Pamelad's 17 in 17

1. Proust

2. New Books
Books published within the last three years.

3. Prize winners

4. Off the Shelf
I'm listing anything that was on the shelf on January 1st 2017. Books that I've counted in another category are in italics.
Update: now including anything that is currently on the shelf.

5. Off the Kindle
As for Off the Shelf.

6. Forgotten and Rediscovered Books
The Custodian of Forgotten Books
Ten Great Writers Nobody Reads
Lost Classics
Jonathan Latimer

7. Non-fiction

8. Crime

9. Guardian 1000

10. Other lists (anything but the Guardian 1000)
Fifty Crime Writers to Read Before You Die Planning to check out William McIlvanney, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Jonathan Latimer and Dan Kavanagh (crime-writing alias of Julian Barnes).
The twenty best spy novels of all time

11. Australia

12. Africa and Asia

13. Endless Europe
For a few years I have been reading my way around Europe in the Endless Europe thread, and have a few books by Eastern European writers that are waiting to be read.

14. Book club and other recommendations

15. CATs and Challenges

16. New authors

17. Everything else

1. Proust

The Way by Swann's
Marcel Proust: A Life by Edmund White
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
The Guermantes Way
Sodom and Gomorrah
The Prisoner
The Fugitive

2. New Books

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Tell the Truth, Shame the devil by Melina Marchetta
Real Tigers by Mick Herron
Spook Street by Mick Herron
The Forensic Records Society by Magnus Mills

3. Prize Winners

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood Stella Prize
Dead Lions by Mick Herron CWA Gold Dagger
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata Nobel
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
In Pursuit of the English by Doris Lessing Nobel
The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose Stella Prize

4. Off the Shelf

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives ed. Sarah Weinman
The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenov
Up at the Villa by Somerset Maugham
Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

5. Off the Kindle

Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong
Wild Wives by Charles Willeford
Rainbow's End by Ellis Peters
The Third Betrayal by Michael Hartland
August Folly by Angela Thirkell
The Rector by Mrs Margaret Oliphant
The Doctor's Family by Mrs Margaret Oliphant
The Perpetual Curate by Mrs Margaret Oliphant
Nine Lives by Bernice Rubens

6. Forgotten and Rediscovered Books

Sinners and Shrouds by Jonathan Latimer
The Fifth Grave by Jonathan Latimer aka Solomon's Vineyard
The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes
Fidelity by Susan Glaspell
Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy
The Strange Crime in Bermuda by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Bramton Wick by Elizabeth Fair
The Mingham Air by Elizabeth Fair
The Late Mrs. Prioleau by Monica Tindall
Begin Again by Ursula Orange
Journeying Wave by Richmal Crompton
Tom Tiddler's Ground by Ursula Orange
Company in the Evening by Ursula Orange

7. Non-fiction

Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank
Learn Italian the Natural Way, Part 1 by Paul Noble
Learn Italian the Natural Way, Part 2 by Paul Noble
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Learn Italian the Natural Way, Part 3 by Paul Noble
Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
A Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell

8. Crime

Rainbow's End by Ellis Peters
In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen
The Bath Mysteries by E.R. Punshon
The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene
Picture Miss Seeton by Heron Carvic
The Case of the Famished Parson by George Bellairs
The Girl Who Had to Die by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
The Red Bishop by Howard Mason
Kill Joy by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
I am Watching You by Teresa Driscoll
Reconstruction by Mick Herron
A Decent Interval by Simon Brett
The Murder on the Enriqueta by Molly Thynne
Hole in One by Catherine Aird
Somebody at the Door by Raymond Postgate

9. Guardian 1000

Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham
Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
A Married Man by Piers Paul Reid

10. Other Lists

Laidlaw by William McIlvanney 50 Crime Writers to Read before You Die
Quicksand by Nella Larsen 1001 Books
Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham The twenty best spy novels of all time
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki 1001 Books
The Clue by Carolyn Wells The Haycraft-Queen List of Detective Story Cornerstones

11. Australia

The Boy Who Loved Apples by Amanda Webster
Lion: A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley
Two-way Cut by Garry Disher
The Dry by Jane Harper
Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey
Force of Nature by Jane Harper
Under the Cold Bright Lights by Garry Disher

12. Africa and Asia

Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Naomi by Juníchiro Tanizaki
The Key by Juníchiro Tanizaki

13. Endless Europe

Moldova The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov
Armenia An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman
Andorra Andorra by Max Frisch
Ukraine Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

14. Book Club and Other Recommendations

The May Beetles by Baba Schwartz
Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
You're Saying It Wrong by Ross Petras and Katherine Petras
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
The Marquise of O by Heinrich von Kleist
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
Drown by Junot Diaz

15. Historical Fiction

China Dolls by Lisa See
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Penmarric by Susan Howatch
A Gentleman Never Tells by Eloisa James
Just Like Heaven by Julia Quinn
Henrietta (The Daring Debutantes) by Marion Chesney

16. New Authors

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Slow Horses by Mick Herron
The Third Betrayal by Michael Hartland
Paradise City by Elizabeth Day
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby by Donald Barthelme

17. Everything Else

Sanditon and A Memoir of Jane Austen by Jane Austen and James Edward Austen-Leigh
Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield
Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell
The Brandons by Angela Thirkell
Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood
Kingdom Lost by Patricia Wentworth
A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked in by Magnus Mills
The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac
Salem Chapel by Mrs Margaret Oliphant
Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski
Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes
The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

Category 14: Recommendations

The May Beetles by Baba Schwartz was recommended in an article published in The Age on December 3rd, The books we loved: Australian writers recommend their favourite reads of 2016. Joan London and Helen Garner both recommended Schwartz's memoir.

