Annie reads in 2021 - Part 1

I am Annie, I had been living in the Valley of the Sun in Arizona for the last decade after moving from Bulgaria.

I read pretty much anything but I am a lot more likely to read a genre novel (speculative fiction and thrillers/mystery/crime mainly, westerns and historical novels occasionally) than a contemporary one. I am a serial series reader - and I rarely drop a series I had started.

I like the classics - the Victorians and their contemporaries usually.

Most of my reading is novels but I also like comics, poetry, plays and short stories. Last year I tried to read "A Play a Day" and it got caught into my "2 months of almost not reading and 3 months of not reading at all" phase so this year I will be a bit more conservative and aim for "A Play a Week" (for now) - 10-minutes plays count.

Non-fiction can be tricky - I like reading it but I tend to harp on a topic and stay there for a long time so I am trying to break out of the habit. Maybe my "Read through history" will finally move out from pre-history this year.

I read in three languages: Bulgarian (my native), Russian (my second language although these days my English is much better than my Russian) and English. Most of my reading is in English because of where I live but I make an effort to read in Russian (so I do not forget it even more than I had) and Bulgarian authors are rarely translated...

This is my 11th year here (10th in a row - I skipped one early on) and maybe this is the one I won't drop off the face of the Earth before mid-year.

Books (no touchstones by design -- check the post for the book for a touchstone)

=== JANUARY ===

1. Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
2. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
3. Shadows in Death by J. D. Robb -- In Death (51)
4. The Sugar Syndrome by Lucy Prebble
5. Silver Wings, Iron Cross by Thomas W. Young (as by Tom Young)
6. The Iron Sickle by Martin Limón -- Sueño and Bascom (9)
7. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler -- Earthseed (1)
8. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel -- Wolf Hall Trilogy (1)
9. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
10. Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn
11. Robert B. Parker's Colorblind by Reed Farrel Coleman -- Jesse Stone (17)
12. Running Blind by Lee Child -- Jack Reacher (4)
13. Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker -- Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch (1)
14. The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner
15. William I: England's Conqueror by Marc Morris -- Penguin Monarchs
16. The Fox by Sólveig Pálsdóttir
17. Witches of East End by Melissa de la Cruz -- Beauchamp Girls (1)
18. Revenge in Rubies by A. M. Stuart -- Harriet Gordon (2)
19. The 20th Century in Poetry by Michael Hulse and Simon Rae
20. Love You Dead by Peter James -- Roy Grace (12)

=== FEBRUARY ===

21. Gallows View by Peter Robinson -- Inspector Banks (1)
22. Robert B. Parker's The Bitterest Pill by Reed Farrel Coleman -- Jesse Stone (18)
23. The Book of Koli by M. R. Carey -- Rampart Trilogy (1)
24. When the Lion Feeds by Wilbur Smith -- Courtney Family Saga (1)
25. The French Widow by Mark Pryor -- Hugo Marston (9)
26. Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter
27. History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold
28. Road Out of Winter by Alison Stine
29. A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century by Flannery Burke
30. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
31. Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle
32. A Nail the Evening Hangs on by Monica Sok
33. Robert B. Parker's Grudge Match by Mike Lupica -- Sunny Randall (8)
34. Stranger by Night: Poems by Edward Hirsch
35. The Chill by Jason Starr
36. The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
37. King Lear (Norton Critical Editions) by William Shakespeare

=== MARCH ===
38. Hope for the Best by Jodi Taylor -- The Chronicles of St Mary's (10)

Stories, articles and other things that do not qualify as books

Plays

1. The Sugar Syndrome by Lucy Prebble (2003), full length
2. Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle (2018), full length
3. Code by Andrea Fleck Clardy (2018), 10 minutes

Audio Plays and other audio drama

1. Release by Matt Hartley (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes
2. Beethoven Can Hear You by Timothy X Atack (2020), radio, BBC Radio 3, 89 minutes
3. Lives in Transit by Rosemary Jenkinson (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes
4. King Lear: Arkangel Shakespeare, 3 hours and 8 minutes
5. Domino by Archie Maddocks (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes
6. Writ in Water by Angus Graham-Campbell (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes
7. London Particular by Nick Perry (2020), radio, BBC Radio 4, ~2 hours and 15 minutes (3x44 minutes)
8. The Elder Son by Alexander Vampilov, adapted by Jan Butler, translated by Tom Wainwright (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, ~1 hour and 30 minutes (2x44 minutes)
9. Making Peace by Tessa Gibbs (2019), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes
10. French Like Faiza by Ilana Navaro (2021), radio, BBC Radio 3, 94 minutes
11. The Christopher Boy’s Communion by David Mamet (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes
12. Scenes from a Zombie Apocalypse by Katie Hims and Paul Elliott (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes
13. The Flowers Are Perfect in the Garden by Lucy Caldwell (2021), radio, BBC Radio 4, 44 minutes

Series: only the ones I am really trying to work on...

Waiting for the next book (series):

Crime/Mystery/Detective
- Alex McKnight by Steve Hamilton. Read 1-11
- Cassie Dewell by C. J. Box. Read 1-4
- Gabriel Allon by Daniel Silva. Read 1-20. Next: 21. The Cellist, July 13, 2021
- Harriet Gordon by A. M. Stuart. Read 1-2.
- Hollow Man by Mark Pryor. Read 1-2.
- Hugo Marston by Mark Pryor. Read 1-9.
- Michael Parson by Tom Young. Read 1-6.
- Reykjavik Wartime Mysteries by Arnaldur Indriðason. Read 1-2.
- Samuel Craddock Mysteries by Terry Shames. Read 1-8.
- Spenser by Robert B. Parker and then Ace Atkins. Read 1-48+prequel. Next: 49. Robert B. Parker's Someone to Watch Over Me, on hold
- Sunny Randall by Robert B. Parker. Read 1-8+5.5+6.5.Next: 9. Robert B. Parker's Payback by Mike Lupica, May 4, 2021

SF/Fantasy/Horror
- Alex Benedict by Jack McDevitt. Read 1-8.
- Eric Carter by Stephen Blackmoore. Read 1-5. Next: 6. Bottle Demon, May 4, 2021
- In Death by J. D. Robb. Read 1-51. Next: 52. Faithless in Death
- Shadow Police by Paul Cornell. Read 1-3.
- Sorcerer Royal by Zen Cho. Read 1-2.

Catching up (series):

Crime/Mystery/Detective
- Alex Delaware by Jonathan Kellerman. Read 1-11; 26-31. Next Book: 12: Survival of the Fittest and 32: Heartbreak Hotel
- Cassie Black by Michael Connelly. Read 1. Next Book: 2: The Narrows (also Harry Bosch (10), Terry McCaleb (3), Rachel Walling (2))
- Cool and Lam by A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner). Read 1-3. Next Book: 4: Spill the Jackpot
- Commissario Brunetti by Donna Leon. Read 1-2; 20-28. Next Book: 3: Dressed for Death and 29: Trace Elements
- Dark Iceland by Ragnar Jónasson. Read 1-3;5. Next Book: 4: Whiteout
- Decker/Lazarus by Faye Kellerman. Read 1-10. Next Book: 11: Jupiter's Bones
- Dirk Pitt by Clive Cussler. Read 1. Next Book: 2: The Mediterranean Caper
- Ellery Queen by Ellery Queen. Read 3;7. Next Book: 1: The Roman Hat Mystery
- Harry Bosch by Michael Connelly. Read 1-6. Next Book: 7: A Darkness More Than Night (also Terry McCaleb 2 and Jack McEvoy 2)
- Inspector Banks by Peter Robinson. Read 1. Next Book: 2: A Dedicated Man
- Inspector Rebus by Ian Rankin. Read 1-20; Next Book: 21: Rather Be the Devil
- Jack McEvoy by Michael Connelly. Read 1; Next Book: 2: A Darkness More Than Night (also Harry Bosch 7 and Terry McCaleb 2)
- Jack Reacher by Lee Child. Read 1-4; Next Book: 5: Echo Burning by Lee Child
- Jesse Stone by Robert B. Parker and others. Read 1-18+5.5; Next Book: 19: Robert B. Parker's Fool's Paradise by Mike Lupica
- Joe Pickett by C. J. Box. Read 1-10; Next Book: 11: Cold Wind
- John Wells by Alex Berenson. Read 1-3; Next Book: 4: The Midnight House
- Martin Beck by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Read 1-6; Next Book: 7: The Abominable Man
- Mitch Rapp by Vince Flynn. Read 1-2; Next Book: 3: Separation of Power
- Molly Murphy Mysteries by Rhys Bowen. Read 1-4; Next Book: 5: Oh Danny Boy
- Murder Squad by Alex Grecian. Read 1-4; Next Book: 5: Lost and Gone Forever
- Nameless Detective by Bill Pronzini. Read 1-3; Next Book: 4: Blowback
- Nero Wolfe by Rex Stout. Read 1-22+40; Next Book: 23: Three Men Out
- Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton. Read 1. Next Book: 2: Exit Strategy
- Perry Mason by Erle Stanley Gardner. Read 1-77;79. Next Book: 78: The Case of the Queenly Contestant
- Rachel Walling by Michael Connelly. Read 1. Next Book: 2: The Narrows (also Harry Bosch (10), Terry McCaleb (3), Cassie Black (2))
- Roderick Alleyn by Ngaio Marsh. Read 1-5; Next Book: 6: Artists in Crime
- Roy Grace by Peter James. Read 1-12; Next Book: 13: Need You Dead
- Sueño and Bascom by Martin Limón. Read 1-9; Next Book: 10: The Ville Rat
- Terry McCaleb by Michael Connelly. Read 1; Next Book: 2: A Darkness More Than Night (also Harry Bosch 7 and Jack McEvoy 2)
- Tom Thorne by Mark Billingham. Read 1-13; Next Book: 14: Love Like Blood

SF/Fantasy/Horror
- The Academy: Priscilla Hutchins by Jack McDevitt. Read 1; Next Book: 2: Deepsix
- Alex Verus by Benedict Jacka. Read 1-4; Next Book: 5: Hidden
- Alliance-Union Universe: Publishing order by C. J. Cherryh. Read 1-16; Next Book: 17: Chanur's Homecoming
- The Chronicles of St Mary's by Jodi Taylor. Read 1-10+8.5 (collection). Next Book: 11: Plan for the Worst
- Commonwealth Universe by Peter F. Hamilton. Read 0;1-6; Next Book: 7: Night Without Stars
- Earthseed by Octavia E. Butler. Read 1; Next Book: 2: Parable of the Talents
- Foreigner by C. J. Cherryh. Read 1-2; Next Book: 3: Inheritor
- Luna by Ian McDonald. Read 1; Next Book: 2: Luna: Wolf Moon
- Morgaine by C. J. Cherryh. Read 1-3; Next Book: 4: Exile's Gate
- October Daye by Seanan McGuire. Read 1; Next Book: 2: A Local Habitation
- Polity Universe - Publication Order by Neal Asher. Read 1-3; Next Book: 4: Brass Man
- Quiet War by Paul McAuley. Read 1; Next Book: 2: Gardens of the Sun
- Rampart Trilogy by M. R. Carey. Read 1; Next Book: 2: The Trials of Koli
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Read 1-6; Next Book: 7: Lies Sleeping

Historical/Western/Others
- Courtney Family Saga by Wilbur Smith. Read 1; Next Book: 2: The Sound of Thunder
- Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch by Robert B. Parker and others. Read 1; Next Book: 2: Resolution by Robert B. Parker
- Wolf Hall Trilogy by Hilary Mantel. Read 1; Next Book: 2: Bring Up the Bodies

Authors (!under construction!)

Waiting for the next book:

- Mark Pryor - Fiction only
- Terry Shames
- Daniel Silva
- A. M. Stuart

Catching up (authors):

Hi Annie. Happy New Year and welcome back. I think reading slumps come and go, but hopefully 2021 will be easier for us all. I would love to see those 52 play reviews.

Happy New Year, Annie. I'll be following along here this year.

Will be hanging out again this year. Happy new year.

>7 dchaikin: Hi Dan :) Happy New Year. Yeah and slumps are not that unheard of but 3 months beats anything I had been through. And it took me almost 3 months to realize I had not opened a book since the summer -- days were just... passing. Weird year. Oh well - will see how it goes this year.

>8 BLBera: Happy New Year! Pull up a chair, fasten your seat belt and... oops, sorry, no seat belts here ;)

>9 AlisonY: Happy New Year! Well, if you are going to be hanging around anyway, can you make sure that everyone has a place to sit... (and probably a book to read) ;)

Thanks for stopping by everyone!

Happy New Year, Annie, and here's to 2021... whatever that holds.

Happy New Year, Annie!

1. Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

Type: Novel
Length: 566 pages
Original Language: Japanese; translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies
Original Publication: 2012 (Japanese as 64（ロクヨン))/ 2016 (English). Earlier version was serialized in 2004-2006 in Japanese
Genre: Crime, Police
Part of Series: Prefecture D (unofficial)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
Reading dates: 30 December 2020 - 1 January 2021

Almost 14 years earlier, in the last days of the Showa period (January 1989 in our calendar), a 7 years old girl was kidnapped and then, after the family paid the ransom, found dead. In the current time, December 2002, another girl is missing - a 16 years old ran from home 3 months earlier. The two incidents, albeit not connected on their own, get a connection through a police detective, Mikami, - he was part of the initial team on the first and the second is his own daughter.

That's how this novel opens - with a missing girl and the ghost of a dead one. But as the book progresses, you realize that they are not the main focus of the book - they are always somewhere there in the shadows, they drive Mikami and most of the story but they are not the main story.

Six Four (the title derives from the Japanese calendar - that last Showa year, which lasted only 7 days, was the 64th) is a slow burn of a crime novel which is more interested in exploring the police and its relationships than deal with high speed chases (although that will also be there) and gruesome deaths.

Mikami, a career officer in the police in Prefecture D's HQ, had recently been promoted and moved from the Investigative branch to the Administration side to lead the Media Relations department. And while this novel is not told in the first person, it may have been - we have Mikami's actions and thoughts and we never see anything he does not see, hear or think (I wonder if this is not because of how Japanese works as a language - do they have first person narratives at all?). There is a war going in between the two branches and at the time of the opening of the novel it is close to its peak - with Mikami caught in the middle, distrusted in some ways from both sides.

And the ghost of the girl who died as part of the 64 kidnapping is used as the excuse for that war to get even worse - the kidnapper and murderer was never caught, the statute of limitation for the crime is 15 years so in a year or so, even if he gets caught after that, he will never be brought to justice and everyone seems to have their own agenda.

For most of the novel I was pretty sure that there was a play with the names of the characters - they sounded too close to each other - but as with a lot of translations, I assumed that there is a hidden story in there, untranslatable out from the Japanese. I was right - and I was wrong. The names did make sense -- at least some of them - even in the translation. Every unrelated event through the first 500 pages of the novel was there for a reason - even the ones that sounded like filler.

Media Relations of a police department is not a department one would usually want to read about. But between it being traditionally Japanese and Mikami, it works. The story flows slowly and slows you down while you are reading - while uncovering more and more of what happened both during the original case and in the current times. Even the repetitions make sense - we are in Mikami's head and he obsesses and worries about the same things more than once. It has an almost hypnotic quality - you can read a few thousand more pages about the day to day life of the police and its internal battles.

And then the author finally picks up all the dangling threads together and pushes the story in gear. The sleepy style is gone and the story speeds towards its end, bringing the truth to the fore. And then it slows again - because once the truth is out there, it is time to stop and make sure it is not squandered and lost.

And yet, a few strands escape the end -- they remain in the wind. Not forgotten but there. Because this is how life is - things don't resolve each other at the same time.

If you are looking for a thriller which moves fast, look elsewhere. 64 is anything but. But if you are ready to read a very Japanese novel and follow a slow path, you may enjoy this novel as much as I did.

Even though this was the first novel by the author in English, it was not his first work about Prefecture D apparently. It stands on its own - but I wonder if some of those names, especially the ones that show up rarely, won't be easier to remember if we had met them before.

Highly recommended! And what a start of my reading 2021 (and end of 2020).

Well, that sounds amazing. Putting it on my TBR!

2. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Type: Novella/Short Novel
Length: 105 pages
Original Language: Arabic (Palestine); translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Original Publication: 2016 (Arabic, Lebanon)/ 2020 (English, UK and then USA).
Genre: Crime, Contemporary, War
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Paperback
Publisher: New Directions, 2020, NDP1482
Reading dates: 2 January 2021 - 2 January 2021

A story told in two parts - two timelines, two women but in one place.

By August 1949, the Palestine war was over - and the army was deployed close to the borders on patrols - looking for infiltrators and anyone else who may wish ill to the new country of Israel. The group we meet is deployed in the Negev desert, close to the Egyptian border because the dunes are a perfect place for people to hide - and to get into the country. For most of that first story we follow the daily life of the commander of the group - the endless patrols who find nothing, the daily repetition which are almost ritualistic, the daily cleaning which feels almost like a cleansing. Until something changes - a group of people is found and after the gunfire is over, the only survivor is a girl, a young woman, dressed in black and covered in the tradition of her people.

It all starts innocently enough - the girl is taken to the camp and left on her own (although the bath she was given was anything but friendly and was designed to humiliate) but... things change quickly - soldiers don't leave her alone even after being warned off her and she is raped repeatedly - and then killed - as if she does not matter.

There is a play on the clean/unclean in this part - almost everything has a counterpart - and the daily cleaning takes almost sinister overtones because of the girl and because of a wound. And even if the commander does not tell the story, we see only what he sees - so in a way he does.

A few decades later, some time in the late 2000s or early 2010s (based on some dates that do show up as the past), a newspaper in Palestine runs a story about the rape and murder of the girl. Our unnamed second narrator, a young Palestinian woman from Ramallah, is stricken by the fact that the girl died exactly 25 years (to the day) before she was born. And that is enough to make her want to know more. Except that she cannot - she is not allowed in this part of the country because of where she lives in Zone A. But instead of giving up, she finally finds a way and starts on her way towards the desert.

Her repeated thoughts about crossing borders and her almost obsession with minor details sounds almost compulsive - and adding up some other details, it sounds like our second narrator is autistic or at least obsessive-compulsive to some extent (she even buys 4 different maps). Which explains a lot of what happens later - when she finally gets across the border and starts driving towards a desert on the other side of Israel. And while she is driving, we see Israel through Palestinian eyes - both compared to memories and compared to a map of 1948. And then the last sentence shatters you.

We never get any names - in either part of the story. It is a story that is about anyone - the first part does not even mention which war it is in so it almost can be either. Two women across the centuries end up in the same desert - and get connected in ways noone could have anticipated. It is a heartbreaking story that lacks redemption and hope - but then this is a tone which is pretty common for Palestinian authors.

Despite the hard topic, I still recommend this novella. It is exquisitely written even if it is not an easy read. It is a story about a war and what people do to each other - a story as old as the world.

3. Shadows in Death by J. D. Robb

Type: Novel
Length: 355 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Crime, Police, Science Fiction, Romance
Part of Series: In Death 51
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2020
Reading dates: 2 January 2021 - 3 January 2021

And after two pretty serious books, it was time for some fun. Well, a lighter book anyway.

51 books into a series, you know what you are going to get: a crime (a woman is knifed to death this time around) in New York (in spring 2061 by now), Eve Dallas catching the crime, Roarke being there to help and the whole set of secondary characters making an appearance in way or another with someone being in a bit of a danger sooner or later. But that becomes an unusual book pretty fast - a man from Roarke's past resurfaces, the woman's death is solved quickly - except for catching the actual knife-wielder - the same main from the past, now graduated to international killer for hire. And the chase is on - from New York all the way back to Ireland, where everything started -- almost turning the series on its head at the end (especially if someone gets a certain action out of its context).

Despite the unusual twist, the book falls into the expected patterns - which is what I enjoy about this series. More doors to the past were open (both in New York and in Ireland), more good deeds were done, we even have a nightmare showing up again (not Eve this time though...).

If you had been reading the series, this one will probably suit you. If you are not - don't start with this one. It is not one of the strongest in the series but it is a good addition. The series is probably getting a bit too repetitive in places but... it feels like that old t-shirt that had moved with you probably 10 times and you still wear it because it feels like home.

>11 lisapeet: >12 kidzdoc:

Happy New Year! :)

>14 shadrach_anki:

That may be a new record in my thread... ;)

>13 AnnieMod: Oh, that sounds good. Noted, thanks!

>16 AnnieMod: "The series is probably getting a bit too repetitive in places but... it feels like that old t-shirt that had moved with you probably 10 times and you still wear it because it feels like home."

What a great description. I like this series because I know exactly what I am going to get and sometimes that's what you want in a book.

>15 AnnieMod: And I've added this to my library wishlist. Thanks!

I really enjoyed the pacing of Six Four, which felt almost like that of a Victorian novel. And all the details about the political posturing and positioning within the precinct.

