AnneDC's 12 in 12

I cannot even believe I am thinking about 12 in 12 when I’m not even done with 11 in 11, and when I’ve been such an infrequent contributor to my own 11/11 thread. But, I have had a lot of fun with my 11 categories, and have lots of ideas for 2012, so I can’t resist. No doubt I will change these at least a few times, but for now here they are:

1. Next in Line (series) (12/12) COMPLETE
2. The Envelope, Please (prize-winning books) (12/12) COMPLETE
3. Oranges Are the Only Fruit (Orange Prize for Literature, long and shortlists) (12/12) COMPLETE
4. Bright Young Things (2011 and 2012 publications) (12/12) COMPLETE
5. Author, Author (Japanese author theme reads) (12/12) COMPLETE
6. London Calling (books about or set in London) (11/12)
7. From Russia With Love (books about or set in Russia) (8/12)
8. I Have a Dream (African-American literature) (10/12)
9. It’s About Time (neglected classics, classic re-reads, or 1001 books you should have read by now) (12/12) COMPLETE
10. The Meaning of Life (religion and philosophy) (7/12)
11. That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It (memoir) (7/12)
12. Just the Facts, Ma’am (non-fiction. Maybe at least one or two should have to do with science?) (12/12) COMPLETE

1. Next in Line (series)

1. In the Bleak Midwinter (#1), A Fountain Filled With Blood(#2) - Julia Spencer-Fleming
2 In the Woods (#1), The Likeness (#2), Faithful Place (#3), Broken Harbor (#4) - Tana French
3. Still Life - Louise Penny (#1), A Fatal Grace - Louise Penny (#2), The Cruelest Month (#3), A Rule Against Murder (#4)
4. Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde (#2)
5. Doomsday Book - Connie Willis (#1)
6. Gregor the Overlander - Suzanne Collins (#1)
7. The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness (#1)
8. Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson (#4)
9. Sovereign - C. J. Sansom (#3)
10. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (#1), Black Hearts in Battersea (#2), Nightbirds on Nantucket (#3) - Joan Aiken
11. The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths (#1)
12. Soulless (#1), Changeless (#2), Blameless (#3) - Gail Carriger

The Coroner's Lunch (#1), Thirty-three Teeth (#2), Disco For the Departed (#3)- Colin Cotterill
The Shape of Water, The Terracotta Dog - Andrea Camilleri
The Silence of the Grave - Arnaldur Indridason

Reading:

In other categories:
Maisie Dobbs
The Boxcar Children
The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport
Bring Up The Bodies
River of Smoke

Plans here include:
Jackson Brodie series by Kate Atkinson
Matthew Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom.
Scandi-crime series by Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, Arnald Indridason
Three Pines series by Louise Penny
In the Woods - Tana French
In the Bleak Midwinter - Julia Spencer-Fleming
Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn
Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan

These can be rereads, YA or childrens' series, and I am allowed to start new series.

2. The Envelope, Please (prize-winning books)

1. Inside Out and Back Again - Thanhha Lai (2011 National Book Award, Young People's Literature)
2. A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal 1830-1832 - Joan Blos (1980 Newbery Medal)
3. Lord of Misrule - Jaimy Gordon (2010 National Book Award)
4. Half Blood Blues - Esi Edugyan (2010 Giller Prize)
5. The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller (2012 Orange Prize)
6. Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively (1987 Booker)
7. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy (1992 National Book Critics Circle Award)
8. A Spell of Winter - Helen Dunmore (1996 Orange Prize)
9. Property - Valerie Martin (2003 Orange Prize)
10. Possession--A. S. Byatt (1990 Booker)
11. The Giver - Lois Lowry (1994 Newbery Medal)
12. Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel (2012 Booker)

Next:
Empire Falls--Richard Russo (Pulitzer 02)
War Trash – Ha Jin ((PEN/Faulkner 05)

The idea is these are WINNERS, not long or short-listed books (though I reserve the right to change my mind about this), and the prize could be anything, Newbery Medal, translated fiction, Orwell Prize, etc. Last year I restricted this category to fiction but in 2012 it can include anything.
Some I didn't get around to that were on my 2011 list include:

✔ Possession--A. S. Byatt (Booker 90)
Angle of Repose--Wallace Stegner
Empire Falls--Richard Russo (Pulitzer 02)
Interpreter of Maladies--Jhumpa Lahiri (Pulitzer 00)
The Inheritance of Loss--Kiran Desai (Booker 06)

I have incredible numbers of these unread books hanging around on my shelves. Including:

The Road Home – Rose Tremain (Orange 08)
On Beauty – Zadie Smith (Orange 06)
We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver (Orange 05)
Larry’s Party – Carol Shields (Orange 98)
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels (Orange 97)
✔ A Spell of Winter – Helen Dunmore (Orange 96)
The Hand That First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell (Costa 10)
Brooklyn – Colm Toibin (Costa 09)
Behind the Scenes at the Museum – Kate Atkinson (Costa First Novel 95)
The Sea – John Banville (Booker 05)
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje (Booker 92)
The Bone People – Keri Hulme (Booker 85)
The Road – Cormac McCarthy (Pulitzer 07)
The March – E. L. Doctorow (PEN/Faulkner 06)
The Great Man – Kate Christensen (PEN/Faulkner 08)
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (Commonwealth Writer’s Prize 96)
War Trash – Ha Jin ((PEN/Faulkner 05)

And some I'd like to read that I don't even own:

The Conservationist – Nadine Gordimer (Booker 74)
The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga (Booker 08)
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood (Booker 00)
The Accidental – Ali Smith (Costa 05)
March – Geraldine Brooks (Pulitzer 06)
American Pastoral – Philip Roth (Pulitzer 98)
Netherland – Joseph O’Neill (PEN/Faulkner 09)

One thing I'd like to do with this category is shake things up a bit by covering as many different prizes as I can.

3. Oranges Are the Only Fruit (Orange Prize for Literature, long and shortlists)

1. Fall On Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald (1997 longlist)
2 Foreign Bodies - Cynthia Ozick (2012 shortlist)
3. State of Wonder - Ann Patchett (2012 shortlist)
4. Old Filth - Jane Gardam (2004 shortlist)
5. There but for the... - Ali Smith (2012 longlist)
6. The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern (2012 longlist)
7. Gillespie and I - Jane Harris (2012 longlist)
8. Painter of Silence - Georgina Harding (2012 shortlist)
9. The Translation of the Bones - Francesca Kay (2012 long list)
10. The Forgotten Waltz - Anne Enright (2012 shortlist)
11. The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan (1996 shortlist)
12. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers - Xiaolu Guo (2007 shortlist)

4. Bright Young Things (2011 and 2012 publications) COMPLETED

1. On Canaan's Side - Sebastian Barry (2011)
2. Train Dreams - Denis Johnson (2011)
3. The Best American Short Stories 2011 - Geraldine Brooks, ed.
4. How it All Began - Penelope Lively (2011)
5. The Beginner's Goodbye - Anne Tyler (2012)
6. River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh (2011)
7. The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje (2011)
8. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (2012)
9. Broken Harbor - Tana French (2012)
10. The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng (2012)
11. Scenes from Village Life - Amos Oz (2011)
12. The Headmaster's Wager Vincent Lam (2012)

Reading:

Next:
The Round House
The Orphanmaster's Son
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
NW

Some that I've already acquired:
River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
The School of Night - Louis Bayard
The Fates Will Find a Way - Hannah Pittard
A Cupboard Full of Coats - Yvette Edwards
Pigeon English - Stephen Kelman
Far to Go - Alison Pick
The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje

Will mostly be fiction, although anything new can go in here.

5. Author, Author (Japanese Author Theme Reads) COMPLETED

1. Silence - Shusaku Endo
2. Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
3. Deep River - Shusaku Endo
4. The Sea and Poison - Shusaku Endo
5. I Am a Cat - Natsume Soseki
6. The Woman in the Dunes - Kobo Abe
7. Kangaroo Notebook - Kobo Abe
8. The Box Man - Kobo Abe
9. Popular Hits of the Showa Era - Haruki Murakami
10. Scandal - Shusaku Enzo
11. Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
12. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami

Next:

I'm not sure what I want to focus on here. I really enjoyed my Nobel authors category, which I added mid-way through the year last year, and I also enjoyed my personal year-long focus on Toni Morrison.