Baba was born in 1927, in a small town in Hungary. Now almost ninety, she remembers an idyllic childhood in a loving, Jewish Orthodox family, her friendships with both Jewish and Christian children, her delight in learning, and her crush on the boy she saw for only seconds each week at the synagogue. But by 1944, Hungary's government was a puppet of Germany and Hungarians had turned against the Jews, who were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. This is the story of Baba's survival.

Happy reading in 2017! Looks like your first read proved to be a good one?

>9 The_Hibernator: Happy New Year to you too!

>8 Tess_W: It was well-written, and definitely worth reading because we can't afford to forget. The author was one of three sisters. Their mother managed to keep them all together, and it was her strength that helped them survive. Here is a link to a brief video of the author speaking about her experiences.

Welcome back, and, yes your link to the New Yorker article works. :)

>11 DeltaQueen50: Thank you for testing the link. Happy reading in 2017.

Welcome back and good luck with your challenge! Hope you have a great reading year.

>Thank you. Happy 2017 reading to you as well.

This one is off the shelf: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives ed. Sarah Weinman

An excellent collection of short stories by female crime writers of the forties through to the seventies. Some writers I'd read before and was pleased to come across again, but others I'd never heard of, so I'll be looking for more of their work.

Welcome back... and a rather belated Happy New Year to you. ;-)

>15 lkernagh: Happy New Year!

I started Laidlaw with much enthusiasm and was initially very taken with this philosophical policeman. After a while though, I got sick of him, perhaps because the book was written in the seventies and Laidlaw's attitudes which may have been unusually tolerant at the time no longer seem so. Lots of violent Glasgow hard men with their own codes of honour. The author seemed a bit too much in love with his main character.

Not bad, but I won't be reading another in the series.

This was from the list, 50 best crime writers to read before you die, in >4 pamelad:

The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov

This sad, comic novel is by a Moldovan author. There aren't many Moldovans who are published in English, so I was pleased to come across this book, and even more pleased that it was so well worth reading. Moldova is virtually a character in the book, and it's a terrible place: poor, brutal, corrupt, filthy and hopeless. Everyone in Moldova wants to get to the promised land, Italy, where even maids earn 2000 euros a month, the streets are clean, and the people are happy.

In 53 short chapters (the book is only 195 pages long), Lorchenkov chronicles the hilarious ways that the villagers of Laga attempt to get to Italy. Crusaders march on Italy; a mechanic builds a flying machine; government ministers attempt to parachute in. The methods become funnier and the results more tragic.

If you're looking for a Moldovan writer, try Lorchenkov.

From the thirties to the fifties Jonathan Latimerwrote hard-boiled, humorous crime novels and Hollywood film scripts. I had not heard of him until I found this list, Fifty Crime Writers to Read Before You Die, so am including him in my Forgotten Books category, which I have renamed to Forgotten and Rediscovered Books because recently many publishers have published their back lists as ebooks. Many of Latimer's books are now available as ebooks.

I read Sinners and Shrouds and found it very entertaining. A hard-drinking newspaper reporter wakes up next to a dead girl, and spends the rest of the book avoiding arrest and trying to find the real killer. I will read more of Latimer's books.

You've intrigued me with Jonathan Latimer so off I went to Amazon and have picked up Solomon's Vineyard. Apparently this book was so controversial that it was held for publication for some eight years.

ETA: I thought about it a little and then went back and picked up Sinners and Shrouds as well!

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives is an excellent collection of stories.

And I'm impressed you found a Moldovan author to read. I've made a note of it.

>19 DeltaQueen50: From the reviews, Solomon's Shroud sounds a bit like Red Harvest, but with an amoral detective and even more violence. Interested to hear what you think. I'll wait for you to read it! Sinners and Shrouds might be almost sedate in comparison. So much booze - another reminder of Hammett. How did people function?

>20 RidgewayGirl: I visited your thread on the Endless Europe Challenge! Recommending a book for Belarus: Voices from Chernobyl. I am about to start Death and the Penguin, which is by a Ukrainian writer.

Fixed the last touchstone, which led to Catcher in the Rye. Very odd.

I've just received, from The Book Depository, Ultimate Pulp vol. 1, which contains The Fifth Grave by Jonathan Latimer and Night Squad by David Goodis. The Fifth Grave turns out to be a re-release of Solomon's Vineyard >19 DeltaQueen50:

>22 pamelad: Oh excellent, let me know when you plan on reading The Fifth Grave and I'll pick up my copy as well.

