Chatterbox's 2013 Adventures in Bibliomania -- Episode Six

As always, a poem to kick things off.

This is from Louis MacNeice, one of the great poems from the 1930s, who didn't have quite as long a run as did Auden or Spender, and is still less known. Born in Belfast, he was educated in England, but I think a lot of his poetry retains a kind of Irish rhythm to it. This was first published in 1940 or thereabouts.

Entirely

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.

And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

I was getting bored of thread five, so decided to move house. Not sure where the boredom came from -- perhaps too many mediocre books this spring/summer?

Hopefully the new quarters will lead to lots of fabulous reading!

A guide to the ratings, which are highly subjective:
1.5 or less: A tree gave its life so that this book could be printed and distributed?
1.5 to 2.7: Are you really prepared to give up hours of your life for this?? I wouldn't recommend doing so...
2.8 to 3.3: Do you need something to fill in some time waiting to see the dentist? Either reasonably good within a ho-hum genre (chick lit or thrillers), something that's OK to read when you've nothing else with you, or that you'll find adequate to pass the time and forget later on.
3.4 to 3.8: Want to know what a thumping good read is like, or a book that has a fascinating premise, but doesn't quite deliver? This is where you'll find 'em.
3.9 to 4.4: So, you want a hearty endorsement? These books have what it takes to make me happy I read them.
4.5 to 5: The books that I wish I hadn't read yet, so I could experience the joy of discovering them again for the first time. Sometimes disquieting, sometimes sentimental faves, sometimes dramatic -- they are a highly personal/subjective collection!

Stars/scores are given in brackets after the book details.

Asterisks (*) mark books that I have re-read. I'll be trying to keep re-reads to 5% of the total this year. Audiobooks will be marked as such. I'm going to try to increase my non-fiction reading in the final months of the year.

This is the running tally of my total 2013 reading, which includes the books I have read for the 2013 Categories challenge:




And here is the ticker for my third batch of 75 books, read for this challenge. The last group was a bit disappointing: not only did I read less non-fiction than I had intended, but there were a rather larger number of books that I simply didn't like that much or that were rather underwhelming. Not sure if it's me, or that I'm just making poor reading choices? Hopefully this batch will offer more four and five star reads!




1. How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny (3.5) STARTED 7/12/13, FINISHED 7/16/13 (fiction)
2. At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances by Alexander McCall Smith STARTED 7/14/13, FINISHED 7/17/13) (fiction)
3. On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman (3.7), STARTED 7/14/13, FINISHED 7/18/13 (fiction)
4. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (4.9) STARTED 7/11/13, FINISHED 7/19/13 (fiction)
5. Life After Life by Jill McCorkle (3.1) STARTED 7/16/13, FINISHED 7/19/13 (fiction)
6. Through the Window by Julian Barnes (4.3) STARTED 7/19/13, FINISHED 7/22/13 (non-fiction)
7. Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally (5), STARTED 7/20/13, FINISHED 7/23/13 (fiction)
8. The Longest Road by Philip Caputo (4.4) STARTED 7/24/13, FINISHED 7/25/13 (non-fiction)
9. Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini (2.8) STARTED 7/2/13, FINISHED 7/24/13 (fiction; audiobook)
10. *Thunder on the Right by Mary Stewart (3.4) STARTED 7/23/13, FINISHED 7/25/13 (fiction)
11. A Letter of Mary by Laurie King (3.5) STARTED 7/21/13, FINISHED 7/25/13 (fiction)
12. Tun-huang by Yasushi Inoue (2.9) STARTED 7/5/13, FINISHED 7/26/13 (fiction)
13. Oracle Lake by Paul Adam (4) STARTED 7/26/13, FINISHED 7/27/13 (fiction)
14. Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (3) STARTED 7/27/13, FINISHED 7/28/13 (fiction)
15. *The Greengage Summer by Rumer Gooden (4.8), STARTED 7/25/13, FINISHED 7/28/13 (fiction; audiobook)
16. I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson (3.3) STARTED 7/28/13, FINISHED 7/29/13 (fiction)
17. The Engagements by Courtney Sullivan (2.8) STARTED 7/22/13, FINISHED 7/30/13 (fiction)
18. When Asia Was the World by Stewart Gordon (3.5) STARTED 7/27/13, FINISHED 7/30/13 (non-fiction)
19. The Good Rain by Timothy Egan (3.8), STARTED 7/18/13, FINISHED 7/30/13 (non-fiction)
20. The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna (4.8) STARTED 7/30/13, FINISHED 7/31/13 (fiction)
21. Declaration by William Hoageland (3.85) STARTED 7/2/13, FINISHED 7/31/13 (non-fiction)
22. What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube by John Lanchester (3.7) STARTED 7/29/13, FINISHED 7/31/13 (non-fiction)
23. The Edge of Nowhere by Elizabeth George (3) READ 8/1/13 (fiction)
24. The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris (3.75) STARTED 7/31/13, FINISHED 8/2/13 (fiction)
25. Long Live the King by Fay Weldon (2.8) READ 8/2/13 (fiction)
26. The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not to Stay by Hooman Majd (4), STARTED 7/31/13, FINISHED 8/3/13 (non-fiction)
27. The Last Man in Russia by Oliver Bullough (4.2) STARTED 7/28/13, FINISHED 8/4/13 (non-fiction)
28. Divergent by Veronica Roth (3.25) READ 8/4/13 (fiction)
29. Sleight of Hand by Philip Margolin (2.9), STARTED 8/4/13, FINISHED 8/5/13 (fiction)
30. *Fatal Majesty by Reay Tannahill (4.25), STARTED 7/31/13, FINISHED 8/6/13 (fiction)
31. *Hamlet by William Shakespeare (4.75), STARTED 8/2/13, FINISHED 8/6/13 (drama)
32. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (4.75) READ 8/6/13 (drama)
33. The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig (3.9), STARTED 8/6/13, FINISHED 8/8/13 (fiction)
34. Revenge of the Tide by Elizabeth Haynes (4) STARTED 8/8/13, FINISHED 8/9/13 (fiction)
35. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simison (3.2) STARTED 8/5/13, FINISHED 8/9/13 (fiction)
36. The Ambassador's Daughter by Pam Jenoff (2.8), STARTED 8/9/13, FINISHED 8/10/13 (fiction)
37. My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron (4), STARTED 8/2/13, FINISHED 8/12/13 (fiction)
38. Making Money by Terry Pratchett (3.8), STARTED 8/9/13, FINISHED 8/12/13 (fiction)
39. Slingshot by Matthew Dunn (3.3), STARTED 8/10/13, FINISHED 8/12/13 (fiction)
40. Thieves of Book Row by Travis McDade (4.3), STARTED 8/11/13, FINISHED 8/13/13 (non-fiction)
41. Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson (4.7), STARTED 7/20/13, FINISHED 8/15/13 (non-fiction)
42. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4.4) STARTED 8/3/13, FINISHED 8/14/13 (fiction)
43. The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith (3.1) STARTED 8/12/13, FINISHED 8/14/13 (fiction)
44. The Great Pearl Heist by Molly Caldwell Crosby (2.9) STARTED 8/15/13, FINISHED 8/16/13 (non-fiction)
45. Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch (4.2) STARTED 8/6/13, FINISHED 8/17/13 (fiction; audiobook)
46. Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (3.3), STARTED 8/9/13, FINISHED 8/18/13 (fiction)
47. Imperfect Harmony by Stacy Horn (3.5), STARTED 8/17/13, FINISHED 8/18/13 (non-fiction)
48. Lost Girls by Robert Kolker (4.25), STARTED 8/16/13, FINISHED 8/19/13 (non-fiction)
49. Among the Janeites by Deborah Yaffe (3.9), STARTED 8/16/13, FINISHED 8/21/13 (non-fiction)
50. The Lantern Network by Ted Allbeury (3.6) STARTED 8/19/13, FINISHED 8/21/13 (fiction)
51. The White Princess by Philippa Gregory (3.25) STARTED 8/18/13, FINISHED 8/23/13 (fiction)
52. China Trade by S.J. Rozan (3), READ 8/23/13 (fiction)
53. The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan (4.1), STARTED 8/18/13, FINISHED 8/23/13 (fiction)
54. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (4.3) STARTED 8/17/13, FINISHED 8/24/13 (fiction)
55. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (4) STARTED 8/21/13, FINISHED 8/25/13 (fiction)
56. *Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (4.3) STARTED 8/09/13, FINISHED 8/25/13 (fiction/audiobook in part)
57. Stranded by Alex Kava (3.3), STARTED 8/24/13, FINISHED 8/25/13 (fiction)
58. The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett (3.4) STARTED 8/25/13, FINISHED 8/26/13 (fiction)
59. Mister Blue (4.5) by Jacques Poulin, STARTED 8/24/13, FINISHED 8/28/13 (fiction)
60. Christian Nation (3.5) by Frederic Rich, STARTED 8/27/13, FINISHED 8/29/13 (fiction)
61. Harvest (4.6) by Jim Crace, STARTED 8/28/13, FINISHED 8/29/13 (fiction)
62. Winter of the World (2.9) by Ken Follett, STARTED 8/19/13, FINISHED 8/30/13 (fiction)
63. Hild (4.3) by Nicola Griffith, STARTED 8/28/13, FINISHED 8/31/13 (fiction)
64. The Moor (3.7) by Laurie R. King, STARTED 9/1/13, FINISHED 9/2/13 (fiction)
65. Don't Want to Miss a Thing by Jill Mansell (3.2), STARTED 9/2/13, FINISHED 9/3/13 (fiction)
66. Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes (4.1), READ 9/3/13 (fiction)
67. Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett (3.3) STARTED 9/2/13, FINISHED 9/4/13 (fiction)
68. Murder in Chelsea by Victoria Thompson (3.8) READ 9/4/13 (fiction)
69. *Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling (4.3) STARTED 9/3/13, FINISHED 9/5/13 (fiction)
70. Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch (4) STARTED 8/27/13, FINISHED 9/5/13 (fiction/audiobook)
71. *Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling (4) STARTED 9/5/13, FINISHED 9/6/13 (fiction)
72. The Buy Side by Turney Duff (3) STARTED 8/28/13, FINISHED 9/7/13 (non-fiction)
73. The Caretaker by A.X. Ahmad (3.4) STARTED 9/8/13, FINISHED 9/9/13 (fiction)
74. *Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling (4.25), STARTED 9/6/13, FINISHED 9/9/13 (fiction)
75. *The Governess by Evelyn Hervey (3.7), STARTED 9/9/13, FINISHED 9/10/13 (fiction)

* Re-read.

Some subsidiary stuff. I read a lot for the TIOLI (Take it or leave it) challenges, as it's a great way for me to force myself to be a bit more random than I might like in my reading, and try new things or dig out moribund books from my TBR to squeeze into a challenge.

This month (August), PaulCranswick has challenged me to read 15,000 pages for TIOLI. I usually read a lot of books, so that was less of a challenge than reading a quantity of pages, and I have read at least one book per challenge twice this year, so this is a new way for me to challenge myself! Here's the ticker...




Also, I'm expecting to read a lot of the Man Booker Prize nominees between now and the date that the prize is awarded. Almost always it's an interesting assortment of novels, some of which I end up loving, some of which I hate, but I'm usually glad to have had the chance to encounter new works.




1. The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. Read in March, 4.5 stars
2. The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris. STARTED 7/31/13, FINISHED 8/2/13, 3.75 stars
3. The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan. STARTED 8/19/13, FINISHED 8/23/13 4.1 stars
4. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri STARTED 8/23/13, FINISHED 8/25/13 4.4 stars
5. Harvest by Jim Crace, STARTED 8/26/13, FINISHED 8/30/13 4.5 stars
6. Unexploded by Alison MacLeod, STARTED 8/27/13, FINISHED 8/30/13, 4.25 stars

Oooh, the critter du thread (or whatever the equivalent is of soup du jour for a not-quite-monthly thread!) And it's a mammoth... :-) Referring, no doubt, to the magnitude of the 15,000 page August challenge? Thanks, Robert!

And more specifically it is a woolly mammoth.

Robert

Suz - 4 days = 2148 so pro rata = 16,647 ahead of target!
Congratulations on a new thread and thanks for putting up the poem by Louis MacNeice, one of my favourites. Might prompt me to read his Autumn Journal this month which I have on the shelves a-waiting.

Happy new thread!

Great poem to tee off your new thread, Suz! I'm reading The Testament of Mary today. Looks like a one dayer for me which means it probably took you about an hour, yes?

Louis MacNeice was a friend of my grandparents, my grandmother was one of his literary executors. I saw the booklet for Winnie's funeral, and The Sunlight on the Garden, another MacNeice poem, was one of the readings. It's also been used as the title for a memoir by Elizabeth Speller.

It is a small world! Luci, is that the same Elizabeth Speller who has been writing WW1 mysteries?

Lynda -- it took a few hours, as it's a book to read slowly to allow the ideas and thoughts to percolate and to savor the prose.... :-)

Happy new thread, and fair fortune with the 15k dash.

Happy New Thread! I'm off to consider "tigerish waters." I do like the poem!

Lovely little turns of phrase, MacNeice has!

Utterly gorgeous beautiful day outdoors -- bright blue sky and temps in the low/mid 70s. And I am stuck indoors, waiting for phone calls! (From the owner of the Washington Capitals & Wizards, for a story about sports investing, and from an analyst about Best Buy, for a new project I'm working on that I'm hoping will replace the Thomson Reuters income I lost so suddenly in early May.

Tigger, however, seems not to care about the superlative weather outdoors. He has decided his new 'home' is a small Amazon box (which arrived with my latest Amazon Vine pick last week) which I had begun using as a depository for paper recycling near my desk. Not sure how he'll cope when it vanishes on Thursday (garbage night)...

Off to NYC tomorrow on (gulp) Megabus -- book circle tomorrow night, where we'll be discussing both Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Will finish both on the bus -- I know I'll have LOTS of time. And in the meantime, alternate between them and a re-read of Fatal Majesty by Reay Tannahill. There's a 50/50 chance I'll have a check in my mailbox, so please, digits crossed as I don't really want to have to go back down until the end of August for the next migraine meds refill, and I could do with some in/come to set against the persistent out/go.

Meanwhile, some mindless reading to set against the Great Drama:

247. Sleight of Hand by Philip Margolin is a predictable and yet still mildly entertaining suspense novel surrounding the ongoing adventures of private detective and former cop Dana Cutler. This time around she is drawn into the case of one Charles Benedict, a criminal defense attorney who has killed someone (not a spoiler...) and framed her husband for the crime, and now is defending him. If you can swallow that premise, you'll find this a good airplane read. I picked it up on a whim from the library new books shelf. Meh; it blocked out the 'real world' for a few hours! 2.9 stars. Not actively bad, but...

Clearly, I need a really great new book. And I don't think I can wait until the new novel by Joseph Boyden comes out in Canada next month.

Lovely poem up top. I haven't read any MacNeice, so thanks for the intro.

11: The same Elizabeth Speller, yes.

Hi Suz- I've been having a hard-time keeping up with you, maybe I'll jump in early this time and see if I do any better. Hope your reading quality picks up for you. Fingers crossed.

Ha, Mark -- the words "pot", "kettle" and "black" spring to my mind!! How many threads are you up to so far??? You, Richard and Paul put the rest of us to shame, I think!

248. Fatal Majesty by Reay Tannahill was a re-read of a novel in which Mary, Queen of Scots is the main character, but the perspective is provided by her lady in waiting, Mary Fleming, and her secretary of state, Lethington, who emerges as the real hero of the story -- an 18th century statesman trapped in the mid 16th century and dealing with noblemen with a 15th century view of the world. Tannahill has a sympathetic view of Mary, despite her poor judgment, and takes a damning view of the shenanigans of the Scottish lords, which doomed her rule. Great for historical fiction buffs. 4.25 stars.

Brief update post a fascinating dual discussion of Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

249. Hamlet by Shakespeare -- what is there left to say? Shakespeare's language calls out to be read aloud, not silently to oneself. The plot? Well, the bodies REALLY pile up here. But Shakespeare is incredibly inventive with language. I read this over and over again under duress for my Int'l Baccalaureate in English in high school, and then again for a Shakespeare discussion group. I thought I didn't want to re-read it; I was wrong. 4.75 stars.

250. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard is a fascinating play to read in juxtaposition; it takes two minor characters and puts them front and center, trying to puzzle out just what kind of narrative they are trapped in. In many ways, Stoppard is as much of a wonderful wordsmith as was Shakespeare, but with four centuries or so separating these two plays, so much is different. The Player in this play is an ominous/dark figure; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern slightly bumbling characters who never quite figure out what they're doing or who is manipulating them -- Claudius? Shakespeare? Stoppard? Hamlet? -- and are unable to leave the stage. The final chunk of this is utterly brilliant. 4.75 stars.

OK, back to some mindless prose. Or something.

Talking to myself... Oh well. Woke up this morning with a potentially nasty migraine, so I'm going back home from NY on the train instead of the bus and perhaps a bit earlier than planned. I'll run a couple of errands and then see how I feel. Just felt like whining about it briefly. On the plus side, there was a check waiting for me in NY and my migraine meds were filled with the affordable to generic not the costly brand ($53 vs $493/month) so it could be a lot worse!

YAY on $440 saved!!

Glad that you enjoyed the discussion. Andrea knows her onions about plays, all righty alright.

217: (old thread) See your point of Adams and the Alien and Sedition acts. But Adams thought being president meant doing what Congress told him to do. Poor John. And keeping Washington's cabinet (with Hamiliton and Jefferson, the twin backstabbers) was a mistake.

Still snort and giggle to realize that our founders really thought that the person who got the most votes would be president and the person who got the second most votes would be vice president. The Obama-McCain administration, anybody?

They celebrated Washington's Birthday when Washington was president and Adams thought when HE was president they would celebrate HIS birthday - but they decided to keep on celebrating Washingtons B-day instead. John threw a snit-fit that lasted almost his whole administration - he had come back from Braintree to Washington for the anticipated celebration!

1: I like your "If" better than Rudyard Kiplings "If"

5 How about "bete cordon"? Instead of critter du thread?

20: R&G are Dead is a corker - Stoppard is so funny that its easy to miss he is after much bigger game on this one.

The first scene with the coin tossing is the howler for me - especially if you get a really good actor who can totally deadpan it.

