GingerbreadMan ponders on past failings

Things might look pretty good for my 2013 Challenge when I write this. But I failed both the 11in11 and 12in12, in one case badly. Adamant to learn from my earlier mistakes, I dedicate 2014's challenge to the factors that made me flop two years running in the past.

I've been longing for bigger categories, and want to add at least a few books compared to my 2013 Challenge. I'll do 8 categories (2x1x4 - skipping the zero), aiming for 9 books per category, for a total of 72 books. ETA: In a desperate ploy to manage my 2013 Challenge, I've decided to make a swap with this year's. Thus category 5 now includes 10 books, but category 6 only eight

More editing: I've realised I don't have anyplace to put my beloved GN:s. And starting a bonus category mid-january I've tried before, with bemusing resluts. What I'll do this year is include an open end GN category. Every book in this category will count as a challenge read, but the number in this category won't be specified. As usual, GN:s are not included in my page count.




And no matter how you giggle, I will once again set the goal to reduce my TBR, this time by 25 books. This is mainly to fool myself all unred books in this house will get read before I die:

Books read from the TBR:25
New additions in 2014: 20
Total TBR dent/bump this year:-5

Category 1: Overestimating my ability:



Really, this is a consequence of all the other factors. I haven't got the time or energy to read like I used to, but I just can't get that into my thick head. I happily bring four fat novels along for a week's vacation, join all sorts of LT challenges and am still under the misconception that I read about two books on a normal week. This category will be dedicated to making some headway on my Europe Endless Challenge, already on it's fourth year.

1. Blattejävlar by Goran Vojnovic, finished january 26th, ***, #94
2. Fixaren (The fixer) by Joe Sacco, finished february 4th, ****, #110
3. Wunderkind by Nikolai Grozni, finished april 6th, *****, #184
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Candidates:
Gentlemen of the road by Michael Chabon (Azerbajdjan)
Tennets skrik by Gundega Repse (Latvia)
I Babylon by Marcel Möring

Category 2: Having children:



I love my kids to death and love spending time with them. But they are both causing havoc in different ways (one loudly, one quietly), they require eons time and attention, and let's face it, the years go by so darn quickly. In short, they are bad for those afternoon reading sessions in the comfy chair. This category is all about Books for young people, both books read aloud to the big boy, and YA books I read myself.

1. The graveyard book by Neil Gaiman, finished january 30th, **½, #98
2. Min morbror trollkarlen (The magician's nephew) by C.S Lewis, **½, finished february 10th, #124
3. Om det var krig i Norden by Janne Teller, finished march 20th, ****, #166
4. Pojkarna by Jessica Schiefauer, finished march 24th, ****½, #172
5. Heja Pelle Svanslös by Gösta Knutsson, finished april 27th, ****, #207
6. Pelle Svanslös i Amerika (reread) by Gösta Knutsson, finished may 29th, **½, #221
7. Fallet med de stulna smyckena by Susanne MacFie, finished june 2nd, **, #226
8. Saffransmysteriet (reread) by Martin Widmark and Helena Willis, finished june 24th, ***, #279
9.

Candidates:
The hunger games by Suzanne Collins
Catching fire by Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

Category 3: Being constantly tired:



Put me on my back and I'm out in five minutes. Not much evening reading happening. This category will be books possible to read in small bits, Poetry and short stories.

1. In the night garden by Catherynne Valente, finished january 13th, ****½, #60
2. In the cities of coin and spice by Catherynne Valente, finished january 21st, ****½, #72
3. Suddenly, a knock on the door by Etgar Keret, finished april 14th, *****, #198
4. Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell, finished june 6th, *****, #229
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Candidates:
Wayward girls and wicked women edited by Angela Carter
Dikter 1945-2002 by Wislawa Szymborska
Mannen som kunde gå genom väggar by Marcel Ayme
Myror by Leif Holmstrand
Landskap by Per Thörn

Category 4: Choosing books that are too thick:



To read 70+ books a year, it helps if they aren't all more than five hundred pages long. If they are so big they are impractical to bring anywhere, that's even worse. This category will be the dear old Whatever's on the TBR category, old musty tomes, as well as magpie shinies.

1. The maintenance of headway by Magnus Mills, finished february 3rd, ***½, #107
2. Och himlarna ska fall himlarna ska falla himlarna ska falla när du rör vid mig by Emma Karinsdotter, finished april 16th, ****, #201
3. Det förlovade landet (Land of Decoration) by Grace McCleen, finished april 21st, ****, #202
4. Främlingsleguanen by Martina Montelius, finished may 2nd, ****, #207
5. En dag (One day) by David Nicholls, finished may 10th, ****, #209
6. Kast med liten kniv by Sara Kadefors, finished june 30th, ***½, #285
7.
8.
9.

Candidates:
Höstens skuggor by Agnes von Krusenstjerna
Porten vid Johannes by Agnes von Krusenstjerna
The crow road by Iain Banks
Det röda fältet (Red sorghum) by Mo Yan
Det kalla landet by Inger Frimansson
Bring up the bodies by Hilary Mantel
A fatal grace by Louise Penny
Staden och lågorna by Jerker Virdborg

Category 5: Duty reading:



No matter how good the Pearl Rule sounds to me, I'm still a duty reader at heart. I will likely finish, no matter what. Of course, if the book isn't any good, it takes a tad longer. This is my beloved Blindfold Category, where I never know what to expect!

1. Bära mistel by Sara Lidman (Picked for my 2013 Challenge by psutto), finished february 16th, ****½, #124
2. Min skugga by Christine Falkenland (Picked by DeltaQueen50), finished may 27th, ***½, #216
3. Zazie by Raymond Qeuneau (Reread. Picked by laura_88), finished may 30th, ****, #221
4. Albions Skogar (The forest house) by Marion Zimmer Bradley (Picked by RigdewayGirl), finished june 17th, **, #237
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Selection:
Vävarnas barn by Per Anders Fogelström (Picked by paruline)
Nåd och onåd (Restoration) by Rose Tremain (Picked by SouthernKiwi)
Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency by Douglas Adams (Reread. Picked by dudes22 )
Men, women and chainsaws by Carol J. Clover (Picked by psutto)
Mörker och blåbärsris by Kerstin Ekman (Picked by christina_reads)
Pride and prejudice and zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (Picked by lkernagh)

Category 6: Working too much:



I love my job, but my work eats my time and energy a lot of the time, and sometimes my evenings too. This category is all sorts of Work reading, plays, theory, inspiration and research.

1. Svenska ödehus by Sven Olol Karlsson and Philip Pereira dos Reis, finished march 6th, ****, #141
2. Namnbrunnen by Inger Edelfeldt, finished march 20th, ***, #166
3. Introvert: den tysta revolutionen by Linus Jonkman, finished may 7th, ***, #207
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Candidates:
Man ska ju vara två by Lissa Nordin
På jakt efter den dialogiska estetiken by Joakim Stenshäll
Lysande eländen by Staffan Göthe

Category 7: Social Media:



This includes all of you, dear friends. But also Instagram and perhaps above all Facebook, where I show all the restraint of a heroin addict. This category is dedicated to Sci-Fi, Fantasy and horror by female writers.

1. Udda verklighet by Nene Ormes, finished march 4th, ***½, #137
2. Parable of the sower by Octavia Butler, finished may 24th, ****½, #211
3. Parable of the talents by Octavia Butler, finished june 25th, ****½, #279
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Candidates:
The Shining girls by Lauren Beukes
The brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan
Living next door to the god of love by Justina Robson
Geek love by Katherine Dunne
Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine
The left hand of darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
Den enda by Anna Starobinets

Category 8: Computer gaming:



I boldy refrain from playing sandbox games on the Xbox most of the time. Instead I find myself playing Tower defense games on addictinggames. A dubious victory. This category will be Sci-Fi, fantasy and horror by male writers.

1. Redshirts by John Scalzi, finished march 1st, ***½, #136
2. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, finished march 13th, ****, #149
3. Kall hud by Albert Sanchez Piñol, finished march 28th, ****, #175
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Candidates:
Ready player one by Ernest Cline
Escapement by Jay Lake
The islanders by Christopher Priest
Osama by Lavie Tidhar
Sea of ghosts by Alan Campbell
Light by M. John Harrison
Use of weapons by Iain M. Banks
Thunderer by Felix Gilman

Category 9: Comics are not literature:



My days of being ashamed for being an adult reading comics in public are thankfully over. But my reading of Graphic Novels remains something I often tend to think about in terms of something of a side dish. For instance, I never make enough room for them in my challenges, leading me to create silly bonus categories. This will be my open end Graphic Novel category.

1. Locke and key 3: Crown of Shadows by Joe Hill and Gabriel rodrigues, finished march 7th, ****, #149

starred as usual - lots of good candidates as normal, will enjoy seeing your views on several reads and perhaps taking some BBs on the women SF writers... (although some of them look somehow familiar)

Thanks man! Yes, I know, you are probably personally responsible for more than one candidate :) As for candidates there's bound to be a bit of moving, removing and reinstalling before the challenge starts. Not least when it becomes clear which books from this year's lists will ge bumped...

Work reading!? You almost shamed me into altering my challenge. Almost.

Great categories - loving the optimism. :) Starred, of course.

Great theme! Love the illustration for your social media category. Good luck with the challenge!

GReat categories. I will especially be keeping my eyes on your Sci-Fi, fantasy and horror selections.

Good setup! Good luck in 2014 and for the rest of this year. Remember, keep most of your reading fun.

Great set-up, Anders, and you remind me of the years of child raising where I got very little reading time, or much "me-time" at all! It does get better, before you know it, the children develop their own interests and then you'll be missing the 'Dad-time"!

Looking forward to following your reading again next year.

I like you sensible arrangement. I hope you enjoy Redshirts and may I recommend, since you're a gamer and major social media user, Ready Player One. I think you might get a big kick out of it.

Optimism is the glue that keeps the world from falling apart.... and I love how you have brought it to your challenge! ;-)

Annnnnd.... adding my star!

I'm glad you are still plugging away at your Europe Endless Challenge. I enjoyed that one.

I feel your pain, I tried to do the 10 in 10 and 11 in 11 challenges. I never finished. I'm also left with this grand plan to read all of William Faulkner's novels. Actually that might have been from a 2008 challenge. One day ....

I've only read a few of the ones you've listed, but out of those by far my favorite was Light.

Don't feel alone, I am still woefully behind on my European Challenge - always having grand intentions of reading a book for one of the missing nations and then ending up with something else.

The ROOT challenge is helping me to get the books that haven't been read off my shelves - maybe 2014 is your year to join us.

I no longer talk about the European Challenge. It's the equivalent of the mad cousin locked in the attic. Which I suppose is better than what's buried in the basement.. cough *alphabet challenge* cough

Anyway belatedly starred. oh the heady excitement of unknown books I spy in your candidate list with your thoughts on much loved books. Good luck :)

Avoiding the European Challenge only because I need another challenge like I need another hole in my head, but impressed that you haven't completely abandoned it.

> 25 - I no longer talk about the European Challenge. It's the equivalent of the mad cousin locked in the attic. Which I suppose is better than what's buried in the basement.. cough *alphabet challenge* cough

What?.... nothing "walled in" or "locked in a closet" that should also remained unmentioned? ;-)

@26 I will never tell...

>13 March-Hare: I do read a fair bit for my work. I thought it just made sense to include it in my challenge. It also helps me to READ my research books, rather than just flip through them...

>14 -Eva-: Thank you kindly! Looking forward to 2014!

>15 rabbitprincess: Yeah, it's clever, isn't it! I can relate...

>16 Zozette: Thanks!

>17 majkia: Thank you! Actually, you're right. I sometimes have a tendency to think along the lines of "every now and then I should pick one of the books on the TBR that have been collecting dust for a decade", forgetting that there's enough TRULY enticing books to last a lifetime.

>18 DeltaQueen50: Very true, of course. I'm happy to see our boy, now six, turning into a reader. Every so often he disappears into his room straight after coming home from school, snuggling up with a book. I'm fairly sure our two year old will follow before we know it. Then we can all snuggle up with books together - having collective me-time! :)

>19 mamzel: Just bought Ready player one yesterday, after numerous recommendations. Now I just need to find a way to shoehorn it in here somehow...

>20 lkernagh: 2014: 35 off the TBR or bust!!!!

>21 paruline: *Ping!* Likewise, of course.

>22 thornton37814: Did you finish it!? I kind of have to plug awayt at it - I started the group ;-)

>23 brlb21: Cool! I read and enjoyed Viriconium, but Light has lingered unread on my shelf for probably four years...

>24 cyderry: ROOT has sounded like a good idea, from what I've heard. I might look into it for 2014!

>25 clfisha: Again, I started the damn group, so I can't really lock it up in the attic. Plus, I've actually enjoyed almost every book I read, once i've actually read some!

>26 lkernagh:+27 Hahaha! I'm sure you both have dark secrets. Weren't you guys in the "19th century pastoral poetry bonanza" Challenge?

Soooo, I'm currently in that kind of depressing state where I try to cram in more candidates without removing candidates. I resort to the futile hope there will be room for tons of bonus reads this year. (Actually, bumped candidates from the 2013 Challenge seeking asylum in the 2014 ditto with tears in their little rejected eyes is a far likelier scenario. Damn if I know how to handle that...)

"room for tons of bonus reads this year"
Hmm, yeah, let me know how that works out for you. :)

> 29 - awe, poor little refugees, being transported from challenge to challenge like unwanted baggage.... Sounds oddly familiar to what I seem to subject some of my planned reading to. Books don't band together to revolt against their owners, do they!?

> 28 - Weren't you guys in the "19th century pastoral poetry bonanza" Challenge?

It isn't ladylike to mention such things.... *strolls off post whistling nonchalantly*

Hi Anders, I've enjoyed reading through your categories and hope your bumped candidates start feeling at home here.

@29 oh golly I now have a fear I will awaken one night and the all the dusty, ignored books will have grouped together and surrounded me, like an adult horror version of Toy Story. This is why ebooks are much much safer.

@28/31 I.. I must not desire to start that challenge.. must not..

#33 by @clfisha> hahaha! I know that fear all too well! But I think the ebooks can attack through radio waves! Where is my aluminum foil hat??

Belatedly poking my nose into the 2014 threads. Nice set up Anders, good luck for next year!

Ok, that's it. I'm going to bring in the crash cart and bring my thread in The Europe Endless Challenge back to life.

Beginning to get a rather clear idea of which this year's rejects will be. All of which are books I actually watn to read sooner than later, so I will start to make room for them here in the weeks to come. A few poor candidates are likely to get booted for the fourth year in a row as a result...

