japaul22's attempt at 1001 books

Hi everyone! I've been watching some of these threads for a while now and I think I'm ready to start tracking my own 1001 books reading. I only get to about 15-20 of these a year, but I think that keeping track might help me work a few more into my reading. I am working off of the combined lists. I have read 110 books of the list as I'm starting to track my reading in 2012.

***Ultimate Goal to read 500 of the books off the combined lists by the time I'm 50 years old in 2028 (future updates to the list included). I need to read about 23 books per year to make that happen.***

***Goal: 200 books read by 2015***
COMPLETED on 11/21/2014!

***Goal for 2012 is to make it to 145 books!***
COMPLETED on 12/19/2012!

ETA began tracking my list reading in November of 2011

2012 Edition, Additions to the 1001 books list: 3 books read out of 11
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, 4 stars
The History of love by Nicole Krauss, 3 stars
There but for the by Ali Smith, 2 stars

2000s: 18 books read out of 109
02 The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, 5 stars
07 Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson, 4 stars
14 The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 3 stars
23 Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro, 5 stars
24 Saturday by Ian McEwan, 2 stars
25 On Beauty by Zadie Smith, 3 stars
31. Small Island by Andrea Levy, 4 stars
37 Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, 5 stars
42 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, 4 stars
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, 3 stars
61 Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, 3 stars
64 The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor, 5 stars
68 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, 5 stars
72 Snow by Orhan Pamuk, 2 stars
74 The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen, 2 stars
85 Atonement by Ian McEwan, 4 stars
95 White Teeth by Zadie Smith, 3 stars
99 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, 4 stars

1900s: 107 books read out of 924
134 The Hours by Michael Cunningham, 3 stars
136 The Poisonwood Bible by Kingsolver, 5 stars
138 Memoirs of a Geisha by Golden, 5 stars
146 Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, 4 stars
160 Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, 5 stars
168 The Reader by Schlink, 5 stars
183 Felicia's Journey by William Trevor, 4 stars
184 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Bernieres, 4 stars
190 The Shipping News by Proulx, 3 stars
192 Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, 4 stars
206. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
208. the Secret History by Donna Tartt, 3 stars
214 All the Pretty Horses by McCarthy, 1 star
225 Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates, 4 stars
232 Wild Swans by Jung Chang, 5 stars (but isn't this non-fiction????)
238 Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell, 4 stars
240 American Psycho by Ellis, 2 stars
254 Possession by A. S. Byatt, 5 stars
263 Remains of the Day by Ishiguro, 3 stars
275 Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, 4 stars
276 Foucault’s Pendulum by Eco, 4 stars
277 Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong, 4 stars
298 The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, 4 stars
301 Beloved by Morrison, 5 stars
321 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 4 stars
324 Oranges ARe Not the Only Fruit by Winterson, 2 stars
325 The Cider House Rules by Irving, 2 stars
334 The Handmaid’s Tale by Atwood, 5 stars
347. The Lover by Marguerite Duras, 3 stars
373. The Color Purple by Alice Walker, 4 stars
400 The Name of the Rose by Eco, 5 stars
404 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, 2 stars
415 The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt, 3 stars
417 The World According to Garp by Irving, 3 stars
422 The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro, 4 stars
425 The Shining by King, 4 stars
429 Song of Solomon by Morrison, 5 stars
431 Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym, 4 stars
439 Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice, 2 stars
473 Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, 2 stars
475 Sula by Toni Morrison, 4 stars
476 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, 4 stars
480 The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, 5 stars
485 Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro, 4 stars
495 The Bluest Eye by Morrison, 5 stars
514 The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, 4 stars
541 One Hundred Years of Solitude b Garcia Marquez, 4 stars
548 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, 3 stars
549 The Master and Margarita, 5 stars
553 In Cold Blood by Capote, 5 stars
585 The Bell Jar by Plath, 4 stars
588 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, 3 stars
592 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Kesey, 4 stars
605 Franny and Zooey by Salinger, 3 stars
607 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 4 stars
620 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 5 stars
643. The bell by Iris murdoch
654 On the Road by Kerouac, 3 stars
663 The Roots of Heaven by Gary, 4 stars
665 The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, 5 stars
667 Lolita by Nabokov, 3 stars
673 The Quiet American by Graham Greene, 2 stars
684 Lord of the Flies by Golding, 3 stars
698 Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, 4 stars
702 Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, 5 stars
704 Invisible Man by Ellison, 4 stars
705 The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, 2 stars
714 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, 3 stars
731 Love in a Cold Climate by Mitford, 4 stars
735 Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell, 3 stars
740 Cry, the Beloved Country by Paton, 4 stars
762 Brideshead Revisited by Waugh, 4 stars
766 Animal Farm by Orwell, 3 stars
768 The Pursuit of Love by Mitford, 4 stars
775 The Little Prince by Saint-Exupery, 4 stars
793 For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, 1 star
802 The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, 2 stars
810 Rebecca by Du Maurier, 4 stars
817 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, 5 stars
819 The Hobbit by Tolkien, 4 stars
829 The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West, 2 stars
830 Gone With the Wind by Mitchell, 5 stars
854 THank you, Jeeves by Wodehouse, 3 stars
867 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, 3 stars
872 Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, 3 stars
875 The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 5 stars
887 A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, 3 stars
896 The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, 5 stars
901 Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, 3 stars
907 Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, 4 stars
912 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 5 stars
919 Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel, 5 stars
924 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, 3 stars
928 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 4 stars
929 The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, 5 stars
933 The Professor's House by Willa Cather, 3 stars
935 Billy Budd, Foretopman by Melville, 1 star
939 A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster, 2 stars
945 Kristin Lavransdatter by Undset, 5 stars
946 The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield, 3 stars
961 The Age of Innocence by Wharton, 4 stars
967 The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, 5 stars
970 Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun, 3 stars
978 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, 4 stars
980 Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham, 4 stars
1000 A Room With a View by EM Forster, 4 stars
1009 The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy, 4 stars
1013 House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, 4 stars
1025 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, 3 stars
1027 Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, 5 stars
1031 Sister Carrie by Dreiser, 3 stars

1800s: 63 books read out of 187
1036 The Awakening by Chopin, 3 stars
1039 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, 4 stars
1044 The Invisible Man by Wells, 2 stars
1046 Dracula by Bram Stoker, 4 stars
1043 Compassion by Galdos, 3 stars
1048 The Island of Dr. Moreau by Well, 4 stars
1049 The Time Machine by Wells, 3 stars
1053 The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross, 4 stars
1054 The Yellow Wallpaper by CHarlotte Perkins Gilman, 4 stars
1057 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 4 stars
1061 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Hardy, 3 stars
1063 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde, 2 stars
1079 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, 4 stars
1084 Germinal by Emile Zola, 5 stars
1085 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, 2 stars
1088 La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas, 2 stars
1096 The Portrait of a Lady by James, 4 stars
1099 The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, 3 stars
1103 Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, 5 stars
1108 Daniel Deronda by Eliot, 3 stars
1111 Far from the Madding Crowd by Hardy, 2 stars
1113 Around the World in 80 Days by Verne, 4 stars
1118 Middlemarch by Eliot, 5 stars
1122 War and Peace by Tolstoy, 4 stars
1127 Little Women by Alcott, 4 stars
1128 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, 4 stars
1130 The Last Chronicle of Barset by Trollope, 5 stars
1131 Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, 5 stars
1138 Les Misérables by Hugo, 3 stars
1140 Silas Marner by George Eliot, 4 stars
1141 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, 3 stars
1146 The Mill on the Floss by Eliot, 3 stars
1147 The Woman in White by Collins, 5 stars
1148 A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, 4 stars
1152 Madame Bovary by Flaubert, 4 stars
1153 North and South by Gaskell, 3 stars
1155 Hard Times by Dickens, 3 stars
1157 Bleak House by Dickens, 4 stars
1158 Villette by Charlotte Bronte, 2 stars
1159 Cranford by Gaskell, 3 stars
1162 The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 4 stars
1163 Moby-Dick by Melville, 4 stars
1164 The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, 5 stars
1165 David Copperfield by Dickens, 3 stars
1167 Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
1168 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, 3 stars
1169 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, 5 stars
1170 Agnes Grey by anne Bronte, 3 stars
1171 Vanity Fair by Thackery, 5 stars
1172 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, 5 stars
1173 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, 4 stars
1178 The Purloined Letter, 3 stars
1180 The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe, 4 stars
1182 A Christmas Carol by Dickens, 5 stars
1186 The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe, 4 stars
1196 The Red and the Black by Stendahl, 3 stars
1206 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 4 stars
1207 Northanger Abbey by Austen, 4 stars
1208 Persuasion by Austen, 5 stars
1211 Emma by Austen, 5 stars
1212 Mansfield Park by Austen, 4 stars
1213 Pride and Prejudice by Austen, 5 stars
1214 Sense and Sensibility by Austen, 5 stars

1700s: 7 books read out of 47
1227 The Mysteries of Udolpho by Radcliffe, 1 star (could not complete this book but read several hundred pages trying so I'm going to count it!)
1237 Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos, 4 stars
1239 Evelina by Fanny Burney, 4 stars
1246 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 2 stars
1250 Candide by Voltaire, 3 stars
1251 The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, 3 stars
1264 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, 3 stars

pre-1700: 1 book read out of 27
1274 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, 5 stars

*waves* Welcome to the group!

Hi there and welcome. You have a wonderful start already.

From the star ratings, a wild guess that you're quite a fan of Jane Austen. ;)

Looking forward to following your progress.

Ha! Yes, I do love Jane Austen (although I should probably change Mansfield Park to a 4 star), but I realized as I was making this list that I probably need to rethink my rating system! I find rating books hard. For instance, some books that I have high expectations for and then am disappointed by I might end up giving a lower rating than I would if I had no expectations going in. And some I was blown away by at the time (Memoirs of a Geisha), but I expect if I read it now, I might not feel it deserved as high of a rating. And of course the opposite can be true as well. I also tend to rate authors against themselves if they have multiple books on the list which isn't totally fair either.

I guess it gives me and others at least an idea of how I felt about a book, though it's certainly not a perfect way to rate books!

Thanks for the welcomes!

#111 Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, 3 stars

This novel was written in 1932 and was very popular with the French public and also the critics. It is the story of Bardamu and is told kind of like an autobiography. Bardamu is a soldier in WWI when he is 20 and his experience there shapes his life dramatically. He struggles with mental problems from the war and travels from place to place (West Africa, New York, Detroit, Paris, Southern France, etc.) without making any real connections to anyone. The writing in this novel is really interesting and kind of saved this book for me. Bardamu is dark - he's pessimistic and makes horrible decisions. There are no characters in this book that really have any redeeming qualities, but Celine's writing is so stark and there's something so electric about it that the novel still works. It says something that I enjoyed this despite hating every character!

The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That's work enough for a lifetime.

You'd think a passage like that would come at the end of the book. Nope - page 18. Maybe describing Bardamu as pessimistic is an understatement!

#112 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, 3 stars
This book has been so highly recommended on LT that I think I had expectations that were a little too high. It's a pleasant, amusing, well-written parody of authors such as Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. Maybe I haven't read enough of Hardy and Lawrence to get all of the little jokes. It was fun to read, but not earth-shattering.

I'm with you there... it's a good parody but there's a bit too much hyperbole in reviews on the whole

THanks for letting me know I'm not the only one!

BTW, I purchased your 1001 books spreadsheet a month or two ago and it's fantastic! Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

sure thing... thanks for the support!

#113 Home: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson

I think I waited too long after reading Gilead to read this companion novel. Gilead sucked me in from the moment I picked it up. The writing felt so new and so old at the same time. Home took me longer to give in to. Part of it may have been the closed circle of characters and the sadness, regret, and misunderstanding that permeates the entire novel. This novel views most of the same events as in Gilead, but from the Boughton's perspective, specifically Glory, Jack (the prodigal son), and their father. I found Jack just so sad and it made me so mad that he was so polite and passive and always apologizing and laughing nervously when I felt that though he had failed his family, they had failed him as well. The vision of him as a little boy, sitting up in the tree or out in the barn, listening to his family living their lives inside, and knowing that they were thinking he was off causing serious trouble somewhere - it's heartbreaking.

Again, I love Robinson's writing, it's just beautiful and really sucks you in. And she's amazing at developing characters without letting you know she's doing it. Things like, regarding Jack, And his head fell, and it was real regret. He was so tired of himself. Overall, I loved this book though not quite as deeply as I loved Gilead. Some day I'll read them again back to back to see if I feel differently.

#114 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
This must be Anne Bronte year for me. I read both of her books (she only has two, right?) this year for the first time. I have mixed feelings about this book. It's the story of Helen Huntingdon, who is married to a complete jerk. He's an alcoholic who has numerous affairs under her roof and tries to corrupt their young son to his lifestyle. The corruption of her son is the deal breaker for her so she escapes and of course meets a new love interest, Gilbert Markham. I like Gilbert a lot. He makes mistakes (like when he unknowingly beats up her brother) and acts childish a lot of the time, but he has good intentions and seems to have a good heart. I liked that Helen is the one that takes things by the hand and basically proposes to Gilbert in the end and also that she has all the money and will be providing for the couple. Pretty much the opposite of most books of this era, where the impoverished heroine has to snag a rich husband who she hopefully (sometimes too conveniently) loves.

What I didn't like about this book was the pacing. It dragged on a bit for me and the story lent itself to being much more exciting than it ended up being. I think having it told through letters and journals kind of hindered the book. I can imagine it being a deeper, more complex novel if it had not been in first person. On the other hand, Agnes Grey, told through the title character's journal, worked really well for that story, and overall, though I think I'm in the minority on this one, I liked it better.

#115 House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
This is the beautifully written story of Lily Bart, a beautiful woman living in the high society of New York without the personal means to afford it. She struggles throughout the book to balance her desire for money, i.e. marrying a wealthy man, with her need to both be true to herself and find true love. This book has some amazing female characters: Lily herself, her cousin Gerty Farish - a young woman living and working on her own, and Carry Fisher - a divorcee moving in the same social circle as Lily. It's exciting to read well-written women in a book from this era. I really loved the themes and characters that Wharton explores in the book. This was a five star read for me until I got to the end. I won't spoil the ending for everyone else, but I was disappointed in the ending. I think it made it a 4.5 star read instead. But even with the ending not turning out the way I hoped, I still loved the book and want to read lots more Edith Wharton now.