Minor Detail is on my wishlist. I'll definitely pick up a copy when I find one now. Excellent and thoughtful review.

>18 lisapeet: >20 ELiz_M: You are welcome. I think :)

>19 rhian_of_oz: I read for pleasure and I read a lot and I do not need every book to be "different and great"... :) So I have a lot of those series - they may not be great literature but when you are that deep into a series, the characters are three-dimensional because they had been there across the series... And there is something to be said about knowing what you are in for when you start a book... :) Had you read any of her other books? I am not much for romance novels these days so I usually shy away from them but I like her style so had been thinking...

>21 RidgewayGirl: You know, now that you say it, I can see it. It did not strike me as Victorian-like - but it does have the same rigidity and detail-obsession as the Victorians... although even in that it is extremely Japanese. And if I had never been into a real Japanese office (I was there a few years ago on a business trip and one of my projects involved a Tokyo based team for awhile), some of the more... formal parts would have sounded exaggerated. They still do, a bit, but... Japan is one weird country :)

Happy reading in 2021. Minor Detail does, indeed, look fascinating. As for J.D. Robb, I've read two of those and found them quite enjoyable. Cheers!

>15 AnnieMod: Shibli’s perspective from Touch has stuck with me. She dug her fingers in and left a mark. Noting Minor Detail, but not sure i’m emotionally up for it just now. Enjoyed all three reviews.

Hooked me with >13 AnnieMod: and >15 AnnieMod:

Hi!

>23 rocketjk:

Happy reading to you too :)

>24 dchaikin:

That was the first I had read from her (I got it during one of my "let's help the publishers who publish translations" purchasing raids last year) and I had been looking at some of the others. I would not read a few of hers in a row - way too emotional - even if I have no direct connection to the conflict she writes about. So I definitely plan to pick the other 2(I think?) she has in English sometime down the road but I doubt it will be this year.

>25 LolaWalser:

Hi Lola :) Nice seeing you here.

>22 AnnieMod: I like what you say about reading a series, but 51 is a lot. Enjoyed your reviews of Minor Detail and Six Four

>13 AnnieMod: I can't wait to get back to this one. Got 1/3 through before I had to return it to library. Now I'm on 8 week waitlist but excited to finish it off.

>13 AnnieMod: I read this author’s Seventeen a couple of years ago, and loved it, so I immediately purchased Six Four. Haven’t read it yet, though, but clearly I need to get to it soon.

>27 baswood:

Well, she also has ~10 novellas in addition to the 51 novels in the series... :) I had been reading the series for 15 years now (she was at ~20 when I discovered them), she adds 2 per year (3 in some I think) so even if they sound like a lot, it had been a long time as well. But yes - it is longer than any of my current series (Perry Mason being the only one longer than this one).
I did mention that I am a serial series reader, didn't I? :)

>28 stretch:

I love libraries but when this happens, it is annoying. :) On the other hand the novel is actually built in a way that should allow to just fall back into it when you get it back.

>29 arubabookwoman:

I have that one and the short story collection on my shelves. I have a suspicion I will get to them rather sooner than later.. :)

4. The Sugar Syndrome by Lucy Prebble

World Premiere run: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London, UK, 16 October - 15 November 2003
Length: Full Length Play. 2 Acts. Approximate time: about 2 hours 15 minutes, including interval; 74 pages
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Methuen Drama, 2020; published to coincide with the revival in Orange Tree Theatre, London, UK in February 2020 - managed to complete its run as scheduled on Feb 22 before the pandemic closed theaters.
Reading dates: 4 January 2021

And time for the first play for the year.

Dani is 17 and as many young people at the beginning of the century, she is looking for friendship (and more) in chatrooms online. And there she meets two men: 22-years old Lewis and the slightly older Tim. She decides to meet both of them and things start getting complicated - Lewis cannot believe that she is really a girl (and they end up having sex more than ones) while Tim is shocked to discover that she is a girl and 17 at that - he believed that he had been chatting with an 11 years old boy.

Once the shock is over, Dani remains friends with both of them - mainly just having sex with Lewis (while he seems to think it is more serious) while developing a real friendship with Tim. And that second relationship is what drives the play - because Dani opens up about her own problems to this damaged man who is trying to be good. And while she is trying to fix both her companions (sex for one of them, a friendly ear for the other) and openly discuss them with the other one, her own family collapsed around her - or ends her collapse anyway. The 4th character in Dani's circle is her mother Jan who finally realizes that her husband has an affair - or better to say that she finally allows herself to admit it.

And that's where the first act closes. It seems pretty obvious who is supposed to be the bad guy. Except that life is never that easy - and when Dani finally needs help, she gets it from the villain Tim. And Lewis manages to slide into the role of the villain by what amounts to stalking. Until the very end when Dani decides to help Tim and discovers that nothing is what it looks like.

It is a disturbing play - it is designed to be. Good and evil are not absolutes and everyone can have redeeming qualities - even when they still remain human garbage. The fact that by the end of the play both of the men look equally villainous is unexpected but not very surprising. And somewhere in that crazy circle, a mother and a daughter maybe finally find a way to communicate.

This was the first play Prebble wrote and it managed to win quite a lot of awards during its first run: The Critics' Circle Award (2004), George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright (2004) and TMA Award for Best New Play (2004) and lost the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize to Sarah Ruhl. And the play deserves its accolades - it is nuanced and funny and even 17 years later, still relevant (except for the chatrooms of course).

PS: The title comes from a WWII practice as explained by Jan: during the London raids, people were issued ratio tokens and they could either collect a lot of them and buy meat or use a token at a time to buy sugar and sweets. As noone knew if they will be alive after the next raid, people went for the instant gratification. All of the subplots in the play are all about instant gratification - so the title fits perfectly.

>31 AnnieMod: Have we moved on from chat rooms? I would not know. Enjoyed your excellent review of The Sugar Syndrome

>22 AnnieMod: I have (checks library) 63 Nora Roberts books (good grief!).

A number of her more recent releases have been romance plus mystery/suspense/thriller rather than pure romance (Shelter In Place and Come Sundown I particularly enjoyed).

She has a number of romance trilogies with a supernatural element - The Inn at Boonsboro, The Key, and Three Sisters Island are ones I flip through from time to time if I don't feel like "proper" reading. And she has a contemporary romance series the Bride Quartet which I also return to now and again.

>31 AnnieMod: I’m kind of impressed it still sounds very relevant 17 yrs later. Enjoyed your comments.

>32 baswood: Well, they exist for some purposes I suspect but they won't be where a 17 years old will look for sex/friends these days... there are other parts in there that shows its time - the phone bill showing the dial up charges for example. And despite all that, it does not throw you into "oh, this is old" - it shows its time but it also remains timeless.

>33 rhian_of_oz:

Thanks! I was going to say that probably most of them are the In Death and then I looked at your library and nope... :) Guess I asked the right person :) I've read one of her non-series books (The Welcoming - they reissued it in 2019) and it was just there in the library and it was ok but then things happened and I never followed from there.

She also has a post-apocalyptic series that came out lately (starting with Year One) - which was why I was looking at her non-Death books to start with. I like the thriller/romance mix (think the latest ones from Sandra Brown for example - her earlier ones are straight romances - and the paranormal mixes (they and In Death were what got me back to even looking at modern romances as literature (my late teen self read enough of them for a lifetime and then my a bit older self was an idiot judging books by their labels and genres). I will try the ones you mentioned. Thanks again!

>34 dchaikin: I think part of the reason is that a lot of the story is actually in person... the technology bits sound old but they make such a small part of the story that your brain just files them somewhere and forgets about them. Which made me wonder how the current crop of modern plays will age - a lot of them show the quarantine and online work/collaboration - which I really hope is not going to become the norm.

Great reviews of Six Four and Minor Detail, Annie. I also enjoyed Shibli's novel Touch, so I'll add this novella to my wish list.

Nice review also of The Sugar Syndrome. Orange Tree Theatre has become one of my favorite smaller theatres in London, which is a short walk from Richmond Station in West London.

A1. Release by Matt Hartley

Producing company: BBC Cymru Wales
Original airing details: January 5, 2021; BBC Radio 4
Length: 44 minutes
Director: John Norton
Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qy45
Listening date: January 5, 2021

I decided to listen to a play during lunch - and as I had lost track of what BBC had been doing the last few months, I decided to start from the one that aired today.

Aimee is almost 18, living with her mother's sister Sian and preparing to go to medical school. When she was 8, her mother was killed and her father, Oliver, went to prison for it and Aimee grew up with only her aunt, hating a father she barely remembers and who had never sent a single letter from prison. Until this day, 9 years later, when new evidence is used to reopen the case and her father is exonerated and set free.

The play opens at that moment - with Aimee trying to find the truth , Oliver trying to rebuild his life and his relationship with his daughter and Sian trying to hold to the past and to protect Aimee. Or so it looks on the surface anyway. But as the story unfolds and people start talking to each other, a lot of the truth seems to shift - Oliver did write letters (and Aimee finally gets them) and Sian seems less and less like the perfect sister and aunt -- the image she had cultivated for the last 9 years. And then a man is arrested for the murder - and the last remaining secrets of the family are revealed - splitting it again when it becomes clear that Sean knew the truth since the beginning (which is almost obvious from early on - she did protest too much when things started happening).

The plot is neither new, nor entirely original and yet there is something out there that makes the story work. You almost expect to see the killer being connected to the family from early on (and he is) and yet, when it is revealed it almost feels surprising. In some ways, it is not about who actually did it - it is about secrets being kept for too long and the lies that people tell to themselves and others.

At the end, the play is all about family and forgiveness. If a man who lost 9 years of his life can forgive the person who could have saved him with a word, then anything is possible.

A neat little play.

>37 kidzdoc:

I've never been to a London theatre :( I used to work in London a lot when I was back in Europe but never had a free evening or weekend there so never saw a play there. Or in New York...

I seem to be drawn towards what Orange Tree Theatre stages - another one of their productions from last year (not as lucky with its timing - it got closed midway through its run because of the pandemic) ended up in Lockdown Theatre Festival - so BBC aired its radio version (and I managed to listen to it and even post a review last year: The Mikvah Project (recording)). I need to see what they are up to this year (when they reopen that is...) and grab the paper versions (Methuen will probably publish them, if not, someone else might).

>15 AnnieMod: This dimly reminded me of a book which set a crippled woman asking for her brother's body back, set just outside an American military camp set in a desert. I don't know why; I don't think they were that much alike. That one really made an impact upon me.

>16 AnnieMod: I really love the In Death series. Some of the repetitive explanatory material is expected, and the relationship of Roarke and Dallas is delicious. Who wouldn't want a super-rich guy who has your back, anyway? My first 20 or so copies are in my attic and I can't find them. Tragedy!

>33 rhian_of_oz: Rhian, I don't like Nora Robert's books--except the In Death series. Go figure. Those I really enjoy.

>35 AnnieMod: Annie, I read the Year One and others in that series last year, I believe. I liked the first one, and parts of the second, but ultimately, they seemed rather derivative.

>43 sallypursell: Romance author writing in this genre? I expect it to be derivative. Hell, almost anyone writing in the genre these days will be derivative of something. So that does not bother me necessarily. Will see :)

>40 sallypursell: This sounds interesting and for some reason familiar. Oh well. If it is, my brain will work it out sooner or later.

I purchased Six Four last year and am hoping to get to it this year. I just know I'm going to enjoy it especially as I recently read the nonfiction People who eat Darkness which is about the true story of a British girl who was abducted and murdered in Tokyo, and the book goes quite into detail about the bureaucracy behind the police department and the following judicial system.

>40 sallypursell:, >44 AnnieMod: That sounds like the basic plot for Antigone, except the disabled bit is a new twist. Perhaps Home Fire?

(ETA: Is this how the bookish version of the game telephone is played?)

>46 ELiz_M: More like Charades!

The crippled woman is on a small wooden cart, if I remember correctly, and this takes place in Iraq or Afghanistan. She sits in the desert heat all day for days, I think. It might have been by a Roy, but I can't run it down.

>43 sallypursell: and >44 AnnieMod: I've read Year One and Of Blood and Bone and there are definitely better supernatural post-apocalyptic books out there, but these aren't bad.

The thing I *really* didn't like about the second one is there is forced/without consent kissing. In a book written in 2018. Yeah no, that is *not* romantic. (And yes I realise there are worse things that could happen to a young woman)

5. Silver Wings, Iron Cross by Thomas W. Young (as Tom Young)

Type: Novel
Length: 370 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Historical, military, WWII
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Kensington, 2020
Reading dates: 3 January 2021 - 5 January 2021

In the twilight days of WWII in the autumn of 1944, two men from German families, Karl Hagan and Wilhelm Albrecht, are really tired from the war. Karl is a pilot in the US Air Force, based in UK and bombing Germany across the Channel -- his family fled Germany post WWI. Wilhelm is the executive officer on one of the German U-boats which terrorized the Atlantic throughout the war.

When the novel opens, Karl is about to fly his last mission before he is sent back home for good (after 35 missions, you get to go home and away from danger) and Wilhelm is dealing with his crippled submarine - by that time the U-boats are not as invincible as earlier in the war, partially because of their communication being compromised and partially because they are getting old and tired. Both men end up in Bremen - the planes target the city, the submarine finally crawls back home after its disaster. Unfortunately for Wilhelm, the two things happen at the same time. And just to make things worse, the submarine crew gets a suicide order - once they are repaired so they can leave, they are to destroy a ship by ramming it - thus destroying themselves. So when the bombs start falling, Wilhelm deserts - they would not send the boat out with no XO so he even convinces himself it is for his crew. Before long Karl is also on the ground after his plane get shot down - and the real story can begin.

The two men cannot be more different on the surface but when they meet, they realize that they can help each other - and off they go, trying to leave Germany behind and reach the Allied forces. And in a somewhat ironic way, the German is actually in more danger than the US pilot - Goering had ordered all downed airmen to be sent to camps and left alive; deserters are getting killed almost instantly. So while the two men walk through the country side, seeing the devastation brought by the war, they come up with a plan - the German will pretend to be Karl's navigator. And the plan actually works - both end up in a camp for captured airmen.

Young leaves the end almost incomplete - both men are going home but we never see them getting home - he decides against an epilogue but he adds an author note about he would like to think happens next which is basically the same thing.

The description of the devastated Germany and the camp (nowhere as horrific as the other camps but still not a summer camp) are well done. So are all the technical details (as usual). The pacing of the novel never falters but it also is too ordered - Wilhelm leaves the German Navy and sees both a killed deserter and Jewish prisoners within hours for the first time (there is probably a way to read this either as a commentary on how bad the things were going thus making both common things or as him seeing for the first time things that had always been there and ignored). It almost feels like adding too much detail where just a note would have been enough. It is part of allowing the German to change and turn into the man at the end of the novel but too many good things do not make a great thing.

It is a competent novel - it does not have the sparkle of Young's thrillers even if his distinctive and very technical style is suited to it - he is a retired flight engineer and he knows his planes. He alternates the point of view between his two characters but even then there is a bit too much dumping of information in places. It adds to the novel but I wish he had found a better way to incorporate the memories...

I am glad that I read it but I hope he decides to go back to thrillers in the now and here.

On a separate note: despite the seriousness of the novel, the parts in the camp made me think of the British comedic series 'Allo 'Allo! (and the episodes in the airmen camp in it) - some of the descriptions matched enough so despite the differences, my mind kept going there. Not because anything was funny in the story - but things were just lining up way too perfectly. Once that connection was made up in my mind, dissociating it was impossible...

Enjoyed your review. It sounds interesting - imagining wandering through the late wwii German landscape.

>49 AnnieMod: & >50 dchaikin: " imagining wandering through the late wwii German landscape."

On this topic, I must recommend German author Walter Kempowski's All for Nothing.

>51 rocketjk:

Someone recommended that one to me awhile back - I rarely read any novels about WWII but I may track this one down. Thanks!

>50 dchaikin:

It may be just me not reading too many novels about WWII but in almost any I had read, the everyday Germany is just missing... and it is an almost surreal mix of the normal and the normalized in Young's narrative.

>52 AnnieMod: "everyday Germany is just missing"

One more from me, then . . . Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, about life in Berlin during the Nazi era by someone who was there. Also, now that I think about it, Kempowski lived through the events he described in All for Nothing.

(Dropping by from the Reading Globally group; excuse the random intrusion.)

>52 AnnieMod: The lack of a sense of everyday life may simply be a matter of the genre (and, I assume, the author's research being based on political history books rather than first-hand experience or accounts).

Fiction that thematizes life in post-war Germany is arguably one of the major topics of German literature after 1945.

To the suggestions of Kempowski and Fallada, I would add Heinrich Böll (e.g. Tomorrow and Yesterday or one of his short story collections) and Wolfgang Borchert (The Man Outside). Many other members of the "Group 47" (including Günter Grass, Alfred Andersch, Siegfried Lenz, etc.) also have works that would fall into this genre. I'm not sure off the top of my head what is available in English translation.

Since "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" (working through the past) continues to be an important theme in German literature, there are also many younger authors who incorporate the experiences of their parents' or grandparents' generation in their novels. Uwe Timm's The Invention of Curried Sausage is one of the more lighthearted examples of this. If you like mysteries, Cay Rademacher's "Frank Stave" series (set in post-war Hamburg) has been translated and gotten a lot of good reviews.

>2 AnnieMod: Oh, Adania Shibli I read two of her works, what? 8 or 9 years ago, plus she had a piece, a few vignettes, in an anthology Seeking Palestine (I think that I sent that to Dan...) I found her an interesting writer and enjoyed your review.

>54 spiphany: For that end-phase of the war, Böll’s And where were you, Adam? might be an interesting one to set against >49 AnnieMod: — and like most of Böll’s books, short and to the point. The Uwe Timm Currywurst book >54 spiphany: mentions is great, too.

>52 AnnieMod: I've been mostly exposed to the Jewish perspective of things, and that left only Slaughterhouse 5 to fill in the rest. !!

>51 rocketjk: >53 rocketjk: >54 spiphany: >56 thorold: - thanks, from me, for all these titles. A Time of Gifts gave me a curious pre-war perspective on somewhat "normal" German life - of course a naïve (if you believe the older author) outsider one - in 1933.

>55 avaland: Seeking Palestine is a favorite of mine. (It's one of 14 books you have sent me! I have read 8 of them. ==> https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=&tag=%40from%2Bavaland&vie... )

>54 spiphany: Always welcome :)

>53 rocketjk:, >54 spiphany:, >56 thorold:

Thanks. :) I am noting them down but I don't think I will get to them soon - WWII is really not my period - I read about it occasionally but...

>55 avaland:, >57 dchaikin:

I have Seeking Palestine somewhere... And I have Palestine + 100 as well (she does not have a story there but how 2048 looks to the current Palestinian authors is an interesting question). I really need to move some books around and see where I had ordered (uhm... hidden, placed, stuck?) both of them.

6. The Iron Sickle by Martin Limón

Type: Novel
Length: 308 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2014
Genre: crime, military, South Korea
Part of Series: Sueño and Bascom (9)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Soho Crime, 2014
Reading dates: 6 January 2021 - 7 January 2021

Set in and around the 8th US Army's compounds in the 70s in South Korea, Limón's series contains both a picture of the US army at the time and of the South Korean society (and the Northern in the previous book). This is the 9th novel in the series - and after the unusual 8th book, it is back to the normal storytelling and places. Or almost normal anyway.

Sueño is back in Seoul after his mission to North Korea in the previous book and with his lover and child gone into hiding, the dynamic duo of Sueño and Bascom is back to their usual behavior - annoying everyone in power and stumbling into embarrassing secrets.

The novel opens with a gruesome death - a Korean man walks into the compound and kills an officer with an iron sickle. Before long everyone in the army and in the Korean police and army seems to be hunting for the men except for our two sergeants - who are told to stay away from the case even if Sueño is the only American investigator who can speak and understand any Korean. That does not last long of course -- they are already digging into it when the police asks for them by name (Mr. Kill, who we met in a previous book, makes the request). And things start getting weirder and weirder. More Americans die by the sickle and it seems like the 3 organizations who supposedly are looking for him have their own agendas - and truth is not on anyone's agenda. Except Sueño and Bascom of course.

And as the story unfolds, the truth, and the reason why noone wants it out, starts emerging. As usual, its root is deep into the Korean war 20 years earlier but even for the standards of the series, it is a disturbing one.

Sueño gets beaten more often than usual, another doctor falls for him and we get to see another side of South Korea in the 70s - the lands away from the big cities and the American army, the mountains which unlike the valleys are almost bereft of people and the way mental illness is treated in the country (it is not a happy story...)

The novel stand on its own - even if some references will be unclear although there is a lot of nuances that may be missed - by now the author skips the long explanations about the girls who sell themselves and the mamasans who keep them - the basics are there but having read the whole series, a single sentence conjures a complete picture based on what one already knows.