Sorry we missed Book Circle - the OTHER book group that i have the honor of moderating wound up scheduled for the same night

Hi Suz

I hope you are enjoying your new environment. I imagine you miss the little guy who lived in your building.

I hope the migraines are at bay and life is good to you.

Piffle, woke up with a migraine at 4:30 this morning. Not fabulous. Came home earlier than planned as a result. But thanks for the good wishes on that, Linda!

Jim, you & Judy need to send in your picks for the short list! Right now only a single book after 9 people have chosen has 2 votes... Personally, I'm rooting for something by Kafka.

Richard, if you acknowledge the eminence of this play, then it must be good indeed, given your aversion to reading plays! I do find with Stoppard that I have to read and re-read, for layers of meaning. Simply seeing it isn't enough; it all flashes by -- the layers beneath the wit.

Suz I sent in my list early. I will noodge Judy to get hers in.

We just did pick-a-book in my other book group - like pulling teeth to get twenty people to agree that it's Tuesday, let along agree on a book to read.

Kafka is so Kafka-esque. But after you say that I'm not sure there is anything much more to say. We read "Amerika" a few years back.

Hi Suzanne, my wish list and I thank you for all the great suggestions I have been gathering here while I get caught up, including that rare 5 star read, Daughters of Mars.

Hope both your migraines and your neighbour are staying calm and quiet, allowing you both restful nights and productive days.

The migraine has been bullied into submission again; hurrah! Not sure I'm ready for any more 'heavy' reading, but I have some light fluff amidst the ARCs that must get read by next Thursday, luckily! I'm just glad that I feel like reading once more...

There's a reason that the phrase 'Kafkaesque' came to be! He is one of the authors whose works I would enjoy discussing after I read them, I think, because I know disgracefully little about him or them. Just as I would have enjoyed being around when the group was discussing Nabokov, but that ship has sailed, I fear. I'm also rooting for some more non-Southern US writers (after Erskine Caldwell, Faulkner and others, I'd be happy with Bellow or Updike or Philip Roth, for instance.) I also picked Candide, The Mill on the Floss and Passage to India.

Yay for bullied migraines!

(And, no, I have nothing more insightful to offer. It's been a long week :-) )

Yay for disappearing migraines. I wondered if you had come across this nonfiction series by Haus Histories, 'Makers of the Modern World: the peace conferences of 1919-1923 and their aftermath'. I picked up the one on New Zealand's then Prime Minister W.F. Massey who lobbied for NZ to take over the mandate for Western Samoa from the Germans. Each book looks at a different attending delegation.
http://www.hauspublishing.com/books/12

No; good heavens. I shall have to track those down, Kerry -- thanks!!

251. The Passion of the Purple Plumeria by Lauren Willig is about as far as you can possibly get from Hamlet, and yet it was still silly and fun -- just no nutritional value whatsoever. It's the latest in a long-running series featuring a group of improbable spies led by the Pink Carnation (who takes over from the Purple Gentian), all of which is a spoof on Baroness Orczy, only set against Napoleon rather than Robespierre. In this case, the Carnation's younger sister vanishes from her school, along with her roomate, entangling Jane Wooliston and the formidable Miss Gwen in a plot to seize the Berar jewels. (in the parallel modern day narrative, as always less compelling, Colin and Eloise seek out the same jewels.) Lurve comes for Miss Gwen -- possibly -- in the shape of a colonel who has arrived from India (home of the jewels, originally) and father of the sister's roomate. Willig has a knack for a goofy turn of phrase. One of the arch-villains has "the latest in designer iron maidens", while fortunately most of them "seemed to have a convenient weakness for convoluted plots." Unfortunately for our adventurers, in England in 1805, it is still possible to encounter "the odd highwayman with delusions of competence" and find houses "relentlessly decorated by someone who had lurched at good taste and missed by the length of several yards of bric-a-brac." Amusing, if insubstantive. 3.9 stars.

Sounds like fun and just the thing to chase away the last of the defeated migraine. Good!

252. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simison is getting a lot of buzz, but much of its charm escaped me. The narrator, Don, clearly battles an array of "wiring" challenges (somewhere along the Asperger's spectrum?) but within the first 20 or 30 pages, the situations and related issues have already been done to death. Leaving us with an odd boy meets desirable girl and tries to win her even when he doesn't really know he loves her kind of plot that is typical of the Harlequins I stopped reading when I was 16 or so. It's not bad, just not all that witty or charming to me, and ultra-predictable. Which is why I kept putting it down and not finishing it. Made a final push so that I could review it for Amazon Vine. 3.2 stars. This was an ARC; the book comes out here in October.

>20 Chatterbox:. I love Stoppard's stuff. I saw Arcadia not long ago at one of the neighborhood theaters.

I was talking about Stoppard with a friend after the gathering, and he confessed that after R&G, he has been less than overwhelmed by Stoppard's plays. His reasoning: they are verbal pyrotechnics, plays about ideas and in which people play with ideas. I completely agree with him on that score -- but that is part of what I enjoy about them! Is he causing tremendous upheaval in the world of drama by doing something new -- is he the next Beckett or Pinter? Nope. But what he is, is pretty fabulous for those of us who love words and language and ideas. Arcadia was my real introduction to Stoppard, Becky, and I was blown away by it. Went when my mother was visiting NY and Lincoln Center had staged it -- mebbe 1995? Bloody brilliant.

Arcadia is being staged at the Shaw Festival this year- the production has had great reviews and performances are sold out. ( they used the smallest stage at Shaw)

And one more of the countless Amazon Vine ARCs waiting to be read and reviewed can be checked off the list!

253. Dark Tide by Elizabeth Haynes, aka, Revenge of the Tide is a suspense yarn that turned out to be much better than I had anticipated. When we first meet the narrator, she is renovating a barge she has bought, on a river in Kent, and living aboard it, fulfilling her dream. How she came to be there, however, is a tale that unfolds only gradually and turns out to be chilling. Because before Genevieve quit her job(s), she was living in an edgy way -- with a respectable day job, but pole-dancing at a member's club in the evenings. And the factors that drove her to leave London and the latter job, it seems, may have followed her to her new refuge... I liked the way Haynes revealed the past story bit by bit, alongside the current developments. This works well as a suspense "thumping good read", even if it's a little predictable. Still, nice to discover a new author in the genre! 4 stars.

Shame about The Rosie Project, I expected it to be better than that. I'm into the double digits now in the library queue for the book with another 200+ after me.
I've read a few good Australian novels, not literary, but good reads, of late. Look out for The cleansing of Mahommed by Chris McCourt and A man you can bank on by Derek Hansen. The Cartographer by Peter Twohig is another but I haven't read it yet.

Yes, and some of my other ARCs aren't doing much for me, either... But they have to be read.

Compensation will arrive in the form of the weekly Proms concert broadcast; a re-broadcast of something earlier in the week, I think -- Tchaikovsky, Bantock, Walton and Elgar, with the National Symphony of Wales. Not the same as being there, but...

Pro rata is now 14,774 C'mon Suz!

Delightful little anecdote from Luci on one of my favourite poets, Louis MacNeice. I am reading his Autumn Journal presently and revelling in some of those celebrated turns of phrase.

Glad my MacNiece poem has sent you off to read more of his oeuvre, Paul!

I started reading two chunksters today, the first volume of that epic new Ken Follett trilogy that I have had kicking around here forever, and Lawrence in Arabia, which is turning out to be a very excellent book about a group of people in the Middle East from about 1906 until the early 1920s, of whom Lawrence is the most significant. The author's focus is on the decisions that these individuals helped to shape by their actions during WW1, and that shape our world today because they carved out Middle Eastern borders. A tricky subject but an excellent book. Immensely detailed, but immensely readable.

Meanwhile, another mediocre book finished:

254. The Ambassador's Daughter by Pam Jenoff was a dull historical novel with a heroine so naive and milquetoast-y that I wanted to pick her up and shake her. There also were some of those historical snafus that tend to irk me, such as the idea that the heroine and her father could somehow have traveled from Berlin immediately after the declaration of war in 1914 to Oxford, and spend the war at Oxford. Erm, I think not... Blech. But it was an ARC, so no money was spent, and it's set in a period/place that I'm particularly intrigued by, the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919. I'm glad that I still have Robert Goddard's new novel to look forward to... 2.8 stars.

I started watching the BBC version of The Spies of Warsaw last night, and it is EXCELLENT. I'll try to watch the second half of it tonight. Clearly, this is going to end up being one of the television miniseries that I watch over and over and over again, like Branagh and Emma Thompson in The Fortunes of War. I feel old to think that it was half a lifetime ago that I watched it when it first aired on television...

I've got that Follett book (and the second one) on my TBR shelves, but they are both hardcover and I never feel quite strong enough to pick them up!

I know -- that was the problem with trying to read the ARC. There were simply too many pages and the spine of the paperbound galley simply split. I managed to pick up a Kindle special version of it, which makes it possible to read. The second book is slightly thinner; I nabbed it from the library shelves last week, which has prompted me to pick it up. But meanwhile still trudging through my Amazon Vine must-read books. OK, not bad, but not neccessarily what I feel like reading right now.

ETA: The good news? I finally have my iTunes functional again! Which opens up a whole lot of fabulous music that I had lurking in my music library.

More prescribed reading to report back on, and one book read for comic relief:

255. Studio Saint-Ex by Ania Szabo: Reading this debut novel was a bit like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and realizing that there are a bunch of pieces missing. It's the story of three people: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, his wife, Consuelo, and his fictional lover, young fashion designer, Mignonne Lachapelle, in New York in 1942. All three of them are irritable and frustrated: Saint-Ex because he wants to resume flying for conquered France; Consuelo, because Saint-Ex won't give her his undivided attention, and Mignonne because she can't figure out what is going on with Antoine and can't get her career jumpstarted. Meanwhile, Saint-Ex starts to write The Little Prince. The problem? Szabo doesn't know what story she's telling -- is it a romance? About creativity? about complex relationships? About an era? She starts down one road, then reverses and pursues another course. They don't fit together readily and the result is less than compelling. Engaging in some ways -- the setting, the characters -- but persistently annoying in terms of structure and focus (or lack of same). Not really recommended. 2.8 stars. For my 2013 Categories challenge.

256. My Father's Ghost is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron, like the above, is a book I picked at random from the "Last Harvest" section of Amazon Vine -- it clearly is encouraging me to take more risks with what I read, but not always successfully. This is a book that ended up baffling me in some ways. It's poetic and very, very stylized, and it wasn't until I was about 2/3 of the way through this short novel dealing with issues surrounding Argentina's Dirty War (and the pesky question of memory) that it finally clicked together. Up until then, I was reading 10 or 15 pages at a time, and putting it down in exhaustion. It's oblique and structurally tricky -- it does end up working but not without annoying me. So, for me it was a 4 star book. For someone else, who places less importance on a smooth and engaging narrative in addition to ideas and creative prose, it will be higher. For anyone with no tolerance for something different (chapters that are one sentence long; sentences that can go on for an entire page; big parts of the narrative composed of fictional and borderline illiterate 'newspaper' clippings about an apparently irrelevant missing persons case) it will be actively annoying. Ultimately, I found the story of a man coming to grips with the challenges of memory and trying to find a way to tell his parents' tale fascinating if frustrating. 4 stars.

257. Making Money by Terry Pratchett was the book I turned to for relief from the two novels listed above. Both were intense, not always in a good way, and Pratchett can always be relied on to jerk one out of real life and into his Discworld parallel universe. This wasn't as funny as Going Postal but Pratchett amuses himself with the hero of that novel taking over the central bank and wrestling with the introduction of paper currency and how to get his gold-obsessed chief clerk less maniacal about the gold standard. Lots of satire here. 3.8 stars.

Four more Amazon ARCs to go: one nearly finished; one halfway through, and two that I have dipped into. Hmmm.

... and one more ....

258. Slingshot by Matthew Dunn is an OK spy thriller, although the thrills tend to be derived mostly from action-hero like activities rather than anything more gripping. (I'm mentally comparing it in my mind to the far more engaging Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews, that I read last month.) The first third or so was utterly confusing, with people shooting at each other, while the hero miraculously remains not seriously harmed, for reasons that were blurry, to put it mildly. Something about a secret treaty, an evil genius and a superpowerful assassin. By halfway through, the plot finally gels, but even then, it's at best a mediocre entry in the genre. 3.3 stars.

Lawrence in Arabia sounds interesting, is it still holding your interest? I'm reading A line in the sand which covers similar territory at the start. I got a book from the library about Aaron Aaronsohn, but then noticed it got really poor reviews so took it back, Aaronsohn's maps.

Kerry, it's immensely readable. The author isn't a scholar, and it's not a scholarly work, but what seems to me to be a very well-researched and thoughtfully constructed narrative about these events, focusing on four individuals within the broader geopolitical context. I have no idea how it will be received by those with already fixed ideas about Middle East borders and the era covered in the book -- as you know, among some readers across the political spectrum there is a tendency to dispute a book's merits on the basis of their own views of political correctness.

I ran into that most recently on reading a book about the Potato Famine in Ireland, whose author -- of Irish origin -- noted the facts but failed to draw what some viewed as the "right" conclusion, that Britain deliberately orchestrated the famine and prolonged it, and then took advantage of it to consciously murder Irish citizens. John Kelly, the author, reported the fact that grain was exported, and that troops were used to protect those exports, but sets it in what I believe is the appropriate context of an absolute British commitment to free trade and protection of commercial interests: Clearly the English were happy to blind themselves to what was happening and to shelter under this argument, but it's a big stretch to then argue that it was genocide, which is what some die-hard Irish nationalists clearly wanted Kelly to conclude -- and any book that didn't label the famine as genocide was simply going to be a bad book and bad history. I tried to point out in my review that genocide requires deliberate action and intent, as some part of policy, not simply callous indifference, idiocy and ineffectiveness, aggravated by brutality by a handful of individuals. It's not to say that what happened wasn't reprehensible; simply that it doesn't meet the test for genocide. And yet, the views are so strong and so already-shaped that it distorted any ability to assess the book.

Anyway -- I wonder whether there are similar hot-button issues here. If so, I wouldn't recognize them, having no dog in this fight. So far, I would say that Anderson views Lawrence and his ilk -- the men on the ground -- as being imaginatively limited in a way dictated by their upbringing and the world they inhabited, even though each of them had views/thoughts that were radically new for their day. His real criticism, thus far, seems, to be reserved for the policymakers who needed to salvage something from the wreck that was the Great War. The higher the cost became -- both materially and psychologically -- the less it could be allowed to seem as if the battle was fought for no purpose. And so they took advantage of the actions on the part of these individuals on the ground, and set in place a regime whose legacy we have been struggling with ever since.

I haven't read anything yet on Gertrude Bell in this. She has always struck me as the ultimate imperialist, in many ways.

Have just put Lawrence In Arabia on the Giant Freaking Wishlist. I have that Kelly book on my Kindle and think I will make it my next non-fiction read. Time to stop hoarding it.

Charlotte, I'm a big hoarder of books for a rainy day! Alas, the size of my TBR testifies to the fact that there are too few rainy days with enough time to read... Amazon's new rules for the Vine program also make it hard for me to hoard, since anything I request has to be reviewed within about 45 days, or roughly two months of the request. Or else (horrors...) I can't ask for another one! The Providence library system also is tough on hoarding -- one renewal is the max, even if no one else wants the book. Then you have to return it and request it again. Gah.

*crosses Providence off the relocation list*

Posted this on my Facebook page today, and figured that I should cross-post here... It's my best books of 2013, so far...

FICTION:

The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
Due out this month (August); an excellent and beautifully written/vivid tale of two Australian sisters who set out to become nurses during WW1, in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, and how the experience transforms them. Demonstrates that a literary novel can also be unputdownable.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Not in the same league as the above, but fantastical and entertaining tale of classic literary sleuthing meeting the Google era. Great for a rainy summer weekend.

The Round House by Louise Erdich
A writer who is new to me, for inexplicable reasons, and a powerful novel about a young boy's formative experiences on a South Dakota reservation.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin
Packs an outsize punch compared to its diminutive size; this nearly-novella length book is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and deservedly so. What if Mary, the mother of Jesus, had had the chance to tell her own story of her son, the rebellious kid that she can't understand? Best of all, it's utterly persuasive.

Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
A number of my top books of the year so far are books that have been out for a while and that I hadn't gotten around to reading or discovering, and this is one. Set in the 1970s in the Canadian north, against the backdrop of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline royal commission, the characters all work in or around the CBC's northern broadcasting service. The north itself becomes a character, and the prose at times is downright lyrical.

The Good House by Ann Leary
This is the first novel I've read by Ann Leary, and I'll be looking for more. Not literary, but a great read, revolving around the character of Hildy Good, a realtor with roots in her small Massachussets community that go back centuries, whose business is helping more transient arrivals find new homes. She becomes unusually close to one such new arrival, triggering a chain reaction that transforms lives. Not unpredictable, but compelling.

The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal
I read a lot of mysteries, and this gets my nomination for best new discovery of the year. Bilal is the pseudonym for a British/Sudanese literary novelist who has started to write mysteries, set in Cairo in the late 1990s and featuring a Sudanese refugee private investigator as his main character. Bilal does a fabulous job of blending a fascinating mystery with details of the time and place, including the political tensions that culminated in the ouster of Mubarak (after the publication of this first book in the series). The second one, Dogstar Rising, is equally good.

Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
Wow... I used to joke that I wanted Tony Horwitz's writing skills; now I think I'd just as eagerly steal those of his wife, Geraldine. Her latest historical novel is set in 17th century Mass., with the relationship between the curious and intelligent Bethia, deprived by her gender of the chance to study, and Caleb, son of a Wampanoag chief on Martha's Vineyard, who became the first Native American Harvard graduate.

NON-FICTION

The Lost Carving by David Esterly
If you're interested in history, in historical artifacts, or just in creativity, you need to read this. It's beautifully written and I had to pause every few pages to ponder what Esterly was writing about. He's a carver in limewood, and the tale at the heart of this is his work on restoring the Grinling Gibbons sculptures at Hampton Court destroyed by a fire. It was Gibbons' 17th century work that pushed him into carving, and the book becomes a contemplation of what it means to create with one's hands.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
Egan is another of my 2013 discoveries, although I should have been reading his books for a while. This one is about the Dust Bowl, and is compelling on every possible level. Equally fascinating is his most recent book, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, about Edward Curtis's self-impossed mission/mania to photograph the disappearing Native American tribes across North America, and the toll it took on him even as the tribes themselves were changing beyond recognition.