#116 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
I've gotten in the habit of reading an Agatha Christie novel when I go home to visit my parents since my mom has tons of them. I picked this one because it's on the 1001 books list and I couldn't remember if I'd read it. It is a good one. A Poirot novel with a pretty good twist at the end. I liked the narrator of the book, Dr. Sheppard, and is busybody sister. They had a pretty good banter. An enjoyable read!

3 stars

#117 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

I chose this book because it fit three challenges I wanted to participate in: CR's read a book published in the year of your birth, my 12 in 12 category of the same topic, and it's a 1001 book. Unfortunately, I really didn't connect with this book. Kundera's book is part auto-biography, part intertwining fictional short stories, and part political history of the Czech Republic. He wrote it after fleeing Czechoslovakia and it resulted in his citizenship being revoked. I think that if I understood more of the history and politics of the country at the time, this book might have meant more to me. As it is, I didn't like how Kundera kept inserting himself into the book. It felt like he either was too egotistical to keep himself out of his fiction, or too afraid of the truth to keep fiction out of his views. There is also a lot of sex in this book but virtually no love, something that always bothers me.

In the end, I felt like I might not be smart enough to understand this book - a feeling that kept me pretty alienated while reading. I did like how Kundera uses words and there were paragraphs that blew me away, but overall I just didn't get it.

#118 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

This was a very fun book to read. It's long, about 1000 pages, but is definitely a page-turner. Most people are probably familiar with at least the beginning of the story. The innocent Edmund Dantes is imprisoned for 14 years, escapes, and proceeds to avenge himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. The book brings up serious questions about vengeance and the role of the man vs. God in seeking vengeance. I had some real problems with how the Count seeks vengeance, the peripheral people he hurts, his regrets (which I didn't think were deep enough), and the way he still tries to control outcomes, even intending good, instead of letting people live their own lives (regarding Valentine and Morrel for those who know the book). But I loved that the book brought up these themes and made me think.

I loved the first 300 pages and the last 300 pages, but the middle 300 dragged a bit for me. I had lots of thoughts in the middle of the book about cursing the publishers who paid authors by the line, as Dumas was paid for this book. I think he dragged out a lot of scenes and that the suspense aspect of the book would have been more effective if the book had been more tightly constructed.

Additionally, I read in the foreward of the book that this was written around the same time as Madame Bovary and that they represented different trends in literature. Dumas was writing a novel published serially that is part adventure novel, part historical fiction, part travelogue. Flaubert was presenting a carefully crafted novel that he wanted to be realistic (part of the realism movement). I read Madame Bovary last year and I didn't love it right when I finished reading, but I've thought more and more about it since I put it away and the more I reflect on it the more I appreciate it and consider one of the best books I've read. I'm not sure that Dumas really achieved the same heights as Flaubert, but he created an adventure novel that is more than just adventure and addresses some serious themes as well. It's a novel that will stick with me and I enjoyed the experience.

#119 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Well, I wasn't a huge fan of this book. The positives were the characterizations and the insight into human nature which I think Dickens is a master of. But I just didn't really connect to this story. I kind of felt that while the characters were realistic and engaging, the plot was a little too unbelievable for me to get into. I did find that when I got bored with the writing it helped me to read a few lines out loud or at least really imagine the voices of the characters. This made me wonder if I should try my next Dickens as an audio book, something I rarely do. Glad I read it, but not blown away.

#120 Snow by Orhan Pamuk
This is a novel by a Turkish author that won the Nobel Prize for literature. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy it. This is the story of Ka, a Turkish poet who emigrated to Germany as a young adult. He travels back to Turkey all the way to Kars, a small city on the far East border of Turkey and ends up trapped there for several days in a snowstorm. His excuse for going to Kars is that he is writing a newspaper article on the suicides of several young Islamic women who committed suicide after being pressured to remove their head scarves, but he's actually going to reunite with a woman, Ipek, who he met years ago and is in love with. He wants her to come back to Germany with him. I actually really enjoyed the first 150 pages or so of this novel. Pamuk sets up the story well, creating a beautiful sense of the surroundings and describing the political and cultural tensions in Turkey, where the government wants to be secular but there is a large, vocal faction of Muslims who want an Islamic state.

As I read on several things began to bother me so much that they ruined my enjoyment of the book. One is that it's narrated by the author, who is re-telling Ka's story through notebooks that Ka kept while in Kars. This created a stilted kind of language that I could not get into. I felt that it was because of how far removed the language was from the actual events. What I mean is that Ka experiences these actions/conversations, paraphrases them into his journals, and then the author paraphrases yet again to create the novel. Add to that a translator and I have no idea what the flow of the language should have been, but it ended up not being good.

Also, the opinions of the characters in this book on both sides were pretty hard to take. There was no gray about anything - all was black and white. Over and over I read, if you don't believe in women wearing head scarves you are an atheist. Either side with political Islamists or you area western-loving atheist. It got really old.

And the worst part was Ka's "love" for Ipek. It was absolutely ridiculous. He is madly in lust with this woman who he does not know at all and feels his whole life hinges on her willingness to marry him and return to Germany. Their relationship was so far outside anything I would consider love that I was extremely annoyed. Plus, there was all of this serious political stuff going on (murders, beatings, suicides) and all Ka can think about is getting Ipek in bed and writing poems.

Whew - felt good to get all that off my chest! The sad thing about this book is that I felt like it really had potential. It just spiraled into this very pretentious novel with utterly selfish characters that I just couldn't enjoy.

And the worst part was Ka's "love" for Ipek. It was absolutely ridiculous. He is madly in lust with this woman who he does not know at all and feels his whole life hinges on her willingness to marry him and return to Germany. Their relationship was so far outside anything I would consider love that I was extremely annoyed. Plus, there was all of this serious political stuff going on (murders, beatings, suicides) and all Ka can think about is getting Ipek in bed and writing poems.

I haven't read the book, but this type of "love" annoys me greatly whenever I come across it. Unfortunately, I find it extremely common in books and films from the European continent (but not the UK or Ireland).

So completely agree with everything you said about Snow. I think that was probably the book I've liked the least so far on the list (with the possible exception of Cloudsplitter.)

Nickelini - That's interesting about that sort of take on love being common in European books. I have to admit I haven't read very many books by authors outside of North America and Western Europe (and Russia) so I'll be curious to see what trends I come across as I broaden my reading. Not particularly looking forward to that one!

amerynth - I'm kind of glad to not be the dissenting voice on Snow. A lot of the reviews I read were pretty positive. On to more enjoyable books!

#121 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
This short novel is basically a ghost story. The story is told through the first person account of a governess who is hired by the uncle and guardian of two children who live in a house in the country. The governess is told that the uncle doesn't want to be bothered at all about the kids and the governess is left to fend for herself with them. Soon after arriving at the house, the boy is sent home from his boarding school for unidentified misbehavior and the governess begins to see two ghosts. She finds from the housekeeper that these are the ghosts of former workers at the house. I wouldn't consider any of that info to be spoilers, but I won't give any more of the plot away for those who haven't read this yet. I'll just say that James is very good at giving just enough info to make your imagination run wild and there is not a neat, clean ending so your imagination can continue filling in the details after you're done reading. I read this on my kindle and I was shocked when I clicked "next page" and saw THE END.

One thing that took me a long time to get into is the sentence construction and use of way too many commas!!!! For instance:

In the first weeks the days were long; they often, at their finest, gave me what I used to call my own hour, the hour when, for my pupils, teatime and bedtime having come and gone, I had, before my final retirement, a small interval alone.

Yikes!! That's a complicated sentence for a really simple idea.

4 stars

That's a complicated sentence for a really simple idea.

Yep, that would be Henry James! Especially his later stuff. His earlier work is a bit easier. I loved the line in Colm Toibin's The Master where his brother criticizes his writing: "Harry, I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean." If the eminent William James has trouble unpacking Henry James's sentences, how do I have any hope?

#122 Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

This is another great book by Margaret Atwood, though not my favorite of hers that I've read. This book is a first person narrative of a woman artist (painter in her terms) who goes back to her hometown for a retrospective at a gallery and revisits her memories. It is very raw and personal and I keep wondering how much of it is based on the author's life. It was very hard to read the elementary school memories of how mean girls are to each other. That hit a little too close to home. What I didn't like about the book was what really makes it a great work - it just is relentlessly inside this narrator's life and memories, all the pain and anxiety. It really got to me.

4 stars

(3.5 but I don't use half stars for 1001 books ratings because of the spreadsheet and this was closer to 4 than 3!)

hmmm... amazing how technology shapes our worlds. I tried to use 1/2 stars for the spreadsheet but it would sort weird when tried it so I abandoned it!

I don't mind! My rating system always seems haphazard to me anyway and I often change my mind upon further reflection.

#123 Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Loved it! This is the first novel I've read by Pym. I just knew from LT reviews that I would love her books. This has just the right pacing, humor, and character development for me. I love the ordinariness of the characters and the realistic ending (don't want to give anything away!). I'll be reading lots more of Pym's writing.

5 stars

#124 Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

And another "loved it"! I was in just the right mood for this novel about a young man who just lets life happen to him. It's funny and sarcastic and I was very amused by how much Paul enjoys being in jail at the end. He hears of and experiences all kinds of events that could be highly traumatic, but nothing seems to affect him much at all. I need to read more Evelyn Waugh.

4 stars

Thanks for all the reviews! I find that I agree with you about many books, which makes me think that I should read The House of Mirth and fear The Mysteries of Udolpho which I think is our group read for May. I was going to dive into it soon, since it's so long, but now I'm considering giving it a miss!

>32 annamorphic: I've enjoyed your thread as well! And yes, House of Mirth is a winner! I've thought about giving The Mysteries of Udolpho another try with the group read, but I'm not sure. I really wanted to like it, but it was just so long - and usually I really enjoy (and often prefer) long books. Maybe trying to read it on my kindle was the problem. I'll be curious to see what you think if you attempt it!

#125 The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt, 3 stars

This is my first attempt at reading Byatt and I'm honestly not sure what I thought. I liked it, but there were definitely aspects of the book that I didn't connect with. This is a hard book to describe. It's basically a family drama and is the first of a series of four books following the Potter family, specifically Frederica Potter. But then again, the family drama description doesn't work too well, because the family rarely interacts. The entire book is a flashback from the early 70s to 1953, the year of Elizabeth II's coronation. This event and the production of a play written by one of the main characters about the reign of Elizabeth I frame the novel.

First the positives - I very much enjoyed Byatt's style. She has a beautiful way of describing setting. She also strikes a good balance between wordy description and succinct characterizations. I think she's brilliant at choosing the right way to describe each setting, character and event either in a long, drawn-out way or in one sentence. That was neat. It's also rare that I like a book in which I pretty much hate every character, but somehow she did it even though it did detract from my overall enjoyment of the book.

The negatives would be, again, that I didn't really like any of the characters. Everyone was very immature and had terrible judgment. Also, there were a lot of people almost having sex and that was annoying. I felt like screaming either do it or leave each other alone !!!! to almost every character. Also, one of the characters, Marcus, who is the brother of Frederica Potter is either a genius or crazy and befriends a seriously crazy teacher. There are lots of chapters about these strange metaphysical ideas that they have that I found pretty boring to read.

So, overall I liked Byatt's writing without particularly liking this book. I'm curious to try Possession since I've heard great things about it, but I'm not sure I'll continue with this 4 book series.

#126 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

This is a prequel to Jane Eyre that imagines the life of Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester's mad wife, before she meets Mr. Rochester and through their early relationship in the Caribbean. The writing style is pretty and imaginative, though sometimes I wished that Rhys would be a bit more straightforward about the plot instead of talking around things so much. Mr. Rochester does not come off very well in this book, and I have to admit that I never really gelled this book with Jane Eyre. The writing styles are just too different to really connect them in my mind. That being said, it's a good book on its own and I'm glad I read it. It's an interesting look at race and economic classes in the 19th century Caribbean.

3 stars

#127 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
This was the first book I've read by Virginia Woolf and it won't be the last. Mrs. Dalloway is set on one summer day in London in 1923. But though the book only takes place in one day, Woolf manages to tell a lifetime of stories for her many characters in this one short book. The book revolves around Clarissa Dalloway and the party she is throwing that evening and the suicide of Septimus Smith, a war veteran struggling with post-traumatic stress (or whatever they would have called it then). Almost all of the action takes place inside the minds of the many characters that are introduced, which made for a very interesting and different way to read a book.

This is one of those books that I know I won't stop thinking about for a long time, though honestly I didn't connect with it at first. Woolf's writing is very lyrical, and I found myself reading whole paragraphs and then realizing that I had no idea what I'd just read because the words just roll along so beautifully. Once I got used to the pace I needed to read at, I was able to both understand the story and appreciate the language. I'm looking forward to trying out some more of Woolf's books soon.

Re. The Virgin in the Garden, definitely don't continue with the series. I read the next one, Still Life, and it was dreadful, much worse than Virgin which I hadn't liked very much either.

Thanks for the tip on Still Life! I'm looking forward to trying Possession though, since I've heard lots of good things.

#128 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov translated by Burgin and O'Connor

Wow. This is an amazing book about the Devil and his cohorts coming to Moscow in the 1930s and wreaking havoc. It was written in the 1930s, but because it was so subversive, it could not be published until the 1960s and even then was heavily censored. The book is packed with religious references, commentary on life under Stalin, and heavy metaphors. Yet on another level, it reads somewhere between fantasy and horror with terribly interesting characters and a fast-moving plot. This is a combination - intellectual, metaphorical, and readable - that I don't stumble upon as often a I'd like.

One of my favorite things about this book is how visual the language is. I'm not the kind of reader who typically paints a mental image of the words I'm reading, but it was unavoidable in this book - Satan's ball, the variety show with the emcee losing his head, and that cat!!! Unforgettable.