I hope you like The Fifth Grave. I read it a few years ago and enjoyed it, as it's pretty much non-stop action and the "kinky" parts were funny. I've yet to read anything from Goodis, though I should considering how often I see his name mentioned.
Noir is an excellent way to start the new year.

>23 DeltaQueen50: Next week? Now that it's here I'm keen to start.

>24 mstrust: Glad to hear you liked it. I was wondering about the desperately depraved bits, but kinky and funny sounds much more manageable!

>25 pamelad: Ok, I'll put it at the top of my pile, but it might not be until toward the end of the week.

China Dolls by Lisa See

In the late 1930's three young women meet in San Francisco's Chinatown: Helen, from an important local family; Grace, who has run away from her violent father; Ruby, a hedonist with a secret. They find work as dancers in a new nightclub, Forbidden City, a disreputable occupation that distances them from the traditional Chinese community and turns them into no-no girls. When the work dries up in San Francisco, the women go on the road, on the "Chop Suey Circuit" performing in shows around the country.

I found the historical background to this story very interesting. See goes into the rape of Nanking and American-Chinese protests against the shipping of iron to Japan. The miscegenation laws shocked me, as they had in See's family memoir On Gold Mountain. The onset of WWII makes the women's insecure lives even riskier. Some Japanese-Americans try to pass as Chinese, and one of the characters is reported and interned. In mid-western cities, the vice-squad rounds up women who are out at night, on suspicion of them being "Victory girls" who sleep with servicemen. The women are jailed for three days and forcibly tested for VD. If they're found to be infected they are locked up for the duration of the war.

The personal stories of the women, except where they illustrated historical events or cultural traditions, were not very engaging, perhaps because the women never really came alive. The writing is pedestrian, and the book is too long.

Worth reading for the factual bits, but as a novel it's a failure.

Hi Pamela, I started Solomon's Vineyard last night and so far I am enjoying it a lot. It's a true hard-boiled story and the author doesn't shrink away from violence, gunplay and rough sex but I'm ok with that. I'm not feeling all that well today so not sure if I will get much reading done, but it's a short book so won't take very long to read.

The Fifth Grave aka Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer

Latimer's novel was banned in the U.S, but published in England in 1941. A bowdlerised version, The Fifth Grave, was published in the US. The version I read is titled The Fifth Grave, but it's the unexpurgated version. How confusing!

Latimer introduces the femme fatale in the first sentence: "From the way her buttocks looks under the black silk dress, I knew she'd be good in bed." The "I" is a PI going by the name of Karl Craven, who is in town to find a girl who has been kidnapped by a cult.

In the next paragraph the femme fatale has "gold-blonde hair, and curves, and breasts the size of Cuban pineapples." With a start like that, I know that nothing that follows needs to be taken seriously, which is just as well because nearly everyone in this book is brutal, corrupt or both, and anyone who's not is a victim, likely to end up dead. There's a lot of violence, including the violent sex between the femme fatale and the PI, Karl Craven, which is one of the reasons the book was banned in the US.

I was entertained, but probably won't read another Latimer.

I was utterly distracted by the Cuban pineapples, never having seen one. Breasts the size (and shape) of Queensland pineapples would be attractive to a very select few!

Solomon's Vineyard was certainly over the top! The writing wasn't good enough to justify the level of violence or his treatment of women as playthings. I'm glad I read it as it does have a place in the history of pulp fiction, but I doubt if I will read another Latimer book.

The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes

These short stories were first published in 1933 and 1934. The white folks are in charge: they're employers, benefactors, lynch mobs. Some employers pay black people less than whites, work them harder and sack them for imaginary infractions. Benefactors collect "primitive" black protegees. In the thirties, a mob might lynch a black man for talking to a white woman. In some of these stories, the tone is sardonic and the interactions between black and white amusing in their mutual incomprehension. Others are tragic: small missteps lead inevitably to violent death.

This piece of history illuminates the prejudice and violence that is still occurring today. Highly recommended.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

A young woman from a working-class background hangs around with rich people in New York City in 1938. Quite readable but a bit too slow, and I wasn't much interested in the people, who were too materialistic and success-driven for my liking. I thought the tone was snobbish and patronising.

Dropping a comment so that I get to follow your thread - happy reading! (I'm a little behind, so apologies for the generic comment - better to come, I hope.) :)

Hi Eva.

>29 pamelad: - LOL the pineapple reference!

For 13. Endless Europe, I started Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War, but cannot make myself continue. Instead, I've ordered Vasily Grossman's An Armenian Sketchbook, which promises to be much more to my taste.

In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen

After Swann's Way I'm having a break and reading froth, which In Farleigh Field certainly is. Country houses, titled families, debutantes, inquisitive children looking for a criminal, MI5, Bletchley code breakers, assassination plots, gentlemen and cads. Everything we need for a ripping WWII spy story. A cosy wartime spy story. What a genre bender!

ETA Forgot romance!

>37 pamelad: That one looks right up my alley -- BB taken!

>37 pamelad: And a bullet for me too!

Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong

A couple from out of town comes to the city to attend a dinner that is important for the husband's career. When their baby sitter falls through, they employ a young women recommended by the elevator man to mind their nine-year-old daughter. This is a huge mistake. Tension builds as we learn more about the baby sitter and well-meaning people try to help the little girl. An encounter with a disillusioned young man precipitates a crisis. Can't tell you any more!

