions of the politicians, and how various organizations were involved. The book is aimed at a YA audience, so I think it's good that there's not the assumption of a whole lot of knowledge about it all.

I enjoyed the art style and felt like there were enough words, but not so many that the pages felt crowded.

I've got Book 2 out from the library as well, so I'll get to that one soon.

* "graphic memoir" always makes me feel like it's supposed to have a graphic content warning on it, but I'm trying because "graphic novel" isn't right for non-fiction and "graphic novel memoir" is just ridiculous.

103 books is a lot. I'm interested in Ghettoside, especially in light of what's happening in Chicago and the NY Times coverage there. March sounds interesting too (I just call them all graphic novels, even though most of those that I have read were nonfiction)

The Floating Opera

The narrator of the book, Todd Andrews, tells the reader about a day in his life when he "changed his mind". It's not long before we find out what he's talking about - he intended to commit suicide on that day, but didn't end up doing it. The hows and whys aren't revealed right away, but every chapter reveals something that helps put the whole picture together, and still some things at the end manage to be a total surprise.

The conceit of the book is that we are reading a book that knows it's a book - Todd talks directly to the readers. He is a novice writer and apologizes for his clumsy writing, his digressions, things he forgot to mention, etc. It's interesting to see how that works since this was Barth's first book as well. I imagine most authors have wanted to throw in comments like that on their first outings. I felt like the book went on just a tad too long, and some points seemed to be needlessly obscured, but it mostly evens out with the times that I felt like a reveal was both well-done and truly surprising. So I'd say that this was a good book, but I am curious about his other work, to see if more experience and polish make for a really good book.

(This is on the 1001 books list. Also, it's bundled with his second book The End of the Road, but I didn't read that one - the library loan was up and I didn't really want to renew it.)



Dear Mr. M

I really loved Koch's first book, The Dinner, and enjoyed his second one (Summer House with Swimming Pool) to a lesser extent. Koch likes to write about the thin veneer of civilization over something sinister, the horrors that may be lurking beneath the most banal household. This book is no exception. It's told mostly from the point of view of a mysterious narrator who is the downstairs neighbor to a famous writer whose star is fading. The narrator has an unsettling interest in the writer, and at first it seems like the book is going to go into Misery territory, but Koch has something very different in mind. As with his other books, the best part is seeing how your expectations of where the plot is going are either fulfilled or turned on their heads.

So, since I don't feel like it's really the right thing to get into the plot, here's what I can tell you about the experience of reading the book: I do love his writing a lot of the time. He has a dry, dark sense of humor that often makes for unexpectedly comic moments. His imagination is clearly unique. He really puts you into the minds of people who are not quite right. However, I felt that this one was maybe longer and more convoluted than it needed to be. I mean, the storyline is exactly as convoluted as it needs to be, but the book itself still seems unnecessarily long. And I worry a bit that he's writing himself into being the M. Night Shyamalan of literature - you always expect twists, and get disappointed when they're what you expected or aren't big enough to deliver that punch.

I would characterize this as a pretty good read, but not a great one. I'm not sorry I read it, but if I'm asked for a recommendation, I'd choose one of the other two over this one.

>216 dchaikin: Cops seem to be like teachers - it's such an important job but the ones who can come in with a pure purpose and maintain the attitude to try to accomplish it through years of bureaucracy, seeing the worst, being constrained by finances and human limits, etc, are few and far between. I'm not sure what the solution is. But one thing that's clear is that not enough cops see the people who might be involved in crimes as people first and foremost. It's all such a complicated tangle of factors. Like pulling on a knot: if you pull one part, it tightens something else, but you have to keep tugging on different parts until it all starts to loosen. I just don't know that we have figured out how to have the delicacy to keep at it in spite of things not seeming to improve much.

But at the same time, I think it's hard when segments of society won't even admit to some aspects of what's wrong. If you can't acknowledge systemic inequalities, they're probably not going to change.

Coincidentally, I also read 103 books this year, and also did the international move thing. I always expect to read around 100 books, and so felt that this year was a nicely average one, but looking back at recent years, the total was always at least twenty higher. Good thing I'm not keeping track!

Good comments about Ghettoside. One comment in its favor - since it's told from the point of view of (largely) white law enforcement, it's more palatable to many. I keep handing books to my father on the topic and he gives them back, largely unread, with the comment that he doesn't want to read about excuses for people's poor decisions. This one he read. Sigh. It's much like how Jon Krakauer's book on rape was taken more seriously than similar books and articles written by women. It would be lovely if people could talk about their own experiences and be taken at their word, but we seem to still need to hear it from manly white men in order to consider the issues.

Happy holidays! I hope the ample snow makes things extra festive.

>219 RidgewayGirl: My goal (such as I have one) is usually about 85-90 because I mostly make that without too much difficulty. I don't often get over 100. I know that for some people plane travel boosts their reading, but I just sleep most of the time on planes so it is actually lost time. And of course, moving doesn't afford a lot of relaxing reading time, as you well know!

Agreed that it makes the book, and therefore its message, more palatable to people who might not be open to reading other books on the topic. Not wanting to read excuses about other people's poor decisions makes me think of a scene in The Emperor's New Groove, one of my all-time favorite movies. The temporary ruler, Yzma, is holding audiences with the empire's subjects.

Yzma: It is no concern of mine whether or not your family has... what was it again?
Peasant: Umm... food?
Yzma: Ha! You really should have thought of that before you became peasants!

