2011 - Your Best Five Reads of Q3 (July - September)

1. On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry
2. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
3. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough
4. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
5. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

I posted these seven in Club Read:

Fiction:

Emma by Jane Austen
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Light Fiction:

Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

Non-fiction:

The Oxford Handbook of Fascism edited by R.J.B. Bosworth
Island of Shame by David Vine

I can pick two to set aside to pare it down to five, but having already included them I think that might be unfair to them so I won't.

I got a lot out of much of the other non-fiction I read in the quarter. It is just that none is brilliant enough to get me to stand up and cheer.

Robert

In no particular order (and I think I popped reviews up for all of them):

1. The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna - fiction
2. Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof - non fiction
3. Hellhound on His Trail by Hampton Sides - non fiction
4. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - non fiction
5. Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides - non fiction

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Room by Emma Donoghue
Stoner by John Williams
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker
Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes

Top 5 - in order of preference:

1. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. The Legacy: An Elder's Vision for our Sustainable Future by David Suzuki
4. Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle by Thea Cooper
5. Exit by Nelly Arcan

I only have 3 they are: Cutting For Stone, The Guernsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Pie Society, and She's Come Undone.

Most recent read is on top:

Divergent by Veronica Roth
A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

The Road to Middle Earth by Tom Shippey
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Humphrey Carpenter
Tolkien and The Silmarillion by Clyde Kilby
The Paper Grail by James Blaylock
Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Here are mine:

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

As Robert says, I'd stand up and cheer for these ones.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Embers by Sándor Márai

The Slum by Aluisio Azevedo
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
Haroun & the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Fiction
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Listened to the audiobook, read by Sissy Spacek who was the perfect voice for Scout!
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Non-Fiction
Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

This is what I posted in Club Read -- more than five, obviously! If I had to narrow it down to five, it would be the five marked with an asterisk, but they are all so close this is just an exercise in my mood at this moment. They are listed backwards from the most recently read.

Fiction

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
*Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin
*They Were Counted/They Were Found Wanting/They Were Divided by Miklós Bánffy
*A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel
The Moldavian Pimp by Edgardo Cozarinsky
The Skin Chairs and The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns
*Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
The Prospector by J.M.G. LeClezio

Nonfiction
The Factory of Facts by Luc Sante
Classic Crimes by William Roughead
*Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante

In no particular order:
1. The Invisible Bridge
2. The Warmth of Other Suns
3. If the Dead Rise Not
4. Daniel O'Thunder
5. Birth of Venus

A mixed-bag:

Watership Down (audiobook; a "re-read," after 30 years)
Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (graphic)
Dog On It (audiobook)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret (graphic)

Like Storeetllr, mine's mixed:

The Worst Hard Time (non-fiction)
Life As We Knew It (YA)
Please Look After Mom (Translation
The Memory Keepers Daughter (General Fiction)

> 10: Midavis2--With that reading list, you must be just getting over your depression about now. I hope you had a good bottle of wine handy while you were reading them!

Here are mine:

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Home by Marilynne Robinson
The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda
Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger

My five best reads of this quarter are (in no particular order):

The Complete Essex County by Jeff Lemire
The Siege of Krishnapur J.G. Farrell
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

In no particular order:

1) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
2) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
3) Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
4) In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5) A Perfect Spy by John le Carre

The 4 best books I read this quarter were (in the order I read them):

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (reread)
Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King
Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier
The Train of Small Mercies by David Rowell

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney
Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas
and
The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

even though that totals six. All fiction.

Oh, KAzevedo! I read and loved Walk to the End of the World dozens of years ago, but haven't heard much about it recently. As soon as I dig out all my books from storage (soon), I'm going to reread it.

ETA Wait! That only totals 4, not 6, doesn't it? Or did you read the Charnas trilogy and consider each book in it separately?

No actually, the Fionavar Tapestry is a trilogy. I haven't read the third book in Charnas's series of four. Liked the first, but found "Walk to the End..." to be especially wonderful. Someone on LT recommended it quite a while ago and so I've been collecting them. But then I started before realizing there was now a fourth which I don't have yet. Hate that!

OH, ETA to say that I goofed up. Actually it is the second in the series by Charnas, Motherlines, that I particulary love, rather than Walk to the End of the World.

I read just one book I rated 5-star in Q3:
Ragtime by E L Doctorow, the first of his works I’ve ever read.
Wonderful! For me, Ragtime will join The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Grapes of Wrath as the definitive Great American Novels.

But you’re wanting five best reads, huh? Well, I read five ****1/2 books, so that’ll make six in all, but since I can’t downgrade any one of them, you’ll have to take six. In the order I read them, they were:
Look At Me by Anita Brookner
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer
Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig.

Morvern Callar is one of those rare books that grows on you as you read it, and continues to grow on you long after you’ve finished it. It may yet end up as a five-star read. It’s certainly one of those books you’ll never forget.Morvern, the central character comes across as an irredeemable horror in the early chapters, totally self-centred. She works as a shelf-stacker in the local supermarket in Oban, west Scotland and lives for casual sex, drink, drugs and rave music. Well, maybe you and I would too if we were shelf-stackers in Oban. The book begins when Morvern gets up one morning just before Christmas to find her partner has committed suicide, rather messily. (That’s hardly a spoiler – the first sentence of the book is “He’d cut his throat with the knife.”) So what does Morvern do next? Why, she opens her Christmas presents early to see what he’d bought her, then goes off to work, and goes off partying afterwards. Over the next 200 pages, we see Morvern grow up, mature and transform into a fully qualified member of the human race, and by the end… You’ll remember Morvern Callar.

Childhood’s End belongs in quite a different category… one of those books where I completely lose the plot. I mean, I completely forget what it was all about. Once I remind myself, I think once again, ah yes, that was a damn good book, and then I promptly forget it again. I’ve been doing that with some books all my life. Of War and Peace all I can remember is people rushing in to announce excitedly that war has been declared, or peace has been agreed. 1000 pages just for that! Of Wuthering Heights I remember just the name Heathcliffe and the atmosphere of the Pennine moorlands, an areaI knew well.

Look At Me avoids that trap of forgettability very cleverly, by its brilliant title. Frances Hinton, a shy and desperately lonely young woman works in the reference library of a medical research establishment devoted to human behavioural problems - melancholy, loneliness, depression… She desperately wants to join the exciting social whirl of the in-crowd represented by the occasional doctor who drops in – and the thought forever going through her mind is “Look at me, Look at ME”. A brilliantly written, poignant study of loneliness.

Almost as interesting as my best reads in the last quarter were my worst ones. Just two stand out: Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle got just one-and-a-half stars from me, a rare low rating. I just cannot enjoy this man’s writing, which is very, very odd, I’ll have to give it more thought sometime. This complicated anti-science fiction story involves a mad religion, a mad scientist and Oops, Apocalypse!

But I read another one, much, MUCH worse. I give a one-star rating for books that are complete and utter drivel, a total waste of my time. Half a star I reserve for those exceptional rarities that are much worse than that… and I came across one last quarter... Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau... Enough said.