Another strong entry in the series. The whole series is recommended - as long as you can handle the gruesomeness. But the South Korea of the 70s, seen from the eyes of the American soldier (both the author's (Limón was there as well) and his character's), is illuminating.

A2. Beethoven Can Hear You by Timothy X Atack

Producing company: BBC Cymru Wales
Original airing details: Sep 20, 2020; BBC Radio 3
Length: 89 minutes
Director: James Robinson
Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mrgn
Listening date: January 10, 2021

A deaf musician from the future goes back in time to meet the deaf composer - and gets the shock of her life when she realizes that Beethoven can actually hear. Had she ended up in an alternative past or had the deafness been a cruel joke coded as history?

Marking the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, the play could not have asked for a better cast - Peter Capaldi takes on the role of Beethoven and Sophie Stone (who is deaf) plays the visitor. Add the deaf composer Lloyd Coleman who created the haunting music and even with a weaker plot, the play would have worked.

Except that the plot is anything but weak - the Visitor (who never gets a name) had come to get a few lessons from the composer but ends up teaching him about deafness and how important he had been as the first deaf composer. Being the 19th century, Beethoven believes that she is a messenger sent to show him the future and losing one's hearing is probably the worst he can think of. It is all about hearing and deafness and about what music is and what music can do - and all the thoughts and most of dialogue are accompanied by music that fits it in ways that almost sound surreal in places.

The end connects time and space in a way that does not resolve the initial question of what happened but that satisfy the play and history. Listening to Capaldi's delivery I could not get his Doctor Who out of my head - which did not diminish the power of the play - if anything, it felt like a variation of what he had done before. In a good way.

The recording runs for almost 90 minutes and contains a lot of beautiful music but if you do not feel like listening, the transcript is available for download. But I would highly recommend to listen to it - especially if you like Capaldi.

>60 AnnieMod: sounds good

>60 AnnieMod: This sounds excellent, Annie. Great comments.

7. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Type: Novel
Length: 330 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 1993
Genre: Science fiction, dystopia
Part of Series: Earthseed (1)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2017
Reading dates: 8 January 2021 - 12 January 2021

Set in 2024 and moving forward in time until 2027 (the novel was written in 1993), "Parable of the Sower" is a picture of a collapsed world. We never get the fall spelled out - all the stories are rumored and hinted at but it appears that the collapse had come because of climate change and corporate greed. By the time the novel opens, most of humanity is struggling for their lives, living in enclaves (which get raided and destroyed often enough) or on the streets. Water is more valuable than anything, South California (where the novel opens) had not seen any rain in years and people had turned into their worst selves.

The protagonist of the novel, Lauren Olamina, is 15 and as most teenagers wants to be older. She has an unusual gift - because of some drugs her mother had been taking while pregnant, her brain had been rewired and she is a sharer - she can feel what other people can feel. Awesome during sex, not so much when someone suffers. And in her world, suffering is a lot more likely to be encountered than joy.

At the start of the novel, Lauren and her family live a pretty safe live - yes, it is hard and a lot of work but they appear to be safe. But then the world superimposes itself and things start going wrong - a brother decides that he is better off on his own (and for awhile he is... until he is not), a parent disappears. And then comes the raid and the security of the small enclave is gone forever - and the survivors band together and start going north.

This is the time where the novel really starts - the initial part is more of a setting and a calm moment in the middle of a storm. And this walk shows just how much the world had disintegrated - it is still here (even air travel turns out to still be around... but not for a girl from South California). But under that patchwork world old things had rared their heads - from slavery to company towns, from cannibalism to greed and lack of care for anyone but oneself. Although the rays of hope are still there - babies are still born and sometimes people help each other.

Lauren and her companions meet more people on the road and even find a common purpose - find a place and build a community. The place turns out to not be a problem, the community part takes a lot longer to even get around it.

And on top of that story, there is a second one - the birth of a new religion which Lauren believes to be just "known". In some parts I wished Butler had left that part alone - it has its part in the novel and possibly for a lot of people it is the important part of the novel but... for me it was a distraction in some cases and made Lauren look almost unapproachable and annoying. Which is probably the point.

The novel closes with a glimmer of hope - not a ray of it, nowhere near but despite the long chances, maybe things can work out for our ragged group of survivors.

The novel works on its own but there is a continuation out there and I plan to read it soon(ish). Butler's world is scary and it is surprising how complete it feels even without the complete backstory. And that lack of the "how it happened exactly" is probably what makes it even scarier - you never know when things reached the point of no return in this world and how close we are to it. Because nothing in what she writes about contradicts anything in the world we are in - and this may as well be our future.

A3.Lives in Transit by Rosemary Jenkinson

Producing company: BBC NI Radio Drama Production
Original airing details: Jan 12 2021; BBC Radio 4
Length: 44 minutes
Producer: Eoin O'Callaghan
Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r3nq
Listening date: January 12, 2021

Based on a stage play by the same author (called "Lives in Translation"), the play is a dramatization of real stories - the struggle of a refugee from Somalia to find a new home in Europe.

Asha Suleman fled her native country and ended up in Ireland. None of it was easy - she had to pay to be smuggled across borders, she was raped from people she trusted and she had to leave her daughter back home with her family. Her hope was to manage to get her refugee status and then send for her child - the conventions are supposed to work that way. Except things got horribly wrong.

When she entered the country she did not speak any English so she had to talk via an interpreter. We never get the complete picture of what exactly happened and why although from the hints and the bits of information Asha shares, it seems like the interpreter made all in his power to fail her claim - and she was denied for not speaking the correct dialect and not knowing her own home city ("how many mosques are there in the area you lived in?" being one of the questions she failed for example).

Going back is not an option - so before they can deport her from Dublin, a friend proposes a solution - catch the bus to Belfast and apply there. So Asha goes, she applies, she gets a room in a house of women like her... and a few weeks later gets a denial because of the Dublin agreement: she needs to seek refuge in the first country she lands in - Ireland. Off to jail for her, a few plane rides and she is back in Dublin (where she is already denied). So off on the Belfast bus she gets again - and as she is now entering anew, she can file again. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.

The years pass. Asha writes letters home, finds friends in the most unexpected places (the immigration office in Belfast starts greeting her with "Didn't we send you to Dublin? OK, here is the paperwork"...) and she stays in limbo - with nowhere to go and noone seemingly caring about a woman who has no home and no options.

This specific story has a happy ending - Asha gets her refugee status. Too late for her daughter (the girl ages out) but still it works out. For how many it does not?

The change of the title of the play between the stage version and the radio one is interesting. Most of what Asha goes through is because of the translator's initial blocking of her claims - and even in the radio play the women talk about the all-powerful translators. The radio play uses that as a setting to set the things in motion - it is the movement and the absurdity of all the hoops that seem to be there that are taking the central role. From what I found online, the stage play used the translation angle a lot more.

Not an easy play to listen to and it can almost sound too set in places and drag because of that but still worth a listen.

8. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Type: Novel
Length: 532 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2009
Genre: historical novel, Tudors
Part of Series: Wolf Hall Trilogy (1)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 2009
Reading dates: 12 January 2021 - 15 January 2021

I read Wolf Hall when it came out in 2009 - I was reading anything Tudors related at the time and despite the fact that I loved it, it may have suffered a bit from all the other books about the period I was reading at the time.

Now, with the third novel finally out, a reread was in order - 11 years is a long time and Mantel tends to be very detail oriented - exactly the kind of thing that blurs and get forgotten across a decade. And I am glad I did.

The story of Thomas Cromwell is always going to be fascinating but Mantel's way to add flesh to the bare bones of history adds this additional piece that is always missing when you cast your eye back to the past. Not that she is inventing much - if you actually read the sources, most of the story did happen - some people were moved around, some words put in other mouths but even the most unbelievable incidents seem to have happened.

Mantel stops this novel at the height of Anne Boleyn's power, when she had achieved her goal of getting the crown (but no son...). If you know the history, you know where this is leading - that plan for stopping in Wolf Hall that Cromwell is working on is going to be the start of the fall. It is also interesting to note the name Mantel chose for this first novel - Wolf Hall looms like a treat for most of the book and the title makes you pay attention to the people of it - most of which could have been mostly ignored if not for this focus (at the reader's peril - they are important later on).

I had forgotten how masterfully Mantel foreshadows in her novel - if you pay attention, you can see the clouds starting to gather on top of Anne long before she even becomes a queen; her downfall is in there with all the companions. Paying more attention to every scene where she is there pays off in the long run.

And then there is the exquisite detail of Tudor England - the people and the households, the main figures and the ones that come from nowhere, the dress and the thoughts of people who had been often lost to the mists of time.

And none of her characters is one-toned - Thomas More is not just the saint being often portrayed, Wolsey and Cromwell are flawed men but not as cruel as most books will make you think.

Using Cromwell's voice for the story, Mantel manages to sidestep the problem of a 21st century narrator or an all-knowing entity. We know what Cromwell knows, we see and hear what he does. Which allows for rumors to leak into our consciousness and for a glimpse into a part of the story that is not told that often. It also pays off to pay attention of which form of the names is used (especially for Norfolk and Suffolk) because unlike history books where the various forms are used interchangeably, here the used form contains meaning.

Some of the story is circular, Mantel backtracks to fill in the story; some of it races ahead, some of it slows down to a crawl. And that change in pacing works better than a straight story would have.

I can spend the next few hours writing about certain aspects of the novel but the more I write, the more I want to write. So instead I will just stop here with a final note: you do not need to know anything about the Tudors to enjoy this novel but the more you know, the more you will take out of it - it is full of nods and waves towards things that are not spelled or important but which add to the tapestry of the novel.

>62 BLBera: I almost skipped it - I like classical music but I was not in the mood for a biographical play. The name of Capaldi made me actually look at the description and I am so glad I did :) BBC are doing their usual good job with their radio plays...

A4. King Lear by William Shakespeare

Producing company: Arkangel Shakespeare
Length: 3 hours and 8 minutes
Original release details: 1999 on audiotapes, 1606 for the play itself
Director: Clive Brill
Online: N/A
Listening date: January 2, 2021 - January 17, 2021
King Lear: Trevor Peacock

I actually both read and listened to this one - an act or 2 per day (thus the long time above) but as I was reading the Norton edition, it will show up as read when I finish its non-play elements. Talking about that, if you want to read and listen at the same time, don't just pick two separate editions in random... see below.

King Lear had been one of my favorite Shakespeare dramas ever since I read it for the first time in my early teens in Bulgarian (I read it a few years later in English as well) Back then I never realized that there is a problem with its texts - for all intents and purposes, there are two separate King Lear plays - while most of the plays suffer from this, Kind Lear has the largest differences (or one of the largest) between its Quatro1 and Folio texts (in addition to the inevitable changes and rewrites the Q has 285 lines that the F does not have and F has 115 completely new lines). And they are not just fillers - there are crucial differences between the two - including the end (oh, Lear dies - that does not change but what he believes when he dies is a different story). Each editor picks up their own way through the two texts although a conflated text had become the norm -- but that conflation can be very different between editions.

But let's talk about the play itself: Shakespeare takes a existing story from various sources (including Holinshed's Chronicles) and gives it a new life - and a new ending.

The king of Britain is getting old and has no sons so he decides to split the kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia - nothing unusual in this and for anyone in 1606 that would have sounded absolutely correct - primogeniture had been the law of the land and when there is no son, the daughters are equal heiresses under the law. Except that Lear decides to test his daughters and asks them how much they love him - and as his youngest, Cordelia, refuses to pay lip service to him, she is disinherited and leaves with her new husband for France. Except that as usual, lip service and real attachment are different things and as soon as they get the power, the two older daughters try to take away everything else from Lear - who is not very happy about that and flees.

But the play is not just the story of one family - it is the story of two of them - Gloucester and his sons (the legitimate Edgar and the illegitimate Edmund) and the dynamic between them is parallel to the dissolving of Lear's family. The two sons of Gloucester and the 3 daughters of Lear exist in parallel but scarily similar lines. Evil and choices become important for the downfalls of both men - the betrayals always having their own blood. But so do the redeemers.

And that's where the story of the two men diverge - Gloucester gets his son back early on (even if he does not know it), Lear needs to wait a lot longer. Both learn about their mistakes before they die and both try to make up for them but at the end just one of the children will be still standing.

I used to think of King Lear as the play where everyone dies. Not that this does not happen in other Shakespeare dramas but here the number of the survivors at the end is extremely low, even for Shakespeare and a lot lower than it is in the sources of this play.

The double end I was talking about earlier comes almost at the end - when Lear dies. In one version he is the cause for Cordelia's death, he knows and he knows that he had not managed to save her; in the other he dies before the final confirmation that she is dead, just when he thinks he sees her moving. One of the ends hints at redemption (Lear is the one who saves her even if he is also the reason for her being killed to start it), the other one is eternal damnation. While this may mean like not much of a difference now, the 17th century drama goer would have considered that a huge difference. The rest of the differences between the versions of the play are less impactful (even though some well known scenes such as the fake trial of the daughters is nowhere to be seen in the later versions). And then there is of course the Victorian version of the play that decided that the play is too dark so gave it a happy end...

The two older sisters and Edmund are evil personified - and in the case of the sisters, it has no explanation. The sources do - so one wonders if Shakespeare had relied on people knowing the story so decided not to add the scenes needed to explain it. And at the same time some of the positive characters (Kent, Edgar and even the Fool (who is the moral compass of the story for the first part of it... and then disappears altogether)) are almost one-tone as well - too good to be true. But then... it is a play, what more can you do in such a short time. The play works -- especially because being good or bad does not spell your end - you are as likely to have a "he dies" queue regardless of where you are on the good/bad scale...

Almost 3 centuries later, a novel will begin with a now well known sentence: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". King Lear makes me think about that exact sentiment.

The Arkangel Shakespeare version of the play uses the Pelican text of the play (the one from the now older edition - they are reissuing again and I am not sure how much the current text is changed compared to the old one). It is a conflated text so most of the missing scenes are added and the end is the one with hope - Lear thinks that Cordelia may be alive. It is a masterful performance led by Trevor Peacock and with a host of other known actors including David Tennant as Edgar, Samantha Bond as Regan and Clive Merrison as Gloucester. If you had never listened to the play before, this is a good version although if you do not know the play, it can get a bit confusing - too many characters with somewhat intersecting goals can lead to confusion.

And if you are going to listen and read along, picking up the correct version of the printed play is crucial, especially in this play - or you may get a bit lost.

9. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

Type: Novel
Length: 371 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 1991
Genre: contemporary, King Lear retold
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Anchor, 2003
Reading dates: 16 January 2021 - 18 January 2021

There are two ways to look at this novel - as a King Lear reinterpretation set in 1979 Iowa or as a novel of rural Iowa. Both will be correct - and both will be incomplete. It is the masterful mix of the two that makes this novel what it is.

In the spring of 1979, the patriarch of the Cook family in Zebulon County, Iowa, decides to split his farm between his 3 daughters. The decision comes as a surprise -- he had been a farmer all his life and stepping away is not what anyone expected. Except that one of them, his youngest, does not show enough enthusiasm so is cut out and leaves for her lawyer career (it is 1979, invasion won't happen - the battles when they come will be in court). In case you had ever read King Lear, you already know where this one is going... or can go. Smiley does not change the main fabric of the play... but she shifts it.

The second family drama is also in full play - being born out of wedlock is not such a big deal anymore so the son is a draft-dodger instead.

Shakespeare gave us the "external viewer" viewpoint; Smiley gives the oldest daughter, Ginny, the speaker part. And that changes things - partially because now we may be dealing with unreliable narrator and partially because Goneril was never given a chance to explain herself. But that shift also means that we see the underside of the play - the good son is almost just a shadow because the 2 older sisters rarely have anything to do with him.

The novel follows the plot of the play faithfully... which initially worried me - because it almost sounded like a recipe for a predictable plotline. But instead it helped - if you knew what was coming, you were always looking into things thinking on how they tie into it; if you did not know (because you never read King Lear), some of the turns may come as a shock.

But when you remove the veneer of King Lear, you find another novel under it - the novel of the changing times of 1979 in rural America when the farmers were facing the changes in the world. Smiley writes this novel with as much mastery as she does the overlaying story - with all the nitty gritty details (get yourself access to wikipedia if you had not read about farming before -- a lot of the descriptions are extremely detailed but they are done by a farmer's daughter who is herself a farmer.

And as a third layer is the back story of Zebulon county and the Cook family - which is the story of the people that made Iowa and its neighboring states and how American farming came to be what it was.

There is a lot of personal heartbreak in this novel - on all 3 levels of the text and there are awful things that happen and that had happened. The evil sisters of the play turn into the victims here (how much they are and how much of it is the narrator is open to interpretation) and the formerly good characters appear to be either vindictive or just shadows. Old secrets also resurface - some of them so disturbing that it makes you wonder if another play's line about things being rotten should not apply here. The sexual tension of the play is also here - as it cannot not be - and unlike the bawdiness of Shakespeare, it is also explored a lot more carefully.

The end is expected - everything dies. Not literally this time (although enough people do die) - but a way of a life is dead nevertheless and the people still standing are different people.

It is a hard novel to read in some parts - some of them because of the farming narrative, some of them because of the pure awfulness of the past of some of the characters. And it is not a happy story - for anyone. But then... the dying of a way of life never is.

10. Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn

Type: Novel
Length: 244 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2017
Genre: contemporary, King Lear retold
Part of Series: Hogarth Shakespeare
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Hogarth, 2017
Reading dates: 18 January 2021 - 19 January 2021

The Hogarth Shakespeare is a great project in theory - pair a well known current author with a Shakespeare play and see what they can do with a retelling set in modern times. That's a second novel I read from the 7 that are published so far (after The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson which I read in 2016) and for a second time I find it lacking...

Edward St Aubyn decides to tell just part of the story so Dunbar is more "based on fragments from King Lear" than it is a straight retelling. And somewhere in those cut fragments is where the story loses its power a bit.

The novel opens much later than the play does - Dunbar had already made his decision to split his kingdom between only his two oldest daughters and cut the youngest a year earlier and when we meet him, he had been committed to an asylum in Manchester from his daughters for at least a few months - away from North America where everyone who cares about his is.

Dunbar's kingdom is not literal of course - he is an entertainment media mogul who had built one of the biggest media empire in the world. That empire is what got split. Just like King Lear, Dunbar tried to give the power away but keep the title... and things backfired as badly as it did in the original. This family drama is all here. What is missing is the second family as a counterpoint and for comparison - while the characters are there, the connection between them is not and there is no betrayal there... and the novel suffers from that.

When the novel opens Dunbar had started to realize that something is indeed rotten and before long he escapes the loony bin and goes wandering around the mountains. There is noone to assist him, he is all on his own (complete with the rage against the storm and the barn he finds) but... the power of that part of the story is in his companions and the fact that he has no idea who they are...

And then there are the sisters... the two older ones are evil personified, just as in the play, except that in a novel they come out almost cartoon evil - and so does Dr. Bob. Add that the sexual tension that carries through the play had been upgraded to almost pornographic here and things are just bizarre in places.

As it is billed as a retelling, everyone knows where this is going - Dunbar will be saved by his youngest daughter, the evil plans will be stopped. St Aubyn makes the same choice as with the start - he does not finish the play - almost noone dies in this version - literally or not. A case can be made that the troubles the sisters find themselves in is the same as dying but... it does not have the same power.

Even removing the King Lear connection does not save this novel - it is so tightly connected into everything that pulling it apart does not leave a secondary story under it.

On the other hand some of the writing was impressive - even if it failed as King Lear, even if half of the characters were comically good or evil, something in the language of St Aubyn works on a level that I did not expect. I am glad I read it -- at least I discovered a new author I want to explore. But this could have been done a lot better... :(

11. Robert B. Parker's Colorblind by Reed Farrel Coleman

Type: Novel
Length: 356 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2018
Genre: crime, police
Part of Series: Jesse Stone (17)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2018
Reading dates: 19 January 2021 - 20 January 2021

Reed Farrel Coleman can write crime stories. But his handling of Parker's series had been somewhat of a disaster. Part of what made all of Parker's stories work was his spare style and the connections between the books, some of them spanning decades. When this series started, it got some of the rogue gallery of Spenser - and worked with it successfully - allowing for continuity... which somehow got lost. At least this time Coleman did not manage to get the continuity wrong - the previous novel attempted to create a better connection in the shared universe and bungled it...

Jesse is back from rehab and before he had managed to settle back a few attacks on mixed-race couples happen and then a young man is killed by one of his police officers. Reading this is 2021, one would think that Coleman went for the low-hanging fruit... except that the police officer was Alisha, the only non-white person in the police force and the killed man was the son of the leader of one of the better known neo-Nazi organizations in the state. But regardless of who was who - Alisha had been drinking, no gun was found on the boy... and things look really bad.