This was loitering on the Kindle. It was first published in the fifties.

>38 christina_reads:, >39 VivienneR: Enjoy!

>37 pamelad: - Book bullet for me too! I love her Royal Spyness series so am looking forward to this stand alone.

Wild Wives by Charles Willeford

This one has been sitting around on the Kindle for a few years. It turned out to be short, sordid, and violent. Authentic 1950's pulp.

The Ways of White Folks sounds like a worthwhile read.

Rainbow's End by Ellis Peters

I read this for the February Random CAT: read a book with a possessive word in the title.

It is one of the Felse Investigations. A rich man moves into the village and starts taking over, to the resentment of the locals, until the night his battered body is found at the foot of a church tower.

Quite readable, but nothing special.

Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank

In the last few months, in an attempt to understand how the people of the US elected Donald Trump as president, I've read Hillbilly Elegy, which was more of an "I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps" memoir rather than a sociological study, Strangers in Their Own Land, which was much more informative and described the perspectives of a group of Southern Tea Party supporters whom the author came to know well, and now Listen Liberal, which describes how the Democratic party betrayed its core constituency of working people, but still expected them to vote Democratic.

I was stunned to read that Bill Clinton dismantled the welfare safety net, brought in the three strikes rule, introduced legislation that enabled companies to move their industries to countries like Mexico, and deregulated banking. He broke the link between the Democratic Party and Roosevelt's New Deal. The Democrats are no longer concerned with wages and working conditions and the well-being of working people.

Frank's premise is that the Democratic Party has deliberately aligned itself with the interests of rich, successful, well-educated liberals at the expense of lower-paid, less educated workers. He provides plenty of evidence, and it's shocking. Even so, Democrats assumed that struggling middle class workers would vote for their party because they had no alternative. The book was published before the presidential election, so it predicts a future where the Democrats lose the votes of the workers they failed to represent, and that's what happened.

Frank isn't presenting a balanced argument here. He's an enraged Democrat who believes that the party has lost its way. That's fine with me. I'm on his side.

Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham

Apparently this is a roman a clef. It's the story of Edward Driffield, a working-class writer based on Thomas Hardy, who became the grand old man of British literature. According to the narrator, Ashenden, who is standing in for Maugham, Driffield was a dull, second-rate writer honoured more for his extreme age than his literary ability. Alroy Kear, a successful writer and critic, and friend of Ashenden, is planning to write a biography of Driffield and has asked Ashenden for has recollections. Driffield and his wife Rosie had befriended Ashenden when he was a lonely adolescent, and Ashenden remembers them fondly, particularly Rosie.

This is shaping up to be a very dull review, so I'll just mention some of the main threads: the appalling snobbery of the times, and the relations between the classes; Rosie, the free spirit who was judged harshly by the literary establishment; back-biting and politics in the literary world; how to judge a good book and what makes a good writer.

Read Nicholas Shakespeare's introduction after you read the book.

I quite enjoyed Cakes and Ale, but thought parts of it it too waspish and petty.

It's on the Guardian 1000 list.

>44 LisaMorr: Thought provoking, even now.

>46 pamelad: - that sounds like a book I need to read.

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

I started this book about a populist politician who imposes a dictatorship on the USA because I'd read that it was eerily prescient of the recent rise of another populist politician. 20% of the way through on the Kindle, I've given up. It's verbose, didactic and obvious, and reads as though it's written by an incensed undergraduate. I can't plough through any more.

Years ago, when I was young and knew everything, I read and enjoyed Babbitt and Main Street. I wonder whether I'd like them now. I hope they justify Lewis's Nobel Prize, because this book certainly doesn't.

>49 LittleTaiko: Frank also has something to say about innovations like Uber, which is interesting in the light of the revelations coming out about that company. Listen Liberal is well worth reading.

13. Endless Europe - Armenia

An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman

After the authorities arrested all the copies they could find of Life and Fate, they offered Grossman the consolation prize of a trip to Armenia to translate an Armenian novel. This delightful book is another product of Grossman's stay.

14. Recommendations

You're Saying It Wrong by Ross Petras and Katherine Petras

I think both rabbitprincess and Deltaqueen50 recommended this one, a guide to the correct pronunciation of 150 commonly mispronounced words and phrases. I'm glad that I've never been tempted to use synecdoche in conversation because sin-NECK-duk-kee is nothing like the way I would have pronounced it. SYnecdosh? An entertaining and useful little book, but if you're speaking a non-US variety of English you need to take care. Ahm-bray for ombre and kyebahsh for kibosh had me puzzled until I remembered the missing American vowel sound: the short, rounded o as in dog, cot, got, off. According to Michael Swan in his book Practical English Usage, Americans pronounce this o like the a in father or the au in caught.

So do cot and caught sound the same in US pronunciation?

Is the title being deliberately colloquial to catch our attentioan, or have adverbs in the US gone the way of the short round o?

Anyway, I enjoyed the book.

>53 pamelad: Yes, cot and caught generally sound the same in US and Canadian pronunciation, but there are pockets in both countries where people pronounce them differently.