The Watchers by Stephen Alford
A great choice for history buffs, chronicling the war of nerves and intellects that pitted Elizabeth I's spymasters -- Walsingham and his heirs -- against French/Spanish/papal agents. It's a great reminder that a reign that we now view as a golden era was in reality uncertain and full of peril; that the Armada wasn't an anomaly but merely the tangible manifestation of a lifelong threat that Elizabeth and her advisors had to deal with.

The World is a Carpet by Anna Badkhen
Badkehn reminds the reader that even in war zones, 'ordinary' life continues, and through her tale of a group of people living in a village so tiny that it can't be found on Google Earth, she tells the story of a carpet and its makers, of the patterns of life in this kind of village, and the often subtle and only sometimes dramatic ways in which the latest battle for control of Afghanistan has affected them. Fabulous; ornate and lyrical prose.

Gun Guys by Dan Baum
At last, a book about what gun ownership feels like, told by someone who is struggling to understand his own affection for guns. Baum tours the landscape of the gun sub culture, tellings it tale, even as he examines his own interest with guns. In light of the polarizing debate, this felt like an important book to read. It didn't change my own views, but it made me more reflective.

Like your list of bests - I've been eying the audio book of Caleb's Crossing at our local library, maybe time to nab it!!!

Favorited the list with thanks!

#51 - Thanks for sharing your list. I almost read Late Nights on Air as a shared TIOLI read earlier this year (probably with you), but I never got to it. Good to know it's a winner.

Have you started Hild Yet? You can tell me if you hate it. I promise I won't cry.

Well considering I hold Irish citizenship (along with my NZ one) I am woefully under read on Irish history. I remember reading Trinity years ago and feeling quite anti-English for a few weeks after. I'm currently dipping into several books on modern Middle East politics and reading a lot of online articles as well and it takes some research to find balanced sources.

...and lots of good looking books on your best of list. I have collected a large number of old paperbacks of Keneally... also for those rainy days that never seem to come.

#54, Kerri, I have to postpone Hild until I finish my two other chunksters, both of which must be finished by Thursday afternoon ahead of Amazon Vine day. It will be a second-half-of-the-month book!

#55, Kerry, I've got lots of allegedly Irish ancestors, but of the wrong kind. They were Protestants, which made one Catholic nationalist research librarian literally hiss at me in Co. Leitrim. Unnerving...

I liked that list on FB and I'd like it here too if I could. I also loved The Worst Hard Time and want to get to his latest. I have Late Nights on Air probably on your recommendation Suzanne.

Book du jour:

259. Thieves of Book Row by Travis McDade is the next ARC in my marathon Amazon Vine reading session, and happily it seems to have snapped the losing streak I had been on, of reading mediocre galleys simply because I could get 'em for free. This was a fascinating and entertaining tale of the height of book theft in the late 1920s and 1930s -- its origins, tactics and archcriminals -- as well as the rivalry between antiquarian booksellers on Fourth Avenue in Manhattan and the librarians on whom they looked with disdain, that helped fuel the crime wave. Full of great detail, such as the chase from one bookstore to another by folks from the New York Public Library to get their hands on an extremely rare Poe volume before it disappeared back underground, one in which minutes proved to matter. 4.3 stars, great for book people to read, and just as interesting as Paul Collins' tales of New York true crime. Reminds me of The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey, which focused on map theft and IMO was even better.

Enjoyable Best of list Suz and quite an effort to pare down your reading to those selections. Agree on Penumbra. Agree on Toibin quality wise but don't agree that it is "deservedly" on the Booker longlist. I always thought it a best novel award and The Testament of Mary, excellent though it is, is not a novel.

Paul, I suppose I'm not as absolutist about the novel/novella label (nor do I know what the distinction actually is, or what the Booker committee's mandate is), but I'm also considering what's in the book. In about 100 pages, the "work" left me with the feeling that I had read a novel hundreds of pages long, even though it was a fraction of that length. In contrast, the Julian Barnes ultra-short novel that won two years ago didn't leave me still pondering its ideas & themes months later.

ETA: Went to Wikipedia out of curiosity, and saw that people were huffy about On Chesil Beach for similar reasons. But the entry had some language that kind of captured my thinking about Toibin's book: "The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the "totality of life".9 The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation." And I suppose when I say that I think of it as a novel, it is that question -- one of content rather than length in pages or words -- that would lead me to define The Testament of Mary as more a novel than a novella. Its focus is significantly broader than a point, IMO, since Toibin has condensed several themes/events/ideas into a very condensed space, and presented it in a form that allows for that condensation -- i.e. a testament, or a kind of fictional memoir. Hopefully that explains my point!

Nice list of favorite books, Suz. I'm in agreement with you on The Testament of Mary, and The Round House is on my wish list.

I agree with your assessment of The Testament of Mary as being worthy of the Booker longlist. It's far meatier that most novels two or three times its size, IMO. I loved The Sense of an Ending and On Chesil Beach, and both were certainly worthy of Booker Prize consideration.

The Golden Scales is only £1.85 on UK Kindle at the moment (I already have it from a previous offer or sale, or from your recommendation - I paid £1.99 for it on 2 March 2013).

Have you read A Student of Weather by Elizabeth Hay? That's her only book that I have on my shelves.

Nice List Suz. Late Nights on Air jumped onto my TBR list - I love hearing about life on the radio.

Did you ever read John Dunning's Two O'Clock, Eastern War Time ? Great book about radio news and drama in the glory days.

The Watchers same comment. Not a period I know a heck of a lot about but this sounds like a good intro.

(unless you count Marvel 1602 where Elizabeth's head spymaster is Nick Fury?)

>62 elkiedee:
I just checked and downloaded. The Golden Scales is available on Kindle USA for $2.51. My Elizabeth Hay is Alone in the Classroom.
(I've read the Dunning, Jim. Liked it too.)

I noticed that the Parker Bilal debut is discounted in both countries -- great! I still had a NetGalley version, with OK formatting, but decided to splurge on the real book, as the NetGalley predates the ability to transfer the file from my Kindle main menu to any device.

Luci/Peggy -- my 'other' Elizabeth Hay novel is Alone in the Classroom, which is lingering close to the top of my TBR. I know of A Student of Weather, but will have to order a second-hand dead-tree version. Her older books are harder to find here as she is/was published by small presses with small runs, although most are still in print in Canada. May order some from Amazon.ca... I do have her book about stories of Canadians in NY (still unread), and there also are some collections of short stories, and another novel, Garbo Laughs.

Darryl; I've not yet read On Chesil Beach. For every 'hit' by McEwan, I've had some misses, like Sweet Tooth, which was better than it first felt but also annoyed me deeply. (Hard to explain without spoilers...) I should dig it out of the library here.

I would have added The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna to that list, but it's not out in North America yet. I'm about 2/3 of the way through Americanah, and while I'm enjoying it tremendously, I don't think it's in the same league as some of the books on the list. Is it engrossing and beautifully written? Absolutely. Does it make me sit up and take notice and say to myself, wow, I'm seeing the world through fresh eyes? Nope. The author's points about the experience of "non-American blacks" are thoughtful and often hilarious, but if someone had asked me, well, what do you think it might be like for someone from Nigeria or Ghana or Benin to come here and find themselves allocated to a particular role in society based not on their real identity (African/regional/national/tribal) but on their skin color, I may well have focused on very similar issues, based on conversations I've had with friends in exactly this position, articles that I've read over the years, and my own imagination. So, an intriguing voice, but it's not rising to the level of a 5 star book for me. That said, were I a Booker judge, I wouldn't have chosen The Marrying of Chani Kauffman as an alternative to this novel. Perhaps they were drawn by the claustrophobic atmosphere that Eve Harris created in that book? Oh well, I refuse to second-guess this kind of stuff. I will be interested to see what ends up on the shortlist.

OK, back to work and to reading. Must finish both Americanah and Lawrence in Arabia by 3 p.m. tomorrow, so that I can pick new Amazon Vine books. I think it's do-able. Barely! And I'm relieved that both are excellent.

Will be looking forward to hearing vicariously what you've picked on Vine tomorrow and next Thursday, since I won't be getting any new Vine books or other items for a few months now - I realised the new system meant that I could go mad in Last Harvest in June and July, and I did - I'm just hoping they don't kick me out. If they bring in further restrictions on Last Harvest, it's probably my fault for testing the system to its limits!

Ugh. I was too slow finishing my reviews, and I missed out on a new mattress (desperately needed) and new headphones for my iPod (ditto -- I don't have any that work any more). I'm really furious with myself. All the books I was offered are kids' books. So I requested a fireproof safe. Hey, why not? It's not theft proof, since I won't be able to fasten it to the floorboards, but it will give me a bit of piece of mind when I have to travel for long periods, since I'm quite sure I can conceal it amidst the clutter here.

Suz, I thought you'd gone very quiet but then I realised I was ignoring your thread by accident!

Sounds good to me. When I haven't liked my offerings on the current newsletter, I've usually gone back to the previous big newsletter- I think I did that with the last one.

You would think that given this is all free stuff, I would be sulking about the beds. Especially since it is all my own fault. I didn't read the books rapidly enough (#1); I didn't budget my time properly today (#2) and I failed to realize that Vine has given us the option to request a 10-day extension on a few items each year (#3). Somehow, that just makes me all the more irritable.

One safe; no books. I'm waiting to see what comes up on Last Harvest.

Well, I finished Lawrence in Arabia in time to hammer together a quick review, but I think I'll end up re-reading the final 100 pages. It's very good, but I felt very rushed reading it. My own fault, natch. So, here's the book report:

260. Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson is one of those rare books that I can recommend unreservedly for the history buff and anyone else interested in learning about the true story behind David Lean's famous film. Best of all, this isn't just about Lawrence, but about his environment and three other lesser-known figures whose lives overlapped with his in the area, all of whom played a role in "the Great Game" in a part of the world they thought of as a sideshow. That may have been true of the Middle East in 1916, but their collective activities -- coupled with or perhaps especially because of the Machiavellian decisions made by cynical politicians desperate to show that the horrific losses of the war had some kind of point -- mean that all of us are still paying a price for this a century later. Anderson clearly prefers Lawrence to some of the others he profiles -- he is particularly scathing about the whisper-voiced Curt Prufer, and a little dismissive of the American William Yale -- but overall this is a balanced and thoughtful tome, and a gripping read, to boot. Highly recommended. 4.9 stars, just because I'm feeling curmudgeonly and don't want to give anything 5 stars today!

261. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a novel that brilliantly captures the experience of displacement of one of the 21st century's global nomads as Ifemelu must first find a way to adjust to life in the United States, and then returns to Nigeria as an "Americanah", someone who no longer fits in to her own society in quite the same way after 15 years away. The writing here is superlative -- one line that stuck in my mind is the following rumination by Ifemulu on the books her boyfriend loves, that "like cotton candy that too quickly evaporated from her tongue’s memory”. This helps compensate for the fact that the core plotline -- once you strip away the cross-cultural experiences and the dialog about race in America -- is rather banal: young lovers separated, come of age, struggle to build lives against obstacles and who may or may not reunite as mature adults. (No spoilers here -- read the book and find out what happens!!) The novel follows Obinze on his own for less than 100 pages or so as he tries to make a life for himself in England (the English and others he encounters there choose to view him as some kind of refugee from poverty or persecution; he ponders that they “could not understand the need to escape from the ominous lethargy of choicelessness” in a society plagued with university strikes, power cuts and military dictatorships. The bulk of the narrative, however, belongs to Ifemelu, and here it became slightly tiresome after a while. The narrative is structured so that the first 2/3 or so is Ifem pondering how she got to the point of returning to Nigeria 15 years after leaving as she sits in a salon in a seedy area of Trenton having her hair braided. Hair plays a big role here: "relaxed" hair, natural hair, Afros, etc. (Ifem is told she should have her hair relaxed in order to land a job, for instance) as well as braids, recurring over and over and over again. But then, as Ifemulu finds her place in the US, it is as a blogger about race, from the POV of a non-American black. At first fascinating, the frequent blog entries as narrative additions began to feel repetitious and wearing, not because the points Adichie is making aren't true, but because if you make any point 15 times within 150 pages, the reader wants to scream "I get it, already!" Of course, that simply could be my inner racist surfacing, too, or a hallmark of white privilege, as described by Adichie/Ifemulu. But the fact remains that I felt that about 100 pages could have been cut from this novel without altering the plot development or harming any of these points (although there would have been fewer of those wonderful turns of prose to read). I was more interested in the fundamental tale of the decision to leave one's society and carve out a place for oneself in a world where color becomes suddenly relevant and other things that once mattered no longer do so. (I was reminded of an ex-bf, who grew up in Japan and went to Japanese schools, but was North American and kept being asked if he liked sushi. On one occasion, we were at a restaurant and the Japanese cook was so convinced that D. couldn't possibly be speaking Japanese that he kept saying to him, "no understand English", in English, as D. was ordering in Japanese.) One disappointment for me is that there was less here than I had hoped about the evolution of a new Nigeria, emerging as Africa's lynchpin. There are sideways references to "Nollywood", but that's about it, and then some examples of how some other things haven't changed, but the final section of the book wasn't as deftly done as the first two-thirds or so, and the ending felt a bit contrived. So, not a blow-me-away novel overall but the writing was superlative. 4.4 stars.

262. The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith is the next book that I hadn't read in the 44 Scotland Street series; read purely as comic relief and because it has to go back to the library. It's a bit disjointed, and the author is prone to lapse into philosophical ramblings, but some of his character studies are priceless (although Irene, mother of Bertie, is utterly dire and a complete caricature.) I like the insights into Edinburgh, and the character of the Cyril the dog, but overall greatly prefer the Isabel Dalhousie novels by this author. The rest of his oeuvre can readily leave to one side. 3.1 stars.

ETA: Now must race to finish two library books ahead of THAT deadline, before the fines mount up. Besides, I Claudius is waiting for me to pick up, along with some Robert Graves poetry, and three other holds are on their way. If I don't finish the backlog by Saturday, I'll make the swap on Monday.

What I am reading now:

The Great Pearl Heist by Molly Caldwell Crosby (So far: meh, but fast paced and fast to read, so I'll probably finish it.)
Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor (So far: early into it, but am quite liking the level of detail, even though so far I've caught him in one or two misstatements on the history.)
Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (So far: finally getting around to reading this after having the ARC for 3 years. It's reasonably entertaining, although being Follett, very predictable. Also epic -- 800 plus pages.)

What I am listening to now:

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch (So far: love, love, love the narrator of this audiobook version. Completely deadpan voice makes it so much richer. Kicking myself for not reading or listening before this.)

Great to hear that you are loving Midnight Riot as I am planning on reading it next month.

I've read the Rivers of London/Midnight Riot books but you make the audio sound compelling. Yesterday I ordered a copy of the Lawrence book so I'm glad you ended up giving it 4.9 stars.
I picked up a copy of Olivia Manning: A Woman at War from the library, I doubt that I'll have time to read it but mention it here in case you haven't come across it.

Book du jour:

263. The Great Pearl Heist by Molly Caldwell Crosby was a mediocre book on all levels -- really, not that compelling a true crime narrative (there's no depth to the background, and the investigation is really more of a cat and mouse game played by Scotland Yard. And the author needs some help with the writing -- there are some bizarrely inaccurate/awkward turns of phrase just littered throughout. A fast read, but deeply underwhelming. And back to the library it goes. 2.9 stars.

Some of the really bizarre turns of phrase in this:

She keeps referring to people being hung "at the gallows". Prepositional confusion: One was hung ON a gallows. Being hung at a gallows wouldn't have done that much damage, really.
Grizzard "saw his first brush with the law". Ahem; try, had, or experienced. He wasn't watching it, he was living it.
More prepositional confusion "inherent to interwar generations" -- inherent IN.
She refers to a gang of thieves that "operated succinctly and lucratively." SUCCINCTLY?? That's for talking, honey, not behavior.
There is a reference to jewels being sold and then appearing "on necks, hands or cuffs". Consistency -- last time I checked, a cuff wasn't a body part. Try wrist.
"This tree trunk of a man" -- no other descriptive phrase available??
A thief's "rough exterior and Cockney accent had been transformed into a finely dressed, well-spoken gentleman". Impressive: transforming characteristics into a human being.
A character "hopped through cabs, trains and mail boats" over the course of a weekend. More prepositional confusion -- and a confusing verb, to boot.
Someone "was in a hurry for the necklace" -- this woman needs a remedial course in prepositions. Try "to obtain" instead of "for".
"Sensing an impenetrable offer" -- Impenetrable means something that -- duh -- can't be penetrated, not something that can't be changed. Nuance? Sure, but using the right word is always less jarring.
Discussion of a building with "its massive stone and meringue masonry" -- Hmm, must be hard to support an entire building with masonry made of meringue. I'm sure she is referring to the decorative elements, but another reminder of why clarity is important.
A thief "knew he was under surveillance for the pearl necklace" -- preposition alert! Try "because of his suspected involvement in the theft of the pearl necklace", rather than "for", which is grammatically incorrect and jibberish.
There are several references, following one to a jewelry store on Regent Street, to "frequenting the jewelry store on Regent"; "a special job on Regent". No one refers to Regent Street as Regent. It's not like Broadway, or telling someone that a store is at 4th and Main. Argh.

Can you tell how deeply all this annoyed me?? These are only some of the things that I flagged, moreover.

On a completely separate note, a story that I wrote about Netflix for one of my editors was posted on the Forbes website and apparently has gotten 49,000 hits. Holy Toledo.