I did a little reading about the book on line, and it isn't considered an expressionist novel, but for some reason I couldn't help linking it with that movement. I know more about expressionist music than I do about expressionist literature, and I kept thinking of those composers as I read this book, especially Berg's opera, Wozzeck. I can't put my finger on why that is, but it helped me personally to enjoy and understand the book, so I'll go with it, even if it's wrong!

5 stars

I have this book on my tbr and had planned to read it in May for the GR, but didn't get to it yet thanks to "Udolpho". Will now definitely try to read it in June. Great review!

I am also being prevented from reading my copy too. It's currently 8,642 miles away in a box.

I feel for you, arukiyomi... I personally find it really annoying not to have all my books with me, and they are only about 200 kilometers away, so that's quite reachable....

#129 Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

This is another classic that I've finally gotten to! This was my first novel by D.H. Lawrence and the review is going to be a bit tricky. I am of two very separate minds about this book.

On the positive side, I liked Lawrence's writing and am eager to read more. Something about the flow and pacing really engaged me. The novel itself was very well-done in it's exploration of the ramifications of WWI on different social classes and sexes. I thought it was interesting to contrast the characters who were changed by the war vs. those who weren't (or tried not to be) and also the areas in which society/culture changed after the war vs. the ways it didn't. All the different combinations of these four possibilities made for a lot of interesting themes.

But then there's the negative. Obviously, this book is most known for the love scenes between Connie and Mellors. The problem is that these are really dated. Not only the language and the ideas of what good sex is, but the thought that their relationship is somehow ideal and lets them be themselves did not convince me. In fact, it offended me. Mellors in particular has some really offensive ideas about women and sex. He did not strike me as the epitome of manhood, as I think Lawrence intended him. I came away from the book hoping that Connie uses this experience as a stepping stone to a better, more balanced relationship, though I doubt that's what Lawrence intended me to hope.

Overall, I liked Lawrence's writing and want to read more of his novels, but I know this particular book won't be my favorite.

3 stars

#130 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

I read and reviewed this book after each part so below are the reviews for part 1 and part 2 as I finished them. I think it was interesting how differently I felt about the two parts.

Part 1:
Well, what can I say that hasn't already been said? I've finished book one of Don Quixote. I started reading in January, and it's my year long project to complete the book. Whether you've read the book or not, you probably know the basic plot; Don Quixote is obsessed with books of chivalry, goes mad, and takes Sancho Panza as a squire and Rocinante, his old horse, off on adventures believing he is a knight.

Some things that surprised me were how modern this very old book still feels. I suspect that since the story is so ingrained in our culture and literature it just feels familiar. I liked the women in this book. I was surprised that there were so many female characters and that they had so much personality and intelligence. I was surprised that the humor was so slap-stick and that it involved bodily functions so often! I was surprised at how sorry I felt for Don Quixote, who really should have been taken care of better with his mental illness. I had a hard time thinking some of the events that stemmed from his madness and resulted in injury were funny.

In the end, I'm very glad that I'm reading this book and I am enjoying it. But to be honest, I don't LOVE it. I like it, appreciate it, and am kind of in awe of how long ago it was written and how relevant a lot of it still is, but it's not necessarily my favorite book ever.

Part 2:
I finished Part 1 of Don Quixote in May and though I enjoyed it and was impressed by it, I never really connected to it. I couldn’t feel more differently about Part 2. Part of it may be that I read it more quickly, but mainly I felt that Book 2 was the work of a more mature writer with deeper characterizations and a better thread of narrative. I LOVED reading of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s adventures and I was so sorry to see it end. Their relationship really develops through this part and their adventures are less silly and more meaningful. I loved the section where the Duke and the Duchess set up adventures for DQ and Sancho, especially seeing Sancho get his chance at being a governor. I also thought it was smart and creative to have the characters all have read the previously published first book of adventures and to have the “unofficial” second part floating around. It was so hard to remember just how long ago this book was written because it feels so modern in many ways. It is definitely a book I will come back to again and again.

A must-read for all readers.

I'm still struggling through Don Quixote. I'm hoping I'll finish it this year. :)

#131 Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Well that may just be the most satisfying book about an unsatisfying topic that I've ever read. This is a brilliant tale that weaves a historical subject with a character study. Atwood delves into the mind of Grace Marks, an 18th century woman convicted of colluding with a fellow servant to kill her employer and the housekeeper he was sleeping with. The book focuses on Grace's time in jail being interviewed by an aspiring doctor to the insane, Simon Jordan. The entire book is a question - just how involved was Grace in the murders? The answers range from her being a young, unwitting bystander who didn't stop the murders out of fear to her being a conniving, manipulative, jealous woman who orchestrated the whole affair. In the middle is the possibility of insanity, multiple personalities, etc. In addition to the questions about Grace, we get a glimpse into the mind of Dr. Jordan, who comes off as not-so-sane himself, even in comparison to Grace. Ultimately, there are few answers in this book, but even though that in itself is unsatisfying, the book is so absorbing and interesting that it is satisfying even without a neatly wrapped up ending. This may be my favorite Atwood novel so far.

5 stars

I totally agree with your review of Alias Grace. It might very well be my favourite of Atwood's books too. I remember reading it within a couple of days -- it was so difficult to put down.

#132 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

I think that Ford Madox Ford should have fought the publishers and stuck with his original title, The Saddest Story. It is a much better descriptor of this intense and depressing short novel. This is the story of the twisted lives of two unhappily married couples and the various affairs they involve themselves in. It's narrated by one of the husbands, John Dowell, whose wife Florence has at least two affairs, one with the husband of the other married couple, Edward, who is the title character. Leonora, Edward's wife, is aware of everything going on and trying to control events as much as possible by managing her husband's affairs - both in love and money. John, the narrator, insists that he never knew that his wife was having affairs. He tells the story of Edward and Leonora through a series of flashbacks after Florence and Edward have both committed suicide, Edward several years after Florence.

If the above description was confusing, I'll say I'm just following the layout of Ford's book. The unreliable memories and misunderstanding of events by the narrator and the rambling, out-of-chronological order retelling make the novel complex and interesting. The writing style is amazing, especially considering this was written in 1915. The characters in this book are all pretty despicable, mostly being either totally passive, like the narrator, or passive aggressive, like Leonora. Usually I can't stand a book where I don't like at least one of the characters, but this book is good enough to overcome that.

4 stars

#133 Small Island by Andrea Levy

This fantastic book was winner of the Orange Prize in 2004. It is the story of two newly married Jamaican immigrants in England just after WWII and the white woman they rent a room from. I don't really want to describe the plot or characters much because Levy does it so beautifully. I will say that the portrayal of the immigrant experience, and the black immigrant experience at that, is done really well. I loved how she wrote their words in clear English as they were thinking them and made it clear how different it sounded by making others not understand. Also the characters are connected in ways they don't realize and I loved that Levy revealed this to the reader, but not to the characters. Levy also explores the war experience through both the black and white characters and especially how they are treated after service.

This book is an enjoyable read that has some important themes to share. I highly recommend it.

4 stars

#134 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
This is the story of two black sisters who grow up in the south in the first half of the 20th century. They escape their abusive father, Celie through being given away in marriage as a very young girl to an abusive husband, and Nettie meets a black family that takes her along on a mission trip to Africa. This book is told through letters. Celie's are to God in journal form and later to Nettie, and Nettie writes to Celie of her experience in Africa.

Walker explores many topics in this book - the challenges of being poor and black in the south, relationships between husband and wife, the justice system for blacks, love, and religion. She also contrasts the African experience with the African-American experience through Nettie's letters.

Overall, I found this a very moving and well-done book. There were sections that I found a bit predictable , but I enjoyed watching Celie and Nettie grow out of their difficult beginnings to be whole, intereting people.

4 stars

#135 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
This is one of those books that I certainly appreciated, but didn't necessarily love. Stendhal's book was published in 1830 and takes place then as well. The book follows the mind of the young Julien Sorel, a man of common birth who aspires to much more. He idolizes Napoleon, attempts a church career, seduces/is seduced by two women - one of whom is married and both of whom are well above his social station, and let's just say this all doesn't end well. I was confused by all of the political factions and factions within the church that are competing in this story. It distracted me from enjoying the character study that is at the heart of this book.

This is a book that I will probably keep thinking about for months to come, trying to figure out what I did and didn't like about it.

3 stars (for now)

I'm intimidated by Stendhal. Was it a difficult read? What do you compare it to in readability terms?

Nickelini - this is probably the third time I've tried to read The Red and the Black and the first time I finished it, so I won't say it's an easy read. Basically, you're in the head of Julien the whole novel and he's not a pleasant person. In that way, it reminded me of the much later Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, but Stendahl lacks the biting sarcasm that makes that book. It also reminded me of Madame Bovary with the realism he uses. Also a bit of Hardy in the sense that there isn't much happiness in this book. One thing that helps the book is that there aren't a lot of diversions like in War and Peace or Les Miserables. The political action is woven into the story. There is quite a bit of action at the end of the book, but it's mainly a character study inside the head of a young man trying to climb out of his social rung and his interactions with two different, inappropriate relationships with women.

I will say that I'm glad I read it, but it takes a little patience and the right frame of mind.

Thanks! That's really helpful. I've had The Charterhouse of Parma on my tbr for many years, but I'm completely daunted by it.

#136 The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro
Alice Munro's book, published in 1978, is best described as a collection of short stories that connect to create a novel. I wouldn't say that each short story/chapter would necessarily stand very well completely on it's own, but each story does focus on one major life event of the main character, Rose, and her step-mother, Flo. Taken all together, they feel like a novel in that the main characters develop through each story and the stories create a fairly complete picture of a life. However, there isn't the same pull of action throughout the work or closure that you would normally find in a novel, which keeps it feeling like short stories. Also the focus on one aspect of life in each chapter, like childhood friends, parent/child relationship, the life of a marriage, etc., remind the reader that these are short stories. I found it a very effective way to write this particular story and thought Munro did it much better than some other authors who've attempted it.

Rose herself was not my favorite person and certain sections of the book left me a little cold, but I was so intrigue by the writing style and format that I still very much enjoyed the book and would love to read more of Munro's work. I'm not usually a short story fan, but this structure really worked for me.

4 stars

#137 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm not sure I've really read any of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries except for the random story/novel assigned in high school. I started watching the new PBS series, Sherlock, and that got me interested in reading these now. It's was a collection of 12 stories and I enjoyed all of them. My favorites were the Adventure of the Five Orange Pips, The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet.

4 stars

#138 Villette by Charlotte Bronte

I'm a huge Jane Eyre fan so was looking forward to reading Villette. Unfortunately I really detested all of the characters and was slightly bored by most of the plot. I know that this is considered to be largely autobiographical, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt that if I knew more about Bronte's life this may have been a more satisfying read. I did like the contrast between Lucy's (the main character and narrator) inner dialogue, which was highly dramatic and flowery, and the way the outside world viewed her, which was as a calm and sedate, almost boring person.

2 stars

#139 Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

I loved this quiet book about four older people, two men and two women, who work in an office together. Pym explores what happens to the two women who retire towards the beginning of the book and how the relationship between the four of them evolves. All four people are relatively alone in the world, and their casual office relationship ends up meaning more to them than they expect. I found this book to be insightful and engaging - another work by Pym that I very much enjoyed.

4 stars

#140 The Professor's House by Willa Cather

The Professor's House is a short novel that Cather based around a short story she had previous written about a drifter named Tom Outland who finds an ancient Indian ruins in the mesas of the Southwest. He and a friend excavate the site and have a falling out along the way. Cather takes this as a centerpiece and adds a long beginning and short ending about how Outland's appearance in a Midwestern college town affects the life of the Professor and his family. The part about the Professor explores changing family relationships as children age and marry, and also the influence of unexpected wealth. Outland's influence is felt though he is not present during the action.

This is a quirky little book. I very much enjoyed it while reading it, but the more I think about it subsequently, the more I question the wisdom of the format. The two stories don't really gel as well as they should and I felt that there were too many loose ends at the end of the book. I love Cather's writing, she has beautiful descriptive passages and interesting characters, but I'm not sure how well this book really worked.

3.5 stars

5 more to go to make my 2012 goal of 145 books total. Anyone have any suggestions of short or page turner reads that they enjoyed?

This year I read and enjoyed So long a letter, Silk and The summer book. You could also try: The nose, Chocky, The pigeon, Ethan Frome, The death of Ivan Ilych, Around the world in 80 days, I'm not scared, Fear and trembling, Claudine's house, Gosta Berling's saga, The tartar steppe, Bonjour tristesse, Under the skin, I, robot, God bless you, Mr Rosewater. The secret history was a page-turner for me. There's a thread somewhere about shorter 1001 books.

Good luck!

Some of the early Ian McEwan are also very short.

Is Casino Royale by Fleming on the list? I can't remember but I think there is a Fleming one there and since I mooched this one, I am thinking that is why. It's short and interesting (if you can ignore the sexism).

Casino Royale is indeed on the list.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is a great short story... will take you no time at all to read it.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day by Winifred Watson is also a pretty short and fast read. (For me it felt like a summer beach book... it was a charming but simple story.)

Thanks for all the suggestions! I read The Yellow Wallpaper this afternoon.

#141 The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This is a short story about a woman's descent into madness as she stays in a room with yellow wallpaper and grows obsessed with it. The themes behind it are that women in the late 19th century were often diagnosed with hysteria and mild mental problems when they were really struggling with post partum depression or even something as simple as boredom. The subsequent treatment, in this case isolation and rest, often aggravated the problem. I enjoyed this short story, though I do wonder at this being included on the 1001 list.

4 stars

http://www.librarything.com/topic/18831#3485119

Here is the thread about shorter 1001 books.

Chess Story is a gem! You should read that one!

