Caty M's 2011 Reading

Twelve months is more than long enough to lurk in the shadows watching this group: I think with the new year and the new incarnation of the group it is time I wandered out into the open and joined in properly. :)

Highlights of last year’s reading were:
Fiction
The Widow's Tale - Mick Jackson
The Wee Free Men - Terry Pratchett
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
I Shall Wear Midnight - Terry Pratchett
Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Minaret - Leila Aboulela
Room - Emma Donoghue
The House at Pooh Corner - AA Milne
The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - JK Rowling
Miss Ranskill Comes Home - Barbara Euphan Todd
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennett (re-read)
Bet Me - Jennifer Crusie (re-read)
Framley Parsonage - Anthony Trollope
Women of the Silk - Gail Tsukiyama
Holy Disorders - Edmund Crispin
Miss Buncle's Book - DE Stevenson
In This House of Brede – Rumer Godden

Non-Fiction
How to be a Bad Birdwatcher - Simon Barnes
Reformation - Diarmaid MacCulloch
Are Women Human? - Dorothy L Sayers
The Earth: An Intimate History - Richard Fortey (still reading)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby

I have an 11 in 11 thread here and a 75 book challenge thread here. I have an Orange January/July thread here.

I’m quite a moody reader and apt to pick up something new because none of the in-progress books appeal. I’m currently reading (amongst others):
Flashman – George MacDonald Fraser
Vile Bodies – Evenlyn Waugh (Read the introduction, not started the actual book yet
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)
The Small House at Allington – Anthony Trollope
Night Train to Lisbon – Pascal Mercier
The Victorian Governess – Kathryn Hughes
Prayer: Does it make any difference? – Philip Yancey

January

1. Encounters with God: In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary - Sister Wendy Beckett
2. The Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie
3. Beowulf - trans. Seamus Heaney
4. Red Bones - Ann Cleeves

Abandoned
Flashman - George MacDonald Fraser

Welcome!

Good to have you with us.

Hi Caty! I'm glad to see you here.

Hi Caty and welcome! I recently read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and will await your thoughts!

Hi Caty, I lurked on and enjoyed your 75-book-challenge thread last year and am glad you're now also in Club Read!

I have Night Train to Lisbon on my TBR pile and look forward to seeing what you think of it. I bought it after a man I got talking to on a train (not a night train and not travelling to Lisbon!) told me how wonderful it was...

#3-7 Thanks for all your welcomes. :)

#6/7 I'm enjoying both The Thousand Autumns and Night Train to Lisbon, but I don't seem to be getting through them very speedily so detailed opinions may have to wait a while.

Rebeki, I am having a quiet chuckle at the fact you bought it after a recommendation from a man on a train.

I have abandoned George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman. It's very well written, and Flashman is a superb antihero, but reading the first-person narrative account of callous abuses and swindles by an unmitigated bastard is not for me, no matter how charming a rat he may turn out to be in the end. I'd give it a 4/5 and definitely recommend it for those that are entertained by antiheroes, but I seem to be just too much of a fluffy bunny to appreciate it properly so I'm quitting at page 65.

I never did post the first review, did I?

1. Encounters with God: In Quest of the Ancient Icons of Mary - Sister Wendy Beckett

Genre: Art History (entry level) with some devotional overtones
Published: 2009
Pages: 132
Acquired: June 2010. I haven't got a note of where I bought it from, and there's nothing in my email folders, so it was probably Waterstones.

Rating: 4.5/5

What's it about? The earliest icons of the Virgin Mary (almost always Virgin and Child) and Sister Wendy's journey to see them.

Comments: Sister Wendy's writing has much of the infectious enthusiasm of her television programmes. The style is very conversational, and the book is beautifully laid out with wonderful pictures. It's not an academic exercise, but rather a spiritual encounter with the icons informed by all the art history background.

The first few chapters explore the earliest Christian art in general, and then the focus narrows to the Virgin and Child Icons. For each of the eight icons, there is a discussion of its history and also of its content.

A nice book on the subject: not a learned treatise, but an interesting and spiritual exploration of it.

2. The Murder at the Vicarage - Agatha Christie

Genre: Crime
Published: 1930
Pages: 380
Acquired: Waterstones in Spring 2010, I think.
From the (3 month+) TBR pile? No: although this was a new, never-been read copy, it was a re-read of a book previously borrowed from the library.

Rating: 4/5

Comments: When the Revd Leonard Clement is called out a sick parishioner, he is rather surprised to discover the parishioner is not sick and he wasn't called - but still more surprised when he returns home to find a body in his study. Still, even if the police don't seem to making much headway in their investigation, his next-door neighbour Miss Marple soon has a very strong idea who did it...

I think this is one of Christie's better books, although not the best and perhaps not one of her better murder plots. It's a longer book than some, and as a result there is more to it. There are some good subplots, and (perhaps because this was the first full-length Miss Marple novel) there is a lot of background and context which is just taken for granted in some of the later books. The first-person narrative is interesting, and both the narrator and the rest of the village are well-drawn and well-developed characters.

A good mystery - and one of the few where the (1986) film matches the book for quality. (I have obviously watched the film too many times, though, because I could hear Joan Hickson uttering every one of Miss Marple's lines in my head - and hear Paul Eddington doing the same for the vicar.)