Authors I'm eyeing are Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf, but I'm also intrigued by the Author Theme Reads group and its focus on Japanese authors. So for now, this is To Be Determined.

ETA: I will use this category to catalogue Japanese authors I read as part of the Author Theme Read group. I'm largely unfamiliar with Japanese authors so this will be an interesting direction.

6. London Calling (books set in London or non-fiction about London)

1. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (reread) (Victorian)
2 Maisie Dobbs - Jacqueline Winspear (WW1)
3. A Study in Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. The Girls of Slender Means - Muriel Spark
5. The Sign of the Four - Arthur Conan Doyle
6. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
7. A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
8. Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
9. The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon
10. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
11. NW - Zadie Smith
12.

Next:

Capital
Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller

From Other Categories:
How it all Began
Black Hearts in Battersea
Bring Up the Bodies
Soulless
The Translation of the Bones
Lost in a Good Book
There but for the
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

I love this category!

Classics/Oldies
Bleak House or David Copperfield or Our Mutual Friend- Charles Dickens
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
A London Life – Henry James
A Study in Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad (own)
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

20th Century
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh (own)
Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
The Heat of the Day – Elizabeth Bowen
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene (own)
A Severed Head or Under the Net – Iris Murdoch (own)
✔The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
New Grub Street - George Gissing (own)
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman (own)
The Tiger in the Smoke - Margery Allingham
King Rat - China Mieville
City of the Mind - Penelope Lively
✔ The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon (own)
Absolute Beginners - Colin MacInnes
Keep the Aspidistra Flying - George Orwell
Our Spoons Came From Woolworths - Barbara Comyns

And a bunch of Orange books too (which I will probably list in the Orange category rather than here):

Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (own)
The Night Watch - Sarah Waters
Brick Lane – Monica Ali (own)
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers - Xiaolu Guo (own)
Notes on a Scandal - Zoe Heller (own)
The Road Home - Rose Tremain (own)
The London Train - Tessa Hadley (own)
Girl in a Blue Dress - Gaynor Arnold (own)

This could include non-fiction too but I think I am likely to get carried away with my fiction options.

7. From Russia With Love (books about or set in Russia)

1. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
2. Death and the Penguin - Andrey Kurkov
3. A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
4. The Party and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov
5. Between Shades of Gray - Ruta Sepetys
6. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevskiy
7. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
8. The Line - Olga Grushin
9. Speak, Memory! - Vladimir Nabokov*
10. The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin - Masha Gessen
11.
12.

Next:
The Siege
Envy

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
✔Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (r)
Fathers and Sons- Ivan Turgenev (r)
✔Eugene Onegin - Aleksandr Pushkin (r)
✔A Hero of Our Time - Mikail Lermontov
✔Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol (r)

Dr. Zhivago - Boris Pasternak (r)
Petersburg - Andrey Bely
Children of the Arbat - Anatoliy Rybakov
Life and Fate - Vasiliy Grossman
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (r)
The Foundation Pit - Andrey Platanov

Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
The Case of Comrad Tuleyev - Victor Serge
The Siege - Helen Dunmore
City of Thieves - David Benioff
Ice Road - Gillian Slovo

And non-fiction:

Travels in Siberia - Ian Frazier
St. Petersburg: A Cultural History - Solomon Volkov
Gulag - Anne Applebaum
Catherine the Great - Robert K. Massie

8. I Have a Dream (African-American literature)

1. Letter From the Birmingham Jail - Martin Luther King, Jr. (R)
2. The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
3. Beloved - Toni Morrison (R)
4. The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Dubois
5. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs
6. Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
7. Passing - Nella Larsen
8. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave - Frederick Douglass
9. Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid
10. All Aunt Hagar's Children - Edward P. Jones
11. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
12. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson*


Snow-Storm in August



A mishmash of fiction and non-fiction, these are a collection of books I've meant to read or want to re-read. Most of them I already have.