#142 Candide by Voltaire

I know this is an important book that's full of political and philosophical satire, but I have to say I didn't really get it. The story was familiar to me after playing Bernstein's Candide and talking about it in high school French a bit, but I think it would take a lot of extra research for me to get much beyond the basic satire. Overall, I was just a little annoyed at all of the characters, the horrible things that happen in "the best of all possible worlds" (yes, I know that was the point), and all the characters dying and coming back to life. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

3 stars

#143 Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

This is a book written in letters that works. I loved the slow unveiling of the characters through their own words and the impressions of others. It took me a while to figure out all the characters because of the letter format, but I ended up thinking the letters were a very effective technique. The characters are interesting and I loved the evil Marquise de Merteuil and her relationship with Valmont.

Sorry, too tired to write more. Suffice to say I enjoyed it.

4 stars

#69 - I asked you a question about this book on your other thread.

We didn't just talk about Candide in French class - we read the whole darn thing in French.

And the Marquise de Merteuil and Valmont are two of my favorite characters in all of literature.

Also #67 is right: Chess Story is fantastic and you should definitely read it.

>71 jfetting: Did we really read all of Candide in French?? I thought I remembered that, but it didn't seem possible. I certainly didn't remember very much of it!

We did! Also Le Petit Prince.

#144 The robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
Another excellent book by Atwood! This one is dark. The book revolves around Zenia, a beautiful woman who does nothing but lie and wreak havoc on multiple lives. Zenia's deviousness brings together three women who loosely knew each other in college. They have all lost men and self respect to her. As much as they are damaged, the men she ensnares are arguably more damaged, though they aren't the focus of the book. Every character in this book has had a tough life, with abusive childhoods and absent parents.

I had no problem going along for the ride with this book, but I'm not sure if I really get the point yet. It bothers me that there was no "reveal" about Zenia's true background and motivations, although it probably would have ruined the book if there was. She was certainly meant to remain an enigma. It also bothered me that the three women who were friends were so different from each other. Besides having Zenia in common, I can't imagine them being friends at all.

So I don't know, the book had some flaws for me, but I was also entranced by it. Not my favorite Atwood, but comparing Atwood novels is starting to be like comparing Austen novels for me - I love them all and start with high expectations.

4 stars

The Robber Bride is Atwood's spin on the Grimm fairytale The Robber Bridegroom. Reading that may give you a little better basis for Zenia.

Thanks for the tip! I read the fairy tale and it helped a little, but I still want to know more! I guess that was Atwood's goal.

#145 The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This gothic novel is as much about the setting of the creepy old house as it is about the characters. The building of the house of the seven gables by colonel Pyncheon at the expense of the Maule family begins generations of bad luck for the Pyncheons. When we meet the family, there are only a few members left and things are looking bleak for the continuation of the family line. Hawthorne creates a suspenseful mystery around the family and very slowly reveals answers.

I really enjoyed this book. The language was flowery and gothic without being silly and I thought the pacing, while admittedly drawn out, was appropriate.

4 stars

And that completes my goal of 145 books by 2013! Because I'm expecting a slow reading year in 2013 (baby #2 on the way in February) I'm going to set a 2 year goal of getting to book 200 by 2015. I will be up for revising that goal (but only upward!) if it looks too easy in a year or so.

Congrats on meeting your goal and on the birth of your new baby. I hope all goes well.

77 - I was in Salem MA in May and saw the House of Seven Gables. It was neat! Is the book better than Scarlett Letter? I hated the language in that book and it scared me off others.

>80 Yells: well, I liked The Scarlet Letter, but the two books are pretty different in tone and writing. I think it would be worth giving it a try.

#146 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Well, this was my first attempt at an audio book and it didn't work very well for me. As such, I'm not sure how much of my disinterest in this book was due to the format vs. how much was due to the actual book. I mainly listened to this in the car while commuting and I found myself zoning out for large passages. I did think that some of the situations Huck found himself in were amusing and I though the evolving relationship between Huck and Jim was interesting.

I think I'll have to put this on the "to read again" pile, in book format this time.

2 stars

#147 Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

I enjoyed this, the first book in the James Bond series, much more than I expected to. I chose it because its on the1001 books read before you die list, which I have been slowly chipping away at. I enjoyed it enough to continue with the series.

This book introduces Bond and gives some background that I know from the movies will help explain his motivation and personality in subsequent novels. This is a good mix of spy adventure, good writing, and suspense. I knew to expect the blatant sexism, but other than that, the book didn't feel dated as I thought it might.

Lots of fun but, whoops, now I've started yet another series.

4 stars

#148 Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition by Joseph Conrad, Ed. by Paul Armstrong

This was an interesting book to read, following closely on the heels of one of my last reads of 2012, the nonfiction book King Leopold's Ghost. Heart of Darkness itself is the long short story or novella that gives some of Conrad's observations of his 6 month trip through the Congo. To be honest, the book itself didn't do much for me. I appreciated some of the literary techniques, such as the embedded narrator and the way he uses descriptive language. However, that descriptive language was also the book's downfall for me personally. It kept me too far removed from the actual story (or what I wanted to be the actual story)- the interaction between the native people who inhabited the region known as the Congo and the white explorers, colonists, invaders, whatever you want to call them! Instead this read as more of one man's obsession with the idea of another, Kurtz. I just didn't get that into it. I felt oddly that as much as the Congo should have been the main point of the book, the actual story could have really taken place anywhere and that bothered me.

However, the text of the book itself only comprised 77 pages of this 504 page critical edition. I did not read every essay word for word, but for the most part they were interesting and enlightening. Included are encyclopedia entries from the time the book was written, essays on race from the time period by people like Hegel and Darwin, contemporary responses to Heart of Darkness, and then more current essays on racism and sexism in the book and its worth as far as being read now. I haven't done this kind of in depth study on a book in quite some time and I enjoyed it, especially with a book that has caused as much controversy as this one.

I'm sorry I can't remember who suggested that I take the time to read this edition, but thank you to whoever it was and let me pass on the recommendation. I personally don't think I would have felt this book worth reading if not for the extra articles included.

2.5 stars for the book, 4 stars for the edition

I've heard a lot praise for Norton Critical Editions on LT but they can't be found in NZ.

#85 - the only place I've seen Norton Critical Editions here is at the university bookstore (or I guess maybe a used bookstore). I don't see them in regular book shops. I've also ordered them from Amazon/Book Depository.

#149 A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
This charming book completely suited my current mood. The heroine is Lucy, who we first meet on a trip to Italy with her spinster cousin. There are, of course, competing suitors to marry Lucy, but though the outcome is predictable, all the characters were interesting and memorable and the travel scenes a lot of fun.

4 stars

#150 Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
Yet another book by Gaskell that I thoroughly enjoyed. This is Gaskell's first novel and, like North and South, focuses on the plight of the working poor in the Manchester mills. I think I liked this book even better, though, as I felt a deeper connection to the characters than I did in N&S. This book really keeps the focus on the lower classes and finds a beautiful love story there. The family relationships are also deep and fleshed out.

The focus is Mary bArton, a young woman whose love interests parallel her growth as a person. There is a lot of drama, including a murder, and I found this 19th century novel a real page turner.

4 stars

Forgot to count these from the newest edition.

151. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, 4 stars
152. The History of love by Nicole Krauss, 3 stars

#153 The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
I've been reading this 1000 page novel made up of three novels and 2 short interludes all month and I think I'm going to miss it now that its over. This book follows several generations of the Forsyte family, an upper middle class family in England the end of the 19th cent and through WWI. The Forsytes and their characteristics become a metaphor for the whole upper middle class society.

The book revolves around the miserable marriage of Soames Forsyte to Irene. Soames treats Irene as his property, and with marriage laws being what they are at the time, in essence she is his property. Soames is possibly the most despicable character I've met I literature. Irene falls in love with a young architect and ends up escaping Soames. In the next book, Soames is back, wanting a child and needing Irene to comply or divorce him. She ends up falling in love with a different Forsyte and marrying him. In the third book, the children of Soames and Irene's subsequent marriages of course fall in love.

The plot seems soap opera-esque, but it's all so tastefully and artfully done, that it definitely reads like literature. Irene is a main character, but she's so passive that the story just happens around her. But there are strong women characters, like June and Holly, so the book doesn't fall into the annoying trap of no female characters. Soames is despicable, but so fleshed out through the book that he's understandable and therefore even more disgusting. I didn't love the last of the three parts because I found the relationship between the youngest Forsyte generation to be kind of annoying, but I was happy with the ending.

Overall, I loved the experience of reading this epic novel.

4stars

#154 Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

I've been reading this book, considered to be Maugham's masterpiece, for the past month. To be honest, I found large sections to be pretty boring and kept wondering if anything was going to happen. The book has an autobiographical feel to it, in that it moves slowly through the life of the main character, Philip, from his early childhood through his early 30s when I would say he finally matures and becomes an adult. Despite the moments of boredom, I ended up thinking this is a brilliant book. The pace is slow but very in depth, and Philip's experiences, relationships, and growth as a person feel authentic. I thought the exploration of youthful love as being repeatedly stronger from one individual in the relationship (sometimes with Philip being the one loved and sometimes with him loving) was interesting and remarkably true to life, especially among youths. I also appreciated Maugham's insights into the poor and the opportunity to work being so important to one's self esteem. I liked that the themes in this book were both clear and subtle at the same time - Maugham isn't beating you over the head with a moral but there are several there.

I have no doubt that this is one of those books that I will continue to ponder for a long time and to me that is always a sign of the best books.

4 stars

#155 The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles

I cannot decide whether I loved this book or was annoyed by it. Fowles wrote this Victorian era novel in the 1960s, but it never struck me as historical fiction. I guess it felt more like a writing exercise with really well thought out characters. Fowles inserts himself into the book, exploring his control or lack thereof over the characters, and comments on Victorian era psyche from the perspective of the 1960s. He also supplies 3 different endings to the book, never really saying which he feels is the right one.

I found this all interesting and annoying at the same time. I think it was even more annoying because the characters are so interesting and the plot so familiar (at the beginning at least) that I kind of wanted it to just be a straight ahead Victorian novel. I think it's kind of brilliant that Fowles was able to mesh these two things but it was also kind of jarring to read.

This is one of those books that I'll have to think about for awhile.

I am also really curious about the movie. I wonder how it manages to incorporate the present day voice into the Victorian story, or if it just ignores it? I don't often watch movies, but I might need to make the time for this one.

4 stars

#156 The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Huh? I'm not sure I really understood this book, my first attempt at a work by Duras. It's an autobiographical novel about a young white girl and her affair with an older Chinese man in Indochina. The title suggests this is the main narrative thread, but the narrator's relationship with her everchanging mother and her two brothers is also central. The problem for me was that I felt like I didn't have enough inside information to understand what was really going on. This was more like a series of musings and I didn't have the necessary background information to fill in the gaps.

I found the writing style unique and interesting. Words like misty, meandering, and dreamy come to mind. I also found my internal reading voice reading the words in monotone. Duras also shifts point of view subtly - using "I" at the beginning and "she" by the end. Not sure why.

This was an interesting reading experience, but I think I need to read more of Duras's writing to truly get it.

3 stars

#157 A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
After loving A Room With a View, I was eager to give Forster another try. Unfortunately, I really didn't like A Passage to India. I found the characters flat and more like caricatures than real people and their relationships with each other even more implausible. Then there was the plot, which seemed to revolve around an inane, imagined incident in a cave between an Englishwoman and her Indian host.

I suppose that when this was written in the 1920s, it was an important and possibly revolutionary look at British/Indian relations, but I found it rather boring. It will not stop me from reading more Forster, though. Maybe this one just wasn't for me.

2 stars

#94 A Passage to India still holds its place as the 1001 book I hate the most. I think it took me two months to finish.

While I liked A Passage to India, it definitely isn't my favorite Forster book. It definitely dragged a bit. If you ever get a chance to see the movie... it's well worth it. It's one of the few instances where I thought the movie did a better job conveying the message in an entertaining way than the book did.

The movie was wonderful! I hated the first half of the book but liked the end with the trial etc.

Well then I'll keep the movie on my mental list. Thanks for the tip!

#96 I have wanted to see the movie and it's good to hear that it's better!

#158 Possession by A. S. Byatt
I have a new book to add to my favorites list! I loved Byatt's Possession. This book was right up my alley. Roland and Maud are literary critics specializing in fictional Victorian writers, Randolph Ash and Christobel LaMotte. They uncover letters that reveal that the two had a secret affair and possibly a child. They hide the knowledge from their peers, advisors, and rivals and pursue the story themselves. Byatt brilliantly creates the source materials that they find along the way - letters, journals, etc. - and also creates a body of work for each other that includes long poems. It's an amazing feat. I still can't quite believe that the Victorians in the book were fictional because she does such a good job. The book is smart, detailed, and funny as Byatt gently pokes fun at the world of literary criticism.

This is a book that is going back on my shelves to reread in the future.

5 stars

#159 Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
This novella definitely packs a punch. It is obviously a retelling of the famous scandal surrounding Ted Kennedy's car accident where he drove his car off a bridge with a female passenger inside, escaped, and didn't call the police until the next morning. The passenger, of course, died. Apparently there is quite a bit of controversy about what really happened (I missed this as it happened before I was born) but Oates skips most of the controversy and keeps the focus on Kelly, the passenger. The book is told almost completely from the Kelly's point of view as she drowns in the car. It's dramatic - time flying back and forth, hallucinations vs. memories vs. her present of drowning - and short. Oates could have chosen to make this a long novel, delving into The Senator's motivations for leaving this woman to die, presenting more background and aftermath, but instead she keeps the focus on the mind of Kelly as she slowly loses air and drowns. This is a powerful and haunting book.

4 stars

Ah yes, you keep hoping against hope for a different ending, right? Poor Kelly.

I read A Passage to India for a university class and at first I was just relieved that it was readable then after I went to the lectures for it I felt like so much more of the book was revealed to me. I really liked it. That was 10 years ago I should reread it and see if I still like it and if any of the stuff we talked about in class comes back to me. I also need to track down the movie!

I also loved Possession, and was amazed that the characters she created were fictional, all that poetry was an impressive feat.

Black Water I thought was an interesting story, especially as it's related to a real event. However it wasn't amazing/memorable for me.

I loved her book Blondie of course about Marliyn Monroe.