And in addition to that, another boy shows up from LA - Cole - who seems to have something against Jesse.

So here we are - one live boy, one dead one, one police officer in disgrace and Paradise on the verge of explosion - because both the neo-Nazis and the advocates for Alisha show up in numbers...

Coleman shows the reader what really happens early on so Jesse is the one that needs to figure out what exactly happened and how the shooting happened. And he does - with the help of both new and old friends. That part of the novel works. The one that does not is Cole's story. It took Jesse the whole novel to finally figure out who he was... when it was screaming from the page from early on.

If you had been reading the series, read this one... and hope that the next one will be better. If you had not, don't start here...

>65 AnnieMod: Great review of Wolf Hall. You gave me some new things to think about as I continue with my last third of the book. I agree that if she hadn't given the novel that title I wouldn't have been so attuned to the scenes with Jane Seymour.

>68 AnnieMod: A Thousand Acres was one of my reads of the year a couple of years go. I haven't studied King Lear so no doubt there were more surprises for me than if you have read it, but I thought it was a fantastic novel. Heartbreaking, but really excellent.

>65 AnnieMod: Your comments and Dan’s have convinced me that I need to re-read Wolf Hall. I’ve been tossing back and forth about whether I want to do it. But here I am, convinced.

>68 AnnieMod: I haven’t read anything by Jane Smiley, although I’ve been meaning to. Is this a good place to start?

Enjoyed all your reviews especially the Shakespeare. I see you were reading the Norton edition which usually goes into some detail on textual variations, but I also like some of criticism at the end. Their selection of this through the ages makes you realise how important Shakespeare has been to the reading public. However the best thing to do with the plays is to read them and then see them in performance so you can see how it works.

When I get to King Lear I will make sure I read A Thousand Acres

>71 AlisonY: I knew it is important (my Tudor phase and all that) but the title did highlight it - even if I did not notice that 10 years ago (I actually remember wondering why this novel is called that way when it does not come into play until the end...)

>72 NanaCC: That will depend a lot. I loved her The Greenlanders a few years ago. They are all very different though. In some ways, this is the more conventional - it is not a fast moving novel by any stretch of the imagination but compared to the almost glacial speed of Greenlanders, it is faster. As long as the passages about farming do not scare you, it should be a good start... Plus it won a Pulitzer... :) But you cannot be wrong by picking either as an introduction.

As for rereading Wolf Hall... I was not planning to either but some people around here decided to do a group read and I figured why not - if it is too familiar I can just stop... except it turned out that because it is too familiar, I actually noticed things I missed before.

>73 baswood: I like Norton - it has a very consistent structure and the choice of materials is usually diverse enough to give you an idea of both the past and the current....

I have the Arden, the New Cambridge and the Oxford also lined up... and I will probably at least look at the pre/post materials in a few others (Folger tends to have good analysis). Arden seems to be stronger on the textual differences than Norton here -- by design I suspect. :) Shakespeare has so many hidden nooks in the plays that learning about them can take one's complete life I guess... I also have a few issues from the Shakespeare Survey that were mostly about Lear... so I will probably still be on it for awhile :)

You are on a King Lear streak, Annie. The premier theater experience of my life was to see Ian McKellan as Lear with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was amazing. I haven't read Dunbar yet, and after reading your comments, I think I may pass on it.

I've read all the published Hogarth Shakespeare novels except for Macbeth and Dunbar. My favorites were The Gap of Time and Hag-Seed.

And I need to get back to my reading of Shakespeare. There are still a few plays I haven't read, mostly the histories.

I loved Wolf Hall. I read it for the first time last year. I quickly followed it with Bring up the Bodies and will finish with The Mirror and the Light sometime this year.

>75 BLBera: I found The Gap of Time problematic when I read it so you may like Dunbar more than I did. It is not necessarily a bad novel and reading it after Smiley probably did not do it any favors. And as I was looking for the Lear connection, coming fresh from both the play and the other novel, its incompleteness grated. I will probably pick up the other Hogarths as I work though the plays again - the idea of the novels is great so I am giving them a chance.

The King Lear thing is somewhat intentional - at another group the January topic was about Shakespeare’s children so I went looking for the Lear retellings. And then decided to read the original and learn more about it.

Never seen any of the Shakespeare plays live... :( but I have a few recordings lined up - it is not the same but it will need to be enough for now. And one day I may be able to see RSC production in a real theater. One always hopes. :)

We are having a group read here in Club Read of the trilogy - the last one is scheduled for May-June. So if you want, you can join us all? :) In the meantime, you will probably see more reviews of the first two soonish. :)

>69 AnnieMod: I haven't tried any of those Hogarth Shakespeare novels. I'm not opposed to them, per se, but they don't spark a ton of interest for me.

>63 AnnieMod: Is this a new read or a reread. I read her books so long ago; it's nice to know her works still hold up. I love the last paragraph of your review or it.

>78 avaland: As embarrassing as it is, a new one. I read her collection a few years ago and loved it and realized I've never read any of her novels - and then it took me forever to start rectifying that (and the only reason I pushed it into this month is because she is the author of the month over in the "Monthly Author Reads"). I have some weird gaps in my English language authors reading even in my genres. :(

Lots of text you’re flying through.

>63 AnnieMod: Butler and dystopia are of interesting and I like the title

>65 AnnieMod: you have me thinking about this title, Wolf Hall. It’s a teaser/foreshadowing and a cliff hanger all in one, prominently pronouncing this is a series. Fun to read your review.

>67 AnnieMod: love to see Lear here and all the follow up. A thousand acres appeals (>68 AnnieMod: ), Dunbar and all Hogarth does not ( >69 AnnieMod: ). I don’t think creative writers today, and say these last 150 years, take instructions well and that’s what Hogarth is kind of counting on - write to instruction. Well, maybe.

>80 dchaikin: Well, the weather had been beastly (for Arizona) so I had been staying warm and reading :)

Apparently the second Butler novel in this series makes the title of this first one even more relevant... and it fits the novel (even if the novel is a lot more as well).

I did not consider the Hogarths in that light but now that you said it, that is probably close to the truth... Writing to instructions works well for romance novels for example (ask Harlequin - they made a business from it) or even some crime/mystery sub-genres but the more creative an author is, the more likely is that they will want to assert their personality... And the more I think about it, the more I think that Dunbar really suffered from being read immediately after Smiley's masterpiece - had I reversed the order, I may have liked it more - like an appetizer before a meal as opposed to having it after the meal. :) We will never know now - but that's how things happen sometimes.

>77 lisapeet:

They sound good on paper though. I probably will read the rest of them one of those days -- I like exploring new ways to tell the Bard's stories but... something just does not pop properly. And it is not as if it cannot be done - see Smiley above for an example...

Have you read or listened to the novelized versions of Shakespeare by A. J. Hartley and David Hewson? I listened to Macbeth, A Novel narrated by Alan Cummings, and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel narrated by Richard Armitage. They were really good. I think I have Romeo and Juliet downloaded as well. I just haven’t had a chance to get to it.

I find it interesting to see how writers today continue to get inspiration from the Bard although some, of course, are better than others.

I am lucky that the Guthrie does a Shakespeare play every year, and there is the Great River Shakespeare Festival close to home in July, so I've gotten to see quite a number of plays, though not in the last year. I can't wait to be able to go to the theater again.

I love Octavia Butler. I used her Parable of the Sower in a Dystopian Lit class I taught, and the students loved it as well. Parable of the Talents is also very good, but I did like the first one better.

>79 AnnieMod: I have loved her books. The only thing I haven't read yet is a book of "conversations with..." her. We hosted her at the literary SF convention I used to work on; sadly, I was so busy I only caught the interview. She was guest of honor along with Gwyneth Jones.

>82 NanaCC: Nope... I knew about the novels but did not know that Armitage read them... I will add them in my notes for when I get to these plays :) Thanks!

>83 BLBera: Well, a lot more use only a detail - the retellings/inspired by are less prevalent but when I started looking, there were a lot of them for some of the more popular plays...

>84 avaland: Huh? Do you have a title for this book?

And I am officially behind on my reviews again... :)

>85 AnnieMod: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Octavia-Butler

Don't feel bad, I seem to be always behind with reviews.

I enjoyed very much reading about all the Shakespeare-inspired stories and it's given me a real yen for Shakespeare.

>86 avaland: Thanks!

I was more amused than feeling bad really - every year I promise myself I won't fall behind and we all know what happens. :)

>87 LolaWalser: :) I have more of them ;) Reading them in a tight cluster (but not back to back for the most part) after the play itself is interesting in a way -- some shine, some pale (poor Dunbar...) but the connections to the play actually jump at me a lot more than they would have otherwise.

I will never catch up if I keep delaying because I have older books to review so books 12-25 will be reviewed when I can (in some order and I am back with 26.


26. Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter

Type: Non-fiction
Length: 299 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2019
Genre: textile, history, personal history
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Abrams Press, 2020
Reading dates: 8 February 2021 - 16 February 2021

First ignore the subtitle. While there are elements of history in this book, that specific title can be very misleading.

"Thread of Life" is the personal story of one woman's relationship with textile, sewing and needlework, peppered with history of both the evolution of needlework and almost peripherally the world. There are real historical figures here - some well known (Mary, Queen of Scots), some not so much. The story is almost weaved together - a personal story gets connected to a traditional one which evolves into a historical account and then circles back. Most of the history is from the English speaking world (mainly USA and UK) but there are glimpses of traditional crafts from all over the world - from the Chinese minority and Ukraine to Africa, Chile and aboriginal Australia. Some of it is elaborated on, some of it is just mentioned in passing.

If you have any interest in embroidery or history of objects, this book is a treasure trove of anecdotes and history. Most of the book is about using the craft for banners and home objects and its relationship to art and not about clothing but as a history about textile, clothes are not forgotten - from the special motives sewn for protection from time immemorial to Singer and the sweatshops.

The book does not really follow any chronology - we jump in time - both in the author's history and the real history. The organization is based on the usage of the craft -- and the chapters follow that. That's also what makes the later part of the book somewhat weaker - because most of the works have more than one meaning, Hunter gets into a pattern of listing previously made points, then adding a new one and then doing it over and over again. The book start sounding repetitive - while these textiles are connected, the separate chapters are part of a whole and not just separate essays so the repetition grates.

The other big topic is the role of the women - the changes in the perception of needlework through the ages traces the changes in the position of women and their ability to provide for their families and to have their voices heard. The role of textiles through history and the changes brought by the markets and displacement run through the heart of the story - the traditions which had come before and the ones made today may sometimes be at odds and their balancing is not always easy. And sometimes things get lost in that shuffle.

Overall it is an engaging story (although I wish the last 1/3rd was consolidated in half the pages it took). There are two mostly visual problems with it:

- No graphics, pictures and images at all. The author discusses pieces of embroidery and various techniques and there is not even a small drawing let alone a picture somewhere. There is a list of sites and a bibliography at the end end where one can go and find these but... this is the kind of book where you want to read on its own, not with opening additional resources. I suspect that it was a cost cutting measure but...

- Someone decided that putting a nail on the cover (instead of a needle) is a good idea. The positioning does not work for a nail so I am not sure what the thought behind that was -- I cannot figure out a way to get that picture to work at all. Unless it is a pin - which would make more sense but it looks closer to a nail to me...

25. The French Widow by Mark Pryor

Type: Novel
Length: 298 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: crime, mystery
Part of Series: Hugo Marston (9)
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Seventh Street Books, 2020
Reading dates: 11 February 2021 - 13 February 2021

If you had read the other series by Pryor, you may wonder for a second if you are reading a novel from the correct series - for the first time (I think?) in the Paris based Hugo Marston series, we get into the head of the bad guy - and just like Dominic, the protagonist of the other series, it is the head of a psychopath (in the medical sense). The novel combines two separate stories - in one Hugo is a potential suspect, in the other he is one of the main investigators.

Hugo Marston, the chief of security for the US embassy in Paris, is on his way home when a seemingly disturbed man starts shooting and Hugo has to kill him. That makes him a hero - except in the minds of the people who do not think that Americans should be allowed to wield guns in France. And with this being 2020 (the novels are pretty much contemporary), the story gets a life on its own online and in the media. Except that there are some coincidences which need explaining and which throw a long shadow into the whole incident.

Meanwhile, in one of the old palaces in the city, an old French aristocratic family is assembling for their yearly get together - combined with one of the big parties for the country's national holiday. And in that august atmosphere, a young girl is almost killed. The girl turns out to be American so Hugo gets involved in the investigation and off we go - while his reputation swings from hero to villain and back and his future in Paris becomes a lot less secure, he is trying to find out what is the story of that wealthy family and the almost death there - especially when weird things keep happening (while trying to also figure out why the shooting he participated in happened at all - despite being warned off that specific course of action).

The novel is probably one of the most disturbing ones in the series and the end is as horrific as a book can be. On the other hand all of the usual secondary characters are here - the ambassador, Tom and Claudia, the members of the police we had seen before and Hugo's assistant. And they are the ones that make that novel what it is - even if they are not fully fleshed here, they had been here in previous books so it feels like another episode in a series you know.

Technically you can read this as a standalone - the introductions are there but... the missing backstory may make some of the characters feel almost like cardboard and Hugo's way of work feels almost too independent and too cheeky without some of that back history.

Now the long wait for the next novel begins again...

12. The Visitor / Running Blind by Lee Child

Type: Novel
Length: 519 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2000
Genre: thriller
Part of Series: Jack Reacher (4)
Format: Tall Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Berkley, 2007 (later printing)
Reading dates: 20 January 2021 - 22 January 2021

When we left Reacher at the end of the previous novel, he had a house and a girlfriend and his nomadic days seemed to be behind him. We find him in the same spot here - except as expected, he is not really adapting well to his new life. The girlfriend is not a problem, the "stay in one place and have a home" is.

So when he sees a small business owner being hassled for protection, he decides to help - handing FBI enough ammunition to blackmail him into helping them (and even that would not have been enough if they had not gone after Jodie as well). And why do they need him? Because someone is killing women - all of them ex-military, all of them connected to his past as an MP. He was really a suspect for awhile - until someone died while he was talking to the police and that became an impossibility.

Child adds a second narrator - the killer's - which is slowly revealed to be a psychopath. Between that and the third person narrative the story start twisting and turning and throwing all kinds of red herrings. Reacher does not take the blackmail kindly, even if he complies, and adds his own agenda into the whole story.

By the time the solution comes it almost feels like the last possible option. And yet, it is not - working back from the solution you can see the hints and foreshadowing, the assumptions which go unchecked for a very long time - and the string of women that could have been still alive if they had been. The other story - the protection rackets also gets its closure - its development is weaved into the bigger one. And the personal story of Reacher gets to a new place - Jodie is off to London, he is preparing to sell the house - and the play at domestication is done.

Another solid story from an author who knows his craft. It works as a standalone but the backstory adds a richness into the characters.

PS: This novel ended up with two titles - the original one for UK (The Visitor), the other for USA (Running Blind). Both fit in different ways although I prefer the UK one. Why the US market needed a new title is almost cute - apparently it was seen by Putnam (the original US publisher) as sounding too much like a science-fiction novel so they had to change it.

27. History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold

Type: Non Fiction
Length: 123 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2000
Genre: history, historiography
Part of Series: Very Short Introductions (16)
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2000, later printing
Reading dates: 6 February 2021 - 17 February 2021

A lot of textbooks, when discussing literary genres, use a sentence which can be summarized as "Herodotus invented history". The first time I saw it I was confused by two things - how history can be considered literature (we were talking about literary genres after all) and how can history be invented - it had always been there... Arnold covers both of these topics and a lot more in his excellent introduction to history.

History can mean a lot of things - it can be the story of what happened, it can be the writing about it, it can be the research of it or even History - that almost force that governs everyone's life. Arnold explores all of those meanings and connects them in a way that shows that as different as they can be, they are all the sides of the same coin. And he does that with the oldest weapon in a historian's arsenal - by telling us stories.

The book is an overview of the development and current state of historiography and history but instead of just introducing us to the different people, methods and controversies, Arnold uses real tales from the past and then shows how they were used (and abused) and reported by historians in different times. The book starts with a murder, loops back to catch up with the Greeks and then moves swiftly through history to get to where we are now. It is a short book so you would not think that this many stories and lives (and pictures) would fit and somehow they do. Some of the writing can get a bit too academic but even when it does, it has a purpose.

A lot of what the book deals with is the changing perception of what truth and history are and how connected they must be. It is fascinating to see how the way history was written shifts between its different branches - from political to social, from specialized to general and back again. All of the examples are from European and US histories which made me wonder how would this book read if it was done by the authors from another part of the word, using their own history to draw both the examples and what they signify. Most of them are from the English-language perspective although there are a few notes about the French historians and how they differ from the English language ones. It would have been fascinating to have a lot more examples both from continental Europe and from around the world. But then writing a unified history of the history of history will require a lot more pages. And this book, exactly as is, is a good enough introduction for an English language speaker.

Book bullet - and I found it as a library ebook, so I should be reading it soon.

>93 jjmcgaffey: Ha - which one got you? :) And oops... :)

13. Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker

Type: Novel
Length: 290 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2005
Genre: western
Part of Series: Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch (1)
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2006
Reading dates: 22 January 2021 - 23 January 2021

Robert B. Parker is known for his detective novels - his interconnected Boston (and the region) based series have more of 50 books between them (and all 3 series had been continued after his death). But in his standalone novels he explored almost every genre (except for speculative fiction) - romance, crime, family sagas, westerns and sports were all covered. "Appaloosa" is not the first western that he wrote, fictionalized biographical novel of Wyatt Earp("Gunman's Rhapsody") had already proven than his style works for the genre. And this novel shows it even more - without the historical figures and the known story to support and be reinterpreted, Parker creates his own Wild West that is as alive as the real one.

Meet Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch - lawmen in the Wild West who travel around the country and take the law in their hands (legally) when things go especially bad. And in the town of Appaloosa they had - a local land owner had been terrorizing everyone (the novel opens with a horrific scene of violence) and anyone who has anything against it gets killed - including the old lawman. So the town calls our guys and they set to solving the problem - in their way.

The story is told by Everett Hitch - the helper to the much more ruthless Virgil Cole. Which does not mean that Hitch is in any way innocent or that he does not kill. But Cole likes his guns and knows how to use them - and even when no gun is around, he can be violent, regardless of the propriety of the situation.

And then someone finds a way to almost disable Virgil - because he falls in love. Then things go badly -- for everyone besides the woman anyway...

It is a gunslinger novel but it is not just that. Somewhere under the deceptively easy prose which is the usual Parker style is hiding a whole world. If anything it is even better used here than in the Spenser series - the Boston of Spenser is known to the world so you back-fill some of the missing information; here you cannot and you do not need to. And despite the spare style there are the nature pictures and the Appaloosa stud and his mares, there are the people of a town somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

I had been listening to the surviving episodes of the radio version of Gunsmoke (most of them made it through time actually) and the world of Parker is very close to the world of Gunsmoke - I was even looking for parallels between the two. They are not the same ones, neither this later one is modeled on it. But they have the same feeling and the same deceptive simplicity that is anything but.

I am planning to continue with this series at least with the novels that Parker managed to finish (only 4) but if the other 3 series are any indication, I will probably decide to continue even with the authors who took the series and continued it after his death. And I probably should read more westerns...

#27, the Very Short Introduction to History. That looks like an interesting series, too, I'll have to investigate some of the other Very Short Introductions...

>96 jjmcgaffey: Ah, if you have never seen the series before, then have fun. They have close to 700 of them all over the topics - their Galaxies: A Very Short Introduction was one of the best introductions I read when I was in that phase (I even wrote a review) and Prehistory: A Very Short Introduction was as good. Some volumes are weaker but for the most part they are good at what they are doing. But I need to warn you - they make you want to read more and they have very good Further Reading sections :)

14. The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner

Type: Novel
Length: 344 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2014
Genre: contemporary, King Lear inspired
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014
Reading dates: 23 January 2021 - 25 January 2021

300 years ago Brumfitt Kings moved to a small island on the border of Maine and Nova Scotia, somewhere in the nowhere land between the US and Canada. It starts as a seasonal job, then he remains behind while everyone gets back and then he decides to stay forever. He starts to write a diary and to paint - the diary will provide the stories for his descendants, the paintings will be "discovered" by the art world and make the current generation comfortably well-off. And it seems like the ocean and Brumfitt had made a deal - because the family can always catch the biggest and best lobsters. But they pay a price - a son is always lost in the water - one way or another.

By the time we meet his descendants, they are the biggest lobstermen on the small Loosewood Island. Woody, the patriarch is still a lobsterman at heart, despite the painting allowing him other choices and his oldest daughter, Cordelia, is as interested in it as he is.