✔Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs
✔Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Cane - Jean Toomer
✔Passing - Nella Larsen
Dust Tracks in a Road - Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
✔Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
The Street - Ann Petry
✔I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou (r)
The Women of Brewster Place - Gloria Naylor
Brown Girl, Brownstones - Paule Marshall
Black Boy - Richard Wright
Meridian - Alice Walker
Beloved - Toni Morrison (r)
Sag Harbor - Colson Whitehead
And This Too Shall Pass - E. Lynn Harris
✔Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid
The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
American Patriots - Gail Buckley

9. It’s About Time (neglected classics, classic re-reads, or 1001 books you should have read by now) COMPLETED

1. If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino
2. Snow - Orhan Pamuk
3. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
4. The Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andric
5. All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
6. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
7. S.: A Novel About the Balkans - Slavenka Drakulic
8. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
9. Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
10. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
11. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
12. Chess Story - Stefan Zweig



From Other Categories:
Wise Blood
The Last Temptation of Christ
Eugene Onegin
A Hero of Our Time
The Souls of Black Folk
Beloved
Fall On Your Knees
Bleak House
David Copperfield
Silence
The Woman in the Dunes
Kokoro
The Girls of Slender Means
A Severed Head
A Study in Scarlet
All the Pretty Horses
Possession
Spring Snow
The Lonely Londoners
Our Mutual Friend
Brave New World
Passing
Go Tell it on the Mountain
Crime and Punishment

10. The Meaning of Life (religion and philosophy)

1. Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
2. Dynamics of Faith - Paul Tilliich
3. God's Philosophers - James Hannam
4. The New Being - Paul Tillich
5. The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis
6. The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
7. The Warden - Anthony Trollope
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

Related reads from other categories:
Snow - Orhan Pamuk (political and religious Islam in Turkey)
Silence - Shusaku Endo (16th century Portuguese missionaries in Japan, the meaning of faith)
Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald (Catholicism, prayer, despair)
The Translation of the Bones - Francesca Kay (Catholicism, miracle, faith, suffering, sacrifice)
Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
Deep River - Shusaku Endo
Bring Up the Bodies
Crime and Punishment

This is a sort-of catchall category for a number of things I've been meaning to read, many of them languishing in my bookshelves. I'm not entirely sure where it will go.

HISTORY

The Great Transformation - Karen Armstrong
Pagans and Christians - Robin Lane Fox
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes - Amin Maalouf
The Closing of the Western Mind - Charles Freeman
The Reformation: A History - Diarmid MacCulloch
Absolute Monarchs - John Julius Norwich
✔God's Philosophers - James Hannam

MISC NON-FICTION
The Case for God - Karen Armstrong
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here if You Need Me - Kate Braestrup
Traveling Mercies - Anne Lamott
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography - Kathleen Norris
God: A Biography - Jack Miles
Night - Elie Wiesel
Under the Banner of Heaven - Jon Krakauer

MISC FICTION
Sophie's World - Jostein Gardner
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig
✔The Sparrow - Maria Doria Russell
✔Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman
The Snow Leopard
✔The Last Temptation of Christ - Kazantzakis
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ -Jose Saramago
Ben Hur - Lew Wallace
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

11. That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It (memoir and biography)

1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman
2 Speak, Memory! - Vladimir Nabokov
3. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake - Anna Quindlen
4. The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal
5. When I Was A Child I Read Books - Marilynne Robinson
6. Travels With Charley - John Steinbeck
7. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating - Elisabeth Tove Bailey
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou*
9. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs*
10. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - Frederick Douglass*
11.
12.


Reading:
Wild Swans

Next:
Night
The Memory Chalet

12. Just the Facts, Ma’am (non-fiction. Maybe at least one or two should have to do with science?) COMPLETED

1. The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
2. Capital and its Discontents - Sasha Lilley
3. Every Man in This Village is a Liar - Megan Stack
4. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century - Alex Ross
5. Democracy Matters - Cornel West
6. Complications - Atul Gawande
7. Color Me English - Caryl Phillips
8. The Big Burn - Timothy Egan
9. Snow-storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 - Jefferson Morley
10. Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools - Steven Brill
11. Postwar - Tony Judt
12. End this Depression Now - Paul Krugman

Welcome to the Challenge!