I've read 2 from Oates- Marya: A Life and We Were the Mulvaneys (not on the list) and hated them both. I'm glad to hear positive things about others of her books. I was dreading the rest on the list!

amaryann21 Black Water is a novella of about 120 pages and can easily be read in a few hours. Can't guarantee that you will like it but you won't have to spend loads of time on it. Blonde (which I haven't read but do have on the TBR pile) looks like a real door stopper and them is another of hers on the list - I need to get to them!

I'd guess that anyone who has written over 40 novels (not to mention all the short stories, essays, etc.) has got to have some duds in there! I'm planning to try all of her book on the 1001 books list at some point and then branch out from there if I enjoy them.

kiwiflowa is right - Black Water is a really quick read. I read it in two sittings.

#160 The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox
This novel was written in the 1750s and is a satire of Don Quixote. The main character, Arabella, is a beautiful, charming, wealthy woman who unfortunately grows up very isolated and therefore reads too many French historical romances about ancient Greece and Rome which she believes in completely. This leads to many humorous situations as she is courted by her cousin who her father intends for her to marry. I really enjoyed the first third of the book, but after a while the humor started to be the same over and over and got a little old. All the men in the book think she's crazy but don't care because she's beautiful and wealthy. I think this is worth reading, especially as an example of women writing in the 1700s. It's genuinely funny and entertaining. It was also obviously an example to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, a book I love.

3 stars

#161 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
As this is a much reviewed book on LT, most of you probably know this novel is told from the point of view of a 15 year old boy with an unspecified condition that is probably a degree of autism or aspergers. I was sucked into the story and Christopher's world immediately. Take away the interesting perspective, and the book is still an interesting look at a family falling apart and trying to stitch itself back together. I thought it was very well done.

My one reservation is that I wondered how Haddon felt qualified to pretend to know the inner workings of a mind so different from his own. As long as I don't think about that too deeply, I enjoyed the book.

3 stars

109 - I listened to it on audio and it was awesome. No idea who did the voice but they nailed it.

#162 The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
I have a new book to add to my favorites. Jansson's The Summer Book is a charming, subtle and humorous look at the relationship between 6 year old Sophia and her grandmother. The book is organized into chapters that are something like short stories, but more like snapshots of summers spent on an island in Finland. Jansson magically shifts point of view from Grandmother to Sophia throughout the stories, making this book equally about both of them. We find out in one short sentence that Sophia's mother has died and her petulant sometimes erratic behavior becomes more than just the mood swings of a typical six year old, but also the reaction of a child to the loss of a parent. Jansson never hits you over the head with an psychological analysis, but keeps the event in your mind as you read. Grandmother is nearing the end of her life. She is sarcastic and ironic and not always patient with Sophia, but she is loving and hilarious. My favorite chapters were "The Pasture", where Grandmother and Sophia have a hilarious but somehow meaningful discussion about God, "The Cat" where Sophia learns her first lessons about loving something that doesn't always act the way you want it to, and "Of Angleworms and Others" where Sophia writes a book. Grandmother and Sophia are two of my favorite characters I've ever come across and I guarantee I'll read this book again.

I seriously hope that everyone takes the time to read this short, beautiful book. You'll love it.

5 stars

Oh yes, The Summer Book is great.

#163 The Secret History by Donna Tartt
This was a 1990s best seller that I picked up because its on the 1001 books to read before you die list. It's one of those books where you find out up front that a murder has occurred and then the book goes though the lead up, murder, and aftermath.

It's an odd book and I don't think I liked it much. It's about a tight knit circle of college friends studying the Classics. They have a Bacchanal where they get out of control and murder a local townsperson and then kill a member of their circle who wasn't there but finds out about it. The characters were all terrible people, but my main problem was that the book is told in first person by someone who was on the outer edge of the circle of friends and I never felt like he knew enough about the other characters or the events for me to get a clear picture of what was going on. So that was annoying. It's also about 200 pages too long (and I typically like long books). It has some redeeming qualities in that the build up to the murder and the downward spiral afterward are delved into in depth and it was interesting to see how all of the characters reacted. Overall, though, I just don't think it worked that well with the first person voice.

3 stars

#164 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

This is a fantastic book. Woolf is a master at making every word count and setting a mood. This book is in three parts. The first is part of a day at a large family's summer home, told from the point of view of Mrs. Ramsey - the beautiful mother of eight children. As I read this section, I was struck by how good Woolf is at fully fleshing out her characters with very little plot or action for them to react to. Instead, the smallest daily events and their reactions show who these people are. It's pretty amazing. The short middle section lets us know what happens to the characters over the next decade or so. The end section cycles back to the summer house where loose ends are tied up - a painting is redone and the trip to the lighthouse that never happened in the first section is completed.

5 stars

Woolf is a master at making every word count and setting a mood

Indeed! She is really hitting her stride with To the Lighthouse. I'm currently struggling through Night and Day, where she does not make every word count--in fact there are thousands and thousands of excess words. I think this was her attempt to write a Victorian novel. Good thing she got it out of her system and went on to things like To the Lighthouse!

Anyway, nice summary and comments on the book.

Thanks! I've read Mrs. Dalloway too, just last year, and loved it. I'm considering going back to the beginning of her novels and reading them all in order. I think they are all on the 1001 list and I've never done that with an author before. Might be interesting to see how she develops/changes as an author over time.

#165 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
I liked but didn't love this Pulitzer Prize winning novel told from the perspective of 3 different women living in different time periods. There is Virginia Woolf while she's writing Mrs. Dalloway, a mother in the 1950s reading Mrs. Dalloway, and a woman in her 60s living in the present day with the nickname of Mrs. Dalloway. These women end up connected in many ways - both through actual life events and through their thoughts and musings. This book is very clever, but I wanted a little bit more from it. It may be one that I come back to in a few years.

3.5 stars

#166 The Bell by Iris murdoch
This was a book that I read with a LT group read. I've never heard of the author or book and had no expectations going in. The beginning of the book struck me as kind of creepy and I thought it might go a bit gothic. The set up is a young woman, Dora, in a stifling marriage. She leaves her husband but decides to go back to him after 6 months. At that point he is living and working (seems to be some sort of historian) with a small religious community attached to a convent. She goes there to be with him and we meet the other people living there and learn about the myth of the old bell that was lost during the dissolution of the abbey in the 1300s. After a while, I figured out that the book wasn't really going the gothic direction and it ended up being more of a relationship study. The interesting thing is that some of the characters are homosexual and I thought that, especially considering this was written in the 1950s, this was written with a lot of understanding and lack of prejudice.

murdoch has quite a few books on the 1001 books to read before you die list, and I'm looking forward to reading more of them.

3.5 stars

#167 Silas Marner by George Eliot
This is a short novel that was much more enjoyable than I thought it would be. I think because the title sounds so drab, this has been sitting on my shelf for years. I love Middlemarch though, so I decided it was time and I wasn't disappointed. This novel has a fable-like feel to it and is very plot driven. Silas Marner is a weaver who is exiled from his first home after being betrayed by a friend. He moves to a new town where he work and hoards gold, living a solitary life. His gold is stolen and instead a young, golden-haired girl whose mother has died wanders into his life. There is more to this story that I won't go into, but suffice to say I enjoyed the book. It's short and worthwhile to get to.

4 stars

#168 There but for the by Ali Smith

This book didn't really work for me. It's the story of a man who goes to a dinner party as the guest of an invitee and ends up locking himself in the host's guest bedroom for months. The reader only finds out bits and pieces about this man through 4 people loosely connected to him. For me, the problem was that, although I'll admit the book was clever, it relied too heavily on the clever form and puns/word usage and never really got me engaged with the characters or had enough direction for me. It also left way too many loose ends in everyone's stories for my taste.

2 stars

#169 Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
What a beautiful book and how sad that it wasn't finished. This unfinished novel was published in 2006 but was written by Nemirovsky during WWII. Nemirovsky was a Russian Jew who had converted to Catholicism and lived her whole adult life in France after her family fled the Bolshevik revolution. She was arrested and ended up being taken to Auschwitz and killed there. The manuscript for this book was saved by her daughter who was hidden by family friends during the war. The book is two complete parts of a novel that was intended to be 4 or 5 parts in total.

I was afraid that the back story of this novel would overshadow any merits of the writing, but I didn't find this to be the case. I really loved the characters, writing, and description of events. The first part is about the arrival of the Germans in France and the fleeing of the French. The second part explores the occupation and relationships between the French and the German soldiers in one small country village. Unfortunately, the two sections deal mainly with a different set of characters that are only partially connected. You can see how she intended to draw them all together, but it is in no way a completed work. This 369 page book should be a highly readable 1000 page novel. I thought is was pretty amazing that she was writing this as events were unfolding. When you read her diary entries that are included in an appendix, they drive home the point that this woman didn't know how the war would end while she was writing the book. It's hard to remember that since we know Germany lost in the end, but when she was writing this living in occupied France, that must have seemed hard to imagine.

5 stars

I loved that book! It really is tragic that she wasn't able to finish it. The bit at the end, telling about how her husband went looking for her, almost made me cry.

I know! The letters in the appendix and her diary with her thoughts behind the book and where she was going with it are so interesting. Would she have waited til the end of the war to finish it to have the war's end tie in with the book? I find it so interesting that she was writing this while the war was happening - almost in real time.

#170 Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
I picked this book up when I heard that Munro had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Munro is mainly known for her short stories and I think this is considered her only novel, though some of her short story collections are linked stories and might be considered a novel. This is a coming of age story about Del, a girl living in the small town of Jubilee, Canada. Each chapter has an episodic feel and I liked some sections more than others. Munro is great at tricking you into thinking a story is straightforward and simple and all of a sudden you realize that dark, depressing, or deep events are being revealed. I appreciate her writing a lot, but it isn't always comfortable.

People's lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

If you change "people's lives" to "Munro's writing", that sentence pretty much sums up how I feel about Munro's writing in her own words.

I'm not generally a short story fan, but I'd consider making an exception to read more Munro.

4 stars

Yep, that sounds like my impression of Lives of Girls and Women too!

#171 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
This is one of those books that I've avoided for years simply because everyone was reading it (including the Oprah book club) and I tend to avoid books that are too popular, thinking they may also be too simple. Not the case in this instance. I absolutely loved this book.

Most people who have heard of this book probably think of it as "the book about the hermaphrodite", and yes, the narrator is a hermaphrodite and it does sort of frame the book, but this is more a family epic than anything else. By tracing the gene mutation that results in Calliope's condition, Eugenides traces three generations of a Greek American family from Greece to Detroit. As with most books I love, the characters are the driving force to the book. Calliope, the narrator, is definitely well written, but Desdemona, the grandmother, is the unforgettable character in the book for me.

I loved this family epic with a twist.

5 stars

#172 The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe
I guess this is included because it's a precursor to the modern detective story, but I wasn't that excited by it. I like Murders in the Rue Morgue (not on the list) much better and it also features the "detective" Dupin.

Anyway - one more short one off the list!

3 stars

#173 Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

On the most basic level, this is a book that imagines Marco Polo describing cities he has seen on his travels to Kublai Khan, but there is so much more to this book. Calvino makes every word count, describing each city with an element of the fantastic that makes you feel as though you might be reading poetry. It definitely doesn't read like a typical novel. Polo admits half way through that he is actually describing Venice when he describes each of these cities and that brings in the interesting thoughts of how alike are cities everywhere and how much does our idea of home influence our reactions to other places.

This is a book that may be short in page number, but is long in the amount of time you need to invest to make it pay off. I was intrigued by it.

4 stars

#174 Germinal by Emile Zola
Forget Stephen King, I think it's safe to say this was the most brutal, horrifying book I've ever read. Zola doesn't shirk from describing the bleak lives and dangerous work of coal miners in mid-19th century France. Unlike other books I've read about the lower economic classes in this era, there are no sweet love stories, moves to a higher economic class, or even the relief of exploring some good in the upper classes (there's honestly not even much good in the miners he describes) to lighten the mood here. Normally, I would detest a book like this, but I was absolutely fascinated by this book. There are scenes that I will NEVER forget.

At the end of the book, when Chaval's body is knocking up against Etienne and Catherine's feet over and over was particularly gruesome to me.

5 stars

Thought you might like to know Zola earned himself a spot in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Which meant, according to the church, reading him was to risk your immortal soul. Cheers!

I am interested to know that. I feel that my soul might have been a bit compromised by that book! ;-)

#175 The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West
After loving Return of the Soldier I was very disappointed in this book. It could best be described as a lifestlyes of the rich and boring. The premise is a beautiful young American widow in France who escapes a disastrous relationship to find love with a wealthy but unattractive man. Most of the book describes their lifestyle and friends/acquaintances who are all horrible and boring people. The book is told from the point of view of Isabelle, the American widow, and she has a knowledge of her own motivations and the thoughts of others that I found unbelievable - no one is that self aware and still makes so many mistakes!

Unfortunately, the boring plot and unlikable characters are not the only problem with this book. The writing was also very wordy, with lots of words I'd never come across and even some that weren't in my kindle's dictionary. Plangency, inchoateness, erethic, lickerish (used twice!), inspissated, frangible, coprophilists were all used.

So I was obviously disappointed, but I'm still willing to try some of her other books since I loved The Return of the Soldier so much.

2 stars

Wow. That's kind of staggering. I too loved The Return of the Soldier and of the words you list, I have never heard of four of them: that's pretty crazy. Lickerisch and inspissated both sound either obscene or, oh, what's that word people use to describe Rabelais, having to do with lots of defecation....

I know, it was so disappointing. I'm thinking about trying one of the other two books of hers that are on the list soon to see whether it falls in the love it or hate it category.

#135: scatological?

#176 The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary
Elephants, elephants, and more elephants. This is the story of Morel, a survivor of the German concentration camps in WWII, who goes to Africa after the war to bring attention to the killing of innocent elephants. During his time in the concentration camps, he survived by imagining himself with the elephants, roaming free over the African plains. When he takes up this cause, the different factions in French colonial Africa attribute all sort of secondary motives to him - mainly equating saving the elephants to freeing Africa from French rule. Morel insists that he takes no side in these human concerns, just wants elephants to be left alone to live their lives. He attracts a following of misfits and the book tells the story of their cause and reactions to them through a story-teller, retelling the events which gives the book the feel of a fable or tall tale.