I too loved the illustration for your social media category. I read it out-loud to Cammykitty. We are currently avoiding working on the stuff that we came to work on. . . . and are getting caught up on LT instead!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

I love the categories---and that picture of the yawning fox! Consider me an official lurker...

So, cramming and cutting of candidates is completed (for now). Many sad cuts. And I have no bloody where to put GN:s. At all. I guess I'll have to include an open 9th category for them...

Oh, WAIT! HERE'S what I'll do!

I'll set the challenge for 72 books in total, with the GN category as a free variable. So those books add to the total, but don't need to get crammed into other categories. So every GN counts, but there isn't a set number of them. This I like!

ETA: Done and done!

>38 bruce_krafft: It's too true, isn't it? Oy, the days I half ignore my kids because I'm in the process of trying to navigate an infected debate, full of misunderstandings, on Facebook... (I'm on Facebook detox by the way. I shut down a month a year typically, quite refreshing!)

>39 whitewavedarling: Thaks! It's my first year with pictures. I liked finding them all :)

Oh Catherynne Valente, you had me at the horse-riding witches wielding twin knives. (My first read for 2014 is In the night garden)

^ Oh, that does sound enticing, as a book read, that is! ;-)

@42..Ooo what a fabulous 1st read.. eagerly awaits review..

an open ended GN category? well that sounds like a great idea and one bound to pepper me with BB's

I think the pic on Cat 7 is something I need in front of me to stop me getting drawn into political arguments on Facebook!!

I am quite confident you'll like Valente but can't wait to hear your thoughts (hope you read both volumes together too)

Happy New Year, Anders. Looking forward to all the reads. :)

I wouldn't say you failed miserably at your other challenges. You didn't meet your goal, but you didn't quit. The candidates look good. I'm trying to reduce the number of books too, but unless I stay away from library book sales and refuse all free e-books, Arcs and gifts it will never happen. It's information greed! So many things I want to know and so many ideas and characters I want to read about. If I own it, it's my "information" even if I haven't assimilated it yet.

I think I also suffer from information greed, what a great phrase!

>43 lkernagh: Hold up great 250 pages later too!

>44 clfisha: Coming, but I've been a bit stalled by Sons of Anarchy season 4 (dang they are bringing ecery single plot line that's been building for three seasons home at the same time. No idea where they'll go from here, but right now this is some very Elizabethan shit) and the worst kind of illness - when you're too poorly to read :(

>45 psutto: I've heard both you and Claire say so, so I'll make sure to not let too much time pass. I'm likely to put at least a couple of other reads in between though, I usually don't tend to like two books by the same writer back to back.

>46 andreablythe: Thank you, and likewise!

>47 cammykitty: With 2013 completed, that's two fails and two hits. Not too shabby. I like information greed too, and think you're spot on. I have a very hard time trying not to think about buying a book I want NOW. Once it's on my shelf though, information readily available, it can immediately wait. For years sometimes. Very strange psychology.

I usually don't tend to like two books by the same writer back to back I agree but this is really one book split in two, I'm guessing for marketing reasons

@49 I am ignoring that series recommendation for my sanity.

I totally blew one of my 2013 75 book challenges. But you know, life happens, and plans change. A year is a long time to plan/commit to and not expect things to change or obstacles to prevent you from completing a challenge. Of course that is what makes it a challenge. . .

Information greed. . .

Is why I have been trying to be really specific on my topics. I can't learn about ALL English literature so I decided to start with the writers from between the two World Wars. I try the same approach with other topics. Of course this whole adding a category every year makes it a bit harder. . . not to mention all the good reviews that people write!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

I didn't make a space for my GNs either, but your idea sounds great - I may have to borrow that one!

>50 psutto: I'll definetly consider it then. I just completed the first cycle of the first book - just as my head was beginning to spin from all the layers. I love how Valente mixes high and low fantasy and fairytale influences here - from questing princes via archetypical myths of fire to a rather silly D&D monster like the leucotta.

>51 clfisha: It's kind of like Hamlet with a leather vest and and a sub-machine gun. Once you get past the initial scepticism of the machismo of it all, it works. Season four is the best by far so far.

>52 bruce_krafft: All this my oh, I'm so rotten for failing should be seen as tongue in cheek. I'm often a bit baffled at the amounts some people here manage to read. But I guess many here have more reading time than I have, with two kids and a more than full time job. And I agree, my information greed has grown since joing LT. Not least because it becomes obvious when you start planning your years how much there is I want to read NOW.

>53 -Eva-: Oh, do! You tend to find great GN:s!

@51 ah thats why I have been avoiding it.. no need in my life for more stories about leather clad men beating there chests aka tarzan :) Curse you.. 4 seasons too! You will be recommending that I try the Wire yet or Breaking Bad (actually I tried breaking bad and gave up after episode 2)

Both also excellent series!!! Actually, both of those are better than SoA by some margin. Then again, miss "I only like season one of Buffy", it could well be that despite liking the same books, we have different taste in TV. So take these recommendations with a pinchy pinch of the salt stuff.

There is only one season of Buffy! I think I am the only person in the universe to dislike the 3rd series of Sherlock so it's probably not sharing the same taste as anyone :-0 Right am going back to my Blakes 7 marathon..

Not the only person...

>54 GingerbreadMan: After a little google research, I stand corrected when it comes to the Leucrotta. It turns out not to be a D&D invention at all, but a creature actually featured in medieval bestiaries. It was thought to be the result of a lion and hyena mating.

Wow. This year's first read was pretty special!

1. The orphan's tales: In the night garden by Catherynne M. Valente
Category 3, 483 pages.

Just a few random images to give you an idea: A young girl who’s just found out she’s really a fox rides on the back of the queen on the loons to the top of a slender mountain, to convince a couple of stars in human form to let go of their head, which has faces on both sides and which has been cracked by a jealous son of a ship-builder, to let it split and the light come out of it. Three dog-headed monks from the Chrysanthemum tower, vowed to pacifism, set out to the gold-crazy city to assassinate a false popess. Behind a cathedral a Monoped, hobbling on one colossal foot, seeks out an old hag chained to the wall, clad only in a dress made by her own hair and without a mouth, to get her advice on how to avenge the living death of his beloved, now possessed by a tribe of greedy moon-children.

And in the night garden outside a palace of countless royal children, a young prince sneaks out to hear the shunned orphan tell her tales, all written in miniature letters in the black folds around her eyes – the above and many many more.

This haunting labyrinth of mythology, fairytale, fantasy, tropes, winks and connections is like diving in honey. It’s powerful, rich, flowery, poetic, TOO MUCH – but just wonderful. Presented in just the merest of bites as we weave in and out of the layers, this becomes an engrossing, mesmerizing read. As you go along, you start to see how the different stories are also connecting across time and space. And, as with all good fairytales, there are life lessons and images of the world to glimpse here too. The pointless war between Griffins and Arimaspians is heartbreaking, the idea of the Quest as purpose in life is deceptively deconstructed. But most of all, this is just a stunningly original, great ride.

Part of me wants to come up and breathe before diving into In the cities of coin and spice, the second half of this book. But I’m afraid to lose too many threads. I’ll just inhale deeply, and immerse myself in honey again. 4 ½ stars, a brilliant way to start 2014!

Wonderful review! I'm going to have to look this one up sooner than later...

Brilliant review - thumbing! I really need to get around to sampling Valente, sooner rather than later.

I was introduced to Catherynne Valente for the first time when I'd read one her Hugo-nominated novelette, "Fade to White", this summer. I liked it very much and promised myself that I will read more of her works one day. In the Night Garden sounds like a wonderful collection, and the images you've presented are very appealing.

>60 GingerbreadMan: - another great review - I had a sneaking suspicion you'd like it ;-)

Wonderful review. Like so many things Valente does, it sounds just lovely.

I really need to read something by Catherynne Valente! Perhaps I can fit her into the June Female Fantasy/Sci-Fi reads.

Fantastic review of The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden. It's been on my shelf since I worked at Borders Books which is now defunct. It's an ARC. I've been remiss at not getting to it sooner!

I want both books to be bound into one beautifully illustrated, giant tome. I want it to be as magical on the outside as it is inside! Glad you enjoy it, great review and I hope the second book isn't too much.

I can't pick a favourite part, there's too much and my memory of it isn't as sharp but I look forward to the day I have the space to reread it!

Thanks everybody! I can see how Valente might not be for everyone - the risk of both being over-satuated and bogged down is there. But I recommend anyone interested in the fantastical to check her out at least once.

>68 clfisha: I agree. I like the covers, but the illustrations within aren't really doing it for me. I would like a fat, lavish hardback with matte color illustrations on separate glossy paper. The kind where the illustrations might not be exactly beside the part of the story they illustrate, but where there's a reference you know? "Let me tell you my story, the huldra said..." (page 78)

Hi Anders! I'm sorry to say that I somehow seem to have missed the majority of your thread last year. :( Nice to be back in the swing of things, and that you're back to your usual trick of hitting me with Book Bullets.

How are your children 6 and 2? Seems like Flea was just pregnant with baby #2.... Time flies, hey?!?

>70 LauraBrook: Lovely to see you here, Laura! I know all about losing threads, it happens so easily. Glad if I can provide a BB or two this year :) Minna is closer to 2,5 actually...Time really does fly!

2. The orphan's tales: In the cities of coin and spice by Catherynne M. Valente
Category 3, 517 pages.

It’s not my usual habit to read two books in a row by the same writer, and after the richness of the first volume of this treasure chest of stories, I was slightly hesitant. Still, I trusted the friends who recommended me to treat this as one book ,and dove in. It wasn’t long before I was drawn back into the maze. Many of the stories in this volume are darker and more sinister. I will long remember the haunting city of Marrow, eaten and changed by a creature all teeth and hunger, now a flimsy shadow of it’s glorious, glittering past, huddling around a single, massive mint creating coins out of children’s bones. Or the grey mice filling out a coat like a wicked golem, eager to taste every color in the world with sharp little teeth. Or the sirens when they to their horror realize the songs they are singing for their own pleasure are driving ships up on the sharp cliffs.

Also, with it’s richness in mythology, this book drives me to the most pleasant form of research, inspiring me to take breaks to read up on manticores, selkies and leucrottas and investigating the world of medevial bestiaries.

The recommendaton to read the two volumes rather closely together is sound. Many threads are weaving all these stories together, and even back to back, a lot of page flipping occured. Really, caling these short story collections is probably wrong. This is just as much a giant, sprawling novel. Towards the end though,a thousand pages later, a certain over-satuation starts to show. I find I lose patience a little bit with the last dozen or so of new stories tossed into the mix, and find myself longing for conclusion – and a growing interest in the frame story of the orphan girl with the story ink around her eyes and the prince who warily befriends her. When that one is finally brought home it is in a lovely way, if perhaps not totally unexpected.

Recommended to anyone with an interest in fantasy, mythology, metafiction and fairy tales. Read them closely together – but I would perhaps on a reread allow a pinch of breathing space, a light book or two, in the middle. 4,5 stars!

A great start for the year. Now I crave some realism.

Valente is extraordinarily rich isn't she! Glad you made it, I just wish I had read something else of hers I was as awed by :( great review btw!

Edited to add. My banishment to sickbed means I am now 6 episodes into sons of anarchy, curse you there are four seasons!

What about Palimpsest? I loved the boldness of that one, and seem to recall you were prety smitten too.

Curse slow Internet connection, I missed your response. I did love Palimpsest but not as much as the orphan tales. I think it was nearly everything I wanted in a fairy tale wrapped up in a neat little bow.

>73 clfisha: I think there are six seasons actually ;-)

Noooooooo. Wait I only have 4 season I can stream! Double noooooooo

Another great review. I did read a couple of books between the two and thought it suffered for it. I guess getting the balance right would be difficult then....

Still, sounds like an author to get to sooner rather than later.

>78 psutto: One really short book while thinking about something else?

>79 hailelib: Valente is really special. Nothing quite like her that I've come across at least.

Hey guys, guess who just went and won the national critics award for best production for young audiences in 2013? Yay!

Oh wow congrats! That's is very cool I indeed.

Congratulations! Way cool, indeed!

I have one of Valente's books in my TBR and I think I was planning to read it for one of the CATS last year, but never got to it. Not sure it's really my style, but it IS in the pile, so maybe I'll see if I can fit it in this year ( she said optimistically).

Hooray! Congrats!

That's so awesome! Congratulations!

Brilliant! Congratulations!

Congratulations! That's fantastic! You guys, we know a celebrity!

And another congratulations!

That's wonderful! Congratulations :)

Getting caught up here and happy to see that back to back reading of Valente did nothing to dim your love for the stories. Congratulations on the national critics award win!

Congrats on the award!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

>80 GingerbreadMan: - That's fantastic! Well done!

!!! Yeah!!! Way to go!

Congratulations on the award, Anders.

Thanks everybody for the congratulations!

We,, I wanted realism, and realism I got:

3. Blattejävlar! by Goran Vojnovic
Category 1, 235 pages.

Marko and his friends are in their late teens, living in the crappy projects of Fuzine in Ljubljana. Their parents are bosnians, serbs and croatians, all gathered in the ”most European” corner of ex-Yugo to find work and the possiblity of a german-made car. Marko, Dejan, Aco and Adi are not bosnians or serbs or croats or bosniaserbs, not really. But they’re certaintly not slovenian either. They’re Cefurji, distinctively second class citizens with little hope for the future. Marko, in his crudely humourous way, takes the reader by the hand through this neighborhood, sharing his insights on the differences between Cefur and Slovenian, the subtleties of family conversation among the Balkan clans and the impossibility of building an identity worth it’s name when there isn’t even a football team worth the name to follow.

But in between the brutally amusing anecdotes a sinister plot is unravelling as well. Getting drunk on a bus as a way to handle getting kicked off the basketball team leads to the bus driver calling the police. Which leads to the police beating them up and throwing them in the slammer overnight. Which leads to a brewing need for revenge – and one day Aco has the name of the driver. The fucker is even a Cefur – supposed to be one of them!

I’ve read a thousand books like this, about youth caught in between their immigrant parents and a society that doesn’t want them. And more often than not, they aret old just like this one, episodic, with some humor, some violence and a streak of real pain underneath. This is neither the best or the worst of them. The setting, and the tension between the more and less fortunate parts of former Yugoslavia is the most interesting part. 3 stars.

I tend to stay away from books like that as if they carried the plague, this is probably unfair of me. Not sure why the themes don't appeal its an important topic.