I also have Possession on my to-read list. I picked it up at a sale earlier this month. If you want company when you read it, drop me a message...

I think I would like a lot of your possibilities. One that I have had my eye on is Catherine the Great. Too many books, too little time.

Hi VictoriaPL--as I recall I replied to you on your own thread, but yes I'd love company when I read Possession and it WILL BE this year. But not this month.

Thanks for stopping by mamzel (even though I've been absent myself since setting up this thread). I got Catherine the Great for Christmas so now it really will go in my Russia category.
-----

Now that I've wrapped up 2011 I am ready to get started in earnest on the 12 in 12. By the way, I did successfully complete my 11 categories, although I completely stopped posting to my 11 in 11 thread by mid-year and just used it to record lists of completed books. I hope to be a little more active this year and at least copy over my book comments from my 75 books thread, if nothing else.

I am very excited about my 12 categories and can't wait to get started. Of course, the first book I read in 2012 ( The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson)did not fit into any category, but I am not going to worry about that.

Category 9: It's About Time
Book 1 If on a winter’s night a traveler – Italo Calvino
(1001 Books)



Rating: 4.0

Not the book I was expecting, and it took me a little while to figure out where it was going, but overall I enjoyed the ride.

The Reader sets out, with great anticipation, to read the latest novel by the author Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, only to find that the volume he has purchased has been misbound, and contains the same 32 pages over and over. He goes to the bookseller to complain and get a replacement—where he is introduced to Ludmilla the Other Reader and embarks on a novel’s worth of thwarted reading adventures—10 openings of 10 completely different novels, each of which is broken off for various reasons at a dramatic moment and not resumed. Don’t expect any of these stories to ever be resumed, because they won’t be, but the real novel is about The Reader (and his quest to finish a book).

This is an experimental novel, told in the unusual second person you. It is not exactly a gripping read--it is intentionally too disjointed for that, and it lends itself well to setting aside at the end of a particular segment and reading at a leisurely pace.

Reading this for me was a similar experience to Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwiter with its cliffhanger soap opera installments alternating with the main body of the novel. Where that book was about being/becoming a writer, If on a winter’s night is all about being a reader. And it is filled throughout with meditations, both humorous and serious, about the practice of reading.

In the process Calvino also touches on various threats to reading, including censorship, commercialization, market research, plagiarism, unscrupulous translation, excessive literary analysis and ideological critique, the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works...

By the end I found byself surprised by a surprisingly unsurprising ending, if that makes sense.

Category 6: Author, Author
Book 1 Silence - Shusaku Endo
(Author Theme Reads: Japan)



I read this for the Author Theme Reads group, which is focused this year on Japanese authors, and which is one of my 12 categories. I am surprisingly unfamiliar with Japanese fiction—while I haven’t consciously avoided Japanese authors, I don't seem to have read many, so there is a lot of new territory to cover.

Set in 17th century Japan, Silence tells the story of Father Rodriguez, a Portuguese missionary. Rodriguez and another missionary secretly enter Japan to serve as priests to the secret Christians in Japanese villages, and to see if they can find out the truth about Father Ferreira, their respected teacher, who is reported to have apostatized or renounced his faith. While Christianity had earlier been accepted in Japan, in this time period it has been outlawed and Christians are relentlessly persecuted and tortured. One of the central themes is the silence of God in the face of suffering, and the crisis of faith and doubt this sparks in Rodriguez. Endo raises many challenging questions around faith: If one can end the suffering of others by complying with a demand to apostasize, what is the Christian course? And who is the audience for one's faith--God or the Church? Silence is spare and powerful, bleak and sad, and leaves a lot to think about. I am curious to read more Endo, which I will do throughout the year.

While reading this, I found myself thinking about The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell which, though set in Japan at the end of the 18th century, references this history.

Note to myself: this book could just as easily go in my Religion and Philosophy category, since the religion is so overtly the subject. I will have to see which category fills up more quickly.

I'm a last chapter reader because I MUST KNOW what happens so I can relax and enjoy a book. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler would drive me absolutely NUTS.