The novel moves between the diary of Brumfitt, descriptions of his paintings (from Cordelia), the back story of the current generation and the now and here of the life on the island - where lobstermen from the neighboring islands and the mainland are trying the steal the catch of the island's families and drugs are finally hitting the peaceful community. Well, relatively peaceful.

Each of those stories have its own heartbreak and beauty. Not everything is beautiful and there is no character who is completely innocent or good - this is real life after all, not one's idealized version of it. There is romance and death, there is beauty and there are a lot of descriptions about the lobster trade and how the lobster fishing works. And then there is that war with the neighbors - fueled both by drugs and by the desire for more lobsters.

The novel is inspired by King Lear but it is neither a retelling, nor it is based on it. The patriarch of the family and the three daughters are all there but it does not follow the trajectory of the Bard's tragedy - in a way it is the opposite of it. Woody Kings' way is not to split evenly - instead he gives each daughter what she needs - a house for one, a job for another, a job for a partner when needed. He still dies but without the regrets and bitterness (and even if the daughters are not always best friends, the acrimony and hate of the play are just not there). If one pays attention, they may notice the rest of Lear's cast - they are there, under names similar enough to recognize. And if one expects this to be a Lear retelling, it won't work for them. If I had not read King Lear a few days earlier, I probably would have missed at least half of the nods to it. And that would have been ok.

I liked this novel a lot more than I expected to. The fact that it was not a retelling of the play actually worked for it better than I expected - it allowed the author to allow his characters to get out of the evil/good roles and be just people. It is a novel of a place and a occupation - the people in it were almost unimportant. It did not really matter that there were no real positive characters (even the narrator Cordelia managed to do things that could have landed her in jail...) or that we never hear all the backstories. They fit the story of the island, a story told in the old pictures, in the memories and in the main story. And there is even a hint of magic out there -- how much one wants to believe in it is up to them.

I am not sure if the novel will work for most people - it is definitely not perfect but it is the kind of imperfect that made it work for me. And this positive end that tied all kinds of lose threads without a happy end just added to the weirdness to the novel. In a good way.

>89 AnnieMod: That sounds very tempting. But, I suppose I would rather be doing it instead of reading about it.

>98 AnnieMod: Hmmm. Interesting. Might think about this one. Reminds me a wee bit of Jason Brown's short story collection, A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, which is set mid-coast Maine and the link between the characters and the stories is that they are all descendants of John Howland, who came over on the Mayflower.

Hi Annie - What a lot of interesting reading you've been doing. I will look for Threads of Life; I do love my needlework.

I've only read the first two in the Pryor series and was just thinking that I need to continue. The second was a bit gory for me, but I'll give the series another chance.

>100 BLBera: The Marston series: Some of them can get a bit gory in certain places but not often - this last one is especially bad at the very end but it makes sense as part of the story. Although it turned my stomach - and that is not easy. Now - it is not graphically gory at all - it is more subtle than that (not easy to explain without a major spoiler which will immediately reveal the killer...). But absolutely horrific. It is one of my favorite series - even when it stumbles a bit (Tom can serve almost as a shortcut when something cannot be achieved otherwise...).

>99 avaland: After I read The Lobster Kings I looked at some of the reviews and was baffled by a lot of them. It seems to be a polarizing book... but I also think that there is a problem with expectations here - it is not a King Lear, it is not a family saga, it is not a cheerful novel (it is a hopeful one though...), it is not really a character novel as much as a place novel - the island IS the main character. Which does not seem to work for everyone. Plus I am not going to stop reading a book because an animal gets killed or the protagonist is not perfect -- especially in a narrative in the first person (which seem to be two of the major problems for most of the reviews...). I will be interested to see what you think if you try it. And this story collection looks very very interesting (although here it is mostly the first and last generation only but yeah... it does seem to have similar threads going inside - tradition vs. reality and all that).

Thanks for the tip about VIS on galaxies. The gory book sounds tantalising but... I really should not... :)

>102 LolaWalser: Pryor’s? It is gory at the very end only (or stomach turning anyway) - if that is why you are interested, you will be disappointed - the whole series is almost cozy in regards to its goriness (almost - it has some flashes of it). If you like the whole idea of the series though - as I said, it had been one of my favorite ones but I would start from the first. :)

I suspect that you may like the Lobster book a lot more - it has its own awfulness (King Lear is a gory and cruel book so no surprises) and bad things happen to a lot of people almost as a matter of fact (again - King Lear...). Plus the whole art side story. Or not - it is a very hard book to recommend because it is a mishmash of things - and either it works for someone or it does not. It did for me (as should be obvious), not so much for a lot of people that left reviews.

Finally getting around to reading people's threads this year and have enjoyed catching up with yours. Quite a few books I'm interested in on here. Particularly interesting to read about the Lucy Prebble play. I hadn't heard of it, but Prebble's Enron play was very funny and I've been interested in checking out more of her work. Sounds like it's worth a look.

Hope the good reading continues and I'll try and keep up this year!

>103 AnnieMod:

Yeah, I meant the one set in Paris--oh my, reading eight first would be quite a task... I must admit the character does not appeal, I could take a random armed American, but an American official flaunting arrogant cowboy ways irks me. Still curious about WHAT HAPPENS though, so ... :)

Lobster cruelty I think I can take. At least, feel as I should not complain about, given I eat them. nom nom nom

>105 LolaWalser: American official flaunting arrogant cowboy ways irks me

Nah, not Hugo - he just got kinda in the wrong place at the wrong time this time around (why he is walking with his gun between the embassy and his apartment has to do with some of the previous books). That's part of the whole point - of all people, he was the least likely to be the shooter and yet... This is why I said that it should be read as part of the series :)

PS: I can send you a private message with the details of that ending if you want. :) I don't want to put them here even under spoiler because knowing it changes how one reads the story but if you do not plan to read it or do not mind... :)

>106 AnnieMod:

Nooo that would be CHEATING. I will read the whole book. :) I'll look for #1 and see what happens--if I like it I may continue, if not, I'll skip to #9.

ETA: ah, #1 is about bookseller murders! Things are looking up.

>107 LolaWalser: Why do you think I picked up the series initially :) Paris and the bouquinistes on the Seine and murder? I was in :) Then I loved the style and here we are... 9 books later (plus 2 in his other series) and waiting for him to write something so I can read it.

>104 valkyrdeath: I would have probably missed the Prebble play altogether if it was not for its revival (which meant reprinting it again - so it showed up on my "what's new" search). It is her first and I was not sure what to expect (especially because I expected it to sound a bit dated based on what it is about) and yet... So she is on my list of playwrights to read more of... :)

I need to catch up on my plays reading - my play a week is getting into a play a month pattern... ;)

23. The Book of Koli by M. R. Carey

Type: Novel
Length: 376 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Post Apocalypse
Part of Series: The Rampart Trilogy (1)
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Orbit (USA), 2020
Reading dates: 5 February 2021 - 6 February 2021

Water became more and more of a problem, humans solved the problem with science and intelligent trees, then things went even worse. Wars and collapse followed and humanity still survived. More time passed, the world mostly reverted to wilderness with pockets of people here and there... except that the trees also evolved. It is a tale of climate change and genetic modifications and progress that somehow got away from humanity - but instead of escaping into the stars, we got stuck on Earth. Or at least we never hear about anyone escaping - who knows what will happen in the next books. And somewhere around this time, Koli was born in one of the villages that somehow managed to survive everything.

Not that you will know all that when the novel opens. We meet Koli, now an older man, telling about the world before the change - not the collapse but a change in his timeline - and how he was part of it. And hos world is full of monsters (literally) and almost magic - old tech that noone understands. It does not take very long to realize that this is not a fantasy set in a secondary world or a science fiction somewhere across the stars but a future Earth.

Carey weaves his world masterfully - allowing Koli to tell the whole story. It is hard to get used to the style - the language had also evolved so sometimes you need to stop and think on a phrase (read it aloud -- see where phonetics will lead you when you cannot decipher it - the expressions survived in a corrupted form because the initial words that were contained in them got meaningless and got replaced by similarly sounding ones). The grammar is jarring at first - but once you get used to it, it runs as smoothly as if you were reading in nowadays English. Looking at the world through the eyes of a man that was there and knows what happens next means that we get all kinds of fleeting views of times yet to come - but mostly we get to see how the world was. And in a lot of cases, when Koli tells you that you may not understand something, you do - because his artifacts are our current and future technology - the AIs and the weapons; the internet and the culture. On the other hand the humans are the same as always - petty, self-centered and allowing self-delusion to rule their lives more often than not - the old stories are still being told - corrupted and changed but still there. Except the monsters are real - and have roots...

It is not a happy place - humanity is dying out - and some branches of it had reverted to the wilderness. And the villages that are still there had mostly lost contact with each other. Anyone who had ever read a single article on genetics knows that this will not end well. However Carey knew it also. So there is an explanation on how they are still surviving and at least in this first novel of the trilogy, there is hope for the future.

If I had a problem with this novel, it was that it read way too much as a first novel of a trilogy. I wanted more of an end, a possibility for this to stand on its own as a novel. Yes, Koli got out of his village, had some adventures, met friends and got an end goal in sight but... that's what happens in prologues. The novel feels incomplete and almost like a teaser and not like the main show. On the other hand it made me want to see more, made me want to mean the cast of characters again -- and if that is not the job of a first novel in a trilogy, what is?

Overall - a great start of a series.

24. When the Lion Feeds by Wilbur Smith

Type: Novel
Length: 376 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 1964
Genre: Historical, Saga
Part of Series: Courtney Family Saga (1)
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2006
Reading dates: 7 February 2021 - 10 February 2021

The novel opens in the 1870s in Natal - one of the colonial possessions of England in what will one day become South Africa. Sean and Garrick Courtney, the twin sons of one of the local ranch owners, spend their days hunting and playing under the hot sun. Until a tragedy strikes, Garrick loses his leg (due to his brother's negligence) and the relationship between them changes. Sean tries to make up for it, Garrick gets more and more bitter and manipulative.

And all that story unfolds while the world around them changes - they both end up in the Anglo-Zulu War - Garrick comes back a hero, Sean and their father are presumed dead. Until Sean comes back home to find his pregnant girlfriend Anna married to his brother and confirming the father's death. Had it been almost anyone in the world, that may have been the end of it but Anna wants a revenge for being forced to marry Garrick (because she believed Sean to be dead) so she spins a story and causes the two brothers to fall out permanently and Sean to leave, leaving all he owns to his unborn son.

And this is where the story really begins. While the Natal chapters are interesting and the war is tragic, they serve to set the scene for the future. Because Sean 's adventures are just beginning - he gets in the middle of the Witwatersrand golden fever, gets extremely wealthy and participates in the founding of Johannesburg, then have to run out of there after trusting the wrong people and ends up chasing ivory into the Bushveld, gets married, gets a child and then loses almost everything again when his two worlds meet for the first time. It is an adventure novel set in a place and time which is almost forgotten.

It is the story of Sean but it is also the story of the land that is to become South Africa - with all its beauty and weirdness, with the large open spaces and the wild animals, with the local tribes and the colonists - Dutch, English and Portuguese (and anyone else who shows up...). Sean's best friend may be white but his constant companion is Zulu and there is also a friendship there, albeit unconventional and looking almost insulting from our viewpoint - but both men respect each other and listen to each other and both learn from the other. There is a play on race and the changing in perceptions around it (and in how race is being used and abused at the colonies) - it is a world in flux where your yesterday's friend is an enemy tomorrow (the Boer war is coming soon) and your enemies may be the ones to save you next time.

And in counterpoint to Anna from the first part of the novel are the women of the later parts - Candy and Katrina - different as two women can be and yet, both of them hardworking in a men world. Their meeting ends up being the undoing of Sean's world - because none of them understand the other and neither Sean understand any of them.

The novel finishes almost where it started - with Sean looking back to Natal and deciding to go back home. It is a long novel and yet when it finished, I wanted more - Wilbur Smith is one of those storytellers that knows how to keep you interested. I am definitely planning to read more from Smith.

28. Road Out of Winter by Alison Stine

Type: Novel
Length: 314 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Apocalypse
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Mira, 2020
Reading dates: 16 February 2021 - 19 February 2021

One day spring just did not come - the cold and the snow kept coming. Before long the next winter was upon everyone and the weather never changed. But it was the second spring that never came that finally got everyone on edge - it started to seem like the weather is here to stay - at least in the Appalachian part of Ohio.

Setting the novel outside of the big cities pays off for Stine - the region is already poor and one of the hot beds of the opioid crisis today. And this future is not too far removed - it can happen next spring or 10 years from now - but it seems to be coming.

The main character and the narrator of the story is Wylodine (Wil for short) - a young woman, a few years out of school who was left by her mother and step-father to watch over and work on the family farm. Their crop is weed - and that had made them half-outcasts, half-celebrities in the region. And Wil has a green thumb - things just grow for her. Which makes her an anomaly and valuable in the frozen world.

And she has a goal - her mother sends her a card and she decides to go rescue her from the step-father. How much she needs rescuing is unclear - some of the backstory reads like Lobo being abusive but some of it shows him as carrying and careful man - and there is the element of the unreliable narrator. But the decision is taken, Wil attaches her little house to her truck and off she goes. She seems to be picking up strays along the road (and then some of them leave) and the expected quick trip is anything but. A compound ran by frat-boys, a group of tree-savers who seem to be running of trees to save, the Church which escaped the small town just to get stuck somewhere else -- the trip seems to be getting slower and slower as time progresses.

And somewhere in the backstories of everyone, we can see the Appalachia of today. People there did not get desperate because spring never came - they were already desperate before that and this was the last nail. The 15 years' old who has a toddler and got kicked from home because she got pregnant, the people that believe that they are meant to die, the man who despite having nothing and having been robbed still finds a can of condensed milk for a baby - horrors and hope paint a picture of a humanity in a crisis - with some bright spots here and there. The world collapses around them and anarchy rules. And somewhere in there, there are still some live seeds... and a grower who can make something from them.

We never see the world out of Appalachia. We hear about California and we know that things still grow there but as time passed, Ohio and the rest of the region gets worse and worse so one would assume that the cold is slowly taking over the world.

The novel is cruel and horrible and what people do to other people is awful enough. The parts that are really chilling and make you think are the ones that happen today - the ones that already happened before the weather went crazy. Reading this novel at the same time when most of the States was frozen, including states that rarely see ice, made it even scarier. One day spring may decide not to come... and when that happens it will be one more problem in a very long list of problems - when the apocalypses comes, it won't come alone.

The novel finishes with hope and with an opening for a sequel. But it also feels like a complete novel - we never get to California but we get to a place that can be home and can be the end. And where hope is still alive.

29. A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century by Flannery Burke

Type: Non-Fiction
Length: 306 pages + Notes, index and Bibliography
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2017
Genre: History, cultural history, Southwest USA
Part of Series: The Modern American West
Format: Paperback
Publisher: The University of Arizona Press, 2017
Reading dates: 15 February 2021 - 20 February 2021

Flannery Burke defines the Southwest in this book narrowly - as the states of Arizona and New Mexico. Yes - California and Texas are part of the Southwest but they had their own history and development and when they are added to a story, they become the focus. And while Utah, Nevada and Colorado can be considered part of the story, they have a different story as well. On the other hand, the two states started as a single territory, have similar racial structure and in a lot of ways are the two sides of the same coin. Of course, history and geography does not care about lines on a map so the story takes us to the neighboring states and to Mexico often enough but the main focus are the two States, buffered between the giants of Texas and California - it is just how the Southwest works.

The book is full of facts, names and details which can get someone lost quickly. The structure of the book does not help much - Burke decided on separate essays as chapters so she will revisit the same people, places and times in different chapters (until at some point she also starts saying things like "as we saw already" and "as we will see" which lead to other chapters)... But despite it, the story emerges.

The main thesis is clear from early on - the two states are joined together by their past, present and future but exactly the same things is what sets them apart from the rest of the country - despite everyone wanting to adopt parts of them. They have the mix of Indian and Spanish speaking population that came from having the territory as part of Mexico much longer than other parts of the country and that is part of what delayed the statehood for both states. Unlike the Eastern states, most of the local Indian tribes were not expelled to some new lands (although the Long Walk of the Navajo changed them as much as the Trail of Tears changed the Eastern tribes). But the goal here was not relocation - they were moved to prison instead - and when they were released, most of them made it back.

The first two parts of the book deal with the racial make-up of the state - the reservations are part of both states and Spanish is even an official language in New Mexico. Burke traces how the race self-determination changes and how at different times, the same group is either white or not - depending on what they need it to be. And under that is the story of assimilation and the creation of the nations and tribes of today. Some of it is hard to read (people can be cruel...), some of it makes one smile and some of it gives you hope. But by the end of the century, the two states emerge as two siblings - growing up together but having their own paths - taking almost opposite decisions along the way in a lot of places.

The rest of the book never lets these topics fail (if anything they add the rest of the peoples that make up the area) - but they are deal with different problems. The tribes and nations got their reservations but as it turned out, America needed the resources from them - the Four Corners area where the Navajo nation makes its home has coal, uranium and water. And next door in New Mexico, Los Alamos was created specifically so USA can develop a bomb. And both states struggle with their climate and aridity - the Colorado River and the Rio Grande are right here but that does not make them fair game... and everyone wants their water.

The region is also a popular tourist place - which through the century had been explored and abused by everyone. All that defined the region - it had to stay in the past so the tourists can see it and it was in the present and future because the land was needed for that. As a result it got out of time - and almost out of focus - when people think about the Southwest, they think either of the romantic version sold on postcards where time has stopped or about the Grand Canyon and the rest of the area - or if they are so inclined, they think about the Sun Belt. When they remember that there are two states between Texas and California that is - for a lot of people the Southwest is defined by the two big guys on both ends...

And all that history is also mixed with the story of the local arts, the artists who were born here or made their home here, the traveler and writers who left something of them here, the changing perceptions and understanding of native art and crafts.

At the end I learned a lot about the region I call home these days. It also made me think about all the states I know nothing about - they all have history, they all have their quirks.

If you are looking for political history, look elsewhere. The big names are mentioned but mainly in connection with their environmental and local work. And even if some events from the 21st century are mentioned here and there, the book is concerned with the 20th and the changes it brought. And all the damage that we had done to other people and to the environment.

It is an extremely dense book but if you are interested in the topic, it is worth reading.

30. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

Type: Novel
Length: 101 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 1895 (1894 in serialization)
Genre: Science Fiction, Time Travel
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Hardcover, Leather bound
Publisher: Easton Press, 2002, The Masterpieces of Science Fiction
Reading dates: 20 February 2021 - 21 February 2021

I was absolutely sure I had read this novel - it is an early classic, the first time travel story (which is one of my favorite genres) and yet it did not feel familiar when I read it. It is possible that I had read it either so early in my life that most of the story had disappeared from my head or that it was an abridgement. In either case, a planned reread turned into reading a new novel that I enjoyed very much.

The story is simple - or at least appears to be - a guy invents a time machine, goes in the future and comes to tell his friends what he saw there. That part as novel as it was for the end of the 19th century is a known trope these days. And as much as that is an important development for the genre, it is also the part where Wells, in his normal style, does a lot of hand-waving so he can get to the real story - the story of the Earth in the future. I cannot not wonder what would have Verne done with this story -- I suspect that he would have turned it into a scientific novel with very little real future history - but then these were the styles of the two fathers of Science Fiction.

But back to the story -- our traveler ends up in the year 802,701 and finds an idyllic world there - the sun is shining, people spend their time in leisure and pleasure. But something does not look right - he expected to see highly technological society and found a garden, almost like the garden of Eden - which very soon turns out to be everything but. Humanity had managed to do into two different species - one on the surface, living in leisure and one under the ground, supporting them. And somewhere along the long millennia, things had gone horribly wrong and the underworld people, the Morlocks, are not something that the traveler wants to believe the humanity can devolve into.

The social commentary on this future world is writing itself - even in the parts that Wells does not mention. The traveler finds and loses a companion - despite the differences, the people above the ground are still people and he can flirt with Weena easily enough. And that opens other questions - because if we follow the logic, the people still in the open are the ones that caused the separation and exploited everyone else and yet... they seem to have kept their humanity - in some ways anyway.

The Time Traveler does not stop there - he pushes ever further along. The next stop is more than distressing (but at least there are still some creatures that seem to be people) and the last one is the end of the world -- it a tide-locked world, humans are all gone (well... unless we somehow ended up in the water).

The part with the second stop was cut from the first publication of the novel as a whole - although noone knows if it was by design or simply a mistake. I find the novel a lot more powerful because of it.

And the end of the novel is as mysterious as the whole story - having told the story our traveler goes away again - and his friend is still waiting for him. He speculates on where he may be... but it is left to the reader to decide if he went away for love or for an adventure. And if someone does not believe the story, there are those two flowers that do not exist in our world -- the symbols of love and friendship and the proof if one needs one.