>95 clfisha: Yeah, I kind of crave this sort of story taken to the next level, I think. I've seen the theme enough times to want something more from it.

Adding my belated congratulations! That's wonderful news!

>97 paruline: Thanks!

Going to get a bit grumpy now. Sorry in advance.

4. Kyrkogårdsboken (The graveyard book) by Neil Gaiman
Category 2, 333 pages.

To cut to the chase: Sniff, I’m underwhelmed. I like Gaiman as much as the next geek, and after the Sandman books – which outshine everything else he’s ever done – my favorite works of his have been the ones aimed at younger readers. Loved Coraline. Loved the picture books with McKean. Maybe didn’t LOVE Stardust, but liked a whole damn lot anyway.

But this is like someone else trying to write a Gaiman book, clumsy and thin. Sure, there are tons of cool stuff. The man has ideas, as usual, and the particulars work: Ghulheim is lovely, the ghosts in the cemetery are sweet and corny, and the allusions and winks and quotes (of which I'm surely missing half) are clever and fun. But the story itself…I don’t know. It starts great with the Man Jack killing a whole family but the one who really matters – the boychild who instead stumbles into a graveyard and gets adopted. But what follows are a number of loose episodes, acting more or less as intermission up til the last hundred pages when the main bad guy and his bad guy pals suddenly and randomly resurface. The motivations of this rather abstract secret society remain obscure at best. But hey, that’s okay, because another secret supernatural society, helping our boy hero, are currently in a mountain in Krakow doing...um,something unspecified, but randomly dangerous, to help out. Oh yeah, and apparently something happened in San Fransisco too.

Bit of spoling here:
I mean, I like a bit of mystery, but actually getting an idea of why a secret society of philanthropist murderers spend a decade trying to kill someone, or why a vampire-werewolf alliance spend the same amount of time protecting him, besides two lines saying “Um, see, it was this prophecy” doesn’t seem to much to ask, does it? There seem to be pieces missing everywhere.

End rant? Sadly, not quite. While many of the characters kind of work, their relationships just don’t. I don’t feel them. We get sentimental descriptions of loss and pain and separation, but seldom get to feel something first hand, or see the bonds form. More often than not we just have to take the authors word for it: Oh right, he really liked her and now he’ll miss her bitterly, okay then. And yes, I suppose it's sad when your mentor goes away. Heartbreaking even? I'll take your word for it.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been a real stinker. Now Gaiman mostly saves the mess, by being Gaiman. But I just expect a lot more from this pen. 2 ½ stars, and I kind of already suspect this will be the letdown of the year.

That's too bad about The Graveyard Book. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't his best by a long shot. Apparently it's a homage to The Jungle Book by Kipling, which partly accounts for the episodic structure of the telling.

Sorry, I can't agree with you on The Graveyard Book, as I'd liked it very much. I'd read it aloud to my kids on a long car trip, and I recall it being a very enjoyable experience. However, it was several years ago, before I'd read the Sandman series and some of Gaiman's other works. Perhaps I'd have higher expectations now.

Congratulations on the award!!

>99 andreablythe:-100 With a whooping 4,2 star average, I'm clearly in the minority here. And I can totally see how you can enjoy this, a lot even. It's just that sloppy structure is a pet peeve of mine, and not even providing a real cause for the major plot arc annoys me. I also have no beef with episodic storytelling per se, I think it can be wonderful. It's just that since some of the episodes actually do have some indirect bearing on the major plot (visiting the crypt, for instance), the ones that don't, at all, come across as rather empty fluff. I don't think it's just expectations - even though I must say I was surprised at how little I enjoyed this one.

I might be unfair, but you know what it's like when you've started to feel a slight irritation about something in a book, and then realize there's just more and more and more of it. It's probably wise to put a YMMV sticker on the above review.

I remember it being a light, mostly enjoyable read but if you asked me to detail anything that happened now I'd be hard pressed to tell you!

I have so low an expectation about kids books I think I rather enjoyed. Though that is weird because as soon as I read your review.. I thought yeah that would drive me mad.. Half tempted to reread it to see, half tempted to bury it quietly book pile death.

I know exactly what you men about irritation boulders.. It's why I can't read crime novels ;)

->80 GingerbreadMan:
Very belated, but huge GRATTIS!!!

->98 GingerbreadMan:
Sorry about The Graveyard Book - it's next up for me, so it'll be interesting to see if it works for me.

You wrote, "It's probably wise to put a YMMV sticker on the above review." That's a good attitude for people to take with all reviews, I think. If we were all affected by books in the same way, then talking about them wouldn't be nearly so much fun. :)

My own pet peeve is the "...if only I'd know what was going to happen, then...". One is ok, but when I read a book with some type of multiples of that statement, I get annoyed. my rant over

But I can appreciate your annoyance with things put in which don't seem to matter to the story. Of course I haven't read this Gaiman yet, so what do I know?

>106 dudes22: Yeah, that's a bad one. I get suspicious when an author has to work up a sweat trying to create suspense. LITTLE DID I KNOW THAT THIS VERY CHOICE OF MINE TURNED OUT TO BE THE STARTING POINT OF MANY A SINISTER AND TRAGIC EVENT...

5. The maintenance of headway by Magnus Mills
Category 4, 152 pages.

After a detour into a slightly more fantastical landscape for a couple of books, Mills brings it home to his trademark understated everyday absurdsim again. This slim volume, dealing with the fragile, odd construction that is the British bus system is probably way more documentary than you’d like to think. As usual, Mills has a perfect eye for the million little things that can complicate something as presumeably straightforward as taking a bus from part of a city to the other. There’s the clash between the drivers’ wish to run slightly early and the officials’ preferreance for running slightly late. There’re the sudden changes in route. There are hapless water work workers placing temporary traffic lights with badly calibrated intervals. There’s red tape, fractions and endless theory making in the lunch room. And of course ”the maintenance of headway”, that illusive, impossible to reach principle of exactly eight minutes between each bus on a route.

This is a kind of novel I don’t know of anybody but Mills being able to pull off. While Mills’ usual themes of individual, collective and corruption are all present, here he is operating on a smaller scale than ever. There’s virtually nothing in here that isn’t mundande or petty, but everything is told in great, earnest detail. The result isn’t his finest work by a long shot – but perhaps his most uncompromising yet. 3 ½ stars.

He is actually still an active bus driver you know, hasn't given up the day job yet as far as I know (hadn't when we met him a couple of years ago)

>108 psutto: I knew he had a background as a driver, but didn't know he was still active. Doesn't surprise me at all though :)

One more for the Europe Endless!

6. Fixaren (The fixer) by Joe Sacco
Category 1, 106 pages.

Joe Sacco, for those of you who don’t know his work, is a journalist working with the graphic novel as a form. The result is powerful, a combination of the autenhicity of the news story with the immediability of comics. His massive work ”Safe area Gorazde” taught me more about the coflict in former Yugoslavia than anything i’ve ever read.

This is a story on a much smaller scale. It is the last shaky days of the Bosnian war when Sacco arrives in Sarajevo. Most of the international press is long since gone, and when Sacco meets the ”fixer” Neven in a hotel lobby, he is long out of work. A fixer is a local who takes care of foriegn reporters, arranges meetings and interviews, acts as guide, translator and bodyguard. Sacco and Neven strikes up a friendship, of sorts, and this book is a portrait of a complex person, a complex place and a complex time. Through Neven’s stories we learn about the early days of the siege of Sarajevo, when local gangsters were the quickest to take up arms against the invading sebs. Larger than life, blokes like Juka, Caco and Celo and their militias were crucial for the defence of the city, but very soon became a liability as soon as regular Bosnian forces were formed.

Neven is a very unreliable narrator, and the story we get here is subjective, contradictory, and sometimes likely false. Sacco’s portrait of him is vividly painted, as is his own ambivalence towards him. The concept of documentary graphic novel is very appealing, with the sense of place coming across very strongly. Again, this is a book that make me feel wiser. 4 stars!

Well 1 out of 2 BBs isn't bad. Sacco is someone I need to read more of.

I think it helps to read The maintenance of headway on a British bus, not that I think anyone should actually go on a British bus.

>111 clfisha: I liked it in a Swedish comfy chair too! Just not as much as some of Mills' other works. I think I would have liked to see a bit more of the embryotic plot of the divide among the officials. I also thought it resembled The scheme for full employment a bit much.

The Mills books has caught my attention, probably because I rely on local transit and have been witness to any number of interesting events - from road rage drivers, to passengers that need to be removed from the bus and my personal pet peeve: the drivers that ignore their time stop points on the route because they want a longer break at the end of the run, even if it means they blow past a stop 8-10 minutes ahead of schedule. ;-)

Oh, you'll get a complete explanation of that practice here!

>111 clfisha: - I got the bus today, was totally fine, I was only 10 minutes late for my meeting. The advanced notice said that the bus was due in 6 minutes time for a whole 10 minutes then said due for another 5.....

Gosh, here in Germany the buses run on time! : )

> 115 - LOL! Nothing like not being able to rely on advanced notice readouts.

I have The Maintenance of Headway patiently waiting on my bookshelf. I don't drive, so buses are my primary means of getting around. I love when the bus is 15 minutes late and then two of them show up at the same time!

I love when the bus is 15 minutes late and then two of them show up at the same time!

Me too! I have learned to watch to see if the second bus is making the turn three blocks up the road when all of the passengers are jockeying for position to get on the first bus to arrive at the stop.

All this talk about the bus has made me add The Maintenance of Headway to my TBR list. I'll have to remember to ILL it though. The closest library that has it is about 2.5 hours away in North Carolina.

@112 Yeah it dd echo it. I wonder if thats why he has gone in a completely different direction/tone in his latest book. The plot did throw up some things but sort of meandered.. although I like Mills meanders I think it could have been tweaked.

@116 I have never understood why the enligsh always mock Germany efficency, I would like public transport to run on time!

I do have some experience with British buses, so I'll put The Maintenance of Headway on the wishlist. If you're ever in Gothenburg, know that if it's raining or snowing, the only way to get the tram to show up is to light a cigarette. :)

>115 psutto:+117 Ah, the realtivity of those advance notices.
>116 RidgewayGirl: They do here in Sweden too. The trains, on the other hand...
>118 rabbitprincess:+119 This is also thouroghly covered in the book :)
>122 -Eva-: YES! It's uncanny!

7. Min morbror trollkarlen (The magician's nephew) by C.S Lewis
Category 2, 115 pages.

I only read a few of the Narnia books as a kid, and had no real sense of the overall arc of this series. When my six year old picked the thick omnibus out of his bookshelf and said he wanted us to start reading it, I thought I was in for a light, fairytale-tasting fantasy adventure with some Christian metaphors. I wasn’t expecting this, and cannot say the surprise was pleasant. For this, the first book of the series, about the creation of Narnia and the opening of portals between it and our world, is very light on story indeed, but heavy on solemn religious imagery and looong descriptions of mostly nature.

I have no problem with a book for children being religious, but I’m not sure I at all like how Lewis is using poor Digory as a symbol for all mankind, making him personally responsible for bringing evil into the newly created land. There’s just too much guilt and sin and disappointment here, for reasons that just seem too thin, and the redemption doesn’t seem to make up for it. I still see a child being shamed for something he couldn’t possibly have foreseen. The fun bits – perhaps above all the animals trying to get to terms with what manner of creature Digory’s uncle really is, cracked both me and my son up, but it wasn’t enough to take away the stern, rigid feeling of this book overall. We’ll surely plunge on for at least one more book (the next, of course, being the real classic), but if that one doesn’t deliver, I think we’ll abandon this series, at least for the time being. 2 ½ stars.

8. Bära mistel by Sara Lidman (This was picked by psutto for my 2013 Challenge)
Category 5, 265 pages.

Being the mother of two children out of wedlock, and rumored to having cheated the workers at a foresting venture, Linda already has a reputation. But when she meets with the musician Björn Ceder, with his slight frame and troubled eyes, and realizes he has just had a parting of ways with the other half of his duo, she just has to pick up her accordion and go with him. It’s the early decades of the 20th century in the rural north of Sweden, and Linda leaves her hard-earned lodging business and her two children, to go on eternal tours of village dances and recitals with the man she hopelessly loves. That Björn is homosexual is abstract to her, despite his constant flirting with young farmboys, spending their earnings on presents and sweets, and leaving a trail of angry parents behind. Between Linda and Björn something is growing that is more hate than love, more guilt than friendship, but a bond that none of them seem to be able to break.

This is an unusual Sara Lidman book, and it took me a while to get the hang of it. Her style is usually so sparse and dense, but here it is much more expressive, modernistic, rich in imagery. This, and that it focuses more on the meandering inner workings of people than outer events, creates a book harder to follow than many of her others. But once it grips me and I start to follow on this horrific, sad downward spiral, once Linda starts drinking and Björn humiliating himself, this is a profound meditation on the nature of obsession, self-destruction and the worst sides of friendship. Towards the end, I can hardly breathe. Not a happy read by any standard, but powerful, stark and full of insight. Highly recommended, but I don't know if it's been translated to English. 4 ½ stars!

OK, I know that I am straight forward kind of person, who takes things at 'face value' and I know that the Narnia series is heavy on Christian beliefs (becuase everyone says so), but as a kid my Grandparents read them to me and I loved them.

My favorite was The Horse and His Boy and and I loved the idea in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where they fell through a picture of the sea with a Narnian ship on it. And they got stuck with their awful cousin Eustace.

As for the The Magician's Nephew as a kid what got me was the way between worlds. My takeaway was that there are consequences for our actions, and we shouldn't be blithely running from world to world.

Hopefully you will find the others more to your liking.

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

The Chronicles of Narnia are what taught me to read. My father read a chapter a night and by The Voyage of the Dawn Treader I couldn't stand the suspense and read on my own. Back then the series was put in the order in which they were written, meaning that The Magician's Nephew was the second last book. It was also my favorite. I think I responded to Digory's loneliness and that between worlds place with all the small ponds and the idea of the rings. My other favorites are A Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair, which features the lovely Puddleglum.

Another with belated congratulations for your award, Anders. I'm a bit behind this year and have noted once again that I need to read more of Ms Valente than just The girl who circumnavigated Fairyland.

Bära mistel A review so good even if the book sounds nothing like my usual fare I still want to read it. Unluckily (or luckily) I can't find a translation!

and I never been interested in the Narnia books, clunkly symbolism or no, Joan Aitken and Enid Blyton for my sins :) Mind you the BBC series of the books did make me desperate to eat that most exotic of foods: Turkish Delight.