Hi AnneDC, You are always one of my top "members with the same books". I particularly noticed it because I live in DC so I'm wondering if there's some connection there. I'll be following your thread to see what you're reading this year.

Category 9: It's About Time
Book 2 Snow - Orhan Pamuk
(1001 Books)


Exiled Turkish poet Ka, who has been living in Frankfurt for the past twelve years, goes to the city of Kars, “the poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey,” after attending his mother’s funeral in Istanbul. His ostensible purpose is to report on impending municipal elections and investigate a suicide epidemic among young women in Kars. Although maybe he is really traveling to Kars to search for his lost childhood, or to reacquaint himself with beautiful former classmate Ipek, with whom he seems intent on falling in love even before they meet. As he arrives, heavy snowfall cuts off the city from the outside world, setting the stage for a bizarre political coup led by members of an acting troupe and backed by the military.

Telling the story is the novelist himself, Orhan Pamuk, an old friend of Ka’s who already knows the outcome of his story. The backward-looking narrative gives the story an aura of menace, as it is clear from the start that there is not going to be a happy ending.

The novel is long and dense, and Pamuk uses it to cover a lot of territory, including Turkish history, Islam vs secularism, the role of Turkey vis a vis Europe, the intellectual in society, art, gender, etc. I found the political and religious themes to be fascinating, and the background to be as interesting as the plot, which was quite interesting too. I should say that I listened to Snow rather than read it, and it this format I found it to be a very engaging story.

The novel is atmospheric, and snow (which is falling constantly) is a steady theme, serving many purposes. For Ka the snow reminds him of god, and shakes him from his intellectual position of atheism. The new poems he suddenly begins to write are on the theme of snow—he conceives of a snowflake with six axes, with the 19 poems aligning themselves along the axes around a central poem (I, Ka). I really loved the imagery of this and it made me want to read Ka's poems, which, unfortunately, don't really exist.

I found Ka himself to be something of a cipher—a poet who stops in the middle of dramatic events around him when he feels a poem coming on, self-consciously planning for love and happiness, apolitical and yet involved in strange ways in the turmoil in Kars. I found him possibly the least compelling of the vast array of characters in the novel, but a useful vehicle for exploring the tensions and contradictions of modern Turkey.

>18 Morphidae: Ha! Yep, Morphy, it probably would drive you crazy if you couldn't let go of the idea that a beginning requires an ending. The book itself does have an ending, and if you read the last chapter it might even seem somewhat conventional.

>19 japaul22: Welcome japaul22. I already went by and starred your thread, and I will be interested in following your reading too.

@ 17 -- Nice review of Silence -- it's a book I'd definitely like to try sometime!

Updating this thread with my January reading:

Category 3: Oranges Are the Only Fruit (Orange Prize for Literature, long and shortlists)
Book 1 Fall On Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald



Rating: 5 stars

I loved this book, and I don’t hand out 5 stars often. It had everything I appreciate in a book: beautiful writing, a perfectly rendered setting, unforgettable characters, and a storyline that kept me turning pages right up to the last page, and then going back to revisit sections and images.

Although my copy of Fall On Your Knees is over 500 pages long, I never would have called this a long book. I read other books this month that though shorter, felt much longer.

The setting is Cape Breton Island, off Nova Scotia, just before World War I. James Piper, whose mother had taught him “to read the classics, to play piano and to expect something finer in spite of everything,” moves to Sydney, the only city on the island, to try his luck tuning pianos for a living. He falls in love with Materia Mahmoud, the twelve (yes, twelve) year old daughter of a Lebanese family whose piano he tunes. They run off and get married, and are disowned by her large and prosperous family. Mrs. Mahmoud, who reads fortunes in tea leaves, feels both sorrow and “a chill. For she had seen something in his cup.”

Bad things happen to the Piper family and the four Piper sisters, Kathleen, Mercedes, Frances and Lily. In fact, very bad things. It is a grim family saga laced with dark humor. But although this is a story about damage, it is also about resilience and love.