Bookwise: on deck are the following:

Hild by Nicola Griffith
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki - ABANDONED FOR NOW
The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard
Imperfect Harmony by Stacy Horn COMPLETED 8/18/13
Harvest by Jim Crace (already started)
The White Princess by Philippa Gregory COMPLETED 8/23/13
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri COMPLETED 8/25/13
The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith COMPLETED 8/25/13
Lost Girls by Robert Kolker COMPLETED
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (stalled halfway through)
Among the Janeites by Deborah Yaffe COMPLETED
Bricks and Mortality by Ann Granger
Unexploded by Alison MacLeod

Books du jour:

264. Catilina's Riddle by Steven Saylor, turned out to be a great recommendation (sorry, can't remember who suggested it now, though!) It deals with the Catiline rebellion, as do Robert Harris's novels about Cicero, but from a different POV, that of Gordianus the Finder, who is trying to lead a peaceful existence on his farm outside Rome. But Rome won't let him be: Cicero calls on a favor, and ends up embroiling Gordianus in great political issues. Together with his spat with the neighbors (who, furious that their cousin bequeathed his farm to a plebian, want Gordianus gone) brings the Finder and his family to near disaster. Good evocation of the era, and a fascinating plot. Will definitely read more in the series. For my 2013 Categories challenge, 4.2 stars.

265. Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch is something that has been on my TBR list forever, and finally ended up listening to via audiobook. The narrator is FABULOUS, doing a completely deadpan rendition of some very funny moments in this part-mystery, part-supernatural, part-satirical novel set in today's London. Half the fun was that I knew the part of the West End where it all was set, from the location of the Tesco Metro to the streets and church porticos. I think I'm going to upgrade this to 4.4 stars, as a thumping good read. I was able to snaffle the e-book of the second in the series from the library for my Kindle; I think it will be interesting to read the next one, as there are so many great moments in the narrative. I've put in a hold for book #3 in the series.

Roman Blood. #1 in the Gordianus series, is 99p on UK Kindle at the moment - an omnibus of the first 4 books in the series (including the one you read, #3) is £6.59.

Thanks, Luci! I see I already snaffled that one... These 99p deals are great.

ETA: Off to finish Fall of Giants. It's mildly entertaining, in the way that family epics can be. Then I have another library book or two to finish before I head there on Monday.

Hi at last! I loved the Steven Saylor books I read a few years back, one of which was Roman Blood. I think I had Catalina's Riddle out of the library but it had to go back before I finished it. Anyway, you've nudged me to look for it again next time I have lots of time in the library. I really like Gordianus' character and the setting - tried one of the Falco series and couldn't get into it in the same way.

Hey Cushla -- tks for coming out from under the table during all this quakes to check in! Yes, this was what I think of as a series that is "rich" in terms of character and setting, so it's not just about the plot. I did read the first Falco, and sort of shrugged. Picked up The Ides of April at Heathrow out of curiosity to see if the series works better with a female protagonist. I'm thinking of re-reading the epic series of Roman novels by Colleen McCullough, which are about the only books of hers that I like. Although I hate the fact that I like them so much, given her blatant plagiarism of The Blue Castle.

Book du jour:

266. Fall of Giants by Ken Follett was appropriately named -- the tome came in at 852 pages on my Kindle and I see from the book details that the paperback edition boasts more than 1,000. I finally started reading it (got an ARC from Amazon pre-publication) because the second volume appeared on the library bookshelf, and I decided to bring it home; one of the most annoying thing about these epic series (in this case, a trilogy) is that unless the content is fabulous (Mahfouz, for instance) by the time book #2 is published, you've forgotten the details you need to know to make sense of book #2. Follett has called this the century trilogy, but it's pretty clear that he's focusing on a narrow time band and area of experience. He has a handful of characters who all end up in some ways representative of their country -- a British coal miner, a suffragette and an earl; a Russian who becomes a Bolshevik; a German aristocrat, etc. -- and then tells the story of what led up to WW1 and the events of the War (Western Front primarily) using them as a kind of puppet or device. In contrast to the building of a cathedral in Follett's other epics, this turns out to be quite constraining: he is dealing with well-documented facts (to which he adheres, hurrah!) and as a result has to put his characters in improbably coincidental places to move the plot forward. Slightly addictive, in the way that any epic family saga is (I used to read these in my late teens and early 20s) and entertaining, in that I wanted to see what happened to the characters, but the epic sweep means that the actual accomplishment (except in the sheer effort of keeping it all straight in his mind and getting it down on paper) isn't that impressive. 3.3 stars; only if you like the genre. I have Winter of the World on hand, and about three weeks to read it in (assuming that I can renew it). For some reason, I had thought it was shorter, but nope: it's about 950 pages. Sigh.

Wow when you update your reading, you really update your reading. It always makes my updates look like I'm not trying hard enough Suzanne. Anywho, I certainly won't be spending the time it would take to get through close to a thousand pages in the Follett. I will definitely read Americanah as it has consistently gotten great reviews and I will be interested to see your take on A Tale for the time Being which, along with Transatlantic are the only Booker nominees I've read. I let Harvest and Five Star Billionaire go back to the library unread after being disappointed in the Ozeki.

I think I may be the Gordianus recommender, Suz; at least, I know I have enjoyed them through the years although I haven't read all the series.
I can't wait to hear what you make of Hild! I'm tempted to put it on Kindle now, but I'll wait.
I'm afraid that M.C. Crosby is the wave of the future. My high school students had more trouble with prepositions than just about anything else. For them the problem was never having read anything. On the other hand, our local mystery writer had a piece in today's paper about another writer in which she said, (talking about the woman's coming to a sudden decision), "... the light bulb went off..."

Wow, Peggy -- that's a doozy. Not only a prepositional challenge, but a muddled metaphor. I feel so much better about my own growing tendency to confuse my homonyms when I right, erm, write.

...and one more

267. Imperfect Harmony by Stacy Horn was an ER win, and so I'll be writing a complete review in the next couple of days -- hopefully tomorrow. When it's good, it's fascinating: her experiences with music; insights into what it's like to compose/conduct/accompany choral music as well as perform it, and some of the historical context. But at times it's also slightly irksome, like the frequently-mentioned quest to meet a guy through the choir or at all (hey, she's in her 50s and single -- I kept wanting to ask whether she hasn't figured out how to find a measure of contentment? at any rate, it came across as slightly over-emphasized), or her frequent reminders (scattered throughout the book) that she may sing in a church choir but she doesn't believe in god, really (just in case we had forgotten since her previous mention of this 25 pages earlier.) There are some musicological elements that jarred a bit, and overall she came across as someone who discovered music because of singing rather than someone who discovered singing after gravitating to music, if that makes sense. (The idea that she wasn't familiar with the work of Vaughan Williams until she joined the choir was one hint of this; her 'revelation' that harmony means not being a 1st soprano was another.) 3.5 stars. It's a book for a generalist reader, with the occasional slip into musical jargon but not frequent enough for that to be an impediment. I really liked the structure -- the chapters are set around a piece of music, each of which enables the author to explore a theme linked in some way to that music, and the chapters are separated by historical notes, aka "recitatives" -- but found the writing very pedestrian. In other words, a mixed bag. If you love choral music (I do), it's worth reading.

What I am reading now:

Lost Girls by Rober Kolker, which has to go back to the library on Monday or Tuesday.
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
The White Princess by Philippa Gregory
Among the Janeites by Deborah Yaffe

What I am listening to:

Barchester Towers, narrated by Simon Vance.

ETA: Went ahead and wrote and posted the review. Now off to bed and to listen to a bit of the trials and tribulations of Archdeacon Grantly.

I'm glad that you enjoyed Rivers of London, Suz. I may try to get to it next month.

Darryl -- it's not your usual fare! It's witty, and it involves the paranormal. It definitely would be classed as light entertainment and not food for thought & sober reflection...

...food for thought & sober reflection...

A very tactful way of describing Darryl's usual fare, the "please-merciful-goddesses-let-me-die-before-it-gets-grimmer" reads.

Suz, pardon me for hijacking your thread, but......

If anyone else out there put The Daughter of Mars by Thomas Keneally on their wish lists after Suz's ringing endorsement, the Kindle price has dropped significantly. Amazon tells me it was $12.74 when I added it to my list, and it's now available for $7.49 (this is Amazon US). I'm snapping it up!

ETA: It's being released tomorrow, August 20.

>88 katiekrug:. Thanks so much--I went to the site right quick and bought this one, based on Suzanne's review.

No probs, Katie -- hijack away. It's all in a good cause (boosting sales of a very good novel...)

I dipped into the first few pages of The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (an ARC thanks to Amazon) and clearly am going to have to dive right into it, as soon as I finish my (about to be overdue) library book.

Katie, thank you! I've pre-ordered too. I may have to go to debtors' prison, but I'll have plenty to occupy my time.

The next book:

268. Lost Girls by Robert Kolker was an impressive true crime novel that managed to break through the genre and be a sympathetic yet "warts and all" tale of five young missing women, all of whom ended up becoming prostitutes/escorts and advertising for johns on Craigslist in the New York area -- and all of whose bodies were found in an isolated stretch of the barrier islands off the coast of Long Island. I read this as I remembered the discovery of the bodies beginning in late 2010, but really hadn't followed the story and wanted to find out what had happened so close to my own home, especially because of the twist that Craigslist throws into the tale. How can prostitutes be safe this way? Anyway: Kolker doesn't just start with the crime, but with the young women, showing how each followed separate yet oddly parallel paths -- dead-end jobless communities; dysfunctional families; poor educational opportunities; drugs -- to end up in the place they found themselves. Making the tale particularly disturbing is the presence in the narrative of the sister of one of the victims, still working as an 'escort', and the friend of another, who has managed to pull out of the life. If the fact that the police have yet to catch the killer is disturbing, so is the indifference on the part of police departments to reports of the women when they were still missing. The whole book, while very well written and a solid piece of reporting -- he manages to knit together the whole narrative without it ever feeling cobbled together, and creates an almost visual sense of what is happening -- is a rather damning indictment on our society. The families, for all their love for their sisters and daughters, don't come across as particularly impressive; the cops, too, have their weak points, and Kolker's fellow journalists sneer at what they see as an over-orchestrated and emotional memorial service where the bodies were discovered, saying something along the lines of "all this for a w***e!" I think I have to go read something else to jolt me out of book-induced depression, although if there is something in our society that we should be depressed about, this glimpse of an underworld certainly fits the bill. 4.25 stars.

Suz I do like Follett for getting his facts right - but did he have to get ALL of them in?

Was just reading an old Follett Night over Water which was more then you wanted to know about the Pam Am Clipper circa 1939. But i enjoyed it.

World War I fascinates me - perhaps I will have to kill a tree and try this one. Someone asked the French Marshall how the war got started and he sighed and said "Ah, if Only we knew". After reading John Keegan and others I think that the Marshall still has the last word on the one.

I knew Stacy Horn back in the days when she was running her online service, ECHO. Bad timing - she put a lot of effort and money into establishing a dial up BBS system and the Internet came along and she never really got traction. Can't say I've enjoyed her books much - she's written a few of them now.

>92 Chatterbox: Dammit Suz! Now I have to go get this book. And The Daughters of Mars is shipping tomorrow, per my (ALL YOUR FAULT) pre-order info.

*fumes off to Amazon to spend MORE of his paltry funds at the behest of a Certain Perfidious Party*

Erm, isn't the Kolker book available via the library?? That's where I got mine...

yrs, truly,
CPP

I can't get to the liberry anymore. I don't fit in the Toyota! Knees won't flex enough.

Enjoyed (?) your review of Lost Girls, Suzanne. It is so sad and infuriating, isn't it?

Nuts, Richard. Can you figure out a way where they will deliver or you can have someone pick up/return once a week or every 10 days?? Let me know if there are others that you might like to borrow from here. Can you borrow e-books with an account? It might be worth giving them a call, saying, hey I'm a disabled book addict, and seeing what, if anything, they suggest. On my end, I can't do much about Kindle stuff (unless it's lend-able) or stuff that is still unread, but if I've read it, I can pass it along as a loan. (The Louise Penny, natch, is not a loaner as it has your very own name inscribed in la Penny's own hand...)

Rebecca, yes... I think for me, more sad than infuriating. The problem seems so immense -- both the real problems that make these young women think this is their best/only option, and the men that prey on them, and the attitudinal problems of society -- that if I start to think about it as something to be infuriated about, I end up depressed and exhausted before I even get to infuriated. If that makes sense.

There was a dead bird outside my door today; some kind of hawk or other raptor, I think. (I confess, I didn't really examine it closely before I dumped it in the garbage...) Sad. In other news, a few new pieces of work are trickling in.

#94 -- Jim, belatedly -- yes, somehow Follett is always engaging, in spite of his occasionally potboilerish style. Occasionally it starts feeling too much like "show and tell", but he's less annoying as a writer than is Philippa Gregory. I'm trudging through The White Princess now, and all that is keeping me going is curiosity. My own embryonic novel deals with roughly the same time frame, albeit from a very different pov, and I'm planning to buckle down and make it at least halfway through a first draft in November for NaNoWriMo.

Stacy Horn -- I'm still very ambivalent about both her and the book. How could anyone interested in classical music, especially choral music, be so unfamiliar with Ralph Vaughan Williams as to not know even his name until told she would be singing "Through the Unknown Regions"? Or that the reason music written to be performed in spring tends to be about death because of Easter, the fact that much choral music up until the mid/late 19th century was church music, ergo....? (She notes that she was raised in a rather Christian family, so it can't be that.) To be blunt, she comes across as being either not terribly bright or not terribly curious about the world. Certainly, the book isn't growing on me in retrospect.

I have posted my reviews for both that and the wonderful Daughters of Mars on their respective pages.

Meanwhile...

269. Among the Janeites by Deborah Yaffe works far better than Stacy Horn's book does as a glimpse into a world you probably knew existed but may well not have given much thought to. In this case, it's the world of the avid Jane Austen fans, who swoon over Colin Firth in a wet shirt and dress up in Regency era clothing to dance in a hotel ballroom at annual gatherings. It's a fairly predictable format -- author offers 360 degree view of this parallel world, including her own love for Austen -- but Yaffe makes it work well enough for it not to feel predictable as I read it. There also are segments that I wouldn't have expected to find, such as a thoughtful chapter about the evolution in Austen scholarship. A fun and light read; recommended if you like/love the novels. 3.9 stars.

Battling another of these pesky migraines, mostly because I forgot to eat lunch, so there isn't much that I really feel like reading. I could listen to some more news from Barsetshire, but...

Woot. Looks like some of the new work is coming through, as noted in #98. It's still hush-hush for now, but it would be 2x weekly blog work for a big daily newspaper.

Ooh, congratulations! Fingers crossed; let us know if it comes to pass, and when your first article will appear there.

I hope that works out for you Suzanne. Thanks to Katie, I have Daughters of Mars safely on my iPad. I paid $7.49 at 11:50 pm on the 19th and on the 20th the price went to $12.74. Woot! I love getting a great book for a great price.

Just edited the post to remove the name of the paper. Clearly, I know not the meaning of "hush hush". Sigh.

Bonnie -- fabulosity!! Hope you enjoy it...

Congratulations, Suzanne. Hope it works out the way you want!

Begone, Migraine!
Be Hiring, unknown newspaper! Good News!

*delurking*
Suz, that's exciting! If it all comes through I hope you'll provide a link so we can follow the blog!
*lurking again*

I'll post a link as/when this materializes. It's not a "hire", Peggy, just that they need someone with a different voice or focus to tackle this twice-weekly blog; it may not even be a long haul project. But it would be a high profile platform, which is good.

Headache is 75% gone, and hopefully will vanish over the course of the day, as long as I can minimize my time on the computer (backlighting bad for heads...) Haven't been able to do any serious reading (non-fiction, literary fiction), as that requires me to not only read but think. I've listened to a bit more of Barchester Towers and read some lighter fiction, including:

270. The Lantern Network by Ted Allbeury is an interesting enough novel that I find hard to categorieze -- theoretically, it would be a spy novel, but since about 2/3 of it takes place in the past and the remainder is about a 1970s era intelligence officer trying to understand what might have caused someone to kill themselves (hint, it has to do with the past, as the book's jacket blurb makes clear), it's not really a suspense novel. Allbeury has done a lot of good espionage novels, including one about moles that mirrors the Aldrich Ames case, but unless you're fascinated by the SOE's adventures in France, this shouldn't top your list. When Nicholas Bailey inquires into the death of someone in the midst of an apparently routine questioning in their own home, he is taken back to 1943/1944 France, and a man named Charles Chaland, who lead an SOE reseau in the Perigord region. The connection between the two and the possible reason for the 1970s-era guy's death becomes apparent, as well as the rather unusual link to Cold War politics. There's an extremely unconvincing love at first sight angle in the final pages that knocked a few basis points off this rating: 3.6 stars.

OK, off to catch up on work...

I hope the migraine has subsided, Suzanne. Great news about the upcoming blog work, will keep fingers crossed that it all works out.

Migraine is still lurking. I'm just stressed about a lot of stuff, which probably isn't helping.

I did manage to nab a copy of the next mystery by Julia Spencer-Fleming in the Clare Fergusson series, which I'm very happy about -- this from Amazon Vine. After a lot of dithering, I eventually used my second choice to nab a new novel by Jennifer Dubois, although it was tough to choose between that and a book about Amsterdam by Russell Shorto. There is an interesting-looking bio of Tsu Hzi (I can't remember how the author spells it) coming from Jung Chang, which was another choice, but... 700 plus pages, and only 30 days to read it in?? Hopefully it will still be an option in September.

Very very jealous of you getting that Julia Spencer-Fleming Suzanne. Migraine begone.

Hope things materialise with the unknown newspaper, Suz. It's very headachy weather these days, she said sympathetically.

Yes, it is, Tui... Headache has actually worsened... Right no, it's unclear whether I can string together three sentences. Although I must attempt this feat and write about the Nasdaq's trading snafu.

Bonnie, my mother did teach me how to share, and I'm sure that if I work at it, I can apply that skill to my books...

Migraine is starting to abate once more, but today I'm taking it very, very carefully. I've had three nightmarish nights, waking up to swap ice packs for ones that are still cold, and my head was so bad last night that I was actually pacing up and down in between paragraphs in order to get the column written. I'm starting to worry a bit about committing to a twice-weekly blog that would have zero flexibility in filing. If I had to, I could do it, but it will be a constraint and might be a new source of stress as well as income.

avatiakh/kerry -- thank you so much for the books! They arrived this morning, and my mailman now thinks I am very exotic. I had mail from you (in NZ), a postcard from a friend in India, and something from a very old & dear friend in the UK that all arrived at once. He asked how I knew so many people in so many places...