This book was a bit outside my normal comfort zone, but I ended up being pretty intrigued by it. It gave me a lot to think about and I enjoyed it even though it was a little weird.

4 stars

Original Publication Date: 1956
Author’s nationality: French
Original language: French
Length: 375 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Format/Where I acquired the book: out of publication - ordered a used copy from Amazon

#177 Bleak House by Charles Dickens
I enjoyed this very long Dickens novel that weaves together multiple stories and has more characters than you can possibly remember. This novel has it all - mystery, lawsuits, love triangles, blackmail, death, crazy people, spontaneous combustion, pre-marital sex . . . you name it. This makes the book both fun and long/confusing. I had to pay attention to every single character introduced, because they all end up being important. As I've found to often be the case with Dickens, I found the peripheral characters to be more interesting than the main characters. I actually didn't like Esther, who narrates half of the book, much at all. She had a goody two shoes attitude that I just couldn't stand or believe.

Central to this book is a lawsuit about a dispute over the estate left in a will. I found the harsh commentary on law to be both amusing and interesting and I think it really bulked up the book in a good way.

Overall, I felt like I did with other Dickens I've read - I liked the plot and characters and some of Dickens' writing is just beautiful, but it was just a bit too long and diffuse for it to really be a favorite.

4 stars

I dont know why but I felt alot for Esther. I think because she was so miss treated as a little girl and she just didnt feel she was really worth or deserved anything kind from anyone.

Have you watch the BBC movie yet now that you are finished with the book well worth it because it goes really good with the book.

ALWINN - I am planning to watch the BBC miniseries though I don't make much time for TV so it might take me a while to get to it. I think that you probably had the reaction that Dickens intended in feeling for Esther's situation, but I just couldn't get over being annoyed! Luckily, and surprisingly considering she was a narrator, it didn't make me hate the book.

Taking care of my 4 month old grandson I understand you not having time for any TV but I have the luck of having a desk job that I can listen and peak and yes watch on lunch to the movies on youtube.

#178 Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
I have had this book on my radar for a while now, but after seeing some mediocre reviews I wasn't sure I would like it much. With the WWI theme and a group read in the "1001 books to read before you die" group, I decided it was time to try it. I'm so glad I did since I ended up loving it.

This is the story of Stephen Wraysford's war experience. The book begins in 1910 and shows a youthful Stephen in France falling in love with an older married woman, Isabelle. This is the most obvious "love" part of the novel. Next we skip to 1916 and see Stephan's brutal war experience. He is cold and detached, uncaring, perfect for a soldier. He also has luck and as all of his comrades are gruesomely dying around him, he somehow lives on. But for what? The next part of the novel takes place in England in 1978 and focuses on Elizabeth who is becoming interested in the history of her grandfather who was a soldier in WWI and who she knows almost nothing about.

The novel is subtitled "A Novel of Love and War" and I found it a significant addition to the title. What really struck me about this book was the idea of love. To me, the idea of love between Stephen and the other soldiers he fought alongside was the real love present in the book. It is an untraditional love - these men don't really know much about each other, they don't share much, sometimes they don't even remember names, but I think you could still say that they do love each other. As they die together and experience the same horrors, they are bound together. It isn't a way I've really thought of love before, but I think it counts. This idea all came together for me when Jack Firebrance says "I could have loved you" towards the end of his life. Then I thought of all the men Stephen had watched die and thought that this was such a deeper love than he ever felt for Isabelle, even though it didn't strike me as love when I was reading those parts.

I did not particularly love the 1970s portion of the book. I thought the main character, Elizabeth, was pretty annoying, and though there was a connection to the war story, I just didn't think it added all the much to the book. I do think, though, that it gave some relief to the horrors of the war sections.

Overall, I really loved this book and would recommend it to anyone looking for some WWI reading during this anniversary year.

4 stars

#179 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
This book did not hit the right note for me. It's an autobiographical novel about a young girl who is adopted by a Pentecostal family. The church is their life and she's raised with the thought that she'll be a missionary - until her teenage years where she discovers she's a lesbian and her mother and the church find out.

The book is humorous in a mocking sort of way, but instead of finding it funny I really just thought it was sad. I think that's why it really didn't work for me. It made me really mad that the super-religious mother had obviously converted later in life and had a wide variety of life experience before confining her adopted daughter to her narrow beliefs.

I just didn't like it, though I suppose I did appreciate the writing.

2 stars

I started Birdsong last night and I am loving it so far. I always go to your page to see if you have read the book and how well or not so well you like them since it seems we have the same taste in books.

I've noticed that too, ALWINN! I really loved Birdsong despite the discomfort of reading about the gruesomeness of war. Hope it's a good read for you!

>144 japaul22: I wonder if you'd like Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, which is Winterson's memoir paralleling Oranges. (I just love the title and want someone to read it & let me know if it's good).

I think I need a break from Winterson first! But now that I know the tone she writes in (assuming it's similar for her other books), I'll know better when I'll be in the mood to read it.

#180 Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
I don't feel like doing a review but I loved this adventure story about Phileas Fogg's bet that he could travel around the world in eighty days.

4 stars

#181 The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross
This is a relatively obscure Irish novel written in 1894 by cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin. It sets up an interesting contrast between two cousins - the 40-something, unattractive, scheming, and bitter Charlotte vs. the 20-something flirtatious, naive, and beautiful Francie. The novel revolves around Francie's three love interests and Charlotte's jealousy of one of these in particular. The characters are well-drawn and complex and I wasn't sure where Somerville and Ross were going with some of them, especially Charlotte. The rather abrupt and unsatisfying ending of the book was the only low point for me. Otherwise, I found it interesting and readable with memorable characters.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes writers from this era (Trollope, the Brontes, Gaskell, etc.).

4 stars

#182 The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

This is a beautifully written haunting and tragic story of how decisions, or lack of action, can create a chain of events. The story begins in Ireland in the 1920s with tension between the Irish Catholics and the Protestant landowners. The Gault family decides to leave their family home after attempted violence and their young daughter runs away to try to prevent their departure. This sets off a chain of events that is unexpected and just so sad. I don't want to give away the plot. The plot is important to this novel, but the reason it's so moving to read is that as central as the actual events are, this is a novel that only uses that plot to explore themes of guilt, loneliness, miscommunication, and forgiveness.

I found the language beautiful and the ideas moving and well-developed. I'd highly recommend this short but loaded novel.

5 stars

>151 japaul22: I really liked that one too. I agree that the plot exists to facilitate the exploration of the themes, and it's done well.

#183 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
This thought-provoking novel looks at the idea of connections and rebirths over 100s of years of human existence. The form of the novel really creates the book. Mitchell uses a character's record (a journal, letters, a novel, a movie, an orison, and icons - since the last two take place in the future, the words or their meaning are unfamiliar) to link each section as the next character finds the record of the past character (presumably their past self). Each story is interrupted and after we've met all 6 characters, their stories are continued in reverse order so that you end where you began reading.

Mitchell uses subtle clues to let the reader come to his/her own conclusions about the idea of rebirth. The most obvious is that each main character has a comet shaped birthmark, but there are other moments that the characters share that lead the reader to link these people as well. And then there's the sextet that the second introduced character, Robert Frobisher, composes. It's called the Cloud Atlas sextet - obviously the 6 parts link to the 6 characters and the music factors in to each story in some way - sometimes largely and sometimes barely at all.

The form of the novel made me think about the importance of leaving a record of both the individual life and the life of a society.

I thought this was a smart novel. The form was beautifully done and Mitchell is great at giving you enough info to think and spark conversation/ideas without ever explaining (and thereby simplifying) his ideas. This was smart, because if he'd done too much spelling it out there would be tons of holes in the plot as there must be in an idea this incomprehensible to the human mind. But as much as I loved the ideas and form of this book, having such radically different narrators and tone for each of the characters detracted a bit from my reading. It was jarring to switch from section to section and took me quite a bit of time to resign myself to leaving the previous world. And with wildly different characters, I of course had my favorites and some I really didn't like at all. This will be a hard book to pick a star rating for because it was intriguing and I know I'll be thinking about it for a long time, but I didn't always enjoy the moments I was actually reading it. I will definitely seek out more of David Mitchell's writing, though, as this was my first time reading a novel of his.

4 stars

#184 Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel

Alberta is a teenage girl living in the far north of Norway. She is painfully shy to the point of being practically mute both out in town and at home. She blushes at the drop of a hat and hides from everyone. Her exacting mother is constantly frustrated with her and her father is too preoccupied with his own money problems to take an interest in her. At the point we meet her, she is done with the schooling her parents can afford and supposed to be learning domestic skills like the other girls her age, something she is hopeless at. She has no desire to be a part of the community or find a husband. The only person she openly loves is her brother, Jacob, who escapes their town as a sailor after disappointing his parents’ hope that he will find a scholarly career.

Alberta is also cold – physically cold. She sneaks behind her mother’s back to drink more than her share of coffee – gulping down the scalding liquid for a moment of warmth. She sneaks coal when her mother is out to build a fire in her room. She runs as fast and hard as she can outside, hoping the physical activity will warm her up. It is all to no avail. The setting of northern Norway is a character in this book – the constant dark and cold of the winter and the round the clock sun in the summer that gives the only short bursts of warmth and with it brings a few characters Alberta’s age home from school in the south. Even with the people her age who try to be friendly to her, Alberta can’t manage to string together more than a few words.

With that bleak description and unsympathetic main character, you may be surprised to hear that I LOVED this book. It is the start of a trilogy about Alberta and I had wish-listed the next two books after reading about ten pages and then purchased them before finishing. I’m not sure what it was, but I just loved the writing and description. I also really liked the awkward Alberta. I certainly was never as shy to the extreme as she is, but I could sympathize with many of the feelings she has. She’s trapped in that age and circumstance where she’s not an adult yet but not a child either. She also has no interest in staying in her town but no vision for an alternative. I’m excited to have found another Norwegian author that I love and looking forward to the rest of this semi-autobiographical trilogy.

5 stars

#185 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
For a book published in 1722, this sure was smutty! It was a good reminder that the Victorian Era prudery was not in full force until Queen Victoria. This is the story of Moll Flanders, a first person account of the life of a woman who lives a life of debauchery and crime in the mid-1600s. Midway through the book, Moll sums up her life thus as she contemplates marrying yet another man who thinks her a good sort:

What an abominable creature am I! and how is this innocent gentleman going to be abused by me! How little does he think, that having divorced a whore, he is throwing himself into the arms of another! that he is going to marry one that has lain with two brothers, and has had three children by her own brother! one that was born in Newgate, whose mother was a whore, and is now a transported thief! one that has lain with thirteen men, and has had a child since he saw me! Poor gentleman!"

Well, Moll does go on to hide her past successfully and marry this man, have 2 more kids, and marry another man after he dies. Oh, and she turns to stealing when she gets too old to attract more husbands.

There are some interesting themes to consider in this book, especially the limited options that a woman had in those days to earn her keep. Overall, I didn't love this book though. Because it's written in first person, we only see Moll's experiences of how she attracts and marries men and there are almost no other characters. In this respect, the book was a bit too narrow for me. There are also some threads that are lost - like the many children Moll has that seem to just be conveniently forgotten with no mention of who takes care of them.

But then again, considering the time period it was written in, that it is an early example of the novel, and the interesting fact that a man chose to write a first person woman's voice, it was kind of fun to read. And there are some great quotes.

I began . . . to have the scandal of a whore, without the joy"

3 stars

I'm not much interested in the earlier books on the 1001 list, but this one sounds pretty readable. If I see a good used copy, I'll pick it up. Thanks!

I did love Moll Flanders. I got a big kick out of her, and how every now and again she slipped in a token "oh, but this was very naughty, I feel so bad about that" but she clearly doesn't really. It is also a refreshing change from the Victorian era bad-women-get-punished plots.

>156 Nickelini: I think it's worth reading. She's quite a character!

>156 Nickelini: Yes! It was awesome that she didn't get a payback plot line. Pretty fun to read and a very memorable character.

Moll was a fun character put Im with JaPaul I always wondered okay how can a woman have children and just leave them behind like that. When she was done with the husband she was done with the children as well.

but it makes you realise that this is not just a modern phenomenon though... that this has been going on for centuries puts social issues today into perspective, don't you think?

#186 Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
This is a Norwegian novel that takes place in the back country where the main character, Isak, carves a farm out of the wilds of Norway with his bare hands. He literally uses his muscle and animal strength to muscle a life out of a rather uninhabitable place. Others slowly follow, but none are as successful as Isak. He marries a woman named Inger who has the slight physical disfigurement of something described as a hare lip. It seems that she is willing to stay with Isak at first because she wouldn't be accepted anywhere else, but Inger and Isak end up sharing their life together in a meaningful way and I would say love each other as well. Isak certainly loves Inger. They have two sons who grow into different men - one craving a city life but finding many obstacles and one embracing the running of his father's farm. By the end of the novel, Isak has neighbors who have followed his trail-blazing, copper mining has come to the area, and Isak owns a mowing machine.

While I appreciated this book and am glad I read it, I'm not sure I really liked it. Something about the language really grated on me. Hamsun writes in brief grunts and I couldn't decide if it was intentional, to reflect the almost animal state of the back country people, or if it was bad transition, or just his style. The dialogue was really ridiculous. It seemed that no one listened or understood anyone else and it really reminded me of the stereotypical cave man grunting. If that was intentional, I think it did a disservice to the people that Hamsun was trying to portray. I was also really disturbed by a part of the novel that explored infanticide. Two different mothers in the book kill their new-born babies. It was for very different reasons with very different legal consequences, but I wasn't really sure what the point of it was and I found it really disturbing.

This is a book that I will rate as middle of the road considering that it won the author the Nobel prize for literature and is highly respected - I just didn't see it. But it is also a book that I won't be surprised if I think much more highly of at the end of the year than I do now.