125+126 I agree there are some very cool ideas in there. I actually seem to recall we read an except of the part with the rings and ponds in school and wrote our own destinations, and that I loved it. It's just that once you get to Narnia, there is very little going on, besides Aslan being stern and singing. I guess if my boy loved it, I would have liked it better too, but I could really feel him going absent at times. I also think it could have been more to my liking if I had read it as a flashback of sorts, later in the sequence, rather than a prologue. Again, I look forward to the next parts.

127 Hi Kerry, good to see you! I'm not in sync with most threads either - are we ever?

128 Ha! I recall my disappointment the first time I actually tasted turkish delight! Nowadays I quite like it, actually. The dusty fingers you get are probably my favorite thing about them.

glad to see that my pick was a good one!

>130 psutto: No shocker, pete. Sara Lidman might be my all time favorite writer. At the very least, she's top five :)

The Narnia books were, like Kay, the first ones I remember reading on my own (apart from classic fairy tales), so they are dear to my heart for that reason, although I do like the stories too - Dawn Treader is my favorite, I think.

Haha, I too was really disappointed the first time I tried Turkish Delight - the book made it sound so good. I still don't like it, though.

I'd read several of the Narnia books to my kids when they were young and I recall being bothered by the overt religious symbolism. However, I did enjoy the stories all the same, and I'm quite sure all the symbolism went over my children's heads at that time.

I was really surprised that I liked Turkish Delight, I imagined it as being really sweet. My daughter is trying to con me out of my latest box. . . though we have very few with the powder on them. I like the ones with chopped nuts instead. But after tasting it I guess I am a bit surprised that Edmund liked it so much.

Perhaps a different Narnia book will tickle your fancy.

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

>132 -Eva-: - 134 Elis isn't too eager to pick up the next part right now (which might be a review in itself), but hopefully later this year we'll dip our toes into it again!

Some of you recall last spring was the plague season in our household. Seemed we were constantly sick then, especially the kids. This past autumn and this spring has thankfully been very different. This last week Minna has been really under the weather though - getting both a nasty virus and an ear infection at the same time. For over a week she didn't get to keep food or drink down, and we had endless days and nights of spoonfeeding, wiping vomit and washing clothes. And on top of this Elis with a massive cold and a distinct sad feeling of getting too little attention and affection. Hard.

Minna is thin as a noodle now, but two days ago she finally got her appetite back. Now the tricky bit is getting her to pace herself so she doesn't shock her stomach into throwing up for that reason... In conclusion: bit of a reading slump. I need to pick up the pace in march, not to fall behind.

9. Redshirts by John Scalzi
Category 8, 309 pages.

On the Intrepid, the space fleet’s flagship, it’s a well-known fact that it’s wise to try and avoid away missions. Especially if these involve the captain, the chief science officer, the lead engineer, the doctor, or the dashing lieutenant Kerensky. Because these missions always involve mortal danger, and always lead to the death of at least one low-ranking member of the crew. Everybody knows this, and a whole culture on loopholes and the noble art of being somewhere else has evolved. But what nobody seems to know, or even reflect over, is why. Not until Dahl and his fellow rookies stumble onto the hermit Jenkins, the “Yeti in the walls”, and learn of his wild and crazy theory about “The narrative”.

This is a clever piece of meta-fiction with more than one twist. Kept mostly light and humorous, towards the end it still digs a little deeper into what constitutes a life and how we depend on each other. It’s not at all bad. The characters are more than a bit flat though (which is a tad troublesome, since the difference between a badly written cutout and a real person is a major point in the book), occasionally, to use Claire’s words, “hardly making two dimensions”, and I must say I was a little surprised at how weak it felt stylistically. It’s clear Scalzi is a scriptwriter – once he gets to write pure dialogue passages, it flows so much better.

The last three “coda chapters” are probably the best thing about the book for me (despite the second person ploy that just feels unnecessary), adding depth and a sense of realness to the whole thing, and pushing the book up slightly above average. The last part even moves me. 3 ½ stars.

10. Udda verklighet by Nene Ormes
Category 7, 254 pages.

Young Udda (which is not a regular Swedish name by the way, meaning “odd”) has been plagued by vivid dreams her whole life, but in the year since she moved away from home it seems to have been getting worse. More nights than not, her only close friend friend Daniel (whom she is constantly trying to convince herself she is not in love with) has to come over and help her calm down and be able to sleep. Her last dream, though, is more real than ever – she even recognizes Malmö’s trainyard as she experiences being hunted by doglike creatures in the night, trying to make it to the safety of a sewer entance. But when she tells Daniel of this dream, his reaction isn’t what she expected. He is intrigued, excited and eager to go and explore the location. All his life he has been hoping for something magical to happen, perhaps this is it? Udda and Daniel part on unfriendly terms.

The next night there’s a message on Udda’s phone. It’s from Daniel. He’s at the sewer opening and has managed to yank the lid off. “You won’t believe it”, he says. “The whole ladder down is wrapped in Christmas lights!”. Then the line suddenly cuts. Daniel is not home, he is not answering his phone. He’s vanished.

You can tell that this is Ormes’ first book. The style is wobbly, full of annoying repetition and strange shifts in past and present sense. She knows her way around a plot though, creating a world that feels rich without bogging us down in explanations and interesting characters.

Urban fantasy really isn’t my thing though. The whole discovering another world just outside the corner of your eye trope feels like it’s always done more or less the same way, and the basic plotlines tend to be fairly similar. So, well done, but perhaps not exactly for me. Extra points for managing to stay clear of both elves and vampires. 3 ½ stars.

Hope illness stays away now!

I think I liked Redshirts more than you but to be honest it's faded a bit in my memory

I've just had pretty much the same reaction to the The whole discovering another world just outside the corner of your eye trope feels like it’s always done more or less the same way, and the basic plotlines tend to be fairly similar. reaction to the city's son so know exactly where you're coming from on that one!

Sorry to see both Elis and Minna have been sick but glad to see they are both recovering. I will continue to stay away from Red Shirts, mainly because the plot doesn't call to me as being appealing. I have a real hit and miss approach when it comes to urban fantasy. Most just leave me with a 'meh' feeling and then the odd one sneaks in that grabs my attention. I don't think the Ormes book would be one of those attention grabbing books.

I think Red Shirts hits a chord with fans of the original Star Trek series the most which is where the 'expendable crewmember' was most obvious.

>138 psutto: Yeah, it's tricky isn't it? Remove that process and it isn't quite urban fantasy anymore. Unless you tell it from the other perspective of course, a la Nightwatch I guess.

>139 lkernagh: It's not translated, I don't think. And I suspect it won't be either. Actually though, one of the cool things about it was that it was set in Sweden. I don't know Malmö at all (been there about seven times in my whole life), but it was still kind of refreshing not to be in London for once...

>140 mamzel: I loved the premise! I just thought the execution could have been much better.

11. Svenska ödehus by Sven Olol Karlsson and Philip Pereira dos Reis
Category 6, 152 pages.

Compared to most other European countries, Sweden is vast, sparsely populated, and in the middle of a strong urbanisation. Corners of this country, thriving just decades ago, are vitually emptying now. This is a book that looks at ten deserted houses in different parts of Sweden, exploring their decay and personality through photography, and telling stories about them. The houses are diverse: a farmhouse in middle-Sweden, built for bragging rights by a family that could never quite afford to live there. The co-op that was the pride of the hardy Bohuslän stonecutters. A farmstead, isolated in a grove of trees, despite having many neighbours close by. A whole suburb built for serving an industry that never happened.

The stories told are not spectacular, but constantly interesting. A villa on the outskirts of town is left hastily when the owner’s nazi past catches up with her. A nationally infamous criminal shows up at a summer camp for poor children. A farmer commits suicide in the barn after the last relative has moved out of the homestead. A man finally decides to show his now adult children where he grew up, and red with embarressment takes them to a cold, small cleft between some huge boulders in the forest. And an old chapel in the mountains in the far north is slowly coming to life again after 40 silent years, as a parish is starting to use it for services again.

This is a poetic, gentle book, full of ambience and quiet wonder. 4 stars!

Svenska ödehus sounds lovely. I love to look at places in decay -- Detroit, Michigan has several websites chronicling its decline. There's something about a building returning to nature.

Here are an international assortment of decaying places>. They are fabulous.

I've seen that series of pictures before. Awesome!! My favorite is probably the Columbian hotel. A friend of mine actually visited Pripyat (the town next to Chernobyl) just this autumn, on a 1,5 hour tour which is about as much as os healthy. It's eerie and fascinating watching her pics from there.

I enjoyed your review of Redshirts. When I'd first read it, I thought it was fun but rather light. Some time later, I reread it, as it had been chosen for a book-club meeting and I wanted it fresh in my memory. Only then did I appreciate how cleverly Scalzi had put the book together and how the separate codas really added to the novel.

I love with the premise of Redshirts and all the riffs/in-jokes I have to disagree with my own review and say that helps a lot. Recently though someone mentioned out of the redshirt character leads.. there is one women (duvall) who sleeps with an officer. Not exactly playing with the old inherant sexism but rather buying into it, odd because Scalzi is a very erudite and passionate feminist. Anyway it's been bugging me :)

Love the review of Svenska ödehus and very jealous of your friends trip to Pripyat.

It's odd how/when migration to and from cities occurs. In the UK its the rich filling our villages, downsizing and second homes. I know I couldn't afford to buy in the village I grew up (luckily I am a city person really!) Which reminds me I must get back to City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age which looks at this kind of thing :)

Aw, poor kids. Hope they're getting better! They'll have fantastic immune systems for the rest of their lives, though! :)

I have a friend who absolutely lived Redshirts. It didn't seem to be the type of book I'd enjoy so I've avoided it.

>144 mathgirl40: I agree, the Codas really add to the book. for me, they take it from "fun concept spoof" to something more.

>145 clfisha: Yeah, the Duvall thing bugged me too. The "barely making two dimensions" comment wasn't made by you in realtion to Redshirts though, but, I think, The circle.

>146 -Eva-: We had a brief recess, but now Minna has a fever again, and me and Flea both have some stomach thing. Hence my absence for another darn week here. Tis the season...

>147 thornton37814: I'm sure it's a typo, but "a friend who absolutely lived Redshirts is pretty funny :)

As stated above, sickness has struck the Gingerbread house in march. We made it fine through what's in Sweden called "Vabbruari" (which in English would translate as something like "Caringforsickchildrenuary"), but March has been a tad more difficult so far. Hence the too slow pace in reading continues. Also I have to admit, Annihilation took a lot longer than I had expected.

Anyway, here's my first real attempt at messing up my list of candidates:

12. Locke and Key 3: Crown of Shadows by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
Category 9, 152 pages.

The construction of this series is pretty damn clever. The discovery of new keys constantly opens up new possibilities and angles to the story line – as well as presenting new and exciting visual concepts. In this the thrid volume no less than three new keys are doscovered. My favorite is probably the Giant Key (making me once again wonder why giant size is so rarely used in fantasy), creating a lovely visual spread spanning several pages.

The hefty dose of new elements here creates an action-packed and fast-moving volume, full of adventure. But something is also lost in the process. The unease, silence and creepy numbness of the first volume is all but gone now, and Locke & Key is distinctively less scary for it. What really stands out and lingers for me in this volume is the closer look at Nina’s ongoing collaps, and what it does for the family to slowly lose their on reamining adult.

Not quite up to par with previous volumes, this is still an exciting and goodlooking series to follow. 4 stars.

Annnnnd...the joy of a new book by a favorite author!

13. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Category 8, 195 pages.

This is the kind of book where you constantly find your self short of breath. The paranoia, quiet horror and utter weirdness of VanderMeer’s slim novel is suffocating and claustrophobic., yet very believable.

Nobody quite seems to know what the deal with Area X is. Under the jurisdiction of the anonymous Southern Reach, this pocket of strangeness behind a border that is both abstract and absolute, is under exploration by small expeditions, sent in one after the other. The second expedition were all found inexplicably dead. The third killed each other. The eleventh suddenly reappeard in their own homes, without knowing how they got there, and somehow strangely different. The twelfth expedition is small, consisting of only five people, all women, with a rather vague task of exploring and refine the maps of the area.

But behind it’s first pristine impression, nothing is right in Area X. Something is moaning in the reeds at night. Something impossible to pin down is wrong with how the animals look. There is a feeling of a presence under the waves. And halfway between the base camp and the abandoned lighthouse, there’s a construction, a winding tunnel, that isn’t on any of the maps.

Written as the journal of the Biologist, this is an understated, horrific wonder. We follow the psychological tension growing between the members of the expedition, as it becomes more and more clear they might not have the same agenda. The desperate tries to make sense of what they find, and later just to stay sane and alive.

This is a thin book, but it’s incredibly dense. It’s pretty amazing the ambience it creates in under two hundred pages, and i’m sure it’s weirdness with linger for a long time. At times though, VanderMeer’s attempts at describing the undescribable, or to pinpoint mental states that have no names, become a tad too abstract for me. I occasionally find myself slipping, having to flip back to recall what I actually read. That said though, this is a deeply original weird horror by one of my favorite writers, and I just can’t wait to see how it will continue. 4 stars!

glad you enjoyed annihilation now we just need to wait until May for the 2nd....

I hope the family is soon feeling better, Anders. I would have taken a book bullet for Annihilation, but Claire/Pete already got me that one.

147> Sigh! It's autocorrect on the iPad at work. I have sat and watch it change "loved" to "lived" numerous times. I just didn't catch itself as I was typing that time.

Oh no! So sorry to hear about the excessive vabbing! Hopefully everybody will get better soon.

Scary concept people. I just spent my first adult night in the emergency room. My "stomach thing" got a hella lot worse this night, me clawing the walls with no chance of sleep. After conferring with the medical advice hotline, I was prompted to take a taxi to the emergency hospital. Which is not in our little town, but in Eskilstuna, 35 kilometers away. I had to go by myself, of course - Flea stayed home with the kids.

The emergency room was quiet. Attending doctor held up in some surgery, badass male nurses in crewcuts and the only patient beside me an elderly finn in flagrant psychosis, rather aggressively accusing me of being there to spy on him and/or score morphine, staring me down. For an hour, it was just him and me. Lovely.

Then finally admitted to do tests, and spending another two hours twisting and turning in fetal position on a bench under a cold flourescent light, waiting for the attending doctor, still held up in surgery as there seemed to be "complications". Tried to read. Not a chance.