Finished another book, although not a great one:

271. The White Princess is the latest by Philippa Gregory in her series of novels set around what is now known as the Wars of the Roses. I find it fascinating that she has rabid supporters who are utterly uncritical, and then there is a group of self-appointed 'history police' who can't admit that she does a thing right. I'm somewhere in the middle. I get annoyed with the history police (who even have a FB page) because they get bent out of shape by such factors as -- gulp -- she gets birth order of siblings wrong. (In a novel, mind you.) But I'm equally irritated by the rabid fans, as she has this annoyingly precious/stylized way of writing, where she repeats the same phrase three different ways in three successive sentences, often using the same words. ARGHHHHH. Over and over again, in a 500 page book, this is like nails down the proverbial blackboard. Anyway -- the focus here is Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, parents of Henry VIII. Gregory (controversially) opts to believe that there was a romantic relationship between Richard III and Elizabeth (I think this is balderdash; for one thing, he was her uncle), but it does mean that she can set up an interesting scenario later in Henry VII's life, in which Elizabeth has to look on as her own husband falls for a much younger woman. So, Bosworth happens, and Elizabeth is half forced into marriage with Henry to save the York interests, at least temporarily, although her own mother keeps scheming in hopes of getting a "York boy" on the throne. (Really, the use of the word boy is so frequent and so Heavily Symbolic I may never be able to read it again...) The novel runs up to the execution of Perkin Warbeck, and while the witchy stuff that was part of The White Queen -- and where I draw a line -- was minimal here, Elizabeth's curse on the murderer of her brothers plays an interesting role. That said, it's a bit of a cop out on Gregory's part to end where she did, before the death of young Prince Arthur. The interesting bits? She has an interesting portrayal of Henry as a a king unable to trust; who doesn't know how to trust, and thus who produces the same kind of wariness in the people he needs to have support him -- Henry as his own worst enemy. He is king, in Gregory's eyes, and yet feels as insecure as he did as a young penniless aspirant to the throne in exile in Brittany in the reign of Edward IV. The bottom line? 3.25 stars. The writing is dreadful and cumbersome.

So, I have done NOTHING all day except read a bit here and there. Didn't want to sit in front of a computer and have the migraine flare up again. Tigger has spent the entire day cuddled up on a fleece blanket that I draped over the back of the sofa, fast asleep at various odd angles, and Molly has come to curl up beside me and purr from time to time. So, I have finished two more books, one of which must go back to the library tomorrow.

272. China Trade by S.J. Rozan is the first in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, a mystery revolving around some stolen antique Chinese porcelain. It was... OK. A bit pedestrian, actually. If this had been the first book in the series that I had read, I might not have continued. As it is, I'll try one more. (Shanghai Moon was quite good.) Part of the problem for me is that there STILL was very little introduction to the characters -- I noted that Rozan seemed to have written short stories before that? Perhaps the material was covered in there? But the character detail is perfunctory, and the mystery not quite engaging enough for me to care. At least it can go back to the library without my worrying I'm missing anything. 3 stars.

273. The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan is significantly better. It's a short novel, told in a great many voices, which ends up giving it the feeling of a mosaic. Each piece in isolation is mildly interesting, but if you assemble them together, you end up with something greater than the sum of the parts. Also impressive is the fact that Ryan is able to give each of those many voices their own individual personality, in only a few pages, and the way he uses each to dole out just the right amount of information about the story we're learning, of the stresses and strains in one small Irish community in the wake of the economic collapse there. There are dramatic events -- a murder, a kidnapping -- but we learn about them obliquely, just as we come to learn, through the window into the characters' thoughts, who is actually responsible. An impressive novel -- perhaps a bit over ambitious and it didn't blow me away, but it ended up telling the tale of what happens when people are pushed to their limits, in any number of ways, and it's a great portrait of a changing Ireland. 4.1 stars.

Now that the head isn't pounding and I don't want to slit my wrists, I may be able to get back to Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. I've also got The Bookman's Tale sitting here and looking at me -- it has to be back at the library in a week's time. And then there is part 2 of the Ken Follett mega-opus.

NZ is far from exotic! Good to know the books have arrived. I've just finished The Rosie Project and thought it was an entertaining read and suited to my inability to read with any concentration at present.

Sorry again about the migraine, Suz. Would it help with the work schedule if you compose the blog entry in longhand first? I'd hate to see you pass up a chance for more visibility in your area because of the migraines.

I think I'll have to give The Spinning Heart a second chance, and I'll definitely do so if it's chosen for the Booker Prize shortlist.

I hope that you're feeling better, and that you're able to get back to The Lowland this weekend.

I should finish The Luminaries tomorrow. I'm a little less than halfway through, and so far it's definitely deserving of a spot on the Booker shortlist. Hopefully I'll be able to read Unexploded next week, and I'll probably start The Kills next weekend.

We're up in Boston this week, visitng friends, and one of them asked me if you had tried voice recognition software. You have good diction, I bet it would work for you and you wouldn't have to look at the screen as much.

I've actually got Dragon on my desktop but haven't tried it yet, Judy. It takes time to 'train' the computer, but yes, def need to try it.

Had a very bad night last night. Woke up slightly headachey and VERY cold at about 4 when my neighbor came home. Put duvet on my bed (usually I get far too hot at night...) and took a capsule of the migraine med. This morning, not only was the headache worse, but I've got a weird feeling at the top of my chest, just below my neck. You know the feeling you get when you swallow the wrong way or something is caught in your throat. Except nothing is caught in my throat -- it just feels bruised and painful. I can breathe easily; it's just that with any deep breath I feel as if I can feel a chunk of food lodged partway down. I can't -- there isn't anything -- so I'm assuming it's just muscles that did something the wrong way when I was so agonizingly cold and uncomfortable in the middle of the night. Oh, and the headache is here again. Only about a 5 on the 1 to 10 scale vs the 8/9 of earlier, but....

I'm going to call a taxi to take me out on my errands and then come home again.

{{{Suz}}} This isn't an easy time, is it...so sorry! I wish I could help.

The pharmacist suggested eating some dried bread in case there is anything there -- that would push it down. We'll see.
The good news -- the pharmacist is pretty sure he can fill a NY state prescription for my migraine meds!! I'll just have to call my neurologist and get one.

So sorry to hear of your health related problems Suz. Having spent the last week plus sleeping alone again after so long, I must admit to having strange thoughts in the wee small hours that with locked doors and no one around what would happen if I need help in the night - have an asthma attack or worse? The alone part when we are not well is the worst. With you in spirit and via virtual hugs I hope the day and SUnday improves for you. x

Thanks for the good wishes, Richard & Paul. The last few weeks have been particularly beastly, and I'm not sure why. I need to keep a keen eye on what I'm eating, monitor my sleeping habits and anything else that might be responsible, because this the first day I've felt really better (i.e. with a modicum of energy) in nearly a week. I can't live like this. Well, clearly, I can exist, but that's not really the point. Still have no idea what that weird bottom of throat/top of chest constriction feeling was, but it has dissipated and the pain started clearing around midnight.

274. The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri was a mixed experience. On the one hand, the writing is so beautiful and the descriptive prose so carefully wrought that at times it brought tears to my eyes. With a few rare exceptions, the characters themselves didn't. What they did and thought is presented to the reader, but I never felt immersed in any character's view of the world, even in the segments told through that POV. The first segment excited me, up to the point when a family tragedy forces Subhash to return to Calcutta. The middle part of the book, in which Subhash attempts to build a family life in Rhode Island, rather bewildered me: it read as a chronicle, rather than anything else. Not until the final 40 or so pages is there any return of the intensity of the original pages. I'm going to have to write a review for Amazon as it was a Vine pick, but I'm still trying to sort out what to say. Parts I loved; parts never really engaged me even as dispassionately admired the caliber of the prose, which is superb. For now, it's 4.3 stars. Of the four books I've read on the Man Booker longlist, I'd put The Testament of Mary at the top, when thinking of a great combination of writing and the author's ability to completely engage a reader in the story. The Lahiri novel was one that I was able to put down, after reading the first 100 pages or so, and feel only mildly curious about resuming.

275. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, aka JK Rowling, may cause me to revise my views about Rowling's ability to write a book for adults that I enjoy, even though what I didn't like about The Casual Vacancy was here, too, in spades. That's the almost unremittingly bleak view of 'real' people that Rowling adopts: I'm no fan of having to like a character in a book in order to find it appealing. (In fact, when Richard suggested a challenge of inviting 7 fictional characters to dine with you, I struggled for this very reason: Many characters I find interesting on the page aren't necessarily people I'd like to meet or share a meal with.) Not a single character in Rowling's first adult novel was without some kind of grotesque failing or characteristic; it felt as if she wanted to emphasize the ugly undersides of our nature to the exclusion of everything else. Undeniably, these exist, but the book that resulted was as unreal as a sappy Amish romance novel that is all sweetness and light. This mystery novel was written pseudonymously, and I may not have picked it up (when I was in London, for my new UK Kindle) had I realized Rowling was the author. And she does take advantage of this to skewer and show the ugly or gritty underside of most of the people that Cormoran Strike, private investigator, encounters as he probes into the death of Lula Landry, supermodel, a death written off as suicide by the police. There are two great twists, one of which I saw coming and the other I didn't, but Strike is a great, nuanced character and I'm glad we may be seeing more of him. Not a comfortable book, and not anything that would blow your socks off, but an interesting and sometimes well-written mystery. 4 stars.

What I'm reading now:

Stranded by Alex Kava (must-read for Amazon Vine) COMPLETED
The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett (must go back to the library this coming week) COMPLETED
Winter of the World by Ken Follett (ditto; sequel to the first chunkster in this series)

I'm listening to Barchester Towers and nearly finished that re-read. COMPLETED

On deck:

Harvest by Jim Crace (I keep picking it up and putting it down, but I will read it this month)
Hild by Nicola Griffith
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
The English Girl by Daniel Silva (not renewable at the library, and due back on the 29th -- gulp)
Unexploded by Alison MacLeod (which I'm eager to read)
The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Mister Blue by Jacques Poulin

Have a happy and pain-free week ahead, Suz.

Thanks, Richard...

My younger nephew, who is now 9, has been getting migraines. This is a big reason that I don't have children: not just the difficulty of caring for an infant or a small child with a migraine (I don't know how my mother coped...) but the strong familial link. Jamie is the fifth generation that is known to have migraines, going back to my great-grandmother, and including both men and women in various generations. I would have been surprised if one of the three hadn't inherited this tendency, and it's not something that I would have wanted to pass along to a child. Sigh.

Meanwhile, elder nephew, turning 11 next month, wants a Kindle for his birthday. He is as voracious a reader as I was at his age.

More books:

276. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope was tremendous fun to re-read, although 25 years after my first reading, I found myself second-guessing a lot of my initial impressions. In particular, I take issue with Trollope's characterization of Mrs Proudie. T wants us to see her as deeply obnoxious, wanting to take over from her husband as de facto bishop. Yes, I know T. was writing in the Victorian era, but given how ineffectual and weak the bishop was portrayed as being, how could any self-respecting, intelligent woman fail to try to do this? (It would be interesting to read a modern recast of the novel from her perspective...) In contrast, Eleanor Bold's failure to live up to her name (she caused so many of her own 'problems') irritated me, while Madeline Neroni's bringing both Slope and Arabin to their senses was fascinating. I'm amazed at how vivid T's women are. I'll keep reading in this series. I've already read Doctor Thorne, but never got further in the series. 4.3 stars. Recommended, although readers need to be prepared for lots of references to 19th century political and theological trends, disputes and issues in England.

277. Stranded by Alex Kava: I may never be able to drive or travel on an interstate again without pondering all the serial killers preying on those who use them to get from point A to point B. This one was chilling enough that I didn't mind that I had pretty much identified whodunnit within the first 100 pages or so. A fast and suspenseful read, in which series heroine Maggie gets a new romantic interest. No nutritional content, but that's not why I read these. 3.3 stars.

My (admittedly male) perspective on why Mrs. P is such a pill isn't to do with her taking over for the Bish...he is so so so out of his depth that one is, I believe, meant to understand that Mrs. P was the guiding force in his entire career...but rather her hectoring, harridanly manner of so doing. Poor Bishop Proudie (his first name has long vanished from memory) is, one just knows, an impossible marshmallow and not that bright on top of it.

And Trollope's women are a huge part of the reason I read his books and shun, with revulsion and contumely, those of Chuckles the Dick. Can You Forgive Her? and The Eustace Diamonds are totally about the women. And the women are vivid, intense, and real to me. Not quite Austen level, but still streets ahead of George Eliot's or *shudder* Chuckles's ladies.

Well said, Richard!

But I don't read Dickens for the women. I read his novels for the caricatures, and the social situations/commentary. I'm impressed by how vivid AT's insights are into his women characters, but not reading novels that didn't have great women characters would, alas, rule out a whole chunk of 20th century literature as well as much written in the Victorian era. I've not read much by Eliot as yet, but admit that it was surprising to find Dorothea Brooke so underwhelming a personality given the nature of her creator and Eliot's own unconventional life. Perhaps that is a sign of just how strong social mores were in Victorian England? That said, I don't find Hardy's depictions of women all that appealing, either -- in fact, while the women may behave unconventionally (in contrast to Dickens, where the heroine of Bleak House irritated me endlessly), he seems in many ways to dislike them. That's why I gave up reading Hardy a while ago, although perhaps I should go back and try again.

I will grant all of you that my perfect writer would have Mr. T's knack of portraying women with Mr. D's brilliant writing with great lashings of the wit of both.

#129 - Hitting the "like" button on Peggy's contribution to the discussion!

Trollope certainly is unfair to Mrs Proudie (his contradictory attitudes to women, both sympathetic and condemning, can be exasperating) but his criticism is certainly about the way she runs the Bishop, not that she does it: the point is made a couple of times that Susan Grantly runs the Archdeacon just as thoroughly but has more sense than to do it in public. :)

Liz/Richard -- yes, I do see the point. I also wonder, however, how much of it is due to AT's clear preference for a church that is "higher" than that favored by Mrs. P? In the final chapter, he clearly indicates his own preference, even while gently mocking Eleanor's liking for her high church husband's snazzy vestments and the red lettering in her own prayer book...

Suzanne, reading these posts and so hope you're feeling better!

>>#132

Oh, he is certainly on the High Church side and Mrs Proudie is not just Low Church but Evangelical, so yes, that is part of it too. Presumably tampering with the "natural" order of things results in pushy women. :)

On a completely different note, Mister Blue by Jacques Poulin is shaping up to be a five-star book.

Here is a sentence that might explain why. The narrator is a novelist living alone and relatively isolated in a cottage on the ile d'Orleans, in the St. Lawrence river. He muses:

"Words are independent, like cats, and they don't do what you want them to do. You can love them, stroke them, say sweet things to them all you want - they still break off and go their own way."

Becky, thanks -- yes, two back to back 'good' days and hoping this will be a reversal of last week! Am taking a gamble by going down to NY for the day; often this ends with a bad headache, in part because of the stuffy air and stress of trying to run hither and yon.

Fingers crossed that there is at least one check in my mailbox, pls...

I believe that I ran over a raccoon once on the Ile d'Orleans. Would this book take me back there at all?

Robert

Only if you ran over it while in pursuit of a perfect phrase for the Great American Novel, Robert...

Did Sheila Fischman do the Poulin translation, Suz? She's brilliant!

Yes, Tui... I'm tempted to put in an order for Translation is a Love Affair, but can't quite bring myself to hit the buy button until I see whether there is a check in my mailbox tomorrow... I really have been good; the vast majority of my books are coming to me via Amazon, NetGalley and the library, but the only Poulin that the library has here is a Spanish (????) edition of Volkswagen Blues. *eyes roll in disbelief*

>134 lyzard: +1

I liked Translation Is a Love Affair, but not enough to read anything else by Poulin. Maybe I should try Mister Blue.

Since I haven't read that one yet, Rebecca, I can't opine on whether Mister Blue is better or not. I'm definitely enjoying it much more than I did Spring Tides, which just got more and more esoteric. I'm in NY (getting my hair de-greyed at the moment) and before I head back to Penn station will stop at BookCourt and see if they have Translation is a Love Affair, which was an Archipelago book.

The good news: there were two checks waiting and one of 'em just arrived today. So at least I'm solvent, and I have my migraine meds. And in an hour or two I will no longer look like a badger with a white streak down the middle of my head...

I have tried twice now to get into Spring Tides but it just doesn't yank me in for some reason.

Tui -- it didn't carry you away?? (yuck yuck yuck) Sorry, I appear to be very 'punny' at the moment.

I just ordered the next Poulin from Amazon; BookCourt didn't have it -- and I have to say, for an indie bookstore that I've been patronizing for nearly 20 years, they really aren't very helpful people. No one there has ever made an effort to get to know me, to have a conversation with me that isn't transactional, commented on a book, etc. -- these days, especially, they are all too busy being hipsters.

Reasonably productive trip -- checks, hair de-greyed and pedicure completed, so I can go out tomorrow evening. A friend's husband (he is an artist; his father is a Nobel laureate in economics; go figure) is showing a couture collection here in Providence tomorrow evening and I'm invited! So I have to look quasi-respectable. It seems Providence has its own version of fashion week for up and coming regional designers. If it weren't for that, I prob would have gone down to NY yesterday and tried to find a place to crash so as to catch "The Audience". Will have to see what I can do about a quick trip for that purpose (and to see a calligraphy exhibit at the Met that a friend of mine has been raving about) soonish. It's before our next book circle, which is chez Richard on the 21st. (I know he has been promoting it, so I thought I would, too...)

Very slightly headachey, so instead of finishing up some work, I'm going to crawl into bed and try to sleep. Not enough of that stuff yesterday, and an old friend/mentor has been lecturing me long-distance. As well as heading into the home stretch with Mister Blue, I am nearly finished with The English Girl, which is a BIG improvement on Daniel Silva's recent and too formulaic thrillers (although it's heading in that direction in the last 200 pages; sigh). Then I have two more library books to read.

One book that I finished up yesterday that can go back to the library is:

278. The Bookman's Tale by Charlie Lovett is getting a great deal of buzz that I don't think is altogether warranted. That said, it is an occasionally charming little novel and it's about BOOKS. Actually, about a socially-challenged young widower and his lifelong fascination with antiquarian books, their quest and restoration. He's always wanted to find the Holy Grail -- a book that would change literary history -- and it seems he might have done so... Could have lived without a slightly over-complicated plot (Lovett wrote himself into corners and then had to find an exit strategy) and the very light ghost elements, but if you're a bibliomaniac looking for a fun light read, you could do worse. 3.4 stars.