3 stars

heh... I take it you've never spent much time in Scandinavia to experience the 'delights' of what passes for conversation up there. Try my review for a different perspective:

http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/?p=4425

>163 arukiyomi: I did wonder if that was supposed to be an intentional description of dialect. I have been to Norway, but only once. My mother's side of the family is Norwegian. Her grandfather and grandmother were Norwegian and grew up there. I remember them only speaking Norwegian and halting English. My grandfather was born in the US, but spent much of his childhood in Norway. We've kept a lot of Norwegian holiday traditions and keep in touch with the "cousins" in Norway, but you're right - I've had no exposure to any Scandinavians but my relatives who are highly educated city dwellers who speak English as well or better than I do!

Anyway, I did appreciate the book, and will be interested to see how it sticks with me and improves (or the opposite) upon reflection.

"only speaking... halting English" might actually have been fluent because from the many Finns and Swedes and the occasional Norwegian I've worked with, they aren't the most voluble people on the planet. Silence is very much valued and the ability to speak without speaking is something of an art form, I believe... much like it is in Japan. So, from that perspective, the prose is very much true to form and, in this respect then, Isak is the epitome of what a man should be.

#187 La Regenta or "The Regent's Wife" by Leopoldo Alas
I came upon this book while trying to help the 1001 books to read before you die group to complete the list as a group. This was one of the books no one had claimed as read. When I looked into it, I found that it was a Spanish classic published in 1884 that is billed as the Spanish "Madame Bovary". Some of my favorite books are from this era - Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Germinal, Madame Bovary, etc. so I thought this would be right up my alley. It was also translated by John Rutherford whose translations I've appreciated in the past. What I found, though, was a book that I adored at moments and hated to the point of dreading to pick it up and doing some skimming at other times.

The fictional setting of Vetusta, Spain is beautiful and the language drew me in for the first pages. And then the multitude of characters with multitudes of names for each person began. I've read lots of Russian literature where each person's name takes on different variations, but that was nothing compared to this. Also, Alas introduces many characters up front before they are part of the story, and I always have a hard time with that. In a book with dozens of main characters, I keep them straight best if they are introduced as they become part of the story. So I started off kind of confused, but I figured I had all 800 pages of the book to figure it out.

The premise was both familiar interesting. Ana is a young woman married to a quirky and bumbling older man who is bored. She is looking for fulfillment outside of her marriage and is torn between two men. One is the canon theologian, Don Fermin, who is her Catholic priest and confessor. The other is Don Alvaro, Mesia, who is the town's "Don Juan" - attractive, out-going, and a womanizer. Both men want Ana - Don Fermin being unable to differentiate between his love for Ana's pure religious soul and her beauty and Mesia seeing her mainly as a conquest, but a very desirable one as she seems so unattainable.

Ana herself is torn as well. There is a part of her that desires health, happiness, and nature that she envisions with Don Alvaro, but for the majority of the book she is having what I would describe as religious ecstasies where she gets so wrapped up in religious fervor that she makes herself physically ill. Don Fermin eats this up and loves her all the more for her purity of spirit. There is a lot of exploration of how he feels that he possesses her soul as her spiritual adviser. I read this on my kindle, so I can tell you that 85% of the way into this 800 page novel Ana finally consummates her relationship with Mesia. To be honest, I could not quite decipher what happens at the end in a scene between Don Fermin and Ana. Alas leaves this scene very vague.

So overall, I'm not sure what to say. Most of the time reading this I didn't enjoy it much. There were so many diversions into religious philosophy, many digressions, and also time shifts that didn't make much sense. The action is delayed so long that it became almost meaningless to me. But, then again, there are passages of beautiful writing and insights and I think there is definitely something there worth the time.

If you're a fan of literature from this era or of Spanish literature I'd love to hear some other thoughts on the book so it might be worth a try, but overall I'd have to say pass on this classic.

2 stars

#188 Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann translated by John E. Woods

Buddenbrooks was written by Thomas Mann when he was only 25 years old, but this reads as the work of a much older and more experienced writer. Buddenbrooks explores four generations of the Buddenbrooks family, a family that has everything going for it at the beginning of the book and declines through the 731 pages of this novel. The 19th century German family experiences business set backs, divorces, ill health, and death, all of which contribute to their demise. The family values itself very highly and refuses initially to see the problems occurring, instead relying on their pride in family to carry them along.

I loved this book. The detail of characterization and the exploration of family history were fantastic. I also loved the themes of entitlement vs. work ethic - sometimes both hard work and a sense of entitlement being balanced in one character, sometimes in contrasting characters. I haven't read much German literature, but I've read a lot of family epics from this general era. This differed in the specifics of money that were always present and the decline of all parts of the family - no one in the family is really successful here. Despite the decline of the family, and the multiple deaths (which by the way are written very convincingly - hit a little too close to home for me), it isn't an unrelentingly dark novel. I found it very readable and captivating. Definitely a 5 star read.

5 stars

it's great to hear that this is very readable. I haven't tackled Mann since the interminable The Magic Mountain and was a little scared to turn to this on my tbr pile

I loved The Magic Mountain, wanted to be in a sanatorium myself. So I guess I should be able to tackle The Buddenbrooks. Thanks to your great review I am now even willing to!

>168 arukiyomi:, >169 Simone2: I've heard such mixed reviews about The Magic Mountain but now I'm willing to try it even though I know it's pretty different.

#189 The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
This is a short story that I listened to as an audiobook, a medium I'm pretty new to and still experimenting with. It's an interesting story about a garden party that is about to happen when the family finds out that the father of a poor neighboring family has been killed in an accident. The family reacts differently to the news - Laura wanting to cancel the party and the rest feeling that she is overreacting.

I found it good but probably not very memorable.

3 stars

ETA - I'm not sure if I was supposed to read the whole collection to count this, but as it isn't listed that way on the list I have, I'm just reading the one story. I'm really not a short story fan in general, so I'll take the out!

I'm not sure if I was supposed to read the whole collection to count this, but as it isn't listed that way on the list I have, I'm just reading the one story.

I've followed several discussions on this and the consensus seems to be that we only "have" to read the one story. I really liked The Garden Party, but I had to read it a few times until it worked for me.

I'm a NZ'er so I grew up on Katherine Mansfield. The first thing of hers I came across was actually the short film 'The Dolls House' which we saw at primary school; I'm not sure if we followed that up with reading the story. Probably not given our ages. "I seen the little lamp" - ohh I love that line!

I can see how people find her difficult but my love of the short story can probably be dated as starting reading her works as a (fairly) young child.

We did 'At the Bay' as a school production in High School, that was great too.

I really really love her work :-)

What refreshing perspective, M1nks -- I've often heard NZers say "ugh, we HAD to read Mansfield" in school. The fact that she is assigned at all is a good thing--I say that because growing up in Canada we read almost no CanLit, which I think is just wrong. And I don't see it changing with my kids either. Anyway, my favourite Mansfield is "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped."

My first real encounter with Canlit (other than Who Has Seen the Wind in high school) was in my last year of uni when I purposely took a Canadian Women Authors course to learn more about my own country. My prof was visiting from Denmark and she was horrifed that we didn't know our own authors!

she was horrifed that we didn't know our own authors!

It IS horrifying!

I find that really surprising, I've always found Canadians to be very proud (in a good way) about their national identity. Like us Kiwi's you have a large neighbour which you need to keep putting in place and everybody else in the world thinks your accent sounds exactly the same!

I definitely knew my NZ authors growing up, through all stages of life. Plenty of NZ works were turned into short films or tv series by NZ on Air and similar and we always made a huge fuss of any author or film which 'made it' on the international stage. NZ books were always reviewed in the papers and magazines, they certainly had a high profile. Even more complex authors like Janet Frame were pushed as part of our national pride and sense of identity. Angel at My Table (the tv version) was a huge success and set off a wave of determined Janet Frame reading even though a fair chunk of the readers confessed that they really didn't like her work. At least they read her :-)

I found Pounamu Pounamu on a friend of the family's bookshelves one evening when I was bored listening to the adults talk and remember genuinely crying with laughter over the short story 'Beginning of the Tournament'

I'm sad to hear that Canada doesn't celebrate it's authors as we do ours, I think that's a real shame.

Oh we celebrate our authors plenty--they're just not taught in school, in my experience.

Like us Kiwi's you have a large neighbour which you need to keep putting in place

I really like that. Too true.

"Like us Kiwi's you have a large neighbour which you need to keep putting in place".

We love patronising our little brother/sister, and if a Kiwi gets too successful on the international stage we generally adopt them as Aussies, at least until they start falling apart (Russell Crowe et al).

Like us Kiwi's you have a large neighbour which you need to keep putting in place

Ha! Too true.

And not content with stealing our people you b*****d's also steal our horses and our food!

Enjoying the nationality commentary! Probably because I'm American, I don't often think about an author's nationality. I did not know that Katherine Mansfield was born and raised in New Zealand until after I finished the story. I have recently added looking up details like the author's nationality, original language the book was written in, publication date, etc. after reading for most books. Margaret Atwood is an example of an author who I had no idea was Canadian until I'd read a couple of her books.

Part of this may be that many "American authors" are American and may have lived here most or all of their lives, but still identify as a writer more with the country of their ancestors. Even in my family, we have a strong Norwegian influence on our holiday customs though no one in my direct line has lived there since the 1920s.

Margaret Atwood is an example of an author who I had no idea was Canadian until I'd read a couple of her books.

That's so interesting, because to me she just oozes Canadianess, and also, she's a national icon and has been since the 80s.

Part of this may be that many "American authors" are American and may have lived here most or all of their lives, but still identify as a writer more with the country of their ancestors

In our mobile world, this gets tricky really quickly. JM Coetzee is considered a South African novelist, but he's an Australian citizen. Rohinton Mistry is Canadian, but writes books that are entirely Indian. I really like to categorize my books, but sometimes I'm just stumped. For example, Slammerkin--the book is set in England, Emma Donoghue grew up in Ireland, but is now a Canadian citizen. I didn't feel comfortable tagging it "Irish" or "Canadian", but what is it? I'm finding more and more examples of this that start to make my categorizing sort of meaningless.

#190 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
audiobook, 3h59m, read by Nadia May

My second audiobook try for the year. First a review of the book, which I loved. This is the story of Miss Jean Brodie, a progressive teacher at a traditional school for girls in the 1930s. Her class is identified as the "Brodie set" and defined by their teacher's progressive attitude towards what is important in education - more of a real life approach vs. book learning. Miss Brodie always says she's "in her prime" and the girls try desperately to figure out what that means throughout the book. In their early years, there's innocent discussions of sex and Miss Brodie's love life and as the girls grow into their teenage years their understanding grows and their own experiences widen. I thought the book was an amusing and entertaining look at the teacher/student relationship and had some great personalities - especially Miss Jean Brodie. I'll definitely look for more books by Muriel Spark.

As far as the audiobook experience, I thought this reader, Nadia May, was great. I think I could get the hang of listening to audiobooks, but it's definitely a different way of experiencing a book. In some ways, I think I get a bit more out of it because hearing the words can make them stick, especially with the inflection a good reader brings. But I don't like not being able to flip back to reread passages or double check something I don't quite remember. I also have to really try to not tune out the words. I'm so used to tuning out extraneous noise (having kids, playing in a band!) that I have to work at not spacing out. I think I'll keep trying it occasionally though. I especially like it when I'm busy and don't have as much time to sit and read as I'd like.

Spark might be a bit challenging for audiobook formats because she does a lot of foreshadowing and jumping back and forth in time, so it's quite common to want to flip back occasionally to take a look at some passage...

#191 Misericordia by Benito Perez Galdos (also called Compassion)

This is an odd but touching Spanish Realist novel from 1897 that looks at the plight of the poor. Benina is the main character and is the loyal servant of a Dona Paca who has squandered her money and now lives in utter poverty. Benina remains loyal to her and takes care of her by begging on the streets and also keeping her spirits up. In order to not shame Dona Paca, Benina lies about where the money comes from, inventing the story that she has a job working for a Priest, Don Remualdo. Benina takes in several other people, seemingly a magnet for the unfortunate. Every pesata she comes upon is used to make others happy, though she does always reserve a small percentage for her personal stash. Towards the end of the book, the fictional Don Remualdo actually shows up at Dona Paca's home and shares that she has inherited an annuity from a distant relative. Dona Paca immediately falls into her old spending ways and also throws Benina aside.

The book explores poverty, compassion, and loyalty through some great characters. I did feel that I would have gotten more out of it if I had a better background in Spanish culture and history. Also, I get the feeling that the dialects the different characters use were important in the original Spanish and probably didn't translate very well. I did enjoy it overall, though.

3 stars

A side note that this is difficult to find in English, but there is a kindle version available on amazon.

#192 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
audiobook read by Martin Jarvis

Another audio book and this one worked really well. The horror story aspect of this book made it fun to listen to - kind of like sitting around a campfire hearing a ghost story. I also liked this reader, Martin Jarvis.

As for the book, what can I say? Though the "science" behind the transformation of Dr. Jekyll is very 1800s, the tale itself is a lot of fun - well-paced and suspenseful - even if you know the ending from the beginning. I enjoyed it!

4 stars for both the book and the reading

Oh, I wanted that book to be my next audio after I finished with Far From the Madding Crowd. I'll have to try and find the reader you like for a guaranteed good 'read'.

#193 Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong
This is a first person narration by a young Vietnamese girl, Hang, living in the 1980s who is an "exported worker" to a Russian textile factory. She is called by her Uncle, who used to be a local leader in the Vietnamese communist party, to visit him. On her train ride there, she revisits her life in flashbacks. She remembers her relationship with her mother from childhood through the present. Her mother (the sister of the uncle I mentioned) had a relationship with a young man who was not approved of by her communist brother and they were never married, though he is Hang's father. She also has an Aunt Tam, her father's sister, who is single and lavishes all of her earnings on Hang, the only descendant of her family.