In the end, the doctor was good when he finally turned up. Nothing strange showing on tests, so probably just my sensitive stomach reacting violently to the same virus the rest of the family has. Got some strong painkillers. Taxi back home as the sun went up, home to the rest of the sick family. Managed two hours of wobbly sleep.

Happy weekend everybody!

I hope health prevails in your family very soon.

And no more hospitals!

Hope you and your family all get well soon!

Love the Locke & Key series! And I've been meaning to read Vandermeer for a while.

Two great reviews. :)

And yikes! Emergency room visits are always uncomfortable at least and often scary. Glad nothing strange showed in the tests and I hope you feel better soon.

Get well soon, all of you! Anders, do you think you could have Ebola? Are you bleeding from your eyeballs?

Scary! Glad to hear there was nothing unusual, but what a wait to find that out! Hope all of you feel better soon.

Thanks all of you! The painkillers seem to do the trick. I hope for some sleep tonight!

>158 RidgewayGirl: hahaha! You know, I hadn't really noticed, but now that you mention it...

Hope you sleep well.

Oh, that's terrible! Hope you've had a restful weekend at least and are feeling better.

Remember what doesn't kill you makes for great material for a play ;-) Hope you & family get better health luck soon!

I sure hope you and the rest of your family are feeling better. Sounds like you all need a vacation to somewhere hot and sunny so you can bake those germs out of your system!

Sorry to hear about your illness. It must have been bad when you couldn't even read! I hope you and your family are on the road to recovery.

I'm also happy to see you're enjoying the Locke and Key series. My library has just ordered the 6th and final volume, and I'm waiting impatiently for it.

Better - but still ill. Got one and a half days of work done this past week, the rest taking care of Elis. Deadlines are brething down my neck. Had to postpone the weekend at a 17th century castle to celebrate my mother's 65-year celebration. And couldn't use the theatre tickets I bought for Flea as a Christmas gift either. She went with a friend instead, as I attended plague camp here at home (two kids with vomit in recent history, me with a fever). It was supposed to be our first night together without the kids for six months. Life kind of sucks a little bit right now.

Eveybody seems much better today though. Could this be the end of it, finally?

Some books:

14. Namnbrunnen by Inger Edelfeldt
Category 6, 242 pages.

This is a collection of new fairytales, written in a classic style, and framed with glimpses from Akasha square in Pa Ghad, where storytellers endlessly pass the baton between themselves. Rather than feeling like the really old folktales, these stories come across as the more arty fairytales from the gothic period and early modernism – written stories rather than told.

It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, to make a comparison with the immensely massive and rich The Orphan’s tales which I read earlier this year, and Namnbrunnen comes up very short. Most of these tales are engaging enough, but seldom feel completely fresh. Edelfeldt, like Valente, plays with a multitude of tropes and mythologies, but where Valente’s mixture left me stunned and full of images, Edelfeldt mostly feels like she’s alluding. That’s not to say there are not glimpses of greatness here too, mostly when she ventures into the more horrific corner of fairytales. The story of the wolf cloak is eerie, the image of the woman returned from death as a puppet, only speaking perky platitudes too. Mostly though, this is the kind of read that keeps you engaged while you read, but which is very easy not to pick up again.

Most annoying of all is probably how the frame turns to nothing. It has no arch and no conclusion. There isn’t even a final touchdown at the square after the last story. Poor structure bugs me. 3 stars.

15. Om det var krig i Norden by Janne Teller
Category 2, 59 pages.

Danish writer Janne Teller blew me away with Nothing a few years ago, and didn’t disapppoint with this. A gorgeous little book, designed to look like a passport, telling a very simple, effective story in second person: a nationalist government with dreams of rebuilding the “Great Sweden” from glory days past comes to power, gradually dismantling democracy. Danes, Finns and Norwegians living in Sweden form guerilla groups. Snipers start to man the high-rises. Ethnic Swedes form militias. And you and your family manage to get out in hopes of a better life, in peaceful Egypt. But life isn’t easy there either. A long wait to get asylum ensues (is it really not safe for you in Sweden? After all, isn’t your brother an officer in a pro-government militia?). The Danes in the other part of the camp hate you. And Scandinavians have a bad reputation in Egypt, as being undisciplined heathens, a possible threat to Egyptian culture.

Turning the perspective around is a simple tool, but works really well. It creates a fresh angle on racism, culture relativism and the concept of “home” and gets you thinking. Clocking in at under 60 pages, this is the kind of book you want to put in the hands of every twelve year old out there. 4 stars!

Yikes. That sucks. Hope you and everyone are indeed on the upward slope to feeling better.

Aw, "plague camp" - sounds funny, but I bet isn't! :) Hope it turns around soon!

Edelfeldt is a tricky one for me - she can go either way and there's no way of telling beforehand which of her works will be merely OK and which will be brilliant.

>168 -Eva-: I agree about Edelfeldt. Which are your favorites? I like some of the short story collections best, and Breven till Nattens drottning. And I thought Betraktandet av hundar was rather great too, as I recall. But I haven't read quite everything.

Breven till Nattens drottning is great. but I think my favorite is her comic-book Den kvinnliga mystiken - it has some weird stuff, but there are gems that are just too funny for words. I thought she did well with Duktig pojke as well, but it was ages since I read that one, so I can't say if it still works.

Sorry to read that illness has taken hold of the family.... and an emergency room visit - Yikes! I am not a fan of the hospital, even if I only there in support of the admitting patient. Here is hoping everyone is back to full health real soon.

>170 -Eva-: I haven't read Duktig pojke. Must remedy that sometime.

>171 lkernagh: Everybody's up and about again now, thanks! But march has been one hell of a month...

Here's one of my best reads so far this year:

16. Pojkarna by Jessica Schiefauer
Category 2, 188 pages.

Three fourteen year old girls – Kim, Bella and Momo - are hanging out in a greenhouse. It’s their refuge, a place to get away from the chaos that is happening inside and outside them. Their bodies changing, becoming awkward, grotesque, sexualised. And the way the boys are claiming their right to them – the rights to stare, taunt, grope, minimize. But a strange new plant arrives in one of the packages of seeds Bella orders from around the world, and the almost vulgar sacks of nectar inside the huge flower it grows, has a strange ability. It temporarily transforms them to boys.

At first it’s just a game. An advanced dress-up party, and a safe armour to walk the world in, without those wet looks clinging to your every curve. Bella and Momo quickly tires, returning to the trio’s ritual games in the grennhouse. But for Kim, being a boy is like a drug. Especially being a boy accepted as a companion by Tony – dangerous, unpredictable, luring Tony.

This book won Sweden’s most prestigious award for books for young audiences in 2011 and it’s easy to see why. The premise might seem borderline silly, but Schiefauer really makes it work. The feeling of subordination felt by the girls in a world run by teenage boys is suffocating and vivid, and the transformation is described in physical detail. Even better is how well she captures that strange combination of thrill and unease one feels in the presence of an unpredictable leader – admiration, scorn, fright and secret superiority all mixed together. And with the final part’s mystery and the open ending, she takes it to yet another level and leaves me with goosebumps.

What stops me from giving it full marks is that the whole bad boy trope of Tony’s is taken unnecessarily far. I would much have preferred him being less of a stereotype, without switchblade, handgun and car theft. His position and unbpredictability are the important parts, not his actions per se. Also, I was a bit surprised how gender isn’t really playing that big a role here. What Kim is getting addicted to is being accepted in the presence of dark charisma – not being a boy per se. It seems a bit of a shame, I would have liked to see her explore her new role in the patriarchy more. But this is an engrossing and somewhat disturbing read, with an authentic, edgy feel. If it's not available in English yet, I suspect it will be. Recommended! 4 ½ stars!

Excellent! I have been hearing great things about Pojkarna, but mainly from bloggers and, unless I know them, I'm wary of their words.

Wonderful review for Pojkarna! A quick search doesn't appear to turn up an English translation, at least not in the usual bookish places this side of the Atlantic, but I remain optimistic that it will happen at some point.

>173 -Eva-: I have a hunch you'll like it, Eva!

>174 lkernagh: Thanks! It's not even two years old, so a translation could be on it's way, I suppose.

And now for some classic horror.

17. Kall hud (Cold skin) by Albert Sanchez Piñol
Category 8, 280 pages.

A resistance fighter trying to break away takes up a very lonely position, as a weather observer on a tiny island in the south Atlantic. But arriving on the island, there’s no trace of the person he’s meant to replace. The cabin is empty, seemingly left in a hurry. The only other building on the island is a lighthouse on the other side of it, under a different jurisdiction. The keeper seems deranged, a quiet, grumpy giant of a man, uninterested in company. Still, our narrator decides to stay, his pickup date a year later. Already the first night he finds himself in blackest horror: out of the water come reptilian, monsterous creatures, bent on forcing their way into his cabin. The lighthouse is the only safe place on the island.

This is an incredibly classic horror tale. A small cast under siege by a nameless horror with nowhere to run, the brutal isolation, the dense psychological tension between them growing, evolving into another form of warfare, the dwindling resources… Piñol does a great job of bringing a story with rather few elements to life, in a way that feels more like Conrad than King. At times I’m biting my nails from the tension, and the pages fly by. It’s not original enough to warrant top marks in my book, but more than worth a read if you’re a fan of this kind of dense, concentrated chamber play. Be warned however, that our narrator is pretty damn unlikeable a lot of the time, if that kind of thing turns you off. 4 stars.

You've made Cold Skin sound amazing. I'll keep it in mind for when I want something creepy (which is not often, but still…)

Glad you enjoyed cold skin :-)

The premise of Pojkarna sounds really interesting. Let's hope there will be an English translation one day.

>176 RidgewayGirl: It very much does what it says on the package, and does it well. Beware of some misogony and general asshole-ness when it comes to the narrator though!

>177 psutto: Good read. Thanks to you and Claire - again!

>178 mathgirl40: Yeah, it's won a prestigious award and stuff, so chances are!

Tis that calendar biting time of year again - high time for a summary of the first quarter of 2014 (where the heck did it go?)

It's been an alright quarter for reading. A had a very low count in both january and february, but made up for it with nine books in march. Spread out fairly well among the categories too! I've not read many thick ones though, so the page count isn't too impressive. Also, I've bought quite a few books (I blame my bastard author friends, all releasing books this spring it seems!), and have, despite a HUGE TBR, starting lending books from the library again. So, there's still a (small) bump rather than a dent, but I have high hopes of making up for that in the months to come. Yes, I do. I do too! Shut up!

As for LT activity in total, it remains too low for me to be happy about. I keep falling behind on threads, and am being a bit of a lurker. Still, I hope you all know how much I enjoy this group and the friendships of you all!

First quarter summary

Books read this quarter: 17
Pages read this quarter: 3781
Average rating this quarter: 3,75
TBR dent/bump by the end of quarter: +3

Reading this quarter by category:
1. Overestimating my ability: 2/9
2. Having children: 4/9
3. Being constantly tired: 2/9
4. Choosing books that are too thick: 1/9
5. Duty reading: 1/10
6. Working too much: 2/9
7. Social media: 1/9
8. Computer gaming: 3/9
9. Comics are not literature: 1

Best reads of the year so far:
Despite not having given full marks to anything yet, I have been dealing out pretty high ratings. The orphan's tales was a rich, chewy firework display of stories, images and wonder, two thick volumes which made me research mythology, look up old role playing games and dream of fairly tales. Pojkarna took a borderline silly premise and made it real, dirty and disturbing. Bära mistel took my breath away in it's cruel unwinding description of dependency and the worst sides of friendship. Annihilation was perhaps just a little too dense for me, but it's weirdness, creepyness and ambience still linger.

Worst reads of the year so far:
To my own surprise, I didn't like The graveyard book. It just felt lika a sloppy re-heated hash to me. And The magician's nephew was just too slowmoving and holy for my taste. Also, my six year old hasn't wanted to return to Narnia since...

I'm definitely going to have to read cold Skin. That sounds creepy and great.

Not a bad quarter consider all the plague your house has had to deal with. :)

I agree. Even though you didn't give Cold Skin a perfect score, you made it sound really appealing. On the WL it goes. & you are reminding me again that I have to put aside some time to read Catherynne M Valente. I think I haven't because I met her for 2 seconds at a party at a con and she rubbed me the wrong way. It was crowded and we didn't even speak, but that's the only impression I have of her. Silly, yes?

Great summary! Hope the second quarter has lots of good reading ahead! :)

>180 andreablythe: Creepy it is. And, if not great, at least very very good :)
>181 -Eva-: Thanks!
>182 cammykitty: Oh, I can totally see how meeting an author that you don't like the vibe of can put you off. I definitely recommend you giving Valente at least one chance though!
>183 rabbitprincess: It's off to a great start anyways - see below!

Don't you just loooove a surprise five star read, that just hops out from nowhere and knocks you over the head?

18. Wunderkind by Nikolai Grozni
Category 1, 317 pages.

It looks like a classic coming of age story. A teenager has major trouble with authority, and is more interested in drinking, doing drugs and having sex than doing what the adult world expects of him. Until, finally, big bad reality catches up with him and forces him to deal with the consequences.

But this skeleton frame is really the only thing unoriginal about this story, which quite frankly blew me away. For the setting here is the Musical Academy for Gifted Children in Sofia, Bugaria, in the years just before the fall of the iron curtain. Konstantin is not an ideologist, he’s just rebellious and has no patience for the strict regime at the Academy. He’s skipping classes to have sex in the attic with brilliant Irina, he’s cheating at tests, he’s selling school property to his hoodlum pals, he’s taunting the party’s informants, he’s constantly pulling pranks. And he gets away with it too, since he’s a genius pianist, a true wonderchild. He threads the thin line, his grades are more than wobbly - but he knows the school will never let him go, he will always defeat the mediocre by doing what he loves. Until the day his best friend Vadim, the other piano ace at the school, gets expelled, with no chance of ever seriously performing again. Suddenly, Konstantin’s beef with the teachers takes a very serious turn. Suddenly, the stakes are very high. Suddenly, music and futures and lives are destroyed. And at the same time, the tiniest pinch of something that isn’t quite realism sneaks it’s way in there.

This is probably the best coming of age story I’ve read ever. Grozni’s blend of dirty realism and lyrical descriptions of classical music is just right, and even an illiterate like me gets caught up in Konstantin’s imagery around Brahms, Bach and Chopin. You can really tell that Grozni himself has a background in classical music. The city Sofia is also beautifully caught, as are the late times of Bulgarian communism, a tired system with few earnest defenders, and the civil war in the faculty between the artistic teachers and the academic ones – the brutality of the latter only matched by the naivety of the former.