There are a few eyebrow raising moments (who he compares the Eloi (the above ground people) to for example) but because the novel is mostly set in the future and the characters in the here and there are more of archetypes than people, the novel actually does not sound dated or worse. And considering when it was written, it sound more modern than a lot of novels written 50 years later.

The edition I read had two introduction - one by George Zebrowski and one by Brian Aldiss (printed as an Afterword). Both are very good and neither should be read by someone who had not read the novel. One of those days someone will figure out how to write an introduction that does not spoil the complete novel...

31. Sovereignty by Mary Kathryn Nagle

World Premiere run: Arena Stage at the Kreeger Theater in Washington D.C.: January 12th, 2018 - February 18th, 2018
Length: Full Length Play. 2 Acts (13+15 scenes). Approximate time: about 1 hour and 45 minutes with one 15 minute intermission; 130 pages
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2020
Reading dates: 21 February 2021

The play weaves together two different timelines - the present day America and the 1830s and the lead up to the signing of the Treaty of New Echota - the legal document with which ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi River to the USA and which ended with the Trail of Tears.

The two stories connect in a lot of ways - the characters in the now and here are descendants of the ones from the 1830s and the main goal in both times is the definition and defense of the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation. The one in the past is doomed to fail, despite all the good intentions; the ones today which should not have happened at all seems to have a better chance. Or does it? And the author wrote the whole story fluidly - scenes move from one timeline to another in mid-speech - showing how some things had not changed, almost 200 years later.

When the story opens a drunk man assaults a tribal policeman in a casino. The drunk is white - so the tribe has no jurisdiction. The state detective tries to arrest the guy but the realize that he has no jurisdiction either - because this is the reservation - if anything, he just opened himself to a lawsuit. The only people who can arrest the guy are the federal police and they are nowhere to be seen... And that leads to the character explaining the Oliphant Supreme Court decision from 1978 - tribal courts have no jurisdiction over non-Indian people even on their own land (yes, I know - I am oversimplifying) while state courts have no jurisdiction for crimes on tribal land at all and as one of the characters said when asked why one would not call the Feds: "I generally don't do things that waste my time". As a result the violence towards women and children had exploded - and only the 2013 VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) renewal added protection at least for these categories. But it is not really implemented yet.

From there the story starts following the Cherokee lawyer Sarah Ridge Polson who had just come home and the escalation of the internal conflict back in the 19th century. Before the end of the play (and the story), a lot of men will be dead in the past (killed based on a law which one of them wrote and still decided to break for the good of the nation) and in present time America, the lawyers will try to heal the gap between the families and the nations.

Remember that state cop who really could not understand how exactly the tribal police does not have jurisdiction on their own land at the opening of the story? By the end of the play he goes to the Supreme court to argue that even though he has been found guilty of domestic violence by the tribal court, it does not count and Oliphant should be still valid despite the VAWA provisions.

After I read the story I looked up the whole story online - both the past and the current days stories sounded almost fantastical. The only "fiction" is that last Supreme Court trial (and it is most likely a question of time) - the rest of the history did happen and is happening.

I found the story in present day America a lot more disturbing than the one in the 1830s (if one can compare two tragedies this way). But we are supposed to be a lot more compassionate these days. And yet men in the 21st century can violate a woman and not be held responsible in the same way as a man from the Georgia Guard in the 1830s was (well, at least noone is now encouraging men to do it...). Andrew Jackson has a lot to answer for - the scenes with him are almost surreal - they probably did not happen exactly like that but the result was the same...

The author is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a lawyer herself - and just like her protagonist, she traces her roots directly to John Ridge - one of the men who signed the treaty and is considered a traitor by many in the tribe. Giving up becomes a major theme in both timelines - when do you just give up and when you risk everything and hope to win. The Ridges of the 1830s lost; the ones in the 21st century may have found a way to win - at least when it matters. And over the whole play is the shadow of belonging and memory - is the future more important than the past and can old wounds heal and can people find where they belong.

If you know the story, the play will be a reminder of it with lively dialog and personalities thrown in. If you do not know the story (I did not), it is a history lesson in the form of a play - and I suspect it will stay with you for a very long time.

32. A Nail the Evening Hangs On by Monica Sok

Type: Poetry Collection
Length: 55 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Poetry
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Paperback with flaps
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2020
Reading dates: 15 February 2021 - 21 February 2021

I do not know a lot about Cambodia - I had read some history, I had read a lot of news from the country (they keep getting there...) and I can find it on a map but I do not know the country or the people and their culture. So I was a bit worried when I picked up this collection - I know how a lot of poetry about my country does not translate well into other languages and this collection may be in English but it is Cambodian (or Cambodian American if you prefer).

Monica Sok is the child of Khmer refugees - they fled the country to save their lives and her longing for the mother country is palpable. A lot of the poem in this debut collection are set in Cambodia - mainly on trips in the present time but some go back in time. Most of them were published in various magazines and journals and anthologies - as usually happens. But assembled here together, they become a single whole.

The book is split into 3 parts, with the middle one consisting of a single poem "Tuol Sheng". That is also the poem that will stay with me for a long time (and which I kept rereading in the last few days) - set in the Genocide Museum of Tuol Sheng, it is full of shadows and ghosts. It used to be a school but in 1975 the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison and an execution center. Thousands of people died in the classrooms where kids used to play and when a child comes to the museum, they want to play - it looks like a school after all. The ghosts of children and dead people and the live child and visitors of the museum merge irrevocably to a point where in places you do not know which one you are reading about; the black board and the torture share the same space. Here is a part of this poem:

"The boy is still inside a classroom.
He raises his hand to answer the teacher's question.
The teacher offers him a turn at the board
and gives him a piece of chalk.
His back is turned to the other students.
Now the teacher is a soldier.
Now the boy has chains on his wrists.
How he's smacked in the face.
Now his glasses break on hos nose bridge.
Now he pretends he cannot spell
or count how many teeth knocked out."

Which does not mean that the rest of the poems were weaker - they build pictures - of loss and longing, of a country in change and sometimes in tragedy. Some of the poems are about her family, some are about one of her countries and a lot of them are about a trip to Cambodia. The poem about her mother (and the mother's sisters) made me stop reading for awhile - there is so much love and longing in it that you need time to just think about it.

The cover of the book is also connected to her family - it is a photograph of traditional Cambodian Silk woven by the author's grandmother Bun Em. Some of the poems worked better than others but they all painted pictures and most of them made me think and feel. And that's what poetry is supposed to be doing.

With all these dark topics, one would expect the whole collection to be dark and repressing. But just like that bright orange cloth on the cover, it somehow manages to sounds hopeful and even the darkest tones seem to be subdued. Tragedies defines lives but they control them only if one allows them to. And Monica Sok refuses to do that. The collection is a love letter to the country her family had to leave - reclaiming the past and finding a way into the future.

>110 AnnieMod: The Book of Koli sounds a lot like Russell Hoban's classic Riddley Walker, both in its post-apocalyptic worldbuilding (minus the deadly trees) and in its use of language.

>110 AnnieMod: I like the sound of The Book of Koli and Road out of Winter

>110 AnnieMod: I seem to be mostly off dystopias/post apocalypse lit since we have been living in one. But, when I recover(?) I will need to consider the Carey and the Stine books. Who knows, perhaps the pandemic has changed my reading direction/s permanently ....

>115 AnnieMod: there was a an episode (or two) of Code Switch that focused on this, featuring DeLanna Studi, another Cherokee that has written a play on the same topic.

There was a Supreme Court case related to jurisdiction/crimes on the Oklahoma reservations that was decided last year -- in favor of the tribes. I don't remember the details, but there is (of course!) a podcast for that: https://crooked.com/podcast-series/this-land/

>117 spiphany:

Never heard of that one but now I want to read it. Thanks for mentioning it! Carey's language changes are subtle - he let English evolve than invent a new language (but then the whole book is written in it so...) :)

>118 SandDune: >119 avaland:

I am usually not much for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels (and everyone and their mother had been writing them lately...) so I skipped these last year when they came out on purpose. But then they got themselves nominated for the Dick award... and here we are.

>120 ELiz_M:

Now you mention it, I may have even listened to an episode. It was really a question of time. The play did not make much of it but there is a scene where they are going to the White House (in the nowadays time) to talk to the president on why VAWA needs to be renewed with its provisions for the tribal courts intact (it it somewhat mirroring scenes with Jackson and the sovereignty in the other plot). We never see the meeting but there was a sentence there about this not being the same president as the one who signed it in 2013 - so it really needs to be explained again. But even without it, the plot is all too plausible - a man who will resort to violence will also try to weasel out of the consequences more often than not.

And I am not surprised that this is not the only play. I had been finding that drama is a very powerful way to tell stories (yeah yeah... I know - just ask the Ancient Greeks). :) I have a few books lined up on Cherokee and other Eastern tribes history now - although I first have a few on Navajo and other tribes from around here. That's the problem with reading weird things... my TBR grows exponentially... :)

I learned a lot catching all your reviews from the past week. I really enjoyed your post on the Southwest, although it feels like there was a lot of American history here. The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner stands out as a book I’m maybe most interested in. Maybe it’s the Lear tie-ins.

>122 dchaikin: Well, the Southwest is part of the country so its history ties with the bigger picture of American history as a whole. Plus a lot of history happened here in the last 100 years - more than I knew in some cases.

>123 AnnieMod: oops. Sorry for my confusing post. In my apparently hazy state I meant to say that several _other_ books you read and posted on recently _also_ touch on American history. Just an impression as I found I was thinking about the Trail of Tears and the US Canada border, and US immigrants from Cambodia, etc. on top of the Navajos and the Southwest. But I didn’t make that clear in post.

33. Robert B. Parker's Grudge Match by Mike Lupica

Type: Fiction
Length: 308 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Detective
Part of Series: Sunny Randall (8 or 9 - depends on how count...)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2020
Reading dates: 22 February 2021 - 23 February 2021

I was not sure about Lupica continuing the series - the previous novel, the first in the continued series, managed to keep the feel of the series but had the subtlety of an elephant in a glass store. This one is a lot better - even if there are some clunky moments (why does Lupica persist with falling into narrative to show a conversation by essentially printing all they say instead of letting it be a conversation is beyond me) but the barbed political commentary is gone (regardless of your side in it, it did not belong and felt like cheap shots - and dated the book badly and quickly).

At the end of the last book, Sunny and Richie were back to being an item again (funny what a shotgun wound will do to a relationship), Tony Marcus lost the guns he thought were his (and blamed Sunny for it) and one of the Burke brothers was dead.

This novel opens a few months later and nothing much had changed. But as expected it soon does, Tony hires Sunny to find his missing lover and Richie's ex-wife comes back in Boston with his son (now 6 years old). Of course with Tony being the main crook in charge of prostitution and the lover, Lisa, being his right hand, nothing is what it looks like. And a challenger coming out of nowhere does not help much. Neither do a pair of eager cops with their own motives.

There is some background in the book so it MAY be read as a standalone but... Lupica pulls in the whole set of characters across the extended universe - even April Kyle is mentioned, Spencer does not make an appearance but is mentioned and Jesse even assists a bit so if you are just coming in or if you had just read the Sunny books or none at all, it will almost sound like a checklist of names that mean nothing. But inside of the universe, it pulls in threads from books across the decades in the same way Parker used to - and it works. I liked the ending and it fits where the other 2 series had gone since Parker's death so even if it may be morally grey (or worse), it matches the characters - noone is just good or bad in Parker (and friends)' Boston.

The book is weak on characterization - but it does not need to do anything more for long term readers - we know all these people and the ones we do not know get defined by their actions. Lupica still struggles a bit with Sunny's depiction (in places she sounds almost dumb... and not in the places she means to) but it is a lot better depiction of the one in the last book. And with Lupica taking over the Jesse series as well, we probably will see even more connections between the series.

There is a lot of things that this novel could have done better. But I still loved to get back to the universe and it is vastly improved compared to the previous one. And the fact that all the in-universe details did not contradict previous books made me a happy reader.

>124 dchaikin: Ah, I see - here as in "in the thread" :)

I was thinking about that while writing some of the reviews. I wonder if I would have reacted the same way to the poetry collection if I was not reading it alongside the Southwest book. The displacement and yearning for a place to belong to is there in both of them but it kinda made it more visible and more immediate maybe? Kinda how the Smiley book made Dunbar sound even worse than it might have... Or if I would have thought of the Trail of Tears at all and how it contrasts with the Long Walk (although are there shades of evil?) when writing about the Southwest book if I had not read the play just at that time...

The history focus was not intentional - the poetry collection and the play were at the top of the Recent books in my library in their category, the lobster book got there because of King Lear (And it also connects with the Appalachian Ohio apocalyptic book in a way via the drugs and the "small places forgotten by the world" topics). They just converged on their own - it seems to happen that way sometimes :) But they made me think along the same lines you seem to so there will be some more intentional connections going forward - both around regional and US history... After a quick break - I need something less real for a bit. :) Or at least a bit more removed.

>116 AnnieMod: I often have trouble with poetry but I think I'll try and give that one a go. I like the sound of it and it seems like the sort I might get on with.

>127 valkyrdeath: If you do, check the notes at the end of the book before reading the poems - there are both historical and personal notes and no indication on the poems which ones have notes - and some of them help understand the structure and context... Or re-read the poem after you read the note... :) Not that they do not stand on their own but they mention places and people sometimes and not knowing them is not very helpful (thus my initial comment on how little I knew about Cambodia) and a couple incorporate lines from other places which add to the texture if you realize that.

I am not great with modern poetry either -- but I had been trying to explore a bit more. :) So far, it had been somewhat working... but we will see. Poetry always felt a lot more intimate and personal than prose so harder to find matches with other people sometimes. And I am sure that someone that understands or studied poetry will have other notes to make. Which is always fine. I will be curious to see what you think - even if you try and it does not work for you. :)

>126 AnnieMod: I find these kind of interconnections really add to reading and there interesting in themselves. I imagine you read that play at about the perfect time - with Navajos in mind.

>129 dchaikin: Oh absolutely - and they tend to get me on interesting journeys :)

My grandmother used to say that things happen because they are written down for you and it does not matter what you do, they will happen to you. That's how I look at these connections when they happen - they were meant to be :)

>114 AnnieMod: Enjoyed your review of The Time machine H G Wells story is worth a read, it is quite mysterious and dark, which surprised me and the Eloi and the Morelocks were an extension of Victorian society.

And a couple of radio plays to catch up on these (leaving me only 8 books to review...)

A5.Domino by Archie Maddocks

Producing company: BBC Radio 4?
Original airing details: Jan 21 2021; BBC Radio 4
Length: 44 minutes
Director: Emma Harding
Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000rc51
Listening date: January 24, 2021

3 generations of men from the same family meet in an old people's home. They are not blood relatives - Horsea became a stepfather after Quashie's father death. The two men never had a real relationship - and the only reason for the son visiting is that he wants the house - which apparently had been promised at some point. But the old man suffers from dementia so the meetings do not go exactly as planned - when they happen at all. And while Quashie tries to push the documents he really needs signed, the stepfather wants to play dominoes. And that's where most of the action happens - across a few games of dominoes in a few days, while Quashie gets more and more desperate (because he needs to go back home and the old man does not seem to want to give him what he wants.

And the third generation? Quashie's son Rico who seems to be caught in between the two men until the day when his features remind the old man of his old friend - the man who died and allowed Horsea to have a family - and in his confusion he decides that he sees a ghost. And past secrets are finally revealed.

There was no real surprise in where this play ends up -- except maybe for the very end but even that is logical. It is a tale of redemption and the very last act of the old man, before he dies, looks almost to be calculated to try to pay for what he did earlier. Or maybe he had a reason for all he did and that was just the last action of a good man.

It is not a terribly original play but the actors made it work and their performance kept me listening.

A6.Writ in Water by Angus Graham-Campbell

Producing company: A Wireless Theatre production
Original airing details: Feb 23 2021; BBC Radio 4
Length: 44 minutes
Director: Cherry Cookson
Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sj88
Listening date: February 26, 2021

The play was written to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the death of John Keats and Angus Graham-Campbell had weaved the poems and the real history inside of his play.

At the end of his life, knowing that he is close to death, Keats went to Rome to see if that will help. He did not want to initially - the woman he loves is not coming with him and he is sure he will never see her again. The trip almost killed him (and that part may be hard to listen to if one has issues with the usual noises of sick people on boats). The story is told by Joseph Severn - the friend who went to Italy and stayed with the poet until he died.

It opens at the cemetery where Keats is buried, during the cold and rainy night of his funeral. On the way back to town, the people who were present, start talking about the dead man and his wishes for his tombstone and how the authorities had treated the poet's possessions. And then we go back in time, to the visit of the doctor which is the long beginning of that trip to Italy and then we follow the two friends until we catch up with the beginning of the story again.

We know where the story must go - not only because we saw the end but also because we know what happens to Keats. And it is still tragic and sad and heart-breaking, especially the death scene.

>131 baswood: Thanks :)

Yeah - it reminded me of how the Eastern bloc writers of 50-70 years later turned these extensions of the real society into an art form, a lot better veiled though. I did not want to go into that in my post (thus the comment about the social commentary) - even the Traveler's speculations are anything but subtle.

What really surprised me though was the darkness - for some reason I've always thought of this story as a bright and almost children story - not even sure why.

I really love those reading serendipities, either on my end or when they happen to others (who can describe them aptly). I don't think everyone has to be a polymath reader, but when you are it opens up the space for those kinds of connections. I'll definitely give the Sok collection a look.

>113 AnnieMod: Hmm, as a New Mexican -- am I allowed to call myself that after I've lived here for a few decades? -- that seems like a work that should be on my radar. One more for the wishlist, I guess!

34. Stranger by Night: Poems by Edward Hirsch

Type: Poetry Collection
Length: 59 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Poetry
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Borzoi/Knopf, 2020
Reading dates: 23 February 2021 - 25 February 2021

The 10th collection from Hirsh, published 40 years after his first, has a very somber tone. It almost feels like a goodbye - half of the poems are about his friends dying (including Philip Levine, William Meredith and Mark Strand - his peers and friends in his craft), the other half are a walk down memory line to past times and past people and sometimes even past places.

The somber tone never really changes but some of the memory poems have a lighter tone - there is some lifting of the clouds. But the sun never really shows up - the overarching images are the ones of cemeteries and funerals, of loss and sorrow.

To all that is added the very personal loss of Hirsh - he started losing his eyesight. A set of poems towards the end of the book deals with that and they are as heart-breaking as anything else in this collection.

For a slim collection, it was a hard work reading it. The poems were sometimes too forceful and the darkness kept coming. Even the lighter ones had enough darkness in them to add to the overall gloominess. The collection makes you think of death and loss - and that is not always a comfortable feeling.

I've read a few of those poems before in various magazines and journals. They are dark but they almost seem to contain a ray of hope on their own. Assembled into a collection, read in the order selected by the author (and the editors), feeding each other, that hope is lost and it is all about the darkness in all its forms. And even the ones that do not work on their own for me add to the overall feeling.

And it is the very last poem that hits the hardest. On its face it is one of the lighter ones. But when a collection full of elegies ends with one called "Don't write elegies", it makes you pause. It is almost a denial of the whole collection. And at the same time it is also a closing chapter - all the elegies are now written, it is someone else's turn to write and mourn, it is time to move on.

PS: The complete text of "Don't write elegies" is available at the Believer's site:
https://believermag.com/dont-write-elegies/

>134 lisapeet: "reading serendipities"

In today's "learn how to use a word you had known since forever in a sentence" installment. I think I am stealing this expression :)

>135 bragan: I had been in Arizona for just a decade and I already call it home so... :) The author is New Mexican so in a way it is a bit more about NM than Arizona - Arizona sometimes comes out as the younger brother that always gets in trouble - not because she wrote it this way but because it just happened to be the case... (although some sections shift the story almost completely into AZ with NM there just as an afterthought).

Did you know that at one point, when the old single NM territory was getting split into the two separate ones, there was a proposal for the border between the two states to go horizontally and not vertically? Maybe they teach that here but I've never heard it before... The book has all kinds of small things like that, almost thrown in without thinking, which add to the whole picture (and make you want to read more...) :)

35. The Chill by Jason Starr, art by Mick Bertilorenzi

Type: Graphic Novel
Length: 192 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2010
Genre: Noir, Crime, Horror
Part of Series: Vertigo Crime
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Vertigo Crime, 2010
Reading dates: 26 February 2021

Vertigo was already the mature imprint of DC Comics when they started Vertigo Crime back in 2009. The whole line used a smaller format than the usual comics and GNs published by DC, they were all in black and white and published as hardcovers. Most of the writers for the new line were not ones you would usually associate with comics - which made most of the stories stronger and different.