I agree with your assessment of Dear Mr. M - not nearly as good as the dinner. I thought it suffered from the shifting points of view and multiple timelines and the twist at the end would have been much more effective if the previous construction had been tighter.

>221 japaul22: And there was one thing I didn't understand at all - he makes a big deal out of the writer cutting Stella out of the story, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it really mattered. If it was just to talk about how authors take a real story and cut out real people, etc, that's fine, but he really hammered on that one for some time. But overall, yeah, it just needed to be woven together more tightly.

>222 ursula: I didn't get that either. Maybe Herman just wanted it to be more about him - breaking up best friends relationships?

I also didn't get the point of the whole scene with M's wife and daughter getting a ride back to their house with H. I thought it was intended to get creepy but I never found it so.

As it turns out, I don't think I'm going to finish anything else this year.

Here are the last straggling books....



Walk Through Walls

I have been interested in Marina Abramovic since I saw some of the short films about her piece in MoMA in 2010, The Artist Is Present. For 3 months, she spent the entire time each day the museum was open seated in a chair, making eye contact with whichever members of the public came to sit in the chair across from her. They sat silently, with no physical contact, for as long as the patron wished. I didn't know much about her previous work, and nothing about her personally, but I got the full rundown here.

She is the daughter of Yugoslavian partisans, and had a pretty awful upbringing. The title comes from her description of her mother's determination - she could walk through walls. Marina definitely takes after her. It takes a certain kind of will to do some of the painful performance pieces she's done, and also the long-duration ones. She is very much about testing boundaries - her own, and that of the audience. She was there at the beginning of performance art and has been incredibly influential in that arena. Her pieces intrigue me very much.

The one she is most famous for was early in her career, called Rhythm 0. She put 70-something objects on a table, and a sign that said she was the object and those items could be used on her, and that for 6 hours, she accepted full responsibility. The objects ranged from the completely innocuous (camera, feather) to the dangerous (knife, razor blade, gun and one bullet).

What I most enjoyed were definitely the descriptions of her art, and her working relationship with fellow artist Ulay. The details of their relationship were important for the narrative, and arguably the artist's personal life is a big part of their public work especially in Marina's case because her work tends to be so raw and intimate. But talking about her subsequent relationship didn't really add anything. I'm not saying she should have left it out, I'm just saying it wasn't the most enthralling part. Also, she's a little crazy. Not because of her art, but because she has a lot of kooky ideas about energies and crystals and telepathy. But whatever.

I really liked having the story told to me by Marina herself - if you have trouble with accents, the audio might not be the best choice because she does have a strong Eastern European accent. But I thought it was a great experience and didn't have a problem understanding her.



This Real Night

This was my first book by Rebecca West. I picked this one out at the library because I didn't necessarily want to read one of hers that's on the 1001 books list. I have been squeezing a lot of those into the end of the year and was feeling a bit overwhelmed. Although the jacket said this one was the middle book of a trilogy, I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did! The story is told by Rose, and it's the story of her life right as World War I is about to start. Rose and her twin sister Mary are young women just out of school, and both are set to become concert pianists just like their mother. The family also includes older sister Cordelia, who no one seems to like or understand, younger brother Richard Quin, still in school, and Cousin Rosamund, who although she lives elsewhere is like a sister to them. The father abandoned them in the recent past due to a gambling problem.

There's not a lot of plot here, really, but that didn't make a difference to me. West's writing is just so beautiful, both her descriptions of place and of feelings. I enjoyed reading about these people so much, and I also liked that this wasn't quite the typical novel of idyllic life before it all comes crashing down thanks to World War I. I don't feel bad about skipping the first book in the trilogy because I don't mind missing out on the characters' younger selves, but I'll definitely pick up the third book.



Zero K

I have previously read two books by Don DeLillo - first Libra, which I absolutely loved, and then White Noise which I loathed and didn't finish. Therefore, I was a little apprehensive picking up another DeLillo book, and particularly one that I don't "have" to read (ie, it's not on the 1001 Books list). And although I don't read reviews of books I haven't yet read, I have seen generalized unhappy grumblings about this one here and there.

But I'm going to buck the trend and say that I liked it quite a bit. It's about Jeffrey, the adult son of Ross a super-rich businessman who has contributed financially to an enterprise out in the remote desert of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, somewhere like that, which is cryogenically freezing and storing people to come back later. Their technology seems to replace the worn-out cells instead of just bringing you back as you are, so it's okay if you're suffering from a disease at the time of your death. This is the case with Jeff's stepmother Artis. Ross and Jeff are at the Convergence compound to "see her off", so to speak.

The plot isn't really a plot in the sense of accomplishing anything - there are no shadowy government conspiracies or industrial espionage to overcome, or even any coercion into a suspended state. It all exists as a way to talk about our thoughts on death. And, of course, a book about death is really a book about life. What makes it worth living, what makes you want to abandon it, what big things happen with no impact to us individually and what small things make an entire day worthwhile?

The writing is beautiful, and the book is open-ended. It gave me plenty to think about.

>223 japaul22: Oh, that too. I guess it was just a misdirect ... but what a long misdirect!

Just catching these last three reviews and I was kind of taken by your comments on each of them. I have two books by West in my wishlist, but I don't know very much about her. DeLillo I would really like to read, and your last few lines about this one make it really appeal.

>224 ursula:, >224 ursula:

I've only read Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier, which I studied at university and adored. It's one of my all time favourite books, and it's very short.