Best of all though, is how this books glissandos from bawdy entertainment to something very very serious, until I find myself silently gasping “oh no” at some of the final twists. I picked up Wunderkind at a sale, mainly to get a Bulgarian entry for my Europe Endless challenge. I wasn’t expecting the best book I’ve read this year. 5 stars!

As I read your review I thought this was a smashing good book. But I gave a gasp when I thought I read 1,317 pages. Whoa! I checked on Amazon and saw it was only 320 pages and I looked at your post again and realized it actually read Category 1 - 317 pages. When my adrenaline rush settles down I'll go back and see if it's available at my library.
Alas, no.
I'll add it to my Kindle wishlist, though.

>185 mamzel: Ha! I decided to omit the name of the category in bold text with my reviews this year - a format i've used for the last three years. Perhaps this was a mistake :) No, this is a fast and not too bulky read!

Don't change it because I can't read carefully!

"surprise five star read"
Those don't come around too often - congrats!!

It's nice to stumble on a really great book.

Okay, I got to find a copy of Wunderkind. I'd read it just to get a feel of Sofia. The music and everything else makes it sound like a must read.

Yes - I've added it to my "recommended by Lt" list also.

I enjoyed Cold Skin as well, it was an unusual setting and one I've read about before but not with 'horror'. Wunderkind is going on the tbr list for sure.
I hope you and family have recovered now that spring is around.

surprise five star read puts it firmly on my radar - will seek out a copy! great review

I hope all of you find a copy of Wunderkind and enjoy it as much as I did!

I've not been active here lately - but I have been reading some pretty good books! Reviews for Suddenly, a knock on the door, Och himlarna ska falla himlarna ska falla himlarna ska falla när du rör vid mig and The land of decoration are coming up in the next few days!

Woohoo! Looking forward to the reviews. :)

Great review of Wunderkind! I'll have to look for this one. My daughter's a fairly serious violin and piano student, so the "blend of dirty realism and lyrical descriptions of classical music" sounds like an intriguing mix that I would enjoy.

Well I disappear for a few weeks and come to find I have to track down a copy of Wunderkind: A Novel, poke publishers until they translate Jessica Schiefauer and Janne Teller (wait they have translated nothing). Luckily I have read and enjoyed Cold Skin, glad you did too!

Hope you are finally out of the plague pit and catching your breath! Sounds like you need a good break.

>196 mathgirl40: For someone who really knows classic music - Chopin especially - I think this book has probably an extra dimension. I think you shold track it down!

>197 clfisha: Oh, Nothing is GREAT. Go fetch!

Here's the first review I owe you guys. More to come!

19. Suddenly, a knock on the door by Etgar Keret
Category 3, 293 pages.

As someone who writes for a living, Keret’s way to dish out ideas by the dozen is borderline annoying: “Here’s a great concept which gets three pages, here’s a clever idea which gets, um, four and a half”. He uses exactly as much text as he needs to to present each story, and not a line more: an angel is faced with someone who actually wishes for world peace with his dying breath. A man wakes up from a coma, and can’t find a way to explain to his wife how much more wonderful it was than being awake. And three distant business acquaintances find themselves the only guests at a birthday party – and the birthday boy seems to have gone missing. A contract killer finds Hell is very different than he thought.

Some stories here are more everyday, borderline realistic, than I’ve read from Keret before. The blend in this book seems eclectic and all over the place, but somehow also works fantastically as a whole. Most impressive of all is that Keret isn’t just about the clever idea and the cool twist. He also manages to conjure interesting, relatable characters and say something about life in contemporary Israel. This is truly a big bag of delicious nibbles. Great, great, great stuff. 5 stars!

Great review of Suddenly, a knock on the door! I thought I had had a previously sub-par experience with a Keret novel but according to LT, that is not the case - it was Imre Kertész I was originally thinking about - so I am happily adding this one to my future reading list. Even better, my local library has a copy of this book and his short story collection Gaza Blues, which shows up on LT under the title of Missing Kissinger. ;-)

5 stars for Keret? I must get round to reading that, it's been sat on the shelf for almost a year!

>199 lkernagh: Kertesz and Keret have very little in common, save a sparseness and being jewish :)

>200 psutto: It did for me too! But then again, so do most of my purchases....

I doubt I will read a book with a longer title this year than:

20. Och himlarna ska falla himlarna ska falla himlarna ska falla när du rör vid mig by Emma Karinsdotter
Category 4, 229 pages.

Jonna is working as a tour manager, and living in a safe little love story with her girlfriend Elin. But her past is turbulent and broken – her passionate affair with drummer Niki from the American punk band drove her into chaos, self harm and psychosis. Elin knows nothing of this, but as news surface that the band is reuniting for a new album and a new European tour, Jonna feels the pull, and the thin varnish of calm and normality cracking. It isn’t long before the magpies start talking to her again.

Karinsdotter (who, it should be pointed out, is a good friend of mine) moves back and forth in time, and switches styles from a more sober present, to a feverish, lyrical past. There’s much to say for the subte way the relationship between Jonna and Elin is handled, the warmth, the unspoken questions and Elin’s concern which comes across as both moving and naive. Also, Karinsdotter has been working as a tour manager, and it shows. The "rock stars on tour" trope has a very rare, true ring to it here.

But it is in the way she lets language dance and mutate and break in her descriptions of the past she has her real strengh – letting imagery become reality so that a hotel room really becomes a circus ring, throwing syntax around and setting up new rules for punctuation. And when Jonna goes into psychosis, it’s actually really scary. This is not for everyone. If the title (”And the heavens will fall the heavens will fall the heavens will fall when you touch me” in direct translation.) puts you off, the book will too. But this is a debut both creepy and beautiful. 4 stars.

21. Det förlovade landet (Land of Decoration) by Grace McCleen
Category 4, 342 pages.

Judith is ten years old and she knows that she won’t get much older. For soon Harmagedon will come and the world will come to an end. She’s actually kind of looking forward to that. Not just because she knows she’ll get to meet her mum, she who was so strong in faith she rather died than accepted blood transfusions when Judith was born. Not just because she secretly knows her dad doesn’t love her. But also because she has no friends her own age, and because the kids at school are horrid and brutal, and she can’t stop herself from wishing them ill.

Judith’s only toy is the intricate model landscape she’s building from junk in her room. And one day, after a sermon about miacles, she covers it in cotton and white paper and shaving foam, wishing for a snow storm so she won’t havet o go to school. It works. As does her next attempt, and her next. God has clearly selected her as his tool. But the consequences of miracles are hard to predict, Judith’s enemies don’t back down easily. And with her father being among the few who breaks the strike at the factory, the little family becomes the target of real terror.

Grippiing, moving and suspenseful, this is a rough read at times. The world seen through the lonely, indoctrinated eyes of Judith is difficult and unjust, and her meekness is a shaky defence indeed. The blend of reality seen through the eyes of a child not quite aware of how shitty her circumstances are, and a pinch of something that might be magic, reminds me of ”The earth hums in B flat”, especially with the welch setting.

Right up until the last fifty or so pages, I’m biting nails and wiping tears. The conclusion seems a little stressed and commodified though, and is my only little beef with this fine debut. 4 stars!

@200 You can't Pete I am half way through reading it ... since August ahem.. Your review Anders has inspired me to pick it up again :) No idea why I stopped I was enjoying it.

I am sort of tempted by Land of Decoration but tidy endings upset me too easily.. maybe I should just get round to reading The earth hums in B flat!

Ooooh, Suddenly, a knock on the door sounds great. BB!

>198 GingerbreadMan:
Yey - it's always great to hear when someone loves Keret; he is easily my favorite writer ever.

>203 clfisha: I think both of these books might be slightly out of your usual fare, but I can see you liking either of them.

>204 andreablythe: One of those books almost anyone with a taste for the slightly odd will like, I think.

>205 -Eva-: Again: thanks for bringing him to my attention! He seems to be in the middle of a popular breakthrough in Sweden at the moment!

I'm a little overwhelmed at the moment, which too much going on in both work and life. Which leads me to spending way too little time with you guys here - again. This is just letting all of you know I really appreciate this group and you poeple following my thread. Your comments are much appreciated, even if it takes me a week to answer them sometimes...

22. Heja Pelle Svanslös by Gösta Knutsson
Category 2: 121 pages.

The books about Pelle, a rather naive cat without a tail, are classics in Sweden, but not especially read anymore. Elis got this as a christmas gift from (typically) my elderly aunt last year, and I wasn’t expecting much. But I was pleasantly surprised. Granted, this is failry light-weight stuff, mostly fun and whimsical, but as entertainment it actually still works. Some chapters, like the one where Frida the pixilated cat is trying to tell an endless fairytale about a bird, had us both choking with laughter.

So, mostly good fun. But Måns, Pelle’s nemesis, is also a good capture of a type of character you’re well off knowing, as you’re bound to meet it many times in your life: the backstabbing false friend, proud, petty and utterly unable to admit to ever being wrong. Extra points also for a book from the fourties which doesn’t feel sexist or racist. Here the love interests have strong minds of their own, and there is even a clear pro immigrant stand. Looking forward to read more books in this series! 4 stars!

23. Främlingsleguanen by Martina Montelius
Category 4: 154 pages.

It’s been a couple of months since our five year old narrator, disgusted with the poor hygiene and low level of intellectual challenge, decided to resign from Kindergarten. She simply walked out. Nobody seems to have noticed. Her parents, or ”originators” as she prefers to call them, are away. It’s not entirely clear where. She now lives alone in the flat with her german speaking iguana. Apart from a rock called Sleipner, it’s the only company she can stand.

This slim book is mostly an account of this deeply original young narrator’s methods for navigating in the world without drawing attention to the fact that she’s five and living alone. But it’s also a book about change. For one day an eviction notice is on the doormat. And the iguana seems to have an illness, becoming more and more apathic. Perhaps dying?

Written in a crisp, literary, pretty detatched style, the voice of it’s narrator, but still bursting with strangeness, this is an odd book, both funny and sad. It’s easy to see where the hype comes from. Occasionally it becomes just a little too clever for it’s own good, but never annoyingly so. And the ending sends parental chills down my spine. 4 stars!

24. Introvert: den tysta revolutionen by Linus Jonkman
Category 6: 243 pages.

I’ve known I’m introvert in the most basic of terms (social activities cost me energy, whereas solitude gives me energy) for a while, and have been wanting to learn more about it. However, most books on the subject seem to deal with an American reality, and as the whole Swedish national character seems to be introvert from that viewpoint, I have felt it might give me a wrong image. Therefor, I have been having an eye on Jonkman’s book since it came out, and picked it up as soon as it was available in paperback.

Most of the stuff in here is stuff I already kind of have figured out for myself, but it’s pretty interesting to see it put into words. And there are also some new thoughts in here, for instance giving me new insight to my burnout a couple of years back (which I never connected with extrovert tasks becoming more and more dominant in my workday with too little alone time to reload, at the time) and also some good ideas about parenting. Our six year old is obviously dominantly introvert, while our three year old is very extrovert, and we need to think about that.

Unfortunately, while the content is good, the execution is kind of weak. Jonkman is often funny, occasionally hilarious, and the book has lots of snappy oneliners like ”I google ’extrovert’ and find job ads, I google ’introvert’ and find articles about Anders Behring Breivik”. But the book is full of annoying repetition. Also, he generalises and draws conclusions on trends from examples in popular culture that just seem random. Even at only 240 pages, it feels at least 50 pages is fluff. And while he claims to want to show how extrovert and introvert traits complete each other, what comes across is often a ”pro-introvert” agenda of sorts, which feels more conceited than anything. Glad I read this, will surely come back to it for reference, but as a book it’s sub par. 3 stars.

The Montelius book makes me wish I could read Swedish! It sounds really interesting.

>208 rabbitprincess: I have virtually no idea how it would fare in translation. Language seems such a huge part of it. i'll let you know if I hear anything of it getting translated into English!

One moth to go to the long awaited holidays, people! For all of you who like me are fighting to the finish line of a hefty spring - hang in there!

(Speaking of which: I just signed up for Fotrally again... This year is 24 hours or bust, dammit!)

25. En dag (One day) by David Nicholls
Category 4, 13 CD:S (431 pages)

As a setup, it’s not exactly mindboggling. We follow Emma and Dexter on a particular day. From the first almost-one-night-stand on the graduation night (him a slick public school boy way too into himself, she an insecure country girl with a political conscience) and then over the years, always on july 15th: the years when he’s travelling and she’s making tacos, the sliding apart when Dexter’s media career makes him more and more of an asshole, Emma’s feeling of being stuck, the sorrows that bring them back together.

The result could easily have been mundane, or just too light. But Nicholls, to my surprise, manages to capture a bittersweet sense of life and friendship and love as being difficult, fleeting and beautiful, all at once. We are, thankfully, far from Harry and Sally. I was actually a bit surprised at how much I could relate to a lot of this book, and how it often moved me. Nicholls has a good eye for the situations that can stand as significant symbols of a place in life. Sure, it’s witty too, and full of banter, but a long way away from the lad lit I was expecting. The Swedish audio version is beautifully handled by anders Ekborg, making this a joy to listen to. 4 stars.

Are the tables set up outside, with people lingering in every bit of sunshine yet, up where you are? We're in for a rainy week, but last week reminded me how glorious summers are in Europe, with everyone cheerful and outdoors.

I liked One Day much more than I had expected to. Don't watch the movie.

>210 RidgewayGirl: Last week was spectacular here as well, Allison! The waters aren't warm enough for really hanging on the beaches yet, but weatherwise it was full summer. This week calls for jackets again. Which, by the way, somehow seems fitting after the cold brown wave that swept over Europe with the EU elections this weekend. Fascism is on the rise again. It's unbelievable!

I'll give the film a pass. Thanks!

26. Parable of the sower by Octavia Butler
Category 7, 345 pages.

I like how Octavia Butler writes. It’s almost a non-style, crisp and honest, evenly paced and matter of factly. It is what it is, like. For a story like this, a pre-apocalypse, relying on events themselves hitting the reader, it’s extremely effective.

Lauren grows up as the daughter of the minister in a walled community outside Los Angeles. The United States is crumbling fast – global warming is eroding the coastline and burning away the crops, the last scraps of welfare are all but collapsed. The gap between those who have, however little, and those who don’t. is getting more and more acute. Police and fire department are privatized and corrupt. The states up north are closing the borders. Inflation is huge, and bartering is taking over as the means of trade. It’s the last twitches of an imploding capitalist nation.