I'm glad you enjoyed the book!

I think that was solely a RP recommendation but I did take a book bullet for it as well! :)

>53 pamelad: That does sound like a good one. I must be one of the ones who pronounce cot and caught differently...caught like cawht...cot like hot.

I'm reading In Search of Lost Time and am a bit bogged down, so I've been reading less than usual.

Recently read Ashenden by Somerset Maugham and Lion: A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley. I've seen the film, Lion. The first half was really interesting, with the lost five year-old Saroo trying to survive on the streets of Calcutta. The second half dragged a bit as Saroo searched for his home on Google Maps, but picked up when he made it back to India. The film-makers gave him and American girlfriend, Rooney Mara. Ho hum. To attract an international audience, I surmise. I preferred the book to the film, because I was interested in what Saroo was thinking and feeling.

Ashenden is a spy story, based on Somerset Maugham's experiences in France and Switzerland during WWI. I've read a few books by Somerset Maugham lately, and they seem to be lightly fictionalised versions of his life.

>57 pamelad: I'm reading In Search of Lost Time and am a bit bogged down, so I've been reading less than usual.

Me too. I'm about 200 pages from the end and then I need a big break!

Was tempted to put Lion: A Long Way Home in the Africa and Asia category, which is still empty, but have put it where it belongs, 11. Australia. The author sees himself as Australian, rather than Indian.

Ashenden is in 10. Other Lists because it is one of the "Twenty Best Spy Novels of All Time".

I have a few empty categories: Nobel Prize Winners; Other Prizes; Africa and Asia.

Might have to rethink the Nobel Prize one, at least. In Search of Lost Time requires a lot of concentration, so I'm not looking for too much intellectual rigour in my other reading.

Finished In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, volume 2 of In Search of Lost Time. I'm reading the new translations, coordinated by Christopher Prendergast. This one was by James Grieve, and I can recommend it. Having a rest before I start volume 3, and looking forward to some less demanding reading. I fancy some short sentences.

I'm reading Slow Horses, which has begun well.

Replacing 2. Nobel Prize Winners with 2. New books, for books published within the last two or three years.

16. New Authors

Mick Herron's Slow Horses.

The slow horses are spies who have made mistakes, been removed from the field, and banished to the decrepit building, Slough House, where they perform tedious tasks and loathe one another. Their boss, Jason Lamb, despite his once fearsome reputation as a field agent, seems to have settled into lethargy and contempt. It's a dismal place. All the slow horses want to make their way back to spy central in Regent's Park, home of MI5, but they haven't a chance, until they become involved in the urgent attempt to rescue a young man who has been kidnapped by right-wing British extremists who threaten to behead him on the internet.

This is the first Mick Herron book I've read. I enjoyed it, and am pleased that there are a few more in the series.

A faster read than In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower !

I read this last year, but our book club is reading it, so I've read it again. Here's last year's review, because I am to slack to write another.

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

Eight young women are imprisoned on a remote property in the Australian bush. There is no escape other than death on the electric fence and the warders are just as trapped as the women. All the women committed the same "crime": they were abused by powerful men and condemned by the press. They include a potential Olympic swimmer who was molested by her coach, a woman who was pack-raped by a group of football players, a young woman in love with a popular, married politician, and a naive passenger on a cruise ship who was drugged and raped at an on-board party. I recognise some of these stories from the Australian press. Diane Brimble died after being drugged on a cruise ship, and too many people blamed her for putting herself in a vulnerable position. Then there was the sixteen-year-old girl who destroyed the marriage and career of a respected, middle-aged football coach. Yes, it was her fault. But the most blatant, recent example of misogyny in Australia was the treatment of our first female prime minister, Julia Gillard. Every woman I know was horrified by the contempt with which she was treated by conservative male politicians and members of the press.

So this is an angry book. It starts brilliantly and, even though the ending doesn't fulfill the promise of the beginning, is well-worth reading.

Won the Stella Prize.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. Snyder sees in Trump's campaign and presidency the warning signs of totalitarianism that preceded the overthrow of democracy in thirties Germany, forties Chechoslovakia, Russia's expansion into Eastern Europe. It's a short book, a sort of handbook of resistance.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/20/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-twe...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/02/24/20-ways-to-recogniz...

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

This is a memoir, written in the last year of Paul Kalinithi's life. A promising neuro-surgeon, Kalanithi discovered that he had cancer. Initially, hoping for another ten years, and with the support of his oncologist, he returned to work, but the return of cancer made it impossible for him to continue in such a gruelling, physically demanding profession. With less than a year to live he turned to writing. Kalanthi died before the book was finished, and his wife Lucy has written an epilogue.

I read this because a friend is very ill. Kalanithi mentions that many people with a terminal illness want to stay close to their families, and make them their first priority, but he was a success-driven man, needing recognition for worldly achievements. When he found that he had perhaps a year to live, he looked for a job that would occupy that time and decided on writing. In her epilogue, Lucy suggests that he presented only his achievement-driven side, and that in life he was warm, funny and kind. Those qualities do not come across in the book.