Now reading:

The English Girl by Daniel Silva (nearly finished)
Christian Nation by Frederic Rich
Unexploded by Alison MacLeod (halfway)
Winter of the World by Ken Follett (2/3 finished)
Mister Blue by Jacques Poulin (nearly finished)

Listening to: Blackout by Connie Willis

On deck:

Hild by Nicola Griffith
Harvest by Jim Crace
The new Julia Spencer-Fleming mystery (an ARC)
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien

Suzanne - Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music just won the Book of the Year and Fiction Awards at the NZ Post Book Awards. I'll have to try getting to it in September.

Great, Kerry; I'm looking forward to reading that and The Luminaries in September. Had hoped to read both this month, but too many chunksters were lurking on my list...

279. Mister Blue by Jacques Poulin is a little gem of a novel. The narrator, Jim, describes himself as Quebec's slowest writer, and has retreated to a cottage on an island in the St. Lawrence to try to write a love story. The problem? He isn't sure he has ever been in love. Then, he realizes that a nearby sandy cave has become occupied -- he sees an empty sleeping bag and a copy of Arabian Nights, with the name Marie K. on the flyleaf, left there, and a boat is moored just offshore. He immediately dubs the mysteriously invisible occupant "Marika", and decides to meet her. But as she proves increasingly elusive, and the characters in his novel keep resisting their instructions, he learns more obliquely about life from his cat, Mr. Blue, and a young woman, La Petite, who de facto moves into his spare room. There are all kinds of moments here when I had to stop and ponder the prose and the ideas and the way it is all presented -- it's not a typical narrative structure, and Jim is a far from typical narrator. There's an element of something fantastic or even supernatural/fairytalish at work here, but it's kept enough to the background to make this a delightful book for me. 4.6 stars, and definitely recommended.

280. The English Girl by Daniel Silva was an unexpected treat, and is one of the author's best suspense books, IMO, ranking just behind The Unlikely Spy and The Marching Season and some of his other early thrillers. It revolves around the young girl of the title, kidnapped in Corsica, who apparently vanishes. Until, weeks later, the English prime minister gets a blackmail threat and Gabriel Allon is called in. Allon, an Israeli spook and Silva's character, is one who has grown irritating to me as a lot of earlier books have involved way too much of his introspection and agonizing, over and over and over, about the same issues. In this book, not only does he seem to stop behaving a bit like Hamlet, but there's more nuanced action (not just Gabriel vs lotsa bad guys) and more real suspense, as well as an EXCELLENT plot twist right at the end, and a good one in the middle, when something really unexpected happens. You could probably read this as a standalone book, too, as Silva gives you enough insight into Allon's background along the way, and you wouldn't have to plod through his less successful ones. Also a recommended book. 4.4 stars. For my 2013 categories challenge.

Tired, tired, tired. By the time I finally got back from NY (train was very late), I was exhausted, with the beginning of a migraine (probably because I didn't eat enough or at the right times yesterday.) That woke me up again early this morning, and I had to take my meds and stay there until I had chased it off. But the painkillers have left me a bit groggy, and still with lotsa work to do. Grump.

I just realized that somewhere in the last week, the total # of books I have cataloged as either having or having read topped 7,000. What is most unnerving is that I haven't cataloged all my books (although happily have disposed of several hundred cataloged ones in the last year or so.)

Suz - 841 pages to go in a little over 3.5 days. Wow and, erm, Wow.

So, Paul, what's my September challenge?? :-)

(I'm now fairly confident I'll make it to 15,000, although last week I was quite doubtful...)

Suz - do you mean BookCourt in Brooklyn? My other face to fqce book group used to meet there in the basement.

Yup, Jim -- that's the one. When I first moved to NY in 1994, I lived on Clinton Street, then Tompkins Place. When I moved back from London, I was further down Court Street, and then on Pacific Street for 10 years, so BookCourt has always been my nearest bookstore. It's kinda telling that a bibliomaniac like me hasn't developed any kind of relationship with any of the people there in that kind of timespan, IMO... Offhand and unengaged, as when I asked about the Poulin. They didn't even offer to order it for me. So they lost the sale to Amazon -- the book should arrive this afternoon.

That's sad that BookCourt was so unaccomodating, Suz. I've been there a couple of times, and I was impressed by its collection of books. It's a bit out of the way for me on my trips to NYC, compared with Strand Book Store, Book Culture and St. Mark's Bookshop, so I probably won't go there again unless I have a particularly good reason (such as a visit to BAM, the Brooklyn Museum, etc.).

I'm glad that you also liked Mister Blue. I've enjoyed the two novels by Jacques Poulin that I've read, so I'll have to look for more of his translated work.

I'll definitely read The Lowland, although I may wait until October to do so, especially if it isn't chosen for the Booker Prize shortlist in a couple of weeks.

Finished my book du jour, which was dark/bleak and depressing:

281. Christian Nation by Frederic Rich is the kind of book that can only be written as a novel and yet isn't a particularly good novel in the traditional sense. Rich is trying to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Sinclair Lewis, Orwell, Huxley and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, by creating a narrative that is written by a lawyer named Greg, looking back over the events of 2008 through 2029. In this counterfactual universe, McCain won the 2008 election, only to die within a few months and leave Sarah Palin as president, ending up as the tool of the kind of fundamentalists who risk giving Christianity a bad name -- the kind who do, in real life and not just in this novel, suggest that stoning adulterers and homosexuals is somehow appropriate, and who do want to create a theocracy in the US, as God's law must always be superior to any laws that man can create. Rich isn't a skillful enough novelist to make this convincing on that level, but what he clearly intends to do is fire a warning salvo about the intentions of the lunatic fringe, who simply can't tolerate a world in which people disagree with them on issues of religion and yet coexist in society. (If you don't think that is the philosophy of some out there, then you need to take a glance at some of the Christian broadcasting network, or read some of the books I occasionally stumble across.) Rich is a lawyer, and he lays out, in the form of fiction a very plausible scenario under which the constitution could be made irrelevant (imagine if jurists who rejected as unconstitutional elements of a law set up to make denying God a treasonable offense could be impeached by the Senate and deprived of their offices -- against which impeachment there is no appeal?) Rich's tale is of a lawyer who only slowly comes to realize the threat to the rule of law and sheer common sense, as mainstream religion is hijacked, and his friendship with Sanjay, who becomes a moral leader of of the secular forces (backed my mainstream clergy) as the battle becomes a literal one. It's a hard book to rate. Clearly, if it had been written as a non-fiction work it would be dubbed alarmist, in spite of the fact that Rich has clearly imagined a road map that could be used to produce the results he hypothesizes in the book. On the other hand, it's too didactic to be a 'good' novel. The people who really should read this, won't: their world view is one where questions and uncertainty don't exist and where if you deny God, as conceived of by those who have accepted Jesus as their personal savior, that is evidence that you are either deranged or evil. (The survivors of the siege of Manhattan are offered a particularly chilling kind of devil's dilemma toward the end of the book.) And if I say just that it's an underwhelming novel, that might stop people from reading it, when it's a more digestible way of absorbing some of the stuff that writers like Chris Hedges (himself an Episcopal priest) have been warning about for years. So: 3.5 stars.

Not a spoiler: the narrator of this book ends up being 'rehabilitated' and working sorting out books to be burned from those that are permissible (and don't challenge the new theocracy). Of his task, he writes: "The book was the ultimate symbol of the great divide between faith, which depends on a single authoritative book, and reason, which challenges the very idea of revealed wisdom and celebrates books for their subversion of authority."

The point from which I'm coming: I'm not a die-hard atheist. I'd probably call myself a wistful agnostic. In some ways, I'd love to have some set of beliefs, to provide an order and meaning to the world. But you don't go out and acquire belief in a supermarket; it comes from within or not at all. And my ability to believe is stymied by the mere fact that so many different groups do believe so ardently in their own revealed truths. Perhaps one is right, but I can't know or believe that. And why would one be more right than another? Why should I select one form of truth to believe in over any other? All address the same kind of human existential angst and offer our societies rules that we seem to need, in some way. (Civil law is a relatively recent concept.) Some form of religious faith is a constant across all societies, but my ideal world is one in which those individuals can recognize that each person has the right to seek their own path and own truth -- or not seek it at all. Alas, the fringe elements in most religions take a binary view of everything: because theirs is the truth, all else is heresy, and heresy cannot be tolerated. And we have seen, again and again through history, where that leaves us.

I'm not anti-religious and have friends who are believers of many kinds. I would like to be sure that we don't inhabit a world where we could end up in the kind of situation suggested by this book, but I can't be. I do think that being anti-religious plays right into the hands of all those who argue that secularists are anti-religion; I think we're simply opposed to being required to live according to precepts that aren't ours and that we can't honestly accept. And I have listened to some of the megachurch evangelical preachers suggest that that is the kind of world they want to bring about.

OK, I don't want this thread to become embroiled in name-calling or hostile comments of any kind at all, from any side. So I'd ask anyone who feels tempted to lash out in any direction to think twice and refrain. If we do end up in the kind of mess Rich believes is possible, in part it will be because of a lack of tolerance on all sides, and because we are too willing to lash out at those with whom we have such fundamental disagreements.

Rant over. Now off to find something to take my mind off this book and my other anxieties, which aren't insignificant right about now, but which I won't bore you with!

Clearly you need to drink more heavily. Books like that one are best washed down with Veuve Clicquot.

Superlatives fail me Suz - 15,000 pages is 50 book at 300 pages each!!!!
How about for September - World War II to Desert Storm - Read a book from each year from 1945-1990? Maybe a bit too restricting in terms of hunting down titles, but I'd sure be impressed.xx

McCain won the 2008 election, only to die within a few months and leave Sarah Palin as president,

I stopped reading right there! It was more than I could think about before breakfast!

I like the term "wistful agnostic".

Paul, I think that's a bit too restrictive. It's something I could probably do over the course of a year, but I suspect there would be years that I simply couldn't find anything that I wanted to read or was remotely interested in and that fitted into the categories... If you've got anything more flexible, I'll be glad to ponder it (eg, something that fits in with TIOLI, like the full house idea, or # of pages, etc.)

#154 -- Richard, if I'd washed it down with champagne, Richard, I'd have a thumping great headache to add to the general blues that I'm battling right now!

#156 -- I agree, Rebecca, but that's precisely the kind of response that the author is pointing out is risky. In his eyes, it's like sticking fingers in ears and singing lalalala to ignore a threat and made it go away. Two not impossible twists and turns of fate -- we can tell ourselves that because they didn't happen, the rest of the scenario is implausible, but the fact remains that while it is extreme, it's not impossible. Or even improbable.

#157 -- Tui, thanks. It's the only one that I could come up with on the spur of the moment.

Ok Suz then what about an a-z, z-a challenge - go through the alphabet either author first/last name or book title and try to get back to "a" again by the month end. 52 books may be too much even for you, my dear!

Excellent review and comments, Suz. I feel much the same way.

Hmm, Paul -- I could try to do that in aggregate -- have an author with a first/middle or last name for every letter over the course of the month, but I wouldn't read them in order. That's WAY too restrictive. And I may need your help with Z...

ETA: And I'd have to include a percentage of shorter works, like Kindle Singles.

Aha, turns out I have a Z in my collection.

A quick list of recent books; I'll post some comments tomorrow when I've had some rested.

282. Harvest by Jim Crace features some of the best writing and most vivid imagery I've read, in a novel that is almost perfectly structured and paced. (Although it drove me slightly crazy trying to identify the era in which it was set -- I eventually settled on the 16th century, for reasons I'll elaborate on if anyone cares!) When the book opens, it's on what could be any day of any year, in an endless agricultural cycle that probably made it heard for the villagers at the heart of this story to know what year it was themselves. If it happens outside the borders of their community (which doesn't have a name), it simply doesn't matter, and strangers are viewed suspiciously. This is old England. But there are newcomers: Walter Thirsk accompanied the master to the village a dozen years ago, and although he married a woman of the community (now dead), he is still not quite one of them. Then there is "Master Quill", making some kind of drawing of the village for unknown reasons. And then come two more threatening sets of strangers -- two men and a women driven off their own land, for reasons that later become significant, and then a relative of the landlord, with unwelcome men at arms and bad news. By the time the book ends, only seven days have elapsed but the collision of these worlds and characters has resulted in violence and upheaval. As Crace writes: “Our snug and tiresome village has burst apart these last few days. Master Havoc and Lady Pandemonium have already set to work. We are a moonball that’s been kicked, just for the devilry, by some vexatious foot. Our spores are scattering.” (A moonball being a kind of mushroom that has hallucinogenic effects, and is important to the chain of events that unfolds.) This is an excellent novel, and along with The Testament of Mary, my favorite of the Man Booker nominees thus far. 4.6 stars.

283. Winter of the World by Ken Follett is the second in a proposed trilogy; I finally got around to reading an ARC of the first that I have had sitting around for years in August, and when I saw this on the library shelf, decided I might as well continue reading while the characters were still more or less straight in my mind. Follett is trying to chronicle the events of the 20th century (at least, in the United States and Europe) and assembles a cast of characters with all kinds of links who coincidentally are present at major/critical turning points in history, in this case, at Pearl Harbor, sneaking military secrets to the Soviets from Berlin during WW2, etc. As in the previous book, which focused on the WW1 period, while the book ostensibly deals with the period 1933-1950 or so, the real emphasis is on the war years, and a lot of the rest gets short shrift. This time, the character coincidences were less plausible and more annoying, and there wasn't enough else there to offset that annoyance. 2.9 stars. Meh.

284. Unexploded by Alison MacLeod -- For my 2013 Categories Challenge -- is another Man Booker nominee by a very interesting author. For the first half of the book, you're reading an excellent if not astonishing novel set in wartime Brighton, distinguished by the author's ability to completely capture the eerie sensation of what it must have been like to live in Brighton -- on the front lines of an expected invasion at any minute. Today, we know what happened; MacLeod's characters clearly don't, and the anxiety that ensues is impeccably portrayed. Everything that the novel's characters take for granted -- the hero-worship of a young boy for his 18-year-old brother, the mutual understanding and support of a married couple -- is 'blown up' and the characters are left to reassemble the pieces. The focus of the book is on a couple, bank manager Geoffrey and his wife Evelyn, and their young son, Phillip: the war forces each to re-evaluate the other in an unwelcome new light, beginning when Geoffrey directs Evelyn's attention to a place at the bottom of the garden where he has buried a metal box containing an emergency sum of cash: if invasion comes, he tells her calmly, it will be his job to accompany the bank's gold reserves to a safe place, abandoning his family to whatever may come. Evelyn, stunned, makes another unwelcome discovery when she finds what else the metal box contains... The story becomes darker still in its second half, as the 'games' by young Phillip take on ominous overtones. This isn't a perfect book, but it's very, very good, and a compelling yarn. Do read it... 4. 3 stars.

Ok no need to be in order; you go so fast that I couldn't tell whether they were in order anyhow! Let me know if your stuck with Xs, Qs or Zs. Close approximations of course allowed.

Congratulations for whizzing past 15,000 by the way. Don't think many others could have done that.

I don't think so either. I bow to the queen of the readers and thank her for insightful reviews.

Well, there were several chunksters in there. The two Ken Follett novels accounted for about 2,000 of the total, or very nearly!

I'll finish two more books before midnight, I think; Hild and The Land of Spices, the latter being a last minute addition to the ranks at the suggestion of calm.

Just a quick note:

285. Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien is a novel that packs a powerful emotional punch and is beautifully written, but that didn't quite work for me. It's the story of Janie, who survived the Khmer killing fields and now lives in Montreal, and her friendship with Hiroji, whose own brother hasn't been heard of since the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia. In a nutshell, it's about survival, both physical and psychological. Despite the points that were so well written and moving that I wanted to cry, I never quite engaged with the story, which was slightly disjointed in terms of time & space. Still, definitely worth reading. 4.1 stars.

Finished two more books earlier this evening, and have been up, awake too late, listening to The Iron King by Maurice Druon on my audiobook. The story is fascinating and the detail interesting, but the narrator is kinda making me crazy.

I'll update all my comments on the books tomorrow, but wanted to make sure I know which ones belong to my categories challenge so I don't get (even more) confused!

286. Hild by Nicola Griffith is an ARC that I got at BookExpo in June, and was at first deterred from reading because there just seemed to be so many details of 7th century life in Anglo-Saxon England that the author just assumed I would be familiar with -- rarely have I felt so out of my depth reading in those initial pages, some of which may as well have been written in a foreign language! Happily, I discovered that the ARC has a glossary of terms (hurrah) even though it lacked a map, and combining that with a quick Google of St. Hilda of Whitby gave me a big jump forward. This is Hilda/Hild's life, told through her own eyes as a young girl of royal blood, who is dangerously close to the throne of Edwin king, her uncle. As Edwin's power grows, so does Hild's, as she becomes his seer, channeling her observation and intellect into what those around her view as something almost supernatural. She becomes a woman and a warrior almost at the same time, occupying an awkward middle ground even as the power of the Christian/Roman church grows and conversions become mandatory. This is a fascinating novel and one in which the author really almost inhabits the era about which she is writing about -- the smallest details are vivid and we understand the significance of receiving spindle and distaff and being paired with another young woman of the same age as lifetime friends almost as Hild would have done, thanks to her writing skills. Once past the initial hump, it's a compelling read. 4.3 stars.

287. The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien -- for my 2013 Categories Challenge. This was a last-minute decision to read, thanks to calm, who had commented on the book in the Readathon thread, a novel that I had spotted while unpacking my books back in May and set aside to read. It's the twin tale, of Reverend Mother Marie Helene and the youngest child in her convent school in Ireland, Anna Murphy, at a time of upheaval and growing nationalism in Ireland. O'Brien clearly has some interesting ideas on that front, as the English nun recognizes the narrowness and parochialism of the Irish nationalist world view, even as she recognizes that within her own French/Belgian order, the Irish now are a growing proportion of the population. This seems to have been published in 1940, and is set in the first decade or two of the 20th century. A compelling story, but I don't think I liked it quite as much as did calm. Though I'll certainly try to read my other novel by this author, That Lady, sooner rather than later. 4 stars.