"The Chill" starts in Ireland where an old curse is awaken when a young woman has sex for the first time. A few decades later, people start dying in New York - and it looks ritualistic and weird. If one pays attention, they will realize that either the illustrator has messed up much earlier in New York or something else is indeed weird (nope, it is not the illustrator). The old curse had crossed the ocean and the woman and her father are now killing in the big city. And the only man who knows what is going on is the one who survived back in Ireland - and who seems to have enough problems to become a suspect when he finally shows up.

The whole novel is steeped into Irish/Celtic legends, pulling pieces of them and rewriting them to fit the story and the narrative. Magic and immortality clash together into a time when noone believes in either; there is even an Irish priest who everyone respects (and who turns out to be anything but respectable). And somewhere under the gore and death, there is a love story. Because while the curse and the story demand sacrifices, love seems to be the only thing that can beat it all. Or at least to change it enough so the victims of it can live with it.

The twist at the end completes a circle - even if it seems like a tale of redemption for most of the novel for some of the characters, it is anything but. And the reversal of roles adds to that.

The novel is explicit - both in language and in its images and sex and gore are shown as matter of fact. Which is why Vertigo needed the new imprint after all. And the art by Bertilorenzi fits the story perfectly, almost too perfectly in places - as with all good GNs, the art carries the stories even further.

If you are looking for a deep tale about Celtic cults and what's not, look elsewhere - this is not it. The sex and the curse it unleashes (or the special power if you wish) are the point of the novel. And it executes them very well.

"The Chill" ended up winning Starr a second Anthony awards - after he won one in 2005 for Best paperback original, this one gave him the one for Best GN - in the first and only year in which the Anthony awards acknowledged the existence of the medium and used one of its wildcard spots to give it an award.

36. The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Type: Fiction
Length: 600 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Science fiction, parallel worlds
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Orbit (US), 2020
Reading dates: 23 February 2021 - 27 February 2021

Parallel Earths are not a new concept - most of the good SF writers had written at least one story involving the concept. And yet, Tchaikovsky found a way to write a novel that does not remind you of anything you read before - even while you can see all the giants whose shoulders the novel stepped on.

Creatures that cannot exist seem to be showing up in the middle of England. A network that cannot exist helps an MI5 analyst. A stocks broker company seems to be able to read the future... until it cannot. And someone really wants to get their hands on a theoretical physicist whose work noone understands. And while we read all that, we get passages from another book, a non-fiction about other Earths by a professor in California.

It takes awhile for all the stories to connect together, it takes 4/5th of the book to finally get a confirmation of what is going on but once that happens, everything clicks together. Not that one does not have their suspicions earlier on but they keep getting annihilated sooner or later.

The story is the story of Earth - Earths that could have been and the Earths that were. Evolution took a different turn, a different random mutation led to different outcomes. And something in that system is broken and the whole thing is about to collapse. And that's why they are trying to get the physicist - theoretical science turns into practical one overnight. Except that as usual there are a lot of players and not all of them have intentions that can pass as good or even decent. And almost none of the players is actually human even if all of them are the intellectual top of their own world.

And humanity is all there - warts and all - there is a xenophobic maniac who wants to protect his type of life, there is a bureaucrat, there is a girl that almost fell into it by mistake (there is a Doctor Who influence in here somewhere). And everyone keeps plotting - until they cannot anymore of course - when some of the other players are the size of 3 blocks, you kinda need to pay attention (on the other hand some of the others are oversized rats so there is that).

And then comes the end. Well - the almost end anyway. There are parallel earths which implies parallel timelines so why not explore the end in the same manner. The text repeats a page or so we read before and then someone takes another decision. The future branches and something else happens. The final solution ended up being right there in front of everyone - like most good solutions. And then the horizon of chance closes and the future comes back.

It is an interesting play on the branching worlds and the explanation for them actually makes sense (as much as it can anyway). And the characters are never two-dimensional - except when they are designed to be. Heroes and villains seem to change places occasionally because good and evil is not absolute. Or at least not completely absolute.

This is one of my favorite novels lately. It requires some patience but it never stopped moving. And if you do not have enough parallel lines, there are the very human ones - the homophobia and xenophobia (almost as 2 sides of the same coin), the country vs humanity decisions, the choices one makes every time. And there is love and monsters (both literally and not).

I like the sound of that... I should stop looking at your thread, too many temptations. :) And the first Pryor has just arrived.

15. William I: England's Conqueror by Marc Morris

Type: Non-fiction
Length: 88 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2016
Genre: History, England, 11th Century
Part of Series: Penguin Monarchs
Format: Small Paperback
Publisher: Penguin, 2018
Reading dates: 25 January 2021 - 26 January 2021

I was not planning to read this book this year. But I picked up Alison Weir's Queens of the Conquest and while waiting for it, I realized that I know nothing about any of their husbands or the history of the time either (yeah, that is why one gets a book but I like to know the background). I knew about 1066 and the Conquest but I could not have told you who the king after or before William was. So I looked at my shelves and realized that the Penguin Monarch series will work perfectly for what I need. And here we are.

Most of my history reading in the last decade and a half had been either for times around and after the invention of the printing press or prehistory. The first have a lot of sources - even when calamities happened, there were copies around. The latter was way too early for any sources (written ones anyway - the flints, arrowheads and pottery tell their own story). And the records for kinds usually are detailed to know their actions day per day and sometimes even hourly.

Except this is the 11th century. It is understandable that there won't be that many sources about William as a child or even as a young man - he was an illegitimate son of a duke of Normandy - noone expected him to become anything special. Even when he became the Duke of Normandy, he was still pretty much nobody. What I did not expect was that the record will be as sparse after he became a king - forget about daily records, there are months and years when it is unclear if the king of England was in England or in Normandy.

Marc Morris wrote a book about the Norman invasion and the start of this one is basically a shortened version of that previous book. The story of William is the story of England - so the story of William is told by the story of the people around him. It is partially because of the lack of sources and partially because his raise and then his time as a king is as much as a function of his abilities as it is a function of the behavior of other people.

The side effect of that is that it made me look for more information about other people - such as Emma, the daughter of the Norman duke who was also the early 11th century queen of England twice and then mother-queen twice after that -- at the times when the crown was passing between the vikings and the Anglo-Saxons.

But back to William. Some things I did not know (or had not connected the dots on):
- The Normans may be French but their first duke of that line started as a viking who came, conquered Normandy and ended up speaking French (and then William made it into England and even if the English did not start speaking French, French managed to get into the language). French is invasive.
- I believed that William was something absolutely new in England - that he came in from nowhere. Well... he appears to have almost as good claim as Henry Tudor has 4 centuries later. So the whole plan of "read the Penguin book and move on" won't work - I want more.
- The Bayeux Tapestry and the Doomsday Book, two of the major documents from the high middle ages are both created during the reign of William - thus allowing us to know a LOT about the 11th century.
- 11th century Europe is worse than a soap opera. :)

The short biography is a good introduction to William's life and reign and the background of both. As the rest of the series books, this one has a very well curated list for further reading -- although it also got dated within 5 minutes of publishing - Morris explains how the last major academic biography of William was the 1964 D. C. Douglas one, with a more updated one from Bates in 1989 (which was a popular one). And in a weird turn of events, Bates published the long awaited academic one in the same year as this one came out (replacing the old Douglas one in the Yale Monarch series). So there is now a modern academic biography as well :)

And one last thing about the book as an object. The cover is part of a bigger story - all the lines on it have a meaning and when the whole series is completed, they will make a big picture connecting all the monarchs. More details here: https://www.foyles.co.uk/blog-penguin-monarchs -- the image is at the bottom of the page - it is too big to be included here. ;)

That's an era I know a bit about (started with a Robin Hood obsession and moved backward). Your list got several "yes"es from me - and then a flat-out LOL on "- 11th century Europe is worse than a soap opera. :) ". I may have to hunt up this series.

16. The Fox by Sólveig Pálsdóttir

Type: Fiction
Length: 205 pages
Original Language: Icelandic, translated by Quentin Bates (2020)
Original Publication: 2017
Genre: Crime
Part of Series: Guðgeir Fransson (4)
Format: Kindle
Publisher: Corylus Books, 2020
Reading dates: 26 January 2021 - 27 January 2021

A year ago, a police investigation in Reykjavik went terribly wrong and detective Guðgeir Fransson was suspended for a year. His family life also suffered so he moved on his own to a small village somewhere among the fjords of Iceland and found a job as a security guide. After the stressful job he did for years, this left him with a lot of time.

Meanwhile, Sajee, a young woman from Sri Lanka, arrives in the same village based on a job offer after having worked in Reykjavik for awhile. Except that the job does not seem to exist so a helpful stranger helps her to find a place to sleep and then even assist her in finding a job. Then things start going weird.

The bored detective hears about that woman who seemed so much out of place and becomes curious. And the whole story unravels.

There are both Sri Lankan and Icelandic legends weaved into the narrative; there is the old US presence which rears its head again. And there is madness and cruelty. It is not always clear if a certain scene is inside of one's head or is really happening; there are times when you know it is reality but you wish it was not.

Sajee's life on the fjord is anything but easy and a lot of the story around that is hard to read. But one still returns to see what happens next. Although in places the novel tried too hard and almost seemed to be going to places just for the shock value. Still pretty readable.

This is the 4th in a series and that explains why we never really get all the details of Fransson's past. There are glimpses here and there and one can almost put the story together. And I suspect that some of the weirdness in the detective is based on what you are supposed to know already from previous books... Why the publisher (and/or translator) decided to start the translations with the 4th in a series is a mystery.

>140 LolaWalser: Oops... sorry about that :)

>142 jjmcgaffey: This series is very similar to the VSIs we talked about higher in the thread - they are introductions but with enough details to actually give you a good background and base into the story and a well curated (and ordered per topic) list of books to continue with if you want to. Plus they are written by people who actually know their subject.

Not all of them are out yet and a few are still only in hardcover (the hardcovers have the annoying half-sleeves that I hate and the paperbacks are moving ~2 years after the hardcovers) - I kinda like the idea of the paperbacks though so I think I will try to collect all of them. :)

17. Witches of East End by Melissa De la Cruz

Type: Fiction
Length: 272 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2011
Genre: Fantasy
Part of Series: Beauchamp Girls (1)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Hachette Books, 2011
Reading dates: 28 January 2021 - 28 January 2021

A few years ago I caught the series based on this novel on TV. It was not a cinematic masterpiece but it was a nice summer series. Unfortunately, as often happens, it got cancelled after the second season with all kinds of plot lines still dangling so I figured I will check the novel and see if its own sequels solve some of them.

Well... they might but they won't be the same. A major character exists only in the series and most of the action required her to be there. So... so much about that.

What about the novel? It is the first adult novel of an author known for YA and it shows - it is pushing into the adult zone but not because of the maturity of the characters and their actions - it is mostly because of the topics and the ages of everyone. Which is not how you write an adult novel...

The premise is interesting enough - a family of immortal witches (which happen to be some well known characters from Norse mythology) is sentenced to spend their lives without their powers and had settled in a small town on the coast of Long Island. When the novel opens, they are starting to slowly push against that ruling, testing the waters and then things start going horribly wrong. I may have enjoyed the novel a lot more if I had found it before the series; with the series in my head, it feels like a draft that needs a lot of revision and color.

I am not sure if I am going to read the rest of the series - these Beauchamps are shadows of the ones in the TV adaptation (which is somewhat hard to do - I tend to like books more than I like their adaptations). I am not sorry that I read it but I wish it was a lot stronger as a novel...

18. Revenge in Rubies by A. M. Stuart

Type: Fiction
Length: 350 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2020
Genre: Historical mystery
Part of Series: Harriet Gordon (2)
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Berkley, 2020
Reading dates: 29 January 2021 - 30 January 2021

Welcome to Singapore of 1910. The British Empire is still alive and well and the life of the white expats is continuing as it had always been. Well... mostly.

This is a second on a series and it helps if you had read the first - there are too many spoilers in this one and some of the backstory is just abbreviated here. Harriet Gordon, the widow of a British doctor who died in India, is now fully settled in Singapore, keeping house for her brother, the Reverend and helping at his school, and trying to forget both her days in London (and Holloway prison) and her losses in India. She even has a job outside of it - as she can type, she works for the local police department, assisting with all the typing needed. After the horrors of a few months earlier, everyone had settled into the usual colonial life. Until a young wife of a very high ranking officer gets killed and things start to unravel.

Inspector Robert Curran is called to investigate, Harriet gets drawn in by the usual channels (curiosity and friendship) and they are off again, trying to solve a murder while things get more and more complicated. A new bout of the malaria which Curran had been carrying for years decides to show up just when it is the least convenient. And Harriet still has no idea when to stop and think before she acts.

Before long more people are dead, the story starts pointing in all kinds of weird directions, we get more of the backstory of Curran and his father and of the different groups in Singapore and Harriet gets pulled back into what is essentially a suffragette movement - and she even talks about her experience in Holloway.

Just as with the first novel, the mystery gets solved almost incidentally - it just has nowhere else to go. No bright detectives who guess everything from the smudge on a cup - in this world all solutions come out at a price. The hints are there from early on, a reader will pick up on them before the detective because he is sick and because we have all of them and only them and he needs to deal with a lot more.

The mystery works as a mystery. But the whole novel works on a different level as well - as a portrait of colonial Singapore and the British army a few years before WWI disrupts the flow of life for the empire forever.

And the author has a perspective that most people this side of the ocean lacks - she is an Australian (Kenya born), she was in the military for some years, she had been stationed and lived in Singapore and according to her biography she had a few different careers besides that. Her Singapore and her British army do not feel like a textbook replicas - they live and breathe. Her research allows her to weave the real story with the invented and connect them into one story. And the characters she invented fit as if they were there.

I was hoping that the second book will be as good as the first and it did not disappoint. And this is turning into one of my favorite series.

20. Love You Dead by Peter James

Type: Fiction
Length: 428 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2016
Genre: Detective, police
Part of Series: Roy Grace (12)
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Macmillan UK, 2016
Reading dates: 30 January 2021 - 31 January 2021

12 books into a series, you know what to expect. In this installment, Roy Grace need to deal with a black widow (with a penchant for creepy-crawlies), finally faces the truth of Sandy's disappearance and seems to find a closure for another old case (or two). If I did not know that there are more books after this one, I would have been worried if this is the end of the series - too many lose threads are getting finally closed, some of them from the very first book.

It does not work as a standalone novel - the black widow plot is a standalone but everything around it is just the continuation of the series and if you don't have the backstory, they fall flat - the spare details added here are enough to understand what is going on but not to build the full picture.

And if you are coming from the previous books, the whole book works - the story-lines connect in weird ways and then diverge again, making one wonder if that connection was really there... and then they do it again. The solutions come slowly as they usually do in this series - but they are logical and without weird jumps around.

I will be very curious to see where we are going to go from here - pretty much all of the drivers of the series are closed now and James has an almost clean sheet (well... there are some figures on the board but no more long threads coming from the past). But as long as the supporting characters are still around and the crime stories keep up the tension, I am sure that some new connections will show up - after all, not every single thread got closed. Plus Roy Grace is very good at annoying people.

>137 AnnieMod: Please do adopt it—it's one of my favorite overall reading concepts, and one of the great byproducts of talking about books with friends.

21. Gallows View by Peter Robinson

Type: Fiction
Length: 309 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 1987
Genre: Detective, police
Part of Series: Inspector Banks (1)
Format: Paperback, rebound as a hardcover from the library
Publisher: Harper, 2010
Reading dates: 31 January 2021 - 3 February 2021

Inspector Alan Banks moved from London to the quiet Yorkshire dales city of Eastvale to escape the stress of his job. The plan seemed solid - nothing happens in small sleepy English towns, right? Well, that may be semi-true in real life but in the imagination of the British crime writers, they are worse than the big city.

A few months into the job he catches a few cases that appear to be unrelated - a peeping Tom terrorizes the women of the town, someone keeps burglarizing homes and one day an old woman is killed, seemingly while she surprised someone trying to steal what little she owned.

The police is struggling a bit with a very vocal feminist about the police not carrying about the Peeping Tom because he does not threaten men so the chief decides to bring in a psychologist, Jenny Fuller, to assist. The fact that she is a beautiful woman and has a connection to the already mentioned feminist makes her even better in the eyes of most people. The fact that she knows it and shares it makes for a funny moment.

And off we are, chasing after all the perpetrators. Except that the tracks keep crossing and you never know when pieces from one of the cases will show up in another. And in the middle of that Alan is being very British and is resisting his attraction to his colleague (being married and all) and all that tension is almost palpable through the novel. And just when the things get completely jumbled, the cases start breaking open one after another and Alan needs to decide who he needs to protect - Jenny or his wife. And the decision has nothing to do with love - he needs to think as a policeman - and that is not exactly easy at that point.

The novel will probably sound a bit dated if one does not check when it was written - police and society had evolved since these days (or so one hopes). But even with those pieces in, it works. Alan Banks is a likeable character, not perfect and human enough, to make one want to read more of this series. It is a very good start of a series that is still going - #27 is expected in March 2021.

>148 lisapeet: Oh, I love the concept - see what happens when I get onto a tangent. I just never thought of using that word for it (way back when in high school, one of my English teacher used to pick 10 random words from a dictionary every day and ask us to write sentences with them as homework. Today that will be a very easy task - back in the 90s without internet? Not as much :)

Wow, you've done some impressive reading in 2021

22. Robert B. Parker's The Bitterest Pill by Reed Farrel Coleman

Type: Fiction
Length: 352 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2019
Genre: crime, police
Part of Series: Jesse Stone (18)
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2019
Reading dates: 4 February 2021 - 5 February 2021

This is the last of the Coleman books in this series and it works a lot better than any of the earlier ones by him. It still does not catch the tone of Parker but it is closer to the spirit, with a lot less subtlety (as weird as it is to call Parker subtle, especially in this series) and with a lot less conversations.

A high school student overdoses in her own bed - and it seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. Paradise had been hit by the opioid crisis - it had been going on for awhile but this death finally brings it to the attention of Jesse and the police department. And the more they dig, the worse it looks. It is not just kids popping pills, it seems like there is someone in the shadows causing things to escalate. And when things start pointing towards Boston, Jesse goes to check in with Vinnie Morris.

As usual with Coleman, we get to see the bad guys early on (and some of the heavies are Bulgarian). By the time Jesse finally gets on their trail, it is also obvious that there is someone in town who is causing a lot of the mess.

A note: if you are going to use a language you do not know, get someone who speaks the language to check whatever your characters are saying in context -- the few Bulgarian phrases were either wrongly inflected (it is a highly inflected language) or were literal translations that have different meaning and usage in the context used (not every language uses the word shit as a curse...).

It is a good crime novel but it did not need to be a Jesse Stone novel - one could have replaced him with a John Doe and the story would have survived almost in tact. The few Jesse moments seemed to be there to compensate for that. Which happens occasionally with series but still. Meanwhile the Cole story got somewhat of positive movement so we will see how that goes in the next book when Mike Lupica takes over.

>151 Nickelini: Quantity or quality-wise? :) I am still working from home and I am finally completely off the reading slump from last year so I had been reading any time I can...

19. The 20th Century in Poetry by Michael Hulse and Simon Rae

Type: Poetry
Length: 787 pages + biographies and index
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2012
Genre: Poetry Collection
Part of Series: N/A
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Pegasus Books, 2012
Reading dates: 28 November 2020 - 30 January 2021

Let's start with a few clarifications on the scope of this anthology:
- All poems are originally published in English, in the year they are indexed under (with a few minor exceptions where they are filed under the period they cover or under the composition date); no translations are collected.
- The poems are not the best in the year or best from that specific author - they illustrate the year (its history, events, culture and so on)
- There is just so much you can collect in a book spanning 101 years.

As a result, what we get is an anthology of over 400 poems, with most authors getting one or two spots only and very few getting more than 2 (the maximum per poet is still in the single digits): Thomas Hardy opens the volume with a poem composed in the last day of 1900, Jeffrey Harrison closes it with one composed in the last day of 2000. Between them are spanning the 101 years - with at least 2 poems per year, more in most, moving slowly through the years, chronicling the history around them and the change in poetry itself.

The book is split into 7 sections:
1900-1914 Never Such Innocence Again
1915-1922 War to Waste Land
1923-1939 Danger and Hope
1940-1945 War
1946-1968 Peace and Cold War
1969-1988 From the Moon to Berlin
1989-2000 Endgames
And each section starts with a short introduction by the editors and then follows through its years. A lot of the poems have notes, a few of the longer ones are just excerpted (the book is long enough, there is no point reprinting a 100 pages poem).

Poem by poem, year by year, the century passes by. But the poems are not just about the history of the world - there are love poems and elegies, there are poems about little known facts and poems about people that are forgotten by time, poems of hope and poems of despair. And sometimes what is not included is louder than what is inside - the 1917 revolution in Russia is barely mentioned; the non-English/Irish/Australian/US voices are missing in the first part of the anthology. When those voices start appearing they add the pictures missing before that - Asian and African poems which can be written only by someone who calls a country there home.