Breathtaking writing:

The night is bright with the moon. Look down over Water Street. On the lonely stretch between where the houses end and where the sea bites into the land, a tree casts a network of shadow that stirs and bloats in one spot, as though putting forth dark fruit that droops, then drops from the bough. It’s a figure come out from under the branches and onto the street. It stops, drifting in place like a plant on the ocean floor. Then it travels again all the way down the street to the graveyard.

Humor:

Lily’s foot is bleeding. She doesn’t know it, because the bagpipes are drowning out the pain. This is what bagpipes are designed to do.

A sense of place:

Mrs. Luvovitz looks at the sea and thinks, when did this become my home? When I buried Benny here? When the second war came? She cannot discern the moment. She just knows that every time she returns to Cape Breton, she feels in her bones, this is my home. That is why she has declined to move permanently to Montreal. She spends half the year there. She loves her daughter-in-law, would you believe? And her five grandchildren who are only each perfect. They speak French at home, English at school and Yiddish with every second shopkeeper. Real Canadians.

One more thing about this book that spoke to me in a personal way: The Mahmouds are Catholic, and the Piper children are raised Catholic, so elements of Catholicism permeate the novel. It is a Catholicism of childhood—rosaries and guardian angels and purgatory and penance and Saint Bernadette--and it felt comfortingly familiar to me, taking me straight back to my own childhood.

Category 3: Oranges Are the Only Fruit (Orange Prize for Literature, long and shortlists)
Book 2 A Spell of Winter – Helen Dunmore



Rating 3.8

It is always tough to move on from a 5 star read, so I might have loved this book more at another time, still, it was very good, and made me want to read more from Helen Dunmore.

First sentence: "I saw an arm fall off a man once," said Kate.

In an old house that is slowly but surely crumbling to ruin around them, Cathy and her older brother Rob live virtually unattended except by Kate, the young Irish servant who is both caretaker and companion. Lurking in the background are Miss Gallagher, Cathy's former teacher who is sinisterly obsessed with Cathy and dislikes Rob, and their remote and slightly frightening grandfather. Their mother has gone away, and their father is in an institution--both absences have an aura of mystery around them. Cathy and Rob are very close--I'll just leave it at that--and a series of increasingly disturbing things happen. Everything in this novel is presented from Cathy's point of view, and it shifts in time from the present to various memories from her childhood. As readers, I don't think we ever see anything more than what Cathy herself sees and understands in a given scene.

Dunmore beautifully captures details of the seasons, the decay of the house (and family), a former prosperity reduced to barely surviving, the impact of wartime privation on the countryside. The strength of this novel is definitely in atmosphere rather than storyline. Although it came to a satisfying conclusion (for me), I found too many questions left unanswered along the way.

Category 2: The Envelope, Please (prize-winning books)
Book 1: Inside Out and Back Again - Thanhha Lai
National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, 2011



Rating: 4 stars

No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.

Inside Out And Back Again begins in February 1975 and depicts a year in the life of a ten-year-old Vietnamese girl. Ha’s parents moved from the north to the south after the communists came to power, and now Ha’s father is away fighting in the navy. As Saigon is about to fall, Ha, her three brothers, and her mother are able to flee on a navy ship, and end up settling in Alabama.

The poignant story, based on the author’s own experience, is very effectively told in verse through Ha’s eyes. She describes her home and her beloved papaya tree, the sadness of leaving, the trials of sea travel, and the difficulties of a new country, as well as the kindness of new friends and the strength and reslience of her family. This book won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.

Category 9: It's About Time
Book 3 The Quiet American - Graham Greene



Rating: 4.2

“Sooner or later,” Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, “one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

Set in 1950’s Vietnam as the French Army struggles against the communist Vietminh, The Quiet American juxtaposes the jaded and cynical Fowler, a British reporter in Saigon, and the naively idealistic American Pyle, newly arrived in the Economic Aid Mission, whose ideas of a ”third force” alternative to European colonialism and communism come straight out of the books he read at Harvard. A love triangle involving the two men and Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress Phuong parallels the political storyline.

This book is brief and brilliant. I had to doublecheck the publication date, as it reads as if Greene had the benefit of knowing what was to come later regarding American involvement in Vietnam. But no—published in 1955, it could have been taken as a warning. It could even now.