>2 Eat_Read_Knit: Caty I think yours is the first front-and-center listing of abandoned books I've seen on a thread, bravo!

*bows theatrically*

Thank you. I've seen it on a couple of other threads, but I can't remember whose for a moment. I only abandoned four books in the whole of 2010, so I'm hoping it won't become a long list.

3. Beowulf - trans. Seamus Heaney

Genre: Poetry, Literature
Published: Original poem dates to around the eighth to eleventh century CE
Pages: 232 including introduction, Old English text, translated text and notes
Acquired: Amazon, in or before November 2007
From the (3 month+) TBR pile? Definitely
Why I read it now: I'd been meaning to read Beowulf since at least 1995, and the Heaney version for a few years; the group read finally prompted me to do it.

Rating: 5/5

Comments: I don't think I can manage a spoiler-free comment on the plot, but I don't think this summary will give away much that isn't common knowledge and on the back of any edition:

The warrior Beowulf saves the Danes from the monster Grendel and then Grendel's mother and then many years later does battle against a dragon guarding a hoard of gold.

I loved reading this. The poetry of the Heaney translation is very vivid and flowing, and creates a great atmosphere of fighting and carousing and boasting warriors and epic battle against mythical beasts. The story is dark and sometimes gruesome, and it is not at all hard to imagine the poem being recited around the fire by Anglo-Saxon warriors, passing round the cup of mead as the tale unfolds.

I am definitely going to pick up a literal/glossed translation at some point and read it again, and try to make more sense of the original text.

2011 TBR:non-TBR ratio = 3:1
Current TBR pile 607

I am tracking those last two stats because I am aiming to read at least one book from the TBR pile for every book that comes from elsewhere (whether new acquisition, library or other loan), and aiming to finish 2011 with a smaller TBR than I had at the start of the year (606 books).

I have the same resolution, about reducing my TBR pile, although mine is a couple of hundred larger than yours! It's a good idea to track them regularly on your reading thread. I might borrow the idea from you...

#14 It seems to be a common resolution around here - no surprise there! Last year, I had a thread in the Books of the Shelf group; it didn't work for me as well as just keeping a count, but I know a lot of people found it helpful.

It's nice to know my TBR pile is not the biggest around - although I wouldn't want it to get too small.

4. Red Bones - Anne Cleeves

Genre: Crime/Mystery
Published: 2009
Pages: 416
Acquired: Amazon
From the (3 month+) TBR pile? Yes - February 2010
Why I read it now: I loved the first two in the series when I read them in 2009, and turned to this one in a desperate attempt to end the book funk.

Rating: 4½ out of 5

Plot in one sentence: After an elderly woman is shot, seemingly by accident, and a visitor to Shetland dies soon after in almost exactly the same place, it is up to DI Jimmy Perez and his assistant Sandy Wilson to find out whether things are as they seem.

Comments: Another excellent and highly atmospheric instalment of the Shetland crime series. The setting is vividly evoked and the characters are superbly written - and these two aspects alone make this a marvellous book. The plot is substantial enough to be gripping, and also avoids becoming overly intricate or convoluted: the whole thing is complex yet plausible, and also very entertaining.

Current TBR:non-TBR ratio = 4:1
Current TBR pile 613

5. No More Christian Nice Girl - Paul Coughlin and Jennifer Degler.

I picked this up after reading Faith's review last year. At the time, I scored 19 on the are-you-too-nice quiz in the excerpt that Faith linked to in her review. When I started the book and retook the quiz, I scored 26. Despite that, I felt that the book wasn't really addressing the problem I know I have. It was too brief and too shallow for me. Too fluffy. Too much 'you go, girl' and anecdotes instead of what I wanted - something to actually help me to address fear of conflict and guilt over saying no when people ask me to do things.

The good? Some good stuff on societal expectations, dealing with conflict and saying no to people.

The bad? Not much Christian content, beyond a constant repetition of 'Jesus wasn't always nice' (not specifically a problem, but it is claiming to be a Christian book) and an irritating, schoolgirlish giggle-giggle-look-at-us-aren't-we-grown-up-giggle-giggle atmosphere to the chapter on sex. Despite the fictional stereotypical nice girl in the anecdotes having a teenage daughter, the book reads as though it's not really intended for anyone over the age of about 23. Plus, the chapter on work that came after a whole book saying "be upfront and calmly and politely say what you think/want/need" and basically advised "the workplace is like a big game and you have to play people in order to get on" struck me as contradictory and just plain wrong.

Recommended if you score highly on the quiz, are happy with something fairly fluffy rather than profoundly Biblical or heavy on the advice/techniques *and* can put up with a 'you go, girl' style of delivery. Possibly also more relevant to the American cultural context than the British. 3/5

6. Does My Head Look Big In This? - Randa Abdel-Fattah

This is a YA coming-of-age story that follows sixteen-year-old Palestinian-Australian Amal as she decides to wear the hijab full-time, deals with the reactions of her schoolmates and family, supports friends through varying problems, and works out who she is as a woman, an Australian and a Muslim. It's not the slickest piece of writing, but the voice and is strong and it tackles some interesting and difficult themes. Less fluffy than the title sounds, especially in the second half. If the theme sounds even remotely interesting and you like YA lit, then I recommend it. 4/5.