If you look at the table of contents, you will find all the big names but maybe not all the big poems. And that is by design - it is supposed to be a history of a century of poetry, not a best of anthology. And yet, a lot of the poems you expect to see will be here and virtually all the poets will be there. But there are a lot more - poets who time forgot and some that had become unfashionable; poets who are better known about their non-poetic writings.

If I could have asked for one change, it would have been to put the author's nationality in the poems' headers - the information is there, in the biographies section at the end (which also contains the list of poems per poet) so one can find these but I found myself flipping back to these while reading the poems - it seemed important in some of them to know where the author was from. And in some it did not matter - maybe that is why they were banished at the end.

There was the random editorial mistake (a poem described in the introduction of one section ends up opening the next section for example) - it seems like there was some shifting of years somewhere in the editorial process. But that made me smile - if anything, it just showed that we are all human.

And the editors could not have found a better poem to close the volume. When Jeffrey Harrison wrote the poem about the skyline of New York and its two towers disappearing while flying away from the city at the last day of December 2000, he had no idea what is coming in the next year. But the editors did - and chose to close the century with that picture.

I cannot say that I liked all the poems - but there were enough that I did and the book works as a whole. It will work also as an anthology to dip into now and then but read in order, as assembled and ordered, it gives an overview of a turbulent century from a new perspective.

>153 AnnieMod:
Quantity or quality-wise? :)

both!

>137 AnnieMod: That sounds very much like one of those facts I probably heard or read at some point in my life -- maybe in How the States Got Their Shapes, a book that I admit kind of made my eyes glaze over -- but have completely forgotten if I did. I'm trying to imagine now how much different things could be here if they had divided things up that way.

(yes, I know it is already March... :) February statistics to follow when I finish the reviews for it... :) )

===January statistics===
Total books: 20 books
Radio plays: 4
Other Audio: 1
Stories: 0 (oops...)

By type:
Novel: 16
Novellas: 1
Plays: 1
Poetry Anthology: 1
Non-fiction: 1

By language (reading):
English: 20

By original language:
Arabic (Palestine): 1
English: 17
Icelandic: 1
Japanese: 1

By gender (books counted):
Female: 9
Male: 10
Mixed (anthologies...): 1

>139 AnnieMod: I haven't read any Adrian Tchaikovsky, but that one sounds like it might have to make it onto the wishlist, too.

>139 AnnieMod: That book definitely sounds like something I'd enjoy. Though I've yet to read any Adrian Tchaikovsky and I've had his Children of Time sat on my bookshelf for ages so I really should read that first.

>159 valkyrdeath: >158 bragan: I do not want to call this one conventional (because it is not) but it is more conventional than the Children in some ways and does not have the slow moving passages that make some of the weirdness of the Children - it is a lot more dynamic book. So if you are just starting with him, I would start with Eden. Just be patient with it (that's valid for all his books IMO) - it takes awhile before things start clicking together - think of a puzzle without a final picture - you see pieces and start building pieces but you have no idea where this house fits on the whole puzzle.

>156 bragan:
Yeah... it would be a totally different dynamic - in both states...

>155 Nickelini:
Well... :) Once my reading block broke, it kinda happened :)

A7.London Particular by Nick Perry

Producing company: BBC Radio 4?
Original airing details: Dec 4, 11 & 18 2020; BBC Radio 4
Length: ~2 hours and 15 minutes (3x44 minutes)
Director: Sasha Yevtushenko
Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q278
Listening date: February 26, 2021 - February 27, 2021

Alice is running a successful podcast about mud-larking in London when she starts finding pieces of pottery with her name on them. Years ago her brother disappeared with no trace so these start seeming like messages to her. And when she meets other people whose loved ones had just disappeared as well, she stats wondering if something weird is happening - especially when she meets a young mudlark who seem to be from another place and time. Before long she boards a train and ends up in 1945 - where things start getting even weirder.

I love time travel stories and I expected to like this one. Its first part is almost too sedate - it sets the stage for the rest but once Alice is back in time, things speed up - we even get to meet Churchill :) I am not sure what I liked more - the story that happened in 1945 with all its details and texture or the actual story that ran on top of that (not so) idyllic one.

And the end is almost heart-breaking - she finds her brother indeed - that's how all that started but the way and the time it happens at is like a tragic coda to a play that already plays a lot on one's feelings.

PS: A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud for items of value, a term used especially to describe those who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries. (Wikipedia)

37. King Lear (Norton Critical Editions) by William Shakespeare, edited by Grace Ioppolo

Type: Play, Critical Edition
Length: 272 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2008
Genre: Play, Critical Edition, Shakespeare
Part of Series: Norton Critical Editions
Format: Paperback
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018
Reading dates: 2 January 2021 - 28 February 2021

For a review of the play itself, see https://www.librarything.com/topic/327792#7399104

The back cover of the Norton Edition proclaims "The First Folio (1623) Text". They forgot to put an asterisk on this statement. While technically the text of the First Folio is used as a base, even the editor admits in her "A Note on the Text" that it is a conflated text - with the parts that were only in the Quarto are interpolated into the Folio text so it is actually a conflated one. Which actually makes it a better text I think - but that statement on the back is confusing.

The introduction is an introduction of the whole book, not just the play which makes it almost safe to read before the play. Almost though - it does have a few elements you may want not to see before you had read the play for the first time. As with most Norton editions of Shakespeare, the notes and annotations on the text itself are mostly lexical although there are a few more extensive where they are really required. Coded by line, they can be skipped if one wants to just read the play - there is no indication which lined have notes unless you want to look at the bottom of the page.

The bulk of the book contains the Sources and Criticism sections.

Most of the sources are well known: Holinshed, the Legend of King Leir, John Higgins, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney's Arcadia, James VI (and I) writings and Camden. Samuel Harsnett was a surprise - he does not write about Leir or kingship (which is what puts James in) but he writes about demons and it made me think about that part of the play. All of the excerpts are dated and some of them even have notes on how they are used in the play. Reading these passages assembled together shows both how influenced Shakespeare was from what was written before him and how he played with facts and sources to create something new (in all sources Cordelia wins and lives and rules at the end for example). The editor includes two sources that may also have be sources although it is unclear if Shakespeare had access to them - one very old one (Geoffrey of Monmouth) and one contemporary - known from a set of letters collected a lot later but possibly being common knowledge and in printing in London at the time (almost like using the yellow press for a source today...).

The criticism is the usual mixed bag. Unlike the sources, some of these are not dated (what book/magazine they were printed inis mentioned but the first publication date is not always there). And this is important because as far as this play is involved, that matters a lot. The way it had been read and interpreted had changed a lot through the years. The section gives a good representation of that changing tide and reading through it in order shows how society changes - from the butchery performed by Nahum Tate in 1681 (which hid the real play from the public for a couple of centuries) through Samuel Johnson in 1765. Charles Lamb in 1818, William Hazlitt in 1838, A. C. Bradley in 1904 to Jan Kott (the only non-English speaker in the whole section) in 1964 - you can see the patterns shifting. And that's about the time when (as one of the later will explain), King Lear starts eclipsing Hamlet as the best play of Shakespeare and the rest of the essays are mostly modern (and sometimes post-modern) interpretations including the feminist ones and the overly sexual ones (and some of these are almost disturbing and feel like overdoing it and trying to get a rectangular object into a round hole that is 3 sizes too small). There is a lot of sexuality in the play, there are things that can be read in certain ways but.... some of those later essays are discussing the F/Q differences and how conflating the text is an abomination (Michael Warren), some talk about how the Hamlet/King Lear swap happened in the audience opinion (Foakes). This is also where the first female critics show up although I found exactly these essays to be pushing in directions that did not sound logical (which initially did not register with me - it was when I started reviewing that I saw that the 3 essays I really disliked were the ones that were written by the 3 female critics). They were selected for their ideas, they are valid interpretations... and still...

The last section was the one that was the most fun: the Adaptations and Responses.

As expected, the section opens with the final scenes of Nahum Tate's abomination (I mean adaptation) of the play. If this is how the audience knew the play, I am not surprised that they did not think it was a good play - butchery is a weak word. Although I am planning to read the whole thing to see just how bad it is outside of this end...

The other two entries are Keats' poem "On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44482/on-sitting-down-to-read-king-lear-once-again) and an excerpt of Edward Bond's Lear (which I stopped reading in the middle because I decided to read the whole play instead).

Overall a pretty good Norton edition. As for the play... it still is one of my favorite ones.

===February statistics===
Total books: 17 books
Radio plays: 2
Other Audio: 0
Stories: 0 (oops...)

By type:
Novel: 9
Novella: 0
Play: 1
Shakespeare edition: 1
Poetry Anthology: 0
Poetry Collection: 2
Graphic Novel: 1
Non-fiction: 3

By language (reading):
English: 17

By original language:
English: 17

By gender (books counted):
Female: 5
Male: 11
Mixed (anthologies, Shakespeare editions with criticism and so on): 1

===Year to date===
Total books: 37 books
Radio plays: 6
Other Audio: 1
Stories: 0 (oops...)

By type:
Novel: 25
Novella: 1
Play: 2
Shakespeare edition: 1
Poetry Anthology: 1
Poetry Collection: 2
Graphic Novel: 1
Non-fiction: 4

By language (reading):
English: 37

By original language:
Arabic (Palestine): 1
English: 34
Icelandic: 1
Japanese: 1

By gender (books counted):
Female: 14
Male: 21
Mixed (anthologies, Shakespeare editions with criticism and so on): 2

PS: And that is my thread finally being uptodate with all the reviews and statistics posted! Now to work on this "authors list" above... :)

>114 AnnieMod:

Excellent review of the Wells. I appreciated how dark he went with the topic, bringing it close to the darkness present in the The Island of Dr Moreau. The only part I didn't truly like was how he immediately portrayed the Eloi as unintelligent simply because they couldn't speak his language. How typical to immediately treat a new people as savages simply because they aren't as you expect they ought to be. I decided to place this attribute on the character and not Wells, however, since it did work with his many other failed observations.

I also immediately wondered how Verne would portray a time machine story! I would love to read it.

>136 AnnieMod: Nice review of the Hirsch. I can't say I've been a big fan, but he was always there in the anthologies and I enjoy his poetry well enough. It sounds like a sad book (as was quite a bit of the content in the new Oates and Atwood collections).

>154 AnnieMod: Excellent review on the big anthology. I think I'm going to pass on that one and stick to my smaller anthologies and collections (although I think I've been through most of the new ones I had in the TBR). I do have a lot of short story collections calling to me....

>154 AnnieMod: That's a book bullet for me!

>164 lilisin: Well, considering some of the comments thrown behind my Mom's back while traveling with me (she does not speak any other language besides Bulgarian), some people still think the same... Plus the novel has some very Victorian(ish) elements in its setup and I would have been surprised if the tome traveler had thought something else. So I do not think it registered with me as much as it did with you.

Interesting that both of us thought about Verne. Not that it is that surprising really - the story could go into the technical side of the genre ;)

>165 avaland:
I have Atwood's latest out from the library so will be getting to it soon. I had not really read any anthologies of English poetry - so I've only met him in journals and magazines and the like. It was kinda interesting how my perception of at least one poem changed by being in this volume as opposed to being on its own...

Well... the 20th century anthology took me 3 months to finish - it needed time to breathe - the whole point of the anthology is variety so inside of the same year, the poems were all very different so it sometimes required time to switch one's brain between styles - so I rarely read more than a handful of poems at the same sitting. It could be done faster but it would be too mechanical. Plus some poems just make you stop and reflect...

>166 Dilara86:
Have fun :)

38. Hope for the Best by Jodi Taylor

Type: Novel
Length: 461 pages
Original Language: English
Original Publication: 2019
Genre: Science Fiction, Time Travel
Part of Series: The Chronicles of St Mary's (10)
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Headline, 2019
Reading dates: 27 February 2021 - 2 March 2021

Max has a plan. Clive Ronan had been free and killing people for way too long so she is really tired of it and if noone else can catch him, she would. Or that is the idea anyway. Except that history does not really care about people's plans so things go pear-shaped. Again.

Welcome to St Mary's - the institute where historians investigate major historical events in contemporary time. About that plan... it requires Max to work or the Time Police (well... she has connections so that works out), everyone there to get really pissed with her (not a problem), a teapot travel pot (check), a couple of crazy teenagers (check) and a bit of luck (well...). Of course there is no way for the plan to happen without distractions - a few years ago Max went back to the 16th century to make sure that Mary Stuart does not become a queen, now it is time for ensure that Mary Tudor does - for a historian, she seems to be changing the timeline a lot (but only when someone breaks it before it of course). And in the meantime Holcombe manages to take over St Mary's and Max finally start realizing that all those bad guys that keep trying to change the timeline are somehow connected... or must be anyway.

Once 16th century is sorted out (and we see what happens when a whole space and time gets out of sync with history), we are back to the plan, stopping in Kush and in the future en route and ending up in the Cretaceous. Where things don't really go as expected - to the surprise of exactly noone.

The end works beautifully - if you had been paying attention, you know that things won't finish in this novel. If you had not, the explanation is pretty straight forward. In both cases, we end up with the Time Police and St Mary's at each other throat's again. Which usually leads to a lot of interesting situations. Plus the dodos showed up again.

If you had not been reading the series, don't start here. The book will be incomprehensible if you lack the backstory. And unlike the earlier books, very little of the actual action is in the past - the novel is dealing with current and future issues more which makes it even less suitable for reading it as a standalone.

Another great entry in a highly entertaining series.

A8.The Elder Son by Александр Вампилов (as Alexander Vampilov), adapted by Tom Wainwright

Producing company: BBC Radio 4?
Translator: Jan Butler
Original airing details: Feb 18 & 19 2021; BBC Radio 4
Length: ~1 hour and 30 minutes (2x44 minutes)
Director: Sasha Yevtushenko
Online: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s9rk and https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sbfj
Listening date: March 3, 2021 - March 4, 2021

Alexander Vampilov is not well known to the English speaking audience - which is a pity. His plays have something of Chekhov in them - they transcend time and place in ways that makes them very Russian and not Russian at the same time. BBC 4's adaptation of The Elder Son managed to keep most of that charm better than I expected.

Two young men, who do not know each other very well, find themselves in a bit of a trouble - they escort two girls home in the evening and manage to miss the last train back to town - thus getting stuck in the suburbs. They start knocking on doors to see if someone will allow them to stay for the night - with predictable results. Until a chance encounter allows them to overhear some names and almost by mistake one of them, Volodya, claims that he is the previously unknown oldest son of a local man. Some more creative thinking and overhearing things and the father is convinced. The men have a place to sleep, the plan is to just sneak out the next morning and never to be seen again... and then things don't always work like that.

The family Volodya crashes is in the middle of huge turmoil - the daughter is about to be married and to move away, the younger brother is in love with a neighbor and it is not going well so he is about to leave as well. Except that noone is leaving for the right reasons. And things keep unraveling.

This is technically a comedy but as with most good comedies, it ends up being a lot more. It is an exploration of the family one is born into and the family one chooses to be a part of. Volodya may have started looking for a warm place to sleep but he ends up with what he had been missing his whole life.

The original was written in 1967, the adaptation was done in 2021. I had watched a movie based on the original play years ago (the Russian one from 1976 (there is also a US one from 2006, moving all the characters to USA and changing some details which I had not watched)). And all of the ones I had seen work very well (well, yes, these days there are Ubers and taxis in most places but... there are still small towns where things are still not working that fast). I loved this adaptation - it is fairly close to the original play and it keeps all of the important things and more importantly, it managed to keep the atmosphere of the play.

Just before my reading slump last year, I started reading 10 minutes plays (https://www.librarything.com/topic/321483 if someone wants to see me talking about earlier ones). These are not meant as scenes or monologues or to be extracts from longer plays - these are complete plays that just happen to be (very) short. Some are monologues but from what I had seen a lot more of them are not. And I was surprised to see just how varied and powerful they can be - even in 10 minutes. https://www.theatredatabase.com/20th_century/ten_minute_plays.html has the background of the term and of how they had evolved.

So now with me back to reading, I pulled the book I started last year so here we go again :)

P3. Code by Andrea Fleck Clardy

Original Production: Ixion Ensemble, Lansing MI, May 12-20, 2018
Length: 10 Minutes
Characters: 2F
Printed in: The Best New Ten-Minute Plays, 2019 by Lawrence Harbison, pages 55-63
Read: March 3, 2021

In 2035 all offices and private homes in USA have microphones and every single word is monitored (and reacted on). And now the government wants to start monitoring even more. The play takes place in the office where the code that does all the monitoring is written and where the lead developer and the supervisor seem to have a bit of a problem with some of the new regulations. Or so it seems.

The two characters' conversation gives us the background of what had happened before and what is about to be implemented. But that is just the stage - the play is all about a human relationship and about what a person is capable of doing and how much one can trust someone else in the middle of a Big Brother state.

It was a pretty good play - and quite effective at this length.

>167 AnnieMod: I know exactly what you mean about the reading of anthologies.

I realized at some point in the last decade or so that I never considered poetry collections/anthologies "finished" and thus rarely reviewed them. Maybe I think the reading of poetry books is less linear and more circular and that's why I never thought them "finished". Anyway, after seeing so many negative reviews I decided I needed to make an effort (although I allow for personal preference). I very much appreciate finding others, like yourself, who enjoy and understand the art.

>171 avaland: Understand may be too strong of a word - it is more of a “stumble along in the dark” thing. :) And I am sure I miss a lot of things when I do - both bad and good. In a way poetry is more forgiving than prose - its point is to elicit feelings so personal preferences always play a bigger role in how I approach and write about poetry.

My library is reopening :) After almost a year of Drive-through only (so only picking up holds), next week they are opening for pre-registered patrons (self-service only - but you can browse the stacks and that is what I was missing). I am a very happy Annie this evening :)

>173 AnnieMod: It’s nice to hear that your library is opening up. I’ve been sticking to downloads to my kindle, or books on my shelves, rather than pick-up outside the library. I can almost see that light at the end of the tunnel.

Enjoyed your excellent review of King Lear (Norton Critical Editions).

I have lots of catching up to do.

>110 AnnieMod: I'm waiting to buy The Fall of Koli and then I'll read all three together. I mostly skipped your review (didn't want to spoil anything as I have no idea what they're about) but am glad to read your positive opinion.

>139 AnnieMod: The Doors of Eden was already on my wishlist - is there such a thing as a double BB?

>168 AnnieMod: I read the whole St Mary's series last year. I found it somehow comforting despite the fact that terrible things happen. I read the first in the Time Police series and enjoyed it enough to read the next one - but the Time Police aren't St Mary's!

Hi. I'm catching up, like Rhian above. Enjoyed all these. The poetry anthology sounds fascinating, and the Norton Lear certainly of interest. hmmm...I've never read a Norton edition of anything.

>172 AnnieMod: Agree with your approach to writing poetry reviews.

Hope all is well (assuming the library didn't swallow you up!)

>174 NanaCC: We are getting there :)

>175 baswood: Thanks, Barry! :)

>176 rhian_of_oz: I was considering waiting for the last Koli book but decided to read the first anyway... And St. Mary IS fun!

>177 dchaikin: Dan, you should - I think you will really enjoy the way Norton editions are built. The biggest issue is that sometimes you want to read the whole book a certain article is from but that is kinda normal I guess. They tend to collect the kind of critical material that is diverse enough to allow to see all sides of an argument - even when one side is not something you consider possible.

>178 avaland: Work :( I wish it was the library. So I was not much around - I kept reading but did not feel like writing. Should be back to writing soon-ish :)

>97 AnnieMod: I set out to read all of these when they first came out. I stalled at maybe a half-dozen, but always meant to continue! Now, I think I would have to be much more selective!

>180 WelshBookworm: The Very Short Introductions? Yeah... they are causing my completist self a bit of a pain as well. On the other hand, reading all of them will give you the basics of a LOT of things :)

>146 AnnieMod: Noting this series. I like a good mystery / thriller. And an unusual time and place.

>181 AnnieMod: I only recently discovered these myself, and lost control a bit. I now have 40+ and still want more. Worse I can't decide which I want to read most. Perfect of a desire to learn about certain things without getting bogged down into too much detail until you want it. I do question why I gave so many of the geology ones though. Fomo I guess.

>183 stretch: It's really funny when you read something designed for beginners and you know more than the book describes...I had that with a math/probability book once, it was very strange.

>184 jjmcgaffey: The VSIs are introductions but the few I’ve read go quite deep into their topic - so even if you know a lot about it, chances are that there is new research or a subtopic you did not know about. I used to think of them as Wikipedia on steroids and written by someone who knows the topic and with analysis added to the facts when I first discovered them and it is not far from the truth. :) Although I had not read a VSI in one of my topics. Hm. That theory needs to be tested. :)

But I know what you mean - happened to me a few times with Tudor books - it is a strange feeling no indeed.