Apparently, Huong's books were all banned in Vietnam for their political content and were first translated into English in 1993. Huong was even imprisoned in the 1990s for her outspokenness. Because I knew these things before reading the book, I was expecting it to be more politically damning than it was (I was thinking of Wild Swans by Jung Chang). Instead, I found this to be a book about the life of one typical family. It was definitely impacted by political upheaval and that comes through, but it wasn't the focus of the book. I actually found more insight into the daily life of the Vietnamese through the excellent descriptions of food and cultural celebrations and traditions.

Overall, I enjoyed this book, though it wasn't quite as memorable or radical as I hoped it might be.

4 stars

#194 The Waves by Virginia Woolf
In The Waves, Virginia Woolf has created a masterpiece. From the elegant prose to the innovative structure (yes, innovative even at a distance of almost 85 years) to the philosophy life and death, this book is a revelation. I found it both unsettling and oddly comforting.

Woolf uses the friendship of six people, three men and three women, to discover both the living world and death. The book is written in an almost poetic style, sticking largely to interior speak. There is very little direct interaction between the friends. There are nine sections, presented chronologically that range from early childhood through school, middle age, and the end of life. The writing is odd – it’s hard to figure out if you’re supposed to believe these people are really thinking these poetic words or is it almost what the brain sees and processes before we’d actually put language to it? In the end it doesn’t matter because it’s beautiful and different and therefore more impactful.

I read the paperback book with a pencil in hand – underlining passages, writing questions, and making connections – something I’ve not done since college but that made a big difference in my reading. This is a book that deserves to be analyzed and I intend to do some research on it after I let it settle and form some of my own opinions. It is also a book to be reread and I’m sure it will mean something different to me over the decades to come.

On a personal note, many of you know that my dad died very quickly and unexpectedly this year way too young – only 63. I think this book meant something much different to me after that experience than it would have before. The whole last section of Bernard’s musing on his life and inevitable death really struck me as a gradual personal acceptance of death and separation from earthly matters. That is, until the last paragraph.

I’m obviously pretty blown away by this book. It’s been a while since I read something both challenging to read and personal at the same time. I think it’s impressive that Woolf was able to do both – stretch a reader’s boundaries in language and form but still make a personal book that can be deeply connected to.

Fascinating.

5 stars

I liked the Waves when I read it, but I really didn't understand it. I think it's the most difficult of Virginia Woolf's books. I will definitely read it again. It's available for audiobook download and I've considered listening to it.

Wow, great review of The Waves. Moving it up my TBR pile.

>191 Nickelini: I'm not sure I understood what Woolf really meant either but it meant something to me. Whatever that's worth. I'm sure it will mean something different to me if I read it again down the road.

>192 annamorphic: definitely wait til you're in an experimental mood and want to read some beautiful prose

great review of what is, for me, the best novel I've ever read.

>194 arukiyomi: I went back and read your review of The Waves, and yes, we had a very similar reaction. I'm still amazed that something written in 1931 still feels so new and revolutionary.

#195 Evelina by Frances Burney
I loved this! Many Austen fans will probably recognize Fanny Burney's name as often suggested as a precursor to and influence on Jane Austen's writing. That's the reason I picked up this book and I found tons of obvious influences on Jane Austen in plot, characters, and style. I was really excited to find that I liked the book on it's own merit just as much as for the glimpse into Austen's influences.

This is the story of Evelina, a girl who was raised by the kindly Rev. Villars after her mother dies in childbirth and her father refuses to claim her as his own. She goes to London with some family friends after being brought up in the country and there every man she meets seems to fall in love with the beautiful and good Evelina. Evelina has a bit of the naivety of a Catherine Morland - she's always getting into situations that she doesn't know how to handle. There is a wide cast of characters - some legitimately funny, some annoying, some stuck up, some very proper. There are misunderstandings that lead to most of the drama and some of these go on a bit too long (Austen was a much better editor!), but I had a lot of fun reading this.

I definitely recommend that any Austen fan give this book a try. I'm not saying it's as good as Austen, but it was fascinating to read a book that I imagine Austen loved. And I really enjoyed it in it's own right as well.

4 stars

I have added it to my TBR. More old classics!

#196 The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
audiobook, 3h59m, read by Tony Jay

This was really silly. It's an example of an early gothic novel so I suppose if you're really into the genre it might be interesting, but I was not into it. The only thing it had going for it was that it's really short, as opposed to The Mysteries of Udolpho which I didn't even finish reading. I sometimes like modern day gothic books, but the originals are not for me!

2 stars

#197 The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

The New York Trilogy is a collection of novellas originally published separately and later collected into this one volume. All three can stand on their own, but they definitely share themes and the last story sort of ties in to the first two. These are all hard to describe. In a simple way, they are detective stories, but they are also much more than that. There is something modern in the writing style of all three, though I don't know the correct literary terms to describe his brand of modernism. The primary link between the three novellas to me was that the main detective becomes obsessed with the case, actually the person, that he is working on. Auster also inserts himself into his writing, but from a distance. In the first novella, he actually uses his name, has a Scandinavian wife, and is a writer. All true. It's not the important part of the book, but it lends to this modern fiction feel in a weird way. There are many questions of identity that lead to madness and confusion over what is true.

I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in detective stories who likes a modern twist. I've had a hard time describing them, but I imagine that the layered themes and interconnections within the detective framework would appeal to many readers.

4 stars

#198 The Quiet American by Graham Greene
I know this book is liked by many around here, but I just didn't enjoy it. It is a look at Vietnam in the 1950s, with different factions competing for political power and plenty of foreign journalists around to muddy the waters. The book is told from Fowler's point of view, a British journalist. While exploring the war and politics, there is also a central story of Fowler and Pyle's (an youthful, naive American) competition for a young Vietnamese girl, Phuong. We find out at the beginning that Pyle has been murdered and Fowler's memories gradually uncover his story.

While I appreciated how politics and anti-war philosophy were woven together with a personal story, I just really didn't like the characters and hated the whole love triangle aspect. I found Pyle unbelievable and one-dimensional and Phuong, as well, had no personality and seemed like a stereotype.

To be fair, this was the first audiobook I've listened to where I really hated the reader, Joseph Porter, and that definitely colored my view of the book. I will definitely not listen to another audiobook read by him - he had a horrible natural speaking voice and then he tried to do American accents and French accents and it was just terrible.

There are many readers around here who I respect who have a great liking for this novel, so don't let my experience put you off, but I really can't say I enjoyed this book. I am still willing to try other Graham Greene novels at some point, though.

2 stars

I hear you on this one. But please please do not postpone Grahame Greene based on this experience. Grab a copy of The Heart of the Matter or The Power and the Glory and you will not regret it. By way of illustration, I was disappointed with The Quiet American *because* Greene is one of my favourite authors.

I've had mixed results with Greene, but he is growing on me. I thought the last one I tried--The End of the Affair, which I listened to on audiobook read by Colin Firth, was just spectacular. I think you have to get your head around the mid-20th century British male mindset. If you can do that, you'll click with it. Hmmm. Maybe.

Yes, I agree with Arukiyomi and Nickelini. I loved A Farewell to Arms and especially The End of the Affair. I also liked The Quiet American though.

Thanks for the tips on what to try next. I won't give up on Greene, especially since the reader on this audio version must have colored my view on the book, but I do need a little break!

erm... A Farewell to Arms is great. It's just not Grahame Greene!

>205 arukiyomi: How stupid.... How could I write that and didn't notice it?!

Oh, that's too bad. But there is a world of Greene out there if you want to try more. I would actually disagree with arukiyomi - The Heart of the Matter is good but I don't think it is better than The Quiet American. I haven't tried The Power and the Glory yet but its short, I do know that.

Greene is absolutely problematic regarding women (although I haven't read The End of the Affair and I think a woman is a major character in that book and not just a trophy). I put him into the same category as John le Carre. Neither of them can write realistic women. But the stories are so good!

#199 Felicia's Journey by William Trevor
I read my first book by William Trevor back in May of this year, when I picked up and loved The Story of Lucy Gault. I immediately bought a few more of Trevor's books and I picked up Felicia's Journey hoping I'd love it as much. While I didn't think it was quite as perfect as The Story of Lucy Gault, I still found the writing beautiful and characters deeply drawn. Trevor's writing has an old-fashioned feel in the very best sense of the phrase. When I picked this up I knew nothing about it - not even the genre - and I think that's the way to read it, so I'm not going to give any plot details away. I think that on the whole, the plot here actually was a little weak, but the writing is so great that it didn't even bother me.

So there's my cryptic review. Sorry for the lack of info, but I loved seeing these characters unfold and wondering if what I thought was going on was really going on.

4 stars

#200 The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Well, book 200 ended up being an unintentional reread! War of the Worlds is one of those books that I couldn't quite remember if I'd read or not when I initially went through the list so I didn't cross it off. As soon as I started listening to this audiobook, I remembered reading the book. Oh well, it was still fun and nice to listen to it instead of reading. This time I had a reader I liked, Christopher Hurt.

I particularly like Wells' comparisons of how the Martians viewed humans to how humans view animals. Overall, considering when it was written, I think it was done well, but it's not really my thing, so I'm still only giving it three stars.

3 stars

Congrats on #200, too bad it was only mediocre for you. Here's to many more!

>210 paruline: Thanks! I'm in the middle of Dr. Zhivago, which I had kind of thought would be my 200th book, but I didn't factor in the audiobooks I've been listening to. It will probably be 201 or 202. In the end, no big deal! I have a long way to go!

#201 Thank you, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
audiobook by LA Theatre Works, 1h30m

This was my first introduction to Bertie Wooster and Jeeves and it was a lot of fun. I can definitely see myself reading or listening to more of these when I need some British humor. The audio book was done as a staged reading, with different actors for each part. It worked very well.

3 stars

I love P.G. Wodehouse. I highly recommend you read more of his work, I've yet to find a dud.

Wodehouse is great. I love him and I agree with M1nks - I've yet to read a bad one.

#202 The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
audiobook, 4h42m, read by Satya Babha

This short novel is present as a monologue. Changez, a Pakistani, relates his time in America to an American visiting Lahore while they sit at a cafe. He tells of his time as a student at Princeton and his high-powered job in NYC after graduation. He also tells intimate details of his love life with an American woman named Erica, still suffering from the grief of losing her childhood friend and boyfriend. Changez's story takes place surrounding 9/11 and we hear about his growing disillusionment with America and his homesickness for his Pakistan.

The monologue aspect of the novel annoyed me in some ways. Changez is supposedly having a conversation with this American, but the only way the American's comments are recorded are through Changez's reactions to them. The ending is also extremely ambiguous and ends abruptly. I also thought the relationship between Erica and Changez was kind of annoying and almost disruptive to what I thought was the main point - one Pakistani's experience living in NYC during and after 9/11.

However, listening to this on audio really saved the book for me. The reader, Satya Bhabha, was excellent and made the monologue format work for me where I'm not sure it would have in print. This is the first example in my limited audiobook experience of a book that I'm fairly certain I liked more in audio than I would have as a physical book.

3 stars

#203 The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
Mini-review: What is more brutal: fairy tales or real life? From the Victorian era through WWI, this epic family novel brings the era to life through history, the arts, and memorable characters.

I don't think I've ever been as desperate for a book to magically never end as I was during the last 200 pages of The Children's Book. I would have been thrilled if this 879 page novel was double the size if I could spend more time with the multitude of characters in this book.

Byatt has created a world of fairy tales, with all of their brutality and wonder, that mirror real life and vice versa. The central family is headed by Olive Wellwood, a writer of children's books, and mother to seven children. The first part of the book focuses on the adults and their friends and relations during the end of the Victorian era. They are progressive for the time, but still "Victorian" on the outside, though we find later that there have been many secrets. As the children grow up and verge on adulthood, the Edwardian era begins. The adults become a bit marginalized here, as is often true to life, and the younger generation's struggles come to the fore. Byatt does an amazing job of using history of the period to integrate seamlessly with her characters' motivations, problems, and interactions with each other and their parents' generation. Women's suffrage is central for a while and then, of course, the book ends with the horror of WWI as so many lives did. As the historical time period changes, so does the language and tone of the book. I found this skill impressive.

The arts are central to the book. Obviously, writing is central, but also pottery and puppetry and theater and poetry. How does Byatt know so much? It's really amazing how much I learn when I read one of her books. None of it seems gratuitous, though. I feel that it all adds to the tapestry of the story.

Byatt is a dense writer. Her language is ornate and poetic and I easily got lost in her world. The fairy tales that she creates or recreates relate to each character and each character's reactions to the fairy tales also illuminate his/her personality. And there are many, many characters to keep track of. They are all individuals and all well-developed, though, and I wouldn't have wanted any of them to not be there.

This book takes an investment of time with its length and density, but it is well worth it. I loved it.

5 stars

Nice comments on The Children's Book. I loved it too. What is more brutal: fairy tales or real life?. Yes--that really sums it up.

I found this novel unusually visual--so much so that I just had to create a Pinterest board for it (you can see it here if you're interested: http://www.pinterest.com/nickelini/the-childrens-book-as-byatt/

>217 Nickelini: That is amazing! I remember that you did that when you read The Children's Book, but it didn't mean much to me until I read the book. It's a beautiful page and captures the book beautifully. I didn't think of looking for the footage of Emily Davison's act of protest. Thanks for sharing!

#204 Sula by Toni Morrison
Mini-review: A girlhood friendship is tested by the realities and pressures of adult life.

This is another excellent novel by Toni Morrison. It is set in Ohio and centers around two girls, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who grow up best friends, go their separate ways as teenagers, and are reunited when Sula returns to town. Nel has stayed in the Bottom, married and had children. Sula went off to college. When she returns, she wreaks havoc on the community, including Nel.

This novel is really a novel of the friendship of two girls and how/if that friendship can survive womanhood. Like all of Morrison's novels, the language is beautiful and the themes and metaphors are deep and meaningful. This sounds like a cliche, but Morrison's writing is the definition of "powerful" writing to me. This early novel is a little less complex and multi-layered than some of her other works, but it was still excellent.

4 stars

Everyone seems to love this book. I will have make room for this shortly I think.

At over 200 posts, I think it is time to continue this thread, everyone. Thanks for all the great comments and looking forward to more!