The September Challenge from PaulCranswick: To read a book with a first letter in the title or author's name that can fill one of the slots from A-Z and then back from Z-A. (NB: This can include shorter works, such as Kindle singles, but not short stories.)

I don't think I'll manage this one, but here's the template.... No books to be counted twice, but I don't have to read them in A-Z order.

A ASSIGNMENT in Brittany by Helen MacInnes (Finished 9/3/13)
B The BUY Side by Turney Duff (Finished 9/7/13)
C Harry Potter and the CHAMBER of Secrets (Finished 9/7/13)
D DON'T Want to Miss a Thing by Jill Mansell (Finished 9/3/13)
E Through the EVIL Days by Julia Spencer-Fleming (Finished 9/1/13)
F
G The GOVERNESS by Evelyn Hervey (Finished 9/10/13)
H HARRY Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling (Finished 9/5/13)
I The IRON King by Maurice Druon (Finished 9/2/13; audiobook)
J
K The Moor by Laurie R. KING (Finished 9/2/13)
L LORDS and Ladies by Terry Pratchett (Finished 9/4/13)
M
N
O Moon OVER Soho by Ben Aaronovich (Finished 9/6/13; audiobook)
P
Q
R Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK ROWLING (Finished 9/9/13)
S
T
U
V Murder in Chelsea by VICTORIA Tompson (Finished 9/5/13)
W
X The Caretaker by A. X. Ahmad (Finished 9/8/13)
Y
Z

Z
Y
X
W
V
U
T
S
R
Q
P
O
N
M
L
K
J
I
H
G
F
E
D
C
B
A

Go Suz! I'll try to do it once.

Hi Suz, I don't know if you remember, but I made this (mad) promise that I'd read a favourite book from the library of every visitor to my thread. From your library I chose Gillespie and I and I absolutely loved it. I don't know if I would have picked this one up if it hadn't been for you, but you lead me to a wonderful reading-experience and I thank you for it wholeheartedly!

#170 -- phew, I'm glad that was a success!! I would have felt horribly guilty had I recommended something that you didn't like...

A friend of mine who was laid up after surgery on her foot just returned a bunch of books that I had lent her to read during the time when she literally wasn't allowed to get on her feet. She confessed that she hadn't warmed up to the idea of The Siege by Helen Dunmore and hadn't been able to get into Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay, and that Rennie Airth's mystery was "just OK". Sniff, sniff, sniff! It's lucky that I don't take these judgments personally... but on the other hand, it's great to know that a book bullet found an appreciative audience...

#169 -- Paul, yes! I do think I"m slightly demented to try this, but what the heck. As long as I can contribute a Kindle single now and then, it might be possible. With the emphasis on "might".

So, I spent money that I really couldn't afford buying entry-level Kindles for my niece and elder nephew for their birthdays (she turns 12 on September 15; he turns 11 on the 10th). All that Connor wanted was a Kindle, apparently, and since they arrived on Friday, and my sis-in-law and brother decided to give them to them immediately, he (nephew Connor) has apparently not been spotted once without it clutched in his hand. If poor Jamie (younger nephew) has inherited the family migraines, I'm glad that at least I've also managed to contribute a bibliomaniac gene to the next generation.

Such a good auntie! I would have adored such a gift at that age. Had an uncle in Scotland who had a bookshop, however, so boxes of books were every bit as good.

I'm happy to see that you liked Hild, and I'll be looking for it. The Iron King is also appealing.
DH gave me my Kindle for Christmas and told people, "She carries the thing around like a doll baby." Connor sounds like the real deal.

Book du jour:

288. Through the Evil Days will be a welcome novel for those who have been following the tale of the Rev. Claire Fergusson (Episcopal priest and sometime National Guard officer) and Russ van Alstyne, chief of police of the small community of Millers Kill, NY. Claire and Russ are finally set to go off on their honeymoon, but it coincides with a mysterious fire, the kidnapping of a young girl with a life-threatening medical emergency and an epic ice storm. Oh yeah, and Claire's bishop has suggested she resign because of Russ, while the town is contemplating shutting down the police department and turning things over to the state troopers. Not enough? Well, the ex-husband of one of Russ's cops shows up, intent on either convincing her to give him $$ or taking away her kids... It's a rollercoaster action kind of story, which is very well handled. But once again it ends on a kind of cliffhanger, just as the last one did. 4.3 stars; recommended for series fans. It's due out in November -- just in time for the REAL ice storms.

Reading now:

The Moor by Laurie R. King
The Buy Side by Turney Duff
Queen's Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle
Place of Confinement by Anna Dean

Listening to:

The Iron King by Maurice Druon
Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

The Land of Spices was a four star read for me as well Suzanne. So I guess we liked it about the same:)

It is raining and thundering so hard out that I can't hear my new audiobook.... This has been a rainy, overcast and humid (not hot, but uncomfortable) long weekend.

I finished the old one, however. Audiobook, that is...

289. The Iron King by Maurice Druon is a re-read (or in this case, a re-listen) to a French series of historical novels of which this is the first volume that I first consumed back in my teens, when I was starting to read in French. I'll probably mix and match the remaining five books in the series in terms of English & French as between 'em I have all the volumes. That said, I loathe the old paper in the Livre de Poche editions -- feels yucky on the fingers! Anyway, the first two books have been produced as audiobooks, but I'm not crazy abou the narrator, who is incapable of not making a Lombard banker sound like an Italian waiter, etc. The book? It's interesting, precisely because it's a different kind of historical novel, revolving not around American figures written by an American or English figures by an English writer or Americans/Brits writing about somewhere else, but a French novelist tackling his own history, in this case, king Phillip Le Bel's final year on the throne. Icy cold, authoritarian, he's an uncomfortable figure and this novel deals with some ugly events in a graphic way -- opening with the burning of the Grand Master of the Templars, who puts a curse on the king and his children -- to the deaths of the lovers of two of his daughters in law, broken on the wheel. If your stomach is strong enough, it's a fascinating tell. This is one of the classics of historical fiction and is being re-issued (in a new translation? I don't know) by Harper, presumably to capitalize on the popularity of A Game of Thrones, since George Martin acknowledges his debt to Druon. The first two are out now and the third is coming at the end of the month, after it has largely been out of print and unavailable for the last 20 years or so in English. Definitely recommended if you like historical fiction, or Game of Thrones. 4 stars. For my 2013 categories challenge.

I've always wondered what possible upside there could be to being a female royal's illicit lover.

It would have to be true lurve, with a lot of idiocy. Or perhaps, as with Isabella, wife of Edward II, the hope of bumping off the husband. (Later in this series, we get to a book devoted to Isabella and Mortimer.) But then, even Mortimer wound up on the scaffold. It's not as if the 14th century female royals could disburse patronage, either.

Interesting that Druon portrays Philippe as a widower who sorely misses his late wife -- a rare royal/political marriage that Druon feels was a good one. Certainly, after her death, he didn't remarry and there are no contemporary reports of king's mistresses littering the landscape, although he was only in his 40s and exceptionally good looking.

They're rare, those successful royal lovematches. William the Bastard and his dwarvish queen Matilda (4ft5in, I think? to his 6ft) seem to have been another one, as the Bastard left no recorded bastards and a brood o' kids.

Oh and the one with Isabella and (stupid) Mortimer is The She-Wolf of France, I think. I like Druon's titles as much as the books.

Hilda Lewis wrote an interesting version of Matilda's story, Wife to the Bastard. She looks at what happened when William fell out with his eldest son and apparent heir, who happened to be Matilda's favorite... There is someone whose story is ripe for retelling by a novelist today, I think. Aside from Sarah Bower's novel about the Bayeux tapestry, which features William's half brother, Odo, there isn't much else out there that is contemporary. Lewis knew the era reasonably well, I think; she also wrote a novel for children set then, Harold Was my King, which I remember as being quite good. (And why the touchstone that appears automatically with that book is "Frankenstein", I would dearly love to know. There are only two options, one is for the precise title, and the other is Frankenstein. Why, when there are only two books listed, isn't the default one, the one whose title you have actually just finished typing, correctly and in full?? I'm going to gnash my teeth over this for a wee while, I think.)

... and one more book

290. The Moor by Laurie R. King confirms my suspicion that the best book in this series may have been the first, followed by the second. Returning to the setting of the Hound of the Baskervilles was interesting, but the explorations across the moor ultimately became too tedious, and this was too much of an homage to the 'real' Holmes. It was fine, but not as engrossing as I had hoped for and not as escapist as I needed right now, so I may prescribe myself some Discworld, via Terry Pratchett. 3.7 stars.

I liked the second best, followed by the first, but I'm still hoping nos 6-11 or whatever it is turn out to be a bit better. I liked The Moor better than O Jerusalem though - I think I might have political issues with that novel which turned me off it.

ETA: There are 12 books in the series (so far - and I don't want to know whether or not reading the 12th would suggest a #13 - I own 11).

Hilda Lewis! Oh goodness, I loved The Ship That Flew! I've never heard of this book, so off I skip to the 'zon to get me one.

Frankenstein. That's a serious WTF moment.

Richard, she wrote a series of books akin to the one about Matilda, all with "Wife to..." in the title. There is Wife to Great Buckingham, Wife to Charles II, Wife to Henry V and I think there is one more. There's even one about Isabella and Mortimer called -- I kid you not -- Harlot Queen. Published in an era where you didn't really want to go wandering around clutching a book with "Harlot" in the title... with a suitably lurid cover.

This is what my typical sleep pattern looks like these days:

11 p.m.: Go to bed and read to wind down. Turn on audiobook and set it to turn off automatically either in 15 mins or at the end of the chapter when I turn out the light.
1:30 a.m. Wake up, for no apparent reason.
2 p.m. Get back to sleep.
3:30 a.m. Wake up again; uncomfortable (this time, partly temperature.) Wide awake. Eventually get up, check e-mail, get a glass of juice and some crackers, read some more, listen to more of the audiobook.
Approx 5:45 a.m. Fall asleep again.
7 a.m. Wake up again. Reset alarm because I've had less than 5 hours total sleep.
7:30 a.m. Fall asleep again.
8:40 a.m. Wake up again as phone rings -- wrong number.

My longest period of uninterrupted sleep? 2 1/2 hours. And this is becoming the norm. I did, however, finish a book.

291. Don't Want to Miss a Thing by Jill Mansell was bibliotherapy, in the sense that chick lit finally enabled me to escape real life anxiety/stress, etc. into a world where there are happy endings and nobody is really deeply unpleasant. (The Terry Pratchett novel I'm also reading wasn't quite doing that for me, alas.) Star-crossed lovers eventually get it together in an English village. This is actually weaker than many by this author or in the genre, so I'm giving it only 3.2 stars, but it was just what I needed late yesterday and today after a long streak of super serious or super intense novels, or others that were gloomy in some way. (Pratchett's book has evil elves coming back and killing people, for instance.)

I'm listening to Moon Over Soho, which is good in a similar way (and a much better book) because the writing and narration are so good and deadpan funny.

Now must try to get some work done in spite of my grogginess and sleep deprivation. I'm exhausted and sleepy NOW, but if I tried to sleep, I doubt I'd get more than an hour or two. Plus, it's the middle of the day, and I need to be on some kind of work schedule. Sigh.

OK, it's official (barring any last minute snags on paperwork and suchlike), or at least not secret any more. For the next four months at least and possibly longer (depending on sponsorship of this feature), I'll be doing an online blog (is that an oxymoron?) on personal finance issues for the Guardian's US website. Starting sometime in the next two weeks, and blogging twice weekly. Similar kinds of stuff/voice to the Fiscal Times thing I have been doing, but higher profile. If it works out, it will be helpful financially, needless to say, and will give me a good platform. So I need to be better focused than I have been in the last six/eight weeks -- and with fewer migraines!

YAY SUZ!! This is wonderful news! Be sure to link to the first one so we can follow you.

Congratulations, Suz! As Richard said, please let us know when your first article is published.

This is really a tribute to networking... Heidi, who was at WNYC (the local NPR radio station) and before that at the WSJ (although after my time there) and I met at the Stanford governance fellowship program for journalists a couple of years ago (remember, Darryl, that was what I was doing at Stanford when we met up in San Fran.) We kept in touch, mostly via social networking, and when the first person tapped for this didn't work out, she turned to me. So let's just hope that the heavens align and this goes well.

Oh yeah, books.

292. Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes was finally just what the doctor ordered. I had read this in high school but don't think I have even picked it up in more than 25 years, oddly enough, because her first novel, set in WW2 Poland, is one that I have re-read every five or six years. This was published in 1942, and I remember reading somewhere that it was assigned reading for SOE and other agents heading into the field in France as an example of what it's like to live in an occupied country, and offering some survival tips. Her main character, Martin Hearne, turns out to have a doppelganger in the form of a French soldier from Brittany, evacuated from Dunkirk. His boss in the secret intelligence service decides to return Bertrand Corlay to his home village -- but to send Hearne instead, to spy. You have to believe in the doppelganger device to enjoy this (I have no probs with it; it's been well done in books like The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier, or Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey, and I can suspend disbelief for the required amount of time) but the suspense that MacInnes delivers is fabulous. This is the epitome of a thumping good read, as Hearne tries to keep his cover intact, even as he realizes that Corlay's real life is much, much more complicated than the young man had chosen to disclose from his hospital bed in England... Recommended. 4.2 stars, and I downloaded two more of the MacInnes thrillers now being reissued, including Double Image. 4.2 stars.

Oddly, am struggling with the Terry Pratchett tome -- Lords and Ladies just doesn't have the same oomph that many of his others possess. Perhaps it's the witches? I don't think I was all that fond of the other witch-focused book that I read.

Congratulations all around and thankful glances at friend Heidi. Looking forward to it!

Congratulations on the new gig, Suz! Yes, please provide us with links when you are live.

Having just had a night similar to yours, may I ask if you are getting sufficient exercise? I find these nights most common when I've spent all day at the computer or in my reading chair, without getting in a walk or some sort of physical activity.

Cojngratulations!
For sleep - I took a course on Mindfulness Awareness Meditation- we had to listen to the CD made by Jon Kabat-Zinn at home- everyone in the group reported falling asleep before the first tape finished. ( Body Scan Meditation)
I highly recommend it for relaxing and falling asleep

Congrats on your news, Suz. That's terrific.

#195 -- the problem is less about falling asleep than staying asleep... The audiobooks are great to help me nod off -- if I set the sleep function to 15 minutes, I'm usually out within 10 minutes. But then I wake up 2/3 hours later...

#194 -- the exercise may be an issue, and that's another reason to investigate gyms in the area. This has been an issue since I started freelancing, but in Brooklyn there was always a reason to get out & about. Here, it's trickier. I haven't left the house since Friday afternoon, except for a brief grocery shopping excursion on Sunday. That's partly because the weather has been really dreadful -- muggy humid, overcast and frequent and ferocious thunderstorms, until today -- but also because by the end of the day it's quite late, and I don't want to go out and don't have a 'destination' in mind.

Thanks, all! Just fingers crossed that everything goes OK...

Oh congratulations on the blog....! That is great news.

I liked your review of Christian Nation - very balanced and fair, and yes, wistful agnostic just about hits it.

Crace, Nicola Griffith, very very tempting!

Great news Suzanne. I'll look forward to reading your column.

188: Congratulations!
187: Much sympathy. I went through a bout of insomnia for several months earlier this year, and it wreaks havoc. FWIW, regular exercise did help, as little as a 20 minute walk during the day.

I got waaay behind on the threads during that time, and I’m only gradually catching up... Providence! I’ve read back several threads to get the gist of the saga.

Yes, you'd have to go waay back to the beginning of the year to catch up on that saga, Katherine!!

I'm thinking of taking a nap before I start work on my usual column & my stuff for YCharts tonight... Getting sleepy....

... and one more book:

293. Lords and Ladies may have broken my winning streak with respect to Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. It was a bit of a struggle to read -- yes, the elves (the Lords and Ladies of the title) are back, but with fairly predictable results as the witches fight back with their various allies. It was fun to see the Librarian (an orang utang) back in the picture, but the main pleasure of this book was the way that Pratchett plays with ideas and concepts. His references, oblique enough to be funny only to those who get 'em and not enough to annoy those who don't, ranged from Schrodinger's cat to Dirty Harry. This was only 3.3 stars, though, overall. I'm having much more fun listening to the fabulously-narrated Moon Over Soho and even reading Murder in Chelsea, the latest in a series that had been disappointing. And I've got a lot of great NetGalley tomes awaiting me.

Re Schrodinger's cat:
"Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. Shawn dived sideways as Greebo went off like like a Claymore mine."

Re Dirty Harry:
When the cook complains she doesn't make "eggy pies":
"Go ahead," said the Queen of Lancre softly, "bake my quiche."

Now reading:

Murder in Chelsea by Victoria Thompson
A Place of Confinement by Anna Dean
The Unwinding by George Packer

Now listening:

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

On deck:

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
Fallen Land by Patrick Flanery
Red 1-2-3 by John Katzenbach
Bio of Elizabeth of York by Alison Weir

Ten days headache-free ending today. Woken up at 3 a.m. with migraine. Gah. Oh, and the overcast/heavy rain has returned.

294. Murder in Chelsea by Victoria Thompson. Easily the best in the series in quite some time -- I've been reading them out of a mild curiosity and interest in the way the author depicts early 20th century Gilded Age NYC. Finally, Thompson moves the plot forward -- midwife Sarah Brandt and cop Frank Malloy are investigating a case that matters to them both in a real way and there are real developments in their characters and lives. Bloody well about time. I tend to become annoyed by mysteries in which nothing changes except the crime & name of the criminal, so this was a move forward. 3.8 stars.

Meant to add: I've decided to re-read the Harry Potter novels from beginning to end. It's been quite a while since I read the early novels, and it would be interesting to read the whole narrative as a single strand, kinda sorta. Starting with book #1 today, as the head permits.

Agree that in the Laurie R. King's the best was the first, though I liked A Monstrous Regiment of Women just for its look at the suffragate movement.

Adding The Ship That Flew! to my TBR list. Thank you for calling it to my attention

Judy and I had the pleasure of hearing George Packer read and talk about The Unwinding a few months back - even picked up a signed copy!

Be curious to know what you make of it.

I added Wife to the Bastard to my Giant Freaking Wishlist. Never heard of Hilda Lewis before, but I peeked at a little of it over on amazon and I really liked it. Going to get it soon.