Kalanithi was very fortunate in his oncologist, who saw maintaining her patients' integrity as an essential part of her work. She encouraged Kalanithi to return to neuro-surgery for as long as he could, when he was thinking of withdrawing into his illness, because she identified that his work was hugely important to him. I hope that my friend is as lucky and that her oncologist sees who she is.

>65 pamelad: I've finally put a hold on this one at the library. Feels like I'm one of the last people to read it!

>66 rabbitprincess: I'll be interested to hear what you think. Re-reading my review, I've judged him harshly, which isn't fair.

The Third Betrayal by Michael Hartland

I can't remember where this came from. Perhaps it was a Kindle Daily Deal.

It's a good story, with lots of plot twists, that's based on the infiltration of MI5 during the thirties. Was there an undiscovered mole right at the top? The main character, Sonia, is based on a real person, Ruth Kuczynski, a Communist spy who was the handler for Klaus Fuchs. Even so, it took me a while to get into it because the writing is so bad. I get distracted by clunky sentences and rewrite them in my head. There are too many long, slim, tanned female legs, and what I see as ageing male author wish fulfillment: the suave, sixtyish investigator, Nairn, is madly attractive to more than one much younger woman.

I own a copy of Slow Horses and now I want to read it right away. Good review.

Snyder's written some well-reasoned and thoughtful articles about Ukraine and eastern Europe and the dangers of totalitarianism lately. I'll have to look for a copy of this book.

The Bath Mysteries by E. R. Punshon

This is the seventh of Punshon's Bobby Owen series. Bobby is from an impoverished, aristocratic, English family. He is an Oxford graduate, forced by the Great Depression to work for a living, and has become an unusually well-educated policeman. He started the series as a constable, and by this book, the seventh, he has become a sergeant. Bobby's family has just discovered that a cousin has been dead for two years, the apparent result of drowning in the bath, and Bobby has been asked to investigate. Bobby uncovers a string of bath drownings. All of the victims have, like Bobby's cousin, become estranged from their friends and families, and been insured for 20,000 pounds.

Punshon shows great sympathy for the unemployed men camping on the Thames embankment, slowly starving, prey to the mysterious man who recruits them, insures them and kills them. He also shows sympathy for the main female character, a former street-walker, but sees her decline as due not to unemployment and poverty, but to contraception! She had imagined that she could live her life as men did theirs, but found only emptiness. Next thing she knew, she was on the streets. I was intrigued.

In summary: a good read, well-plotted, a snapshot of the 1930's.

>69 RidgewayGirl: I'll have a look for Snyder's articles, particularly about the Ukraine.

Followed up Slow Horses with Dead Lions. Another good read.

>70 pamelad: BB taken -- never heard of this author before, but I'm always on the lookout for new Golden Age mysteries!

Replaced Category 15. CATs and Challenges with Best Reads.

I haven't been getting round to any of the CATs, so I've some put 4.5 and 5* reads in the Best Reads category. I hope to find some more 5* books to replace the 4.5* books. The Ways of White Folks is my only 5* read so far.

Replaced category 15 again. Now it's Historical Fiction.

Much too slack about reviewing books, and will do better. In the meantime, here is a list of the best books I've read in the first half of the year.

The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes Short stories from the 1930's.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. I've read the first three volumes and am half-way through the fourth. Enjoying it more and more as I get further in. I didn't expect it to be so funny.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Man's Search for meaning by Viktor Frankl

Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank

Moonglow by Micheal Chabon

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki

I have just finished the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time - Sodom and Gomorrah - and am feeling so pleased with myself that I am thinking of having a go at Ulysses next year. Very much enjoying the Proust.

Have never made it past page 60 of Ulysses, and I've tried a few times, but perhaps it's time.

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman

Bregman advocates sharing the world's wealth. He thinks there's plenty to go around. Take the money away from the financial people who achieve nothing for the greater good, and redistribute it to the people doing worthwhile jobs. Open the borders so that there is free movement of labour. Pay everyone a basic income so that noone lives in dire poverty. Reduce working hours and share the work around.

These ideas are well worth thinking about.

I didn't much like the book, though. The ideas don't connect logically, there is too much hard-sell and the author intrudes too much. The book has been translated from the original Dutch into American English.

I admire you for sticking with In Search of Lost Time. I don't think I made it more than 50 pages into Swann's Way, even though I recognized the good writing.

Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

This is a collection of essays about feminism. Solnit takes the long view and is hopeful. I'm glad I read it.

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby by Donald Barthelme

A collection of short stories, all of them thought-provoking, particularly the titular one. Colby has gone too far, so his friends decide that he must be executed. Reminded me a little of Shirley Jackson, with a little bit of Marcus Mills and a pinch of George Saunders, though Barthelme predates the latter two.

Very pleased to have come across Donald Barthelme and will read more.

I've just finished The Strange Crime in Bermuda by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Went to add it to my library and found that not only did I have another copy, but that I'd read it. Absolutely no memory of it. That's the second time this year. The other one was Susan Glaspell's Fidelity. Had a few faint impressions of familiarity, but not many. I've added them both to category 6, Forgotten and Rediscovered Books. Not the original idea for the category, but whatever fits!