This, coming into the story as the apocalpyse is about to happen, strikes me as refreshingly unusual. It reminds me of Things we didn’t see coming by Steve Amsterdam, but without the same scope in time. Stylistically and storywise, it’s impossible not to think about The Road.

For of course Lauren’s community breaks down, stormed by hateful hungry looters in the night, and she is forced out in the world on her own. With her she carries just the emergency supplies, a few other saurvivors and the slivers of a new faith. For Lauren has had a revelation of sorts, a blasphemous idea, and she can’t help but thinking that it makes sense.

The book then deals with her travelling north, following the streams of refugees on the highways, meeting more people and starting a community of sorts. It’s often hard reading, in a horribly calm sort of way. This world is incredibly bleak, especailly for children, and any reader should be warned of that. But there is more hope and dignity here than in ”The road” for instance, a hope of humankind actually being able to learn something. Occasionally, it’s subtly beautiful.

Written in 1993, this, sadly, feels incredibly visionary. This is pretty close to where the western world is heading if we don’t make some very radical changes very soon, I’m sure. Parable of the sower serves as both a robust alarm clock and a small injection of hope. I’m both eager and a little scared to read the sequel. 4 ½ stars!

Yeah, the EU elections were disheartening. Between the horrible posters up everywhere here and the coverage of everything Nigel Farage said (the UK UKIP leader), it wasn't good. I read somewhere that fear won the election.

>211 GingerbreadMan: I read Parable of the sower last year and was mightily impressed. I wonder if the sequel is as good...

>213 paruline: It has the exact same rating... :)

Too many books to mention here that I need to make a note of. Guess some things in this challenge don't change and the big bad GingerbreadMan giving me BB's remains a constant.

27. Min skugga by Christine Falkenland (picked by DeltaQueen50)
Category 5, 124 pages.

I had no idea what to expect from this slim novel. Flea picked it up at a sale somewhere almost ten years ago, and i’ve never even been close to picking it up. But it turned out to be an interesting, slightly disturbing read. It’s set on an island on the Swedish West coast about a hundred years ago. Rakel, a young woman with a bad limp since an accident, marries a much older man, the widower George. She soon realises he is nowhere near over his dead wife, and her everyday fills with little comparisons, small hurtful reminders of a love she’ll never know herself. The main reson for her being in the house is raising George’s young daughter Cornelia. She does, to her best abilites, and to her own surprise finds a love for the girl, and – finally- love in return. But when Cornelia falls in love with a lowly fisherman and moves out of the house, Rakel’s jealousy starts to eat her. And at the same time, reports from the mainland starts coming, saying that the dreaded spanish flu has arrived, killing blindly.

There’s a lot of what i like here. Crisp prose, stong sense of place, a certain eerieness. It’s really only the feeling that this book kind of goes exactly where you’d expect it to, that keeps me from giving it a higher rating.
3 ½ stars.

>216 GingerbreadMan: Hi Anders, glad my pick was a fairly good read. It's always interesting when one gets a chance to explore their own shelves. It's amazing what I have squirreled away over the years!

>217 DeltaQueen50: Love the term "squirreling away"! Very very fitting.

>218 GingerbreadMan: - It certainly is around my house, and like a squirrel who forgets where he hid his nuts, I sometimes forget where I stashed a book!

>219 DeltaQueen50: I like to think I have a good grasp of my books. But I'm sure there are hidden gems in those rows hidden in the back of the shelves!

I mentioned in passing that hama beads have been occupying a bit of my time this spring. Ahem. You could see this as geekery in full bloom actually. I do mostly 8bit and 16bit motives from old videogames, and have a ton of fun with it - hunting down cool sprites on places like etsy, modifying color schemes and meticulously putting them together. With the stress of my workday and two small kids, i've found it to be a great way to relax and unwind - it demands focus, but not a lot of thought. Also, I really like how they turn out, actually! This new hobby of mine has been eating a bit of reading time for me, but it's frankly been worth it.

Also, it's a good thing I have an office with big empty walls so I have somewhere to put them up. If you're interested, there's a pic of my hama wall in my profile now.

28. Pelle Svanslös i Amerika by Gösta Knutsson
Category 2, 124 pages.

This is the second book about Pelle ,the cat without a tail, that I read with my seven year old. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as good as our first attempt. Here Pelle follows his family to America, and visits New York, Niagara, Chicago and Philadelphia. A syndicate of gangster cats get in their minds to ”catnap” Pelle, and most of the book deals with the respective local charters’ schemes to lure him to their hiding places. Pelle falls for it every time, but is always saved by newfound friends. Really, the eye-rolling and exchanging of looks with my son, as Pelle walks into yet another obvious trap, is the best part of this. But all in all, the book feels mostly thin and episodic. The cast from back home in Uppsala is sadly missed.

Knutsson was clearly an anti racist, but also a product of his time. The way Pelle defends the ”negro cats” he meets in America is well meaning but paternalistic, and occasional breaks had to be made to explain how certain words just shouldn’t be used, and certain attitudes are just wrong. In the end, the book provided a good crash course in racism for our kid, which was alright. 2 ½ stars.

29. Zazie by Raymond Queneau (picked by laura_88)
Category 5, 186 pages.

Back in the days when Flea and I were rose cheeked students, my dorm room had no TV. Instead we would spend our evenings naked in my narrow bed, reading aloud. This brusque, wobbly novel was a favorite back then, making us break out in giggles, and I was looking forward to a reread.

The heroine of this book is a foul-mouthed world weary country girl in her early teens. Her own father has drunkenly tried to molest her, which has caused her mother to put an axe in his head. Now she’s sent to her uncle (who is considered ”safe”, since he’s working as a ballerina in a gay club) in Paris to recover. Zazie is utterly unfazed by her experiences, and equally unimpressed by Paris. The only thing she was looking forward to was going on the Metro, only to find out there’s a bloody strike! Annoyed, she sets out on her own, to at least get a pair of blue jeans. It isn’t long before a strange policeman starts to make passes at her.

What follows is a rather mad romp through the streets of Paris. Mostly told in crude dialogue, full of invectives, we follow a laconic Zazie as her uncle is getting kidnapped by a horde of enthusiastic tourists, though numerous bar fights and taxi rides in over crowded streets and ending in a full scale siege at the Halles. Packed with puns, quirky dialogue and absurd detail, this is a book that makes your head spin. Occasionally trying just a little too hard, occasionally a little sexist, but mostly high speed fun. I have no idea how the english translation is (language is a big part of the fun here), but if it’s as good as the Swedish one, this is a book worth checking out. 4 stars!

This new hobby of mine has been eating a bit of reading time for me, but it's frankly been worth it.

That is the trade off of picking up a hobby one enjoys.... other hobbies tend to get a bit neglected! ;-)

The hama beads hobby looks fascinating - I Googled it to learn more - and I can see how that would be both fun and relaxing.

tsk new hobbies - I've found I'm writing a lot and going to a lot of writerly events and it's getting in the way of reading!

How fun that you're reading Pelle Svanslös - I loved them as a kid, but haven't done an adult reread, so it'd be interesting to see how I feel about them now.

Very disheartening to see the results of the election - can't believe that so many people are leaning so far right. :( I normally don't vote in the Swedish elections, since I don't feel I should have a say when I'm not living there, but I felt I had to vote in the EU one and very happy I did.

>222 lkernagh: It's very much a kid's pastime here (motoric skills ands such), but working with pixelated motives translates soo well.

>223 psutto: Yeah, in my case it's mostly finding a way NOT to think of writing :)

>224 -Eva-: It's one hit one miss for Pelle so far. But the fun one was fun enough to make both me and Elis want to go on!

Elections: The valrörelse for the national elections is kicking off now. A rather intricate situation. I'm fairly sure the right-wing coalition is going to lose - they are way behind in polls. But apart from that it's very open.

Female sci-fi and fantasy month is starting and I'm reading Vampires in the lemon grove. VERY impressed so far! Seems the potential I've seen in Russell's previous work is really coming together here.

But I'm also reading to my son, and having a little less fun with that lately.

30. Fallet med de stulna smyckena by Susanne MacFie
Category 2, 104 pages.

Some of you might remember how I read about a million Lasse-Maja mysteries with my son last year. I wasn’t ovely impressed with most of them. However, that series’ popularity has spawned an army of clones. This is one of those, and reading it actually makes the qualities of the Lasse-Maja books – a sense of humor and a cast of characters with a certain cartoony feel to them – obvious. This just feels like a, flat dumbed down version of a realistic crime book for grown ups. The mystery is okay, I guess. The writing is not. The illustrations are horrid. 2 stars.

Great review of Parable of the Sower. I'd read that novel some time ago and have been meaning to get to the sequel. It's really too bad she never completed the final book in the planned trilogy.

I checked out your hama beads photo and the projects look marvelous! As someone who likes crafting geeky things from yarn, I can really appreciate this. :)

>227 mathgirl40: I didn't know that about the Earthseed books. Here's hoping there aren't too many loose threads left hanging after the second book...

Some of the people I've been swapping designs and ideas with are doing embroderies. Very much the same premise when it comes to this kind of motives!

Oh, what a great start to the Female fantasy/sci-fi June group read! Probably my favorite read of the year so far:

31. Vampires in the lemon grove by Karen Russell
Category 3, 245 pages.

If Russell’s debut was full of deeply original images, but behaps more about single situations than arcs, and Swamplandia! was a brilliant premise of a novel that became just a little one note, this is the book where she shows her full potential. For here are (mostly) tight little stories that will make you turn the pages BOTH to see where they are going and what oddness Russell will whip up next. For make no mistake, these are still strange stories, nesting uneasily in the borderland between horror, fantasy and magical realism, often with a bit of black humor thrown in.

At the heart of them are people (or,um, well, approximations of humans, I guess) trying their best to handle some rather hopeless circumstances. If I were to sum up this book in one word, “coping” comes to mind. From vampires bent on not drinking blood, to American presidents finding themselves reborn as horses in a stable in a place that very much resembles Kentucky, to the veteran tattooing the death scene of his friend all over his back, these stories deal with strategies, deliberate choices that are hard to make.

As we tend to say it in this group when we’re gushing over short stories: all of these are very good, and many of them are great. It’s hard to pick favorites, but two that resonated strongly with me was “Reeling for the empire”, about young Japanese women turned into living silk factories – a weird story with a strange sort of hopefulness to it. And “Dougbert Shackleton’s rules for Antarctic tailgating”, which says so much about what it is to love a losing team in sports (or life) through the wonderfully bizarre metaphor of rooting for Team Krill in the food chain. I loved this book, and I love where Karen Russell is going. Recommended both for you who loved Swamplandia! and those of you who felt it was a “close but no cigar” kind of book. 5 stars, without a question.

Short story anthologies usually aren't my thing but darnitall, this one sounds good, even though I have never read Swamplandia.

I have St. Lucy's on Mt. TBR and it sounds like I should get going on it sooner rather than later.

Ahh, I'm finally catching up!

>211 GingerbreadMan:
Great review of Parable of the Sower. That's a long-time favorite for me and I'm so thrilled that you enjoyed it. The sequel is good, but not nearly as good as the first. It would have been fascinating to see her carry the story past the second book.

>229 GingerbreadMan:
Someone else gave a positive review of Vampires in the Lemon Grove, too. So that's a BB twice over. I better get to reading that one. :)

Definitely adding Vampires in the Lemon Grove to my future reading list.

ditto to vampires in the lemon grove, Claire has just bought another of her books at the weekend too - not doing well on female June, although I did read pure I'm elbow deep in Tigerman as Mr Harkaway is visiting this neck of the woods on Wednesday and I wanted to read it before seeing him, hoping to finish it off then visit my TBR to see which female writer to read

Love the review of Parable of the Sower. I've read a lot of Butler but not that one yet. I'm not a fan of Fledgling but have been blown away by everything else of hers I've read.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove sounds worth a try. I wanted so much to like Swamplandia! but couldn't get into it. I didn't even finish it. It seemed like it was going nowhere fast, but Vampires sounds like she got the craziness under control, plotwise at least.

>230 lkernagh: A bit of tolerance for strangeness is required, I think. But these are mostly much more arc-y than her previous work.

>231 -Eva-: Worth loving for the title story alone!

>232 andreablythe:+233 I think there's a very good chance you'll both like it.

>234 psutto: Angelmaker is lingering on my shelves. Enticing, but I think it'll have to wait until next year. I have enough thick books for this challenge!

>235 cammykitty: I liked Fledgling. It was my first Butler. But Parable of the sower was absolutely way better. I

My second book for Female fantasy june was a blind pick. I wasn't expecting to love this one, after finding The mists of Avalon a bit of a chore despite redeeming qualities. And didn't either.

32. Albions skogar (The forest house) by Marion Zimmer Bradley (blind pick by RidgewayGirl)
Category 5, 469 pages.

Eilan is the daughter of a rebellious druid, and destined to become a priestess of the Goddess. Gaius is the son of a high official with the occupying Roman forces. But when chance brings these two together, they are struck with a mutual passion that will change the destiny of Britannia and zzzzzzzzzzzz…

Marion Zimmer Bradley can write, and this is a well composed epic handling a large cast (of mostly annoying people) and a changing country. But there is not a single thing in this book you, me and the neighbor’s donkey haven’t seen a hundred times before. Your mileage may vary, but I’m officially bored. 2 stars.

That's pithy.

Sorry, Anders. I do badly at blind picks. Including for myself -- if I pick up a book from the library or bookstore because I thought it looked interesting, knowing nothing else about it, more than three-quarters of the time it ends up being a dud.

>238 MissWatson: There is really a lot to add, but this book just rubbed me the wrong way. I often feel I spend too much space trying to sum up a meh experience. (Thanks for teaching me a new English word, by the way! I had to google "pithy")

>239 RidgewayGirl: You can't really be held responsible for a blind pick, Allison! On a side note, I've been a bit more lucky with my random "this looks interesting" picks this year. Wunderkind I picked up on a whim, and it turned out to be one of my top reads this year. Land of decoration was another lucky random pick at the library.

>240 GingerbreadMan: I had to look that up, too, when I first came across it, and the OED says "Of language or style: full of concentrated meaning; conveying meaning forcibly through brevity of expression; concise, succinct; condensed in style; pointed, terse, aphoristic." I have loved that word ever since.

I have learned that some authors write stuff that I just don't connect with and unfortunately, Marion Zimmer Bradley is one of those writers. Sounds like you have the same experience. Good thing there are so many more authors that do strike the right cord!