Hope you feel better soon Suzanne! I know what you mean about needing a destination when walking. I cannot just aimlessly walk about. I want to have something to go to or to see when I'm walking. So far, the best place to go (sort of) for walking purposes is the local cemetery. I like cemeteries for walking, but some are better than others. The good ones are like little parks and the bad ones look horrific. All those stones laid out, row on row, under the pitiless sky with nary a tree in sight. Makes me want to run out into traffic.

Charlotte, I suspect that running out into traffic might increase your odds of ending up in one of those dreadful cemeteries even sooner than we all will have to?? Personally, I'm opting for cremation. And I'd like you all to buy a bench in Kew Gardens in my memory! Either near the rhododendrons or in one of the corners along the walk leading to the Pagoda. *grin*

OK, back to the ice packs and painkillers. Damnit.

I have The Ship that flew down to read this year for my classic children's category. Just need to track down where I put it.
Good luck with the alphabet challenge.

Lost your thread for a while: congratulations on your Guardian job.

Congratulations, Suzanne. Please give us a link to the blog when it's up. And so sorry about the migraine.

I think the blog stuff will start on the 16th -- I just got the contract in my e-mail today and that's the date specified.

I'm about to head out the door for a walk to get some fresh air. Walking up to the fab bakery that is about a mile or so away, and that will be enough to blow the cobwebs out of my brain. Better to walk than to try to bike it, as my head is better but still teetering on the brink... At least it was only a 34-hour killer migraine (yes, I counted, and have resolved to keep better track of these in the next month or two, so that when I find a new neurologist here, I can give him or her a complete chronicle of what's been going on.

I did manage to finish my re-read of the first Harry Potter yesterday, and the audiobook of Moon Over Soho last night. I don't know if the latter is as good in print as it is via audiobook, but the narrator is simply fabulous.

295. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by JK Rowling was a fun re-read. The reason I originally loved these books were their nature as a fantastical twist on the school stories that I loved as a child, only the kids were playing quidditch instead of lacrosse. By the time they got a lot darker, I was ready for that. It was fun rediscovering bits I had forgotten in the first book and revisiting characters like Aunt Petunia and Snape in light of what we learn of them in the final books. I'm moving on to book #2. 4.3 stars.

296. Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch was a fun 'companion piece' to Harry Potter -- very grown up magic, as narrator Peter Grant becomes very entangled indeed with a jazz vampire as his quest to understand how to be a magic constable in contemporary London proceeds. I'm loving this series, but a big part of the enjoyment has turned out to be the audiobook narrator, to the point where I'm contemplating just returning book #3 to the library and downloading #3 audiobook. I've rated the book itself 4 stars, but would give the audiobook a whole additional 0.5 stars. *Impressed*

Audiobooks are good to consume while migraine-y, as long as the reader's voice is the right kind. I've ended up starting to listen to The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir, which wasn't on my original (very long) list of books to read this month, but hey...

I've also been approved for a lot of FABULOUS books from NetGalley. The new thrillers from Scott Thurow, John Katzenbach and Val McDermid, as well as the upcoming Flavia de Luce novel from Alan Bradley. Too bad I'll also have more work to do this month, including the book proposal due with my editor on Monday afternoon.

More tidbits of good news -- I think that my upstairs neighbor's husband's sister FINALLY sold the taco/food truck that has been parked outside my bedroom window since before I moved in. At any rate, a bunch of people were just here and drove off with it. Hopefully it's gone, and this wasn't just a test-drive. There were too many of 'em looking too excited, I think, for that to be the case. (I don't speak Spanish, so...)

OK, off for my walk.

Congratulations on the new job, Suzanne!

a fantastical twist on the school stories that I loved as a child, only the kids were playing quidditch instead of lacrosse.

The Naughtiest Girl In The School, by any chance? I'm pretty sure that's where I first heard of lacrosse. :D

It was definitely Enid Blyton, Liz, but I suspect either the St. Clare's or Malory Towers series. The books that got me completely addicted to English boarding school yarns -- in which genre I would definitely place the Hogwarts/Harry Potter tales! -- were the Chalet School books. There is now even an LT group devoted to them...

Suz - Congratulations on your Guardian assignment - I will be as interested as Darryl and RD to keep up with you there.

Networking is the way of the world Know-Who as well as Know-How. Good show.

I can see plenty of reading this weekend somehow in store for you as you blitz my latest challenge.

Wow, congratulations Suz! Please let us know where and when we can read you.
Have a good weekend.

Congratulations Suz!! I hope it'll be in the international edition too (or whatever it is that I read...).

Thanks, all -- Cushla, it's online only (that's the trend these days...) and I'll post the link here when it goes live, probably a week from Tuesday.

Paul -- yes, am reading! But my instinct is to read light stuff anyway, right now, although I've got a stack of heavier-weight Amazon Vine books that MUST be read. Either I need to rein in my bibliomaniac instincts or apply some reason to my choices. I'm off to tackle one of those now, I think, and finish Elizabeth of York by Alison Weir (one of the NetGalley books I recently got approved for), which is interesting to read so soon after reading The White Princess. Weir's book seems to be as much historiography as history, making it even more interesting: she is aware that whatever she concludes about the whole period of 1483-1485 is going to be seized on by Tudor supporters or Ricardians and torn to pieces, so she is carefully laying out her thinking in a way I doubt she would do if she were dealing with most other characters or eras. It continues to amaze me how intensely people believe what they do about the events surrounding Richard III's two-year reign, given that the main protagonist has spent the last half a millennium buried under a car park in Leceister.

Whoops, the book update...

297. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling is probably my least favorite of this series, for some reason. Not sure why. Perhaps it's in context of some of the later books in which the conflicts between pure-bred and "mudblood" wizards are spelled out in greater detail, and perhaps because I found the whole device of Tom Riddle's diary unconvincing. It's still fun, though, and the character of Gilderoy Lockhart, media-savvy Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, is hilarious. 4 stars, and moving on to book #3 in the series!

I had hoped that Labor Day marked the end to the noisy Saturday kickball league outside my front door (well, almost -- at the park across the way). They have loudspeakers, and music, and commentary on every play that you can hear in a three block radius. Starts at 10:30 a.m. and keeps going until sometime between 6 and 7. I suppose I would be less annoyed if they were friendly, but even the food truck vendors tell people they are there to sell to league members. Very, very, very odd. Oh well, maybe another month and it will be over! Last Saturday was blissfully quiet... and I had been hoping to get a lot of work done today.

...and one more. Which was so depressing to read, I'm going to have to seek out an antidote pronto. Really.

298. The Buy Side by Turney Duff really lives up to the subtitle -- "A Wall Street trader's tale of spectacular excess". In between some insights into the world of trading tactics and the buy side, the author regales us with his descent into booze and cocaine addiction as part and parcel of the Wall Street lifestyle. OK, while I never hung out at the party scene consistently, I was at enough Hamptons bashes and other events to know that this is the extreme edge, not the routine. Because people who live this kind of lifestyle self destruct, as does Duff. Chronicles of self-destruction aren't my kinda thing, however, and I had been hoping for more insights into the more controversial kind of hedge fund trading (of the kind that has put some of Duff's former employers, like the Galleon Group guys, behind bars for insider trading). Perhaps Duff doesn't want still more trouble with the SEC? I'm sure this was cathartic for him to write, but it was painful to read -- I just don't enjoy watching someone self-destruct this badly. 3 stars, only because there are some interesting bits about the relationship between Wall Street and the 'buy side' (the investment firms, like mutual fund firms and hedge funds) and about trading. But I wanted to shake this guy: he's one of those people who knows he doesn't know what he's doing when he starts working on the street but somehow still ends up thinking this is somehow cute or funny?

210: Suz when people say they like the early Harry Potter books I usually toss them a copy of Tom Brown's Schooldays for the same kind of boys in veddy British school days.

Jim, yes, that was the original boy's school book!! Although there is an entirely separate genre for girls, "jolly hockey sticks" kind of yarns of the kind that Angela Brazil was penning a century ago. Armada re-released a lot of them, some with very heavy cuts, in the 60s and 70s. I'm hoping to get the original version of The School at the Chalet with some of the credit I will allegedly receive from Amazon thanks to this e-books settlement. Given that the settlement spans a couple of years and involves a large percentage of the Kindle books I bought, I should end up with $150 to $200 or even more!!

Listening to the Last night of the Proms via WQXR online and wishing I had been able to be there. Imagine being at the biggest classical musical party in the world -- great music and serious goofiness of the kind that doesn't require cocaine and booze to enjoy. Just finished a piece by Britten that is utterly unfamiliar to me, but v. excellent -- resolving to read the just purchased Kindle book about the Aldeburgh scene of the 1950s. This season, I've relished listening to music by Bantock. Now Joyce diDonato will be singing, a piece that my all-time fave classical singer, Frederica von Stade, made famous. Sadly, the latter has retired... :-(

Suz- Of course, I am doing a lousy job keeping up but I am swinging through now. I have Moon Over Soho lined up on audio, for S & S. I should get to it soon. Loved the 1st book. I also have Harvest waiting in the wings. This belongs to a friend, so I hope to get to it, in the next few weeks.
I hope you are having a great weekend.

From Rebecca Solnit's new book, The Faraway Nearby, which is an interesting string of interconnected essays.
She is writing about Frankenstein, and the relationship between readers and their books:

"This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet."

The Last Night of the Proms is getting into the goofy part of the program, when fab music meshes with serious silliness. Judging by the audience's reaction, Nigel Kennedy is hamming it up with the Csardas -- some of it is musical as he just segued into the Russian folk tune "Ochi chorniye", which is NOT part of the original! Makes me wish I were watching it live instead of listening; perhaps it will pop up on YouTube in the next week ors. Not regretting staying up so late to listen, however, even though I'll have to be up at around 5 to get the bus to NYC to meet up with LTers and then go see "The Audience". The bus home won't get me here until 1 a.m., so tomorrow will be an absurdly long day with a surreal amount of deadline stuff to deal with Monday & Tuesday.

ETA: Hi mark! I can't even come close to keeping up with you (or Paul C. or Richard; the three of you give evidence that the real chatterboxes on this forum are the guys...) but thanks for dropping by! As you already know, you're in for a treat with the audio of Moon Over Soho; I'm now 30 minutes into book #3 and facing a real dilemma: I can get #4 for my UK Kindle, but should I wait until it's on audio here??? No release date yet...

OK, Kennedy is getting deeply silly now, so I must go and pay attention...

Sigh. Wonderful, wonderful concert. One of those events too rare even in the music world when -- even with a time delay and thousands of miles away -- I can feel the impact of the music and the event and my whole day becomes brighter. Thank you to the BBC and WQXR...

>221 Chatterbox:: The Last Night of the Proms is getting into the goofy part of the program ...
Right at this very moment, I'm streaming the concert via iPlayer and Nigel is playing the Csardas. What a lovely bit of serendipity, reading your post at the same time.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

The above was Tigger's comment, as he promenaded across the keyboard, which rather echoes mine.

Hopped on an earlier train home from NYC after a very brief meetup (coffee only) with the LT gang, a clean out of my mailbox, and a showing of The Audience (the Helen Mirren play; excellent). The non-LT friend who had booked to come with me turned out not to be feeling well, so that cut the evening short and I hopped onto an Acela home, and got in a few hours ahead of what I had hoped, which is fabulous, as I am fairly exhausted. Maxed out at 3 hours sleep last night and had another of those very very early Megabus trips. The back of the bus stank of weed (you know, the kind one smokes), which wasn't terribly pleasant at 7 a.m. And the way back, I had the misfortune of sitting next to some guy in his 20s, clearly solvent enough to take the Acela, but not cultured enough to refrain from pulling off his shoes and then crossing his legs on his seat, so I had one (smelly) foot almost in my lap. He then proceeded to sleep while occupying about 1/3 of my seat as well as his own. Clearly, this was a ploy to get me to move (it was a crowded train) and it worked. So at least the journey was fast, if not pleasant.

And now I'm going to try to catch up on those Zs that Tigger prescribed for me.

#223 -- Laura that is fantastic! My friend Anne (one of my oldest non-high school friends out there; we've known each other for a third of a century, we calculate) went to see the concert simulcast live at a movie theater in Toronto and as I was listening, she was posting about it on my FB page (as the broadcast was delayed until evening here and was only audio.) I think she has now sent me links to some of the video elements. She came to visit me the last time I was living in London and we were able to enjoy a fab evening -- a Proms concert (the 'completed' Elgar 3rd symphony) and a dinner at cool restaurant in Knightsbridge.

OK, sleep isn't just calling but bellowing.

Hmmm, if you buy the fourth Aaronovitch book through your British Kindle, could you lend it to your American friends' Kindles? *not really resigned to waiting for it to reach the US*

Unfortunately, I don't think we can lend our books out to people here - I'd love to be able to lend to my mum.

Hope you got some much-needed sleep, Suz!

Roni, I think Luci is correct -- there's no way to lend Kindle UK books. (Nor can people buy specific books from my UK wishlist for my Kindle, as can be done here in the US.) The only thing I could do is to give you online access to my whole account, and I suspect that two US ISP addresses logging into what is theoretically a British account might set off alarm bells... I'm not yet sure that I'll buy this anyway -- it's a bit pricey still at 7.50 GBP, and there are other books coming up that are higher priority for me. And a LOT more to read. Maybe if I get an Xmas gift certificate....

Caught up on sleep but behind on work because I overslept! Still, I clearly needed all the extra ZZzzzs. And Tigger slept on my bed (unusual) to ensure that I got 'em. He pinned down one corner of the sheet with Cassie pinning down the other and kept me there until they figured I had had enough rest. At least, that is how I chose to interpret the unusual cat behavior! And no, I don't like moving Tigger in situations like that. He has claws, and uses 'em.

Suz the Acela to Boston is our guilty pleasure every time we go to Boston - train travel the way it ought to be and so often ain't.

Usually there's enough room to avoid the smelly feet of strangers

Jim, I can see why. I rarely opt for it, because it's relatively pricey, but some days simply call for it, and yesterday was one. I'm still exhausted today, and haven't been nearly as productive as I need to be.

But here's a quick book report:

299. The Caretaker by A.X. Ahmad is an interesting genre thriller -- which sounds like an oxymoron, because genre novels may be fun to read but they aren't usually interesting. This one, however, features a main character who is Sikh and ex-Indian army, who stumbles over a conspiracy after having to flee his home country for the United States, where he is working as a handyman and caretaker for rich folks' houses during the winter on Martha's Vineyard. The problem? The coincidences on which all thrillers rely stretched credulity past breaking point (gee, isn't it convenient that only someone who had worked in the Indian military would readily be able to grasp the nature of a key clue?) and some characters weren't convincing. But it was atmospheric and engaging. So, a tossup to recommend or not. If you read genre fiction of this kind, it's worth giving it a try. And this was an ARC, so no money was spent by yrs truly... 3.4 stars.

300. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling is #3 in the series and in my month re-reading this iconic series. In this one, Ron's rat turns out to be not entirely who everyone had thought he was, while Harry first encounters the dementors. It's after this that the series starts getting much darker and the individual books much longer... 4.3 stars.

I'm reading two Alison Weir books almost simultaneously -- The NetGalley copy of her upcoming bio of Elizabeth of York, which is a pleasant antidote to Philippa Gregory's new novel focusing on the same character, and re-reading a novel, The Lady Elizabeth, although I've been consuming most of it via audiobook. Still have some more Amazon Vine books to read -- sigh.

Hi Suzanne, your review of Assignment in Brittany had me scurrying off to download a couple of her books as well. I loved Helen MacInnes when I discovered her in high school, it will be interesting to see how she holds up.

Judy, yes -- I'm reading The Double Image right now. I stopped reading her novels back in the mid/late 1980s, as they mostly were about How Evil Communism Is -- true enough, but the moralistic tone I think began to overwhelm the narratives themselves.

Ugh, 9/11 anniversary. They don't get any better.

But a buddy of mine from high school who lives down in Atlanta remembered how in the dumps they make me feel, and actually called to see how I was doing. Incredibly thoughtful.

Book report later. Must catch up on deadline work projects...

I thought of you, too, Suz, knowing how blue the anniversary can make you. Work should be a good distraction.

I just try to ignore it. All the memorials are, well, self-serving at this point.

I can't ignore it. I knew too many people who died that day; saw too much that still gives me nightmares. What I saw, experienced and felt makes it impossible not to feel that there wasn't 'before' or 'after'. That said, I try to use the day to focus on the future and to finding a way to make my life mean something, because for some reason I am still alive. Even if that is by pure, blind chance, it feels -- careless? thoughtless? -- to squander what others I cared about lost that day and in the months to come. I include in that list a friend kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, another journalist friend who died in Iraq, etc. That may be self-serving; I don't know. I do know that if, on the last day of my life, I had to compile a list of the events that most affected that life, this would have to be one of them. And trust me, it ain't a matter of choice. I'd love to be able to ignore it.

Final book for this batch of 75, and probably for this thread. Makes sense to jump to a new thread when beginning a new batch of 75 books, no? (It would have been even more perfect had this been book #300, but instead it is...

301. The Governess by Evelyn Hervey, one of a series of three short mysteries written under a pen name by HRF Keating (author of the Inspector Ghote mysteries) was a re-read for me, although I've not read any of these since they were first published back in the mid/late 1980s. It's an intriguing little tale: governess Harriet Unwin works in a late Victorian (probably) household, and the mystery that puts her life and freedom in jeopardy begins with the theft of a sugar mouse, a treat awarded nightly to her charge, young Pelham. She catches that culprit -- but then a new and more serious crime takes place within the household: murder. I had forgotten the plot twists, but while it's not an especially complex mystery, I still managed to guess wrong when it came to whodunnit. What was more interesting, however, was Harriet Unwin's own thought process: her recognition that allowing someone in the household to challenge her authority by stealing Pelham's sugar mouse nightly was a precursor to more serious challenges that could undermine her hopes of being a successful governess and ultimately establishing her own school. "Hervey" does an excellent job of capturing the social mores of the time, and the governess's awkward position between the upstairs and downstairs worlds. Interesting to re-read, just being reprinted as "Bloomsbury Reader" editions online and possibly in print, too? Worth keeping an eye open for. I picked up the two others in the series as Kindle specials; this one was a NetGalley offering. 3.7 stars.