Read them both in 2011. Wonder what else I did that year.

>80 pamelad: That ended up being a handy category! :)

Back from Italy. Long plane trip - read a few books!

The Girl Who Had to Die by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding 8. Crime
The Red Bishop by Howard Mason 8. Crime
Kill Joy by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding 8. Crime
Penmarric by Susan Howatch 17. Everything Else
Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski 17. Everything Else
Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes 17. Everything Else
I am Watching You by Teresa Driscoll 8. Crime
Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron 8. Crime
The Rector by Mrs Margaret Oliphant 5. Off the Kindle
The Doctor's Family by Mrs Margaret Oliphant 5. Off the Kindle
The Perpetual Curate by Mrs Margaret Oliphant 5. Off the Kindle
Nine Lives by Bernice Ruben 5. Off the Kindle
Salem Chapel by Mrs Margaret Oliphant17. Everything Else
Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey 11. Australia

The books I liked best were:

Good Evening, Mrs Craven - short stories written and set in London during WWII.

Little Boy Lost by Maghanita Laski - an Englishman searching for his lost son in the aftermath of WWII. Is the boy he finds in the French orphanage really his son?

Penmarric - a romance and family saga, just the type of thing I like to read on holiday. Not as good as Cashelmara, but a good read all the same.

Down Cemetery Road- discovered Mick Herron this year and read the whole Slow Horses series. This is the first in the Zoe Boehm series - she's a private detective.

The Perpetual Curate and Salem Chapel by Mrs Margaret Oliphant. These belong to the Carlingford series. Like Trollop's Barchester Towers series, they focus on the church, both Anglican and Chapel. Gently humorous. Comforting, because people get the ends they deserve. No good people were permanently hurt in the creation of this series!

The other memorable read was Theft: A Love Story, which I disliked because I had no interest in the characters, but made an impression. Peter Carey always does.

Now to allocate them to categories. Done. The Crime and the Everything Else categories are looking very healthy.

Nobody Walks by Mick Herron

I didn't enjoy this. Dark, bleak and nasty. None of the humour of the Slow Horses series.

I hope you had a lovely trip. I remember reading Penmarric many years ago and enjoying it.

Just discovered Elizabeth Fair, a gently humorous British writer from the fifties. I was looking for something light, with a happy ending, and found it in Bramton Wick and The Mingham Air.

Now reading Jane Harper's follow-up to The Dry - Force of Nature

The Elizabeth Fair books sound lovely. I’ll have to check them out.

>85 pamelad: "a gently humorous writer from the fifties" sounds like something I'd enjoy. Thank you, I've added Bramton Wick to my wishlist.

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

Like The Dry, Force of Nature has a good sense of place. The characters in The Dry did not ring true to me - they seemed to be put through their paces for the sake of the plot - and Force of Nature has the same problem.

Aaron Falk, the policeman from The Dry, is investigating a company suspected of money laundering. His contact in the company, an obnoxious woman, goes missing during a team-building exercise in the bush. Is she dead and, if so, is it an accident or murder? If she has been murdered, is the motive connected with the company, or is it personal?

Force of Nature is a gripping read, despite its shortcomings.

>88 pamelad: I really enjoyed The Dry by Harper but I suppose we all find different things in books. I'm going to add Force of Nature to my wishlist.

>89 VivienneR: A big problem with The Dry was that Whitlam is the name of a revered Labor prime minister- he brought the troops home from Vietnam, abolished university fees, instituted free universal health care - so to use his name for the villain is an unnecessary distraction and politically suspect. The author was a journalist for the Murdoch press.

>90 pamelad: Oh, that wasn't a good idea. To malign a good name is unforgivable. And it is there in print forever! OK, Jane Harper has been crossed off my list. Thanks for that. I really dislike that kind of game.

I have finished In Search of Lost Time!!!

>92 pamelad: Woo hoo! Excellent work!

Amazing! Congratulations!!
Will you have comments to sum the experience up or is it too overwhelming?

I hope to be not too far behind you in 2018!

>92 pamelad: Congratulations! I am impressed.

>93 rabbitprincess: >95 mathgirl40: Thank you!

>94 japaul22: In the end it wasn't that difficult. I just had to keep reading. It helped that Proust was a lot funnier than I'd expected him to be, and he could catch the essence of a person in a gesture. In the last volume he explained how he caught that essence, the reason for his exhaustive detail, and the purpose of both the book and his life. Everyone was part of the plan, and at the end the plan became clear. The Fugitive was the only volume that seemed cobbled together from notes and jottings. Despite being short, it was repetitive.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading In Search of Lost Time, and became attached to Marcel with his lacerating self-examinations and scathing character studies. I have never read another author who dissected people's motivations with such skill.

In the last few days I have burned through 3 undemanding books.

In Simon Brett's A Decent Interval, the alcoholic actor and amateur sleuth, Charles Paris, makes a welcome return.

A Winter Away, by Elizabeth Fair is a light, British comedy, written in the 1950s. I've enjoyed Fair's Bramton Wick and The Mingham Air as well.