1. Next in Line (series)
Book 1: In the Bleak Midwinter - Julia Spencer-Fleming



Rating: 3.8

A well-paced and interesting whodunit, with compelling characters, this read like an episode of a TV show—one that you’d tune in regularly to see.

On a cold midwinter night in the Adirondack town of Millers Kill, Clare Fergusson, the newly arrived Episcopal priest of St. Albans Church, steps outside to find an abandoned baby on the doorstep. The body of a murdered girl turns up soon after in this normally quiet town, and Reverend Clare manages to get herself involved in the investigations alongside Chief of Police, Russ Van Alstyne.

This book had its share of “oh, come on” moments—this army-trained former helicopter pilot doesn’t have the sense to get a decent pair of boots or to tell someone where she is going before she heads out into a snowstorm? And she seemed implausibly and inappropriately involved in police business for a civilian, never mind clergy. Still, I enjoyed it and I’ll definitely move on to the next in the series.

Category 6: Author, Author
Book 2 Kokoro – Natsume Soseki
(Author Theme Reads: Japan)


Rating: 4.0

Kokoro is a story that is told very simply but with a steadily building sense of doom. The unnamed narrator, a university student, somewhat randomly makes the acquaintance of an older man, whom he comes to call Sensei (teacher) and to see as a sort of mentor. It is obvious that Sensei’s past includes some kind of melancholic secret which even his wife does not know the details of.

Kokoro, which apparently translates to “heart” or “the heart of things,” unfolds in chapters of little more than two pages at a time, which gave me something of the feeling of someone dealing out a deck of cards—steady and inexorable. It is divided into three sections: “Sensei and I” and “My Parents and I” are both told by the student narrator, and the third section, “Sensei’s Testament, “ is in the form of a letter from Sensei to the student. Betrayal and moral failure are at the heart of the story. There are also historical overtones, reflecting the end of the Meiji period and the beginning of modern Japan.

Category 1: Next in Line (series)
Book 2: In the Woods - Tana French



Rating: 4.0

A cold case from 1984: Three 12-year-olds went to play in the woods near their home in Knocknaree, Ireland, a small community outside of Dublin, and didn’t come home. One of them was found later, frozen in terror against a tree, his shoes filled with blood, and no memory of anything that had happened to him. The other two children were never seen again.

Fast forward 20 years or so—Adam Ryan, the surviving child, now goes by Rob (his middle name) and is a murder detective on the Dublin police force. When a case involving a twelve-year-old girl found dead in the same woods lands on his desk, it reopens the past. Are the cases connected? And is it really a good idea for Rob to be investigating the murder?

I had one set of thoughts when I finished this book and another after a couple of days when I couldn’t stop thinking about it. At first, I thought: enjoyable and gripping read, slightly frustrating ending, plus the self-destructive behavior of the narrator got on my nerves. Later, I came to think that the things that bothered me about the book were perfectly intentional on the part of the author and were part of a much more complicated story than I initially thought. I love the author’s skillful use of an unreliable narrator and the way she created enough ambiguity to merit thinking about this book for a while. If I had a paper copy of this book in hand, I’d be tempted to read it again. Since I don’t, I will have to move on to the next book in the series.

In the Woods is a crime novel but it had a bit more to it than the standard detective fare. French’s characterization is very strong—I especially loved Cassie Maddox, Rob’s police partner.

You'll like the next one, then. The Likeness centers around Cassie Maddox and is better than In the Woods (which I loved).

Hi RidgewayGirl. I've already checked it out of the library and am looking forward to it!

Great reviews! I am hoping to read The LIkeness this year, a leftover from my 11 in 11 Challenge.

I am sending a link to Inside out and Back Again to a friend who is looking for Vietnamese Children's books for her niece, thank you!

Wow Anne you have been busy reading and reviewing, and a great string of reviews! Glad to see your review for In the Woods. I need to read that one so that I can read The Likeness which is part of my 'off my TBR pile' for this challenge.

You're right about Fall on your Knees. That first sentence is a real hook and after that it's a definite all nighter.

The Quiet American is one of my favourite all time books. It is amazing how current it remains.

Great categories!