Ursula Orange's comedy was more wordly than Fair's, and her characters had more depth. Tom Tiddler's Ground was her most famous book, set in the early stages of WWII. I recommend it, and also her first book, Begin Again.

"In the last few days I have burned through 3 undemanding books."

Undemanding sounds perfect for this time of year. My current read is a bit of a struggle but I am at the half-way mark and determined to finish it... and then I am on to the fluffy stuff!

Hi Pam, stopping by to wish you and your loved ones peace, joy and happiness this holiday season and for 2018!

>98 lkernagh: >99 VivienneR: Thank you for the Christmas greetings, Lori and Vivienne.

Wishing you both a happy and rewarding 2018.

The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose

This one is for the next book club meeting, in January. We're having a day at the beach.

As it says on the cover, this is "a novel inspired by Marina Abramovic". It won the 2017 Stella Prize, which was awarded to the best work of literature published in 2016, written by an Australian woman, .

Marina Abramovic is a Serbian performance artist. In 2010, at the MOMA, she performed The Artist is Present, where 6 days a week she sat at a table and gazed into the eyes of the person opposite. Towards the end of the seventy-five days of Abramovic's performance, people were queueing overnight for the privilege of sitting opposite Abramovic. The performance space was surrounded by a gallery, where people watched the sitters below. Some of the watchers in the gallery returned day after day to watch what had become for them a mystical, life-changing experience.

The central character, other than Abramovic, is Levin, a musician who writes film scores. His wife, a famous architect, is in a semi-coma. Before she became incapacitated she legally banned Levin from visiting her (sounds like BS!). Levin spends every day in the gallery, and this participation changes his life.

I would like to say some positive, or at least thoughtful, things about this book, even though I thought it was utter twaddle. My biggest problem is that Rose has inserted herself into the mind of Abramovic, who is a real person whose life is nothing like Rose's. The only thoughts Rose can put into Abramovic's mind are Rose's own; she imagines what she would think if she were Abramovic. So to me, this book is inauthentic. It has borrowed its significance from the life of Abramovic, and has none of its own. Levin, another artist, also strikes me as a fake, a straw man constructed to embody the self-absorption of the artist and to undergo the transformation essential to the plot.

Rose's writing did not appeal. In the following example, the omniscient narrator makes an appearance:

I have stood beside artists a very long time. I was there at the rape trial of Artemisia Gentileschi. I was there as she drove the painted blade through the neck of Holofernes. I stood beside her as she wrote "I shall show you what woman is capable of. You will find Caesar's courage in the soul of a woman." Imagine that, five hundred years ago!

The good thing about the book is that it introduced Abramovic and her art. I read about Abramovic's life and her work and really stopped to think about what she had done. She pushes her body to its limits, and some of her performances have put her life at risk. The extremes she goes to shocked me. I think it's presumptuous of Rose to interpret Abramovic, and that the connections Rose makes between Abramovic's performances and her Serbian upbringing are banal.

I don't think this is a good book, but I do think it's worth the read.

Just Like Heaven by Julia Quinn

As a Georgette Heyer fan I was disappointed in this Regency romance. Minimal historical detail, characters speaking contemporary American English, the virgin heroine and the hero have a quickie at a soiree, as if! people hugging one another all over the place and telling each other how much they love them (not very Regency!). In short, contemporary America transplanted holus bolus to Regency England.

Somebody at the Door by Raymond Postgate

Henry Grayling catches the train home, during the blackout, from his job in London to his house in the suburbs, but does not survive the night. The money he was carrying is missing. It seems likely that one the occupants of the train carriage is responsible, and most of them have a motive.

I enjoyed this crime novel because of the characterisation, and because it's a snapshot of life during WWII. It was published in 1943 and set two years earlier. The characters are working people, and the snobbery I've come to expect from British books of this era is missing. The author was a socialist, and his sympathies are with the men and women who have to earn a living, some of whom are victims of thoughtless, over-privileged people.

A Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviell

This is another book about the blitz, non-fiction this time. The author was a portrait painter living in Chelsea, which was the home of many artists, and one of the most heavily bombed parts of London. She is a Red cross volunteer, working in a hospital and giving aid to victims at bomb sites. There are some graphic descriptions of human damage, written in a detached, matter-of-fact tone that underplays the gallantry and bravery of Faviell, her colleagues and her friends. It's not all bleak though, because Faviell and her friends take every opportunity to be happy.

I recommend Faviell's book highly because it's real, a good antidote to nostalgic stories about the blitz.

>103 pamelad: Nice review. I've been hearing good things about Raymond Postgate. Putting him on my wishlist.

>103 pamelad: Excellent! Somebody at the Door is on my to-read list. Glad to hear it was a good BLCC! And dang, A Chelsea Concerto sounds good too.

Happy New Year everyone!!

Moving over to my 2018 thread.

>105 rabbitprincess: What's a BLCC? It's a shame Raymond Postgate wrote only 3 crime novels.

>106 pamelad: British Library Crime Classic. I collect so many books published by that imprint that I've taken to using shorthand ;)

>106 pamelad: & >107 rabbitprincess: Glad you asked about that, Pam! Like rabbitprincess I have a sizeable collection of British Library Crime Classics, but didn't associate the connection. :)