>237 GingerbreadMan:
No more Zimmer Bradley for Anders!! :)

>239 RidgewayGirl:
In all fairness, it was picked from Anders' own bookshelf! :)

I finished Parable of the talents today. Felt like a very important read for me, very much the right book at the right time. Will elaborate in my coming review.

As for now though, I'm going to bed. For tomorrow is my first day of summer holidays (SIX GLORIOUS WEEKS!), and tomorrow night is the start of...

Fotrally.

Those of you who've known me for a while knows what that means... This year it's 24 hours or bust. Dammit.

OoooOOoo! Can't wait to read your review of Parable of the talents. I read Parable of the sower last year and was mightily impressed.

And of course, good luck with Fotrally. I will be cheering for you on the other side of the ocean.

I'm cheering you on as well, Anders. Good luck!

I've got my fingers crossed you'll make your goal this time.

Good luck with Fotrally.

Awaiting news of your triumphant fotrally. Just remember to stay ahead of the toilet.

Good luck with the fotrally.

Good luck with Fotrally. As the saying goes, "You can do it. You can do it."

Just getting back in the LT swing of things to see that you've survived the plague, read a fair few 4 and 5 star books (much to my bank accounts' chagrin), and that it's Fotrally time again! Good luck this year - you can make the full 24 this time around, Anders! :) Cheering you on from Wisconsin!

Well, at least Mists of Avalon led to one of your wittier reviews. I've read and enjoyed MZB, but after Mists, she's never getting another chance from me. She also had a reputation for being particularly cruel to new writers, to the point that several quit writing. Don't know if it's true or not, but the rumor doesn't encourage me to being particularly generous to her writing.

Recent revelations about MZB's past may help swing the balance to not touching her work any further:

Guardian link

Hope the footrally went well!!!!

>254 AHS-Wolfy:
That's awful!

Oh Wolfy, ick!!! I like Janni's reaction.

The revelations about MZB, not to mention your recent review, are making me regret picking up The Forest House at a library sale recently. I did like The Mists of Avalon but, though I usually try to dissociate an author's work with his/her personal/political views it's hard to do so when the picture is so ugly.

Hope the Fotrally went well?

>254 AHS-Wolfy:
Yeah, that's so disturbing. I thought Mists of Avalon was fine and all, but I won't be reading any more of her work. It's one thing to have political views I disagree with and it's another thing to cause or allow harm to come to children (or anyone really).

Only just clicked on Dave's link - won't be reading any books by MZB then

Where are you? Are you still walking?

Hi guys!

I owe you three reviews, a quarter summary and a new thread. But first things first:

Thursday evening I started my third Fotrally (for those of you who don't know it, it's a kind of extreme hiking event, inspired by King's The long walk, where you walk at a set pace, around the clock, until the last person stops walking.). I had 24 hours as a goal already last year, but quit after just over 20 hours. I got into a bad frame of mind, started neociating with myself, and in the end convinced myself the 3,5 hour improvement from my first year was more than enough. I was disappointed in myself already in the car home. And as time went on, it seemed more and more apparent I wouldn't get this silly march out of my system before I reached those 24 hours. So I signed up again.

This year was a bit more swarmy than before - the race was sent on web-TV, and there's also a full length documentary in the making. I was interviewed just after the start, and after a short hesistance even answered the question how long I was planning to walk. So now I was even on tape, saying 24 hours :)

I've learned a few things in the years before. One is that I (like most) lose appetite as the hours crawl forward. So at the same time as I need a lot of energy, the thought of food makes me sick. This year I ate as much as I could already the first hours, as soon as I felt even the least bit peckish. Also, I'd packed a wider assortment of foods and snacks, to have a broader selection: candy, dried fruit, jerky, biscuits, pancakes, sandwiches, pasta salad, potato chips... Last year's experiment of never even taking the shoes off for the whole time was also discarded this year. I changed socks every eight hours, using toilet time, applying new tape and chafing patches where I needed to. My feet are no pretty sight today, but way prettier than last year. (Had to throw away the shoes afterwards though, as they were filled with blood and blister fluid. Yum.)

This year Fotrally had a new course, which meant less straight and flat asphalt roads, and more rural roads, many of them dirtroads. This was mostly great, a nicer landscape and better surface. But DAMN it was hilly at times - up and down and up again. Uphill was fine, but downhill...ugh, that hurt. Also, in the forests and farmlands, reception was bad. The much needed cheering from friends and family on facebook and sms was missing a lot of the time. There was also a horrible, stifling two hours when the water supply lorry couldn't get through...

I started alone this year, as my previous walking companions felt they'd reached their goals last year. No biggie. By now I know a lot of people in this silly competition. And besides, I had decided to do a more introvert race this year, spending more time in my headphones and only making conversation when it actually gave energy. I guess I spent a little more than half of the time listening to an audio book and podcasts.

The real hard part started after about 19 hours. By then my feet hurt real bad, I was dizzy with lack of sleep, had a hard time getting food down and time seemed to be crawling almost backwards. I also started having problems with keeping the pace, and had to break into a shuffling, limping run to get back in line (overruling a body that screamed at me). But my head was with me this time , and I was never about to quit. Every time my thoughts even touched at quitting, I hammered myself with "You KNOW you want to make 24 hours, and if you don't this year you'll have to next year. And then you'll have to do these same 22 hours all over again". It did the trick. I also talked to some lovely people, about the weirdest things...

Finally, we reached the little municipality Malmköping, and passed 24 hours on the main road there. The route then took us straight thorugh the inn where the locals were singing and giving out cola and drumsticks. About five minutes further down the main road we reached the fourth support zone, where I sat down on the sidewalk...and couldn't get up again without help :)

So, I DID IT!! My time was 24 hours, 13 minutes, and I ended up around place thirty in a very strong field of stubborn competitors.

Then the march continued of course. For a loooong time. Four people walked longer than anyone has before in this competition - 50 hours 45 minutes. When Lena Jensen (a lovely lady!) finally quit, giving Silvio Cannava the victory for the second year running, the clock was on exactly 55 hours. That's 55 hours walk with no breaks whatsoever, save 25 minutes toilet time per 24 hours. Incredible.

For me, this year leaves no trace of disappointment in my mouth. I'm incredibly proud of myself. Right now, I think I won't do it again. But I don't think I can stay away. Next year, I think I'll be an official, helping out with driving, water, timekeeping or support zones. It'll be fun seeing it all form another angle!

>254 AHS-Wolfy: I don't think I need more discouragement to stay away from MZB's books. But that's frigging awful.

Congratulations!!

Have you read they shoot horses don't they? which is about an endurance dance off (not quite the same thing I know) but I am reminded of it when you talk of the lack of sleep and endurance

>265 psutto: I've seen the play a couple of times. Was it a novel first?

Fantastic! Congratulations! So how much time do you get in the toilet each hour? Because 25 minutes out of every hour seems very generous. Or do you need that rest after the tenth hour or so?

Congratulations, GM!

>267 RidgewayGirl: Haha! I've corrected it now. You get 25 minutes per 24 hours, to use as you wish. Me, I did my business (of the wee variety) by the road and used my toilet time to sit on the loo wagon, change socks and look after my feet. I think I used about fifteen of my minutes.

Most walkers actually tend to want to stay away from the toilet. Your legs stiffen up very quickly after sitting down for just a second, and it's no fun trying to get into pace again. More often than not, the toilet wagon is falling a little behind too, so you need to catch up with the group again. A painful trot, I assure you...

Congratulations -- what an impressive achievement!

Wow! Congratulations!

Wow, what a hiking challenge! Congrats, Anders! I don't think I could pull off that amount hiking, but it would be interesting to try. What's the longest time that people have managed on the hike?

I am awesomely impressed!

Have you considered trying sandals to walk with? I recently read Born to Run and it seems that the Mexican tribe that can run over I paved paths at high altitudes for 24 hours at a shot wear sandals made of old tires. At least you wouldn't have to worry about changing socks.

We'll done and good luck in future events.

Well done! I hope your recovery is quick and I think that's a fab idea to be part of the support crew in future fotrallys. and again well done, it really is an impressive achievment of mind over matter.

Congrats! Much respect to you for reaching your goal.

Congratulations, Anders, that is quite a feat (pardon the pun)! I also hope the recovery the quick and fairly painless!

Thanks so much everybody! Recovery is going well, thanks. Already the day before yesterday, I managed some light skipping :) My feet still look rather scary though...

>272 andreablythe: Fotrally is apparently a unique competition, in that it has NO breaks. Extreme Hiking standard seems to be five minutes per hour. Thus the record is the one set this year: 55 hours straight. (The no break thing is interesting by the way. It seems to work with a certain type of person. for instance, a guy like myself, who rarely runs more than 10 km, walked for several hours longer than several ultra marathon types)

>274 mamzel: Some people advocate sport sandals - but then with socks in them. The real pros swap between several shoes, and I've seen people do some hours in both crocs and flip flops. To walk the whole length in sandals with no socks would result in some rather nasty sores, I think. I have, however, no doubt that the Mexican tribesmen would do extremely well in Fotrally :)

Here are some reviews.

33. Saffransmysteriet by Martin Widmark and Helena Willis
Category 2, 94 pages.

This is a reread of Elis (and mine) favorite LasseMaja book. I reviewed it last year, and the rating sticks. This is a rather clever little mystery with a fun culprit. 3 stars.

34. Parable of the talents by Octavia Butler
Category 7, 423 pages.

I’m extremely worried about the future of this planet. The next five or so years are absolutely crucial when it comes to halting climate change, and at present very little is indicating we’ll make the two degree goal, which is the best we can hope for. Capitalism doesn’t seem to have the tools to adapt to a limit of resources, several Antarctic glaciers are melting beyond stopping, and in most places making real changes is impossible for reasons of political popularity. Instead everything is pointing towards a pretty hellish scenario already in my children’s lifetime, with billions of climate refugees, shortage of food and water and global economic collapse. Quite frankly, I often feel there’s no hope.

Well, that’s a perky start of a review, right?

But there’s a point. For Butler’s book is very much the right read at the right time for me, giving me some glimpses of insights that feel very important. Parable of the Talents follows the events of Lauren and her little group after they found the enclave Acorn, making it the centre of the new faith, Earthseed. They are successful, even prosperous, until a new president of the wobbly United States is elected, a hateful bigot who wants to rebuild America’s greatness by trampling the different. Earthseed is looked upon as a satanic cult, and cannot avoid the president’s “Crusaders” forever. When the strike comes, it’s crueler than anyone could foresee.

Butler paints a very cruel, bleak world, a recognizable America in free fall, where human lives are cheap and getting by is hard. But Talents is, more than anything, a book about prevailing. About getting by. About trying again. About finding dignity in the most trying of circumstances. And as such, as a book pointing out that human existence can be worthy, meaningful, even beautiful even in the shittiest of worlds, it resonates strongly with me: If we fail, if don’t make it, if we’re heading towards a world five or six degrees warmer, with melted poles and scorched lands, there might be lives worth living there too.

On the other hand, I realize that the ultimate goal the Earthseed faith paints, the dream of a humankind surviving by taking to the stars, leaves me totally cold. The idea of man spreading to other parts of the universe, at the risk of repeating the same mistakes, holds very little comfort for me. I come to understand, however superficially, that my love is for this planet, rather than mankind per se. Not a bad bunch of insights to get from 430 pages of science fiction, eh?

As a book, Talents has all the same qualities that Parable of the Sower had: a strong sense of setting and character in a no-nonsense kind of way. It’s brutal in the same way (which may deter some). In the end though, it doesn’t quite take full responsibility for it’s setup. The storyline of Lauren and her lost daughter (who is telling the story) never seems to become all it could be. There’s a tiny sense of anticlimax in the end. But the road there is pretty damn stunning. 4 ½ stars!

I'm still one review behind, and a quarterly summary, before migrating to a new thread. My female sci-fi/fantasy june is spilling into july, by the way. I'm reading and enjoying The left hand of darkness.

Now I gotta go tend to the kids, before they kill each other...

I definitely need to read me some Octavia Butler at some point.

Anders - I understand and agree completely that the ecological future seems to be very discouraging. Your comment about capitalism being unable to rein itself in seems exactly right. I've even managed in my own mind to link in computer hacking, scams, and gang shootings with it. People don't seem to have any degree of restraint any more. It's all me,me,me, now, now, now. I think you've described it very succinctly.

And, although this book is not one I would normally gravitate to, I may consider it sometime.

>278 GingerbreadMan:
Wow. Fifty-five hours is an amazing amount of time not to sleep, let along keep hiking.

>279 GingerbreadMan:
Love your review of Parable. I hadn't thought to tie the stories in to today's life, but the comparison works well. It's easy to get pessimistic with the way things are going in the world today. I just hope they don't get as bad as in the books.

putting Butler on the list of "must get round to" great review!

>266 GingerbreadMan: - I've read the novel and seen the film based on it, wasn't aware of the play so no idea which came first. I suspect the novel.

>281 AHS-Wolfy: I think she'll be to your liking, Dave!

>282 dudes22: Thanks. Sometimes it helps a little bit just laying it on the line. And after all: it's not too late yet.

>283 andreablythe: I think she feels eeriliy plausible, actually. Very impressive how the first book was written in the early nineties. Not many even took global warming seriously then.

>284 psutto: The Earthseed books are a good place to start, I think. I've read and liked Fledgling too, but it wasn't at this level.

Here's the last review I owe you - an audio book I mostly listened to during Fotrally:

35. Kast med liten kniv by Sara Kadefors
Category 4, 319 pages (nine hours)

Jonas lives a good life. Two kids, a successful painting business, married to the woman of his dreams, planning to finally buying a house. He’s the reliable sort, not comfortable in the spotlight, not a dinner speaker perhaps, but a beloved kids’ coach in both football and handball. But inside, Jonas is full of self hate, insecurities and feelings of inferiority. His white trash background, his dyslexia, his uninterested father form a hole inside him. And at the bottom of that hole is a nagging, black guilt that he’s never even begun to deal with. When Jonas wife decides to divorce him, he falls freely into an abyss of depression, anger and demons from the past.

In cross cut chapters we meet Jonas now, and in the childhood he never speaks of – when he was just another no good punk on the backyard of the welfare state, drinking, smoking weed, boffing, getting crappy grades and breaking into summer houses. And we get to know what really happened that summer night, many years ago, when Rebecka, the light in his life, died in a moped accident.

Kadefors has a keen eye for class especially. Like in her other books, this is a story of luggage, of falling out of the frame, of being unable to keep up. And Jonas’ inferiority visavi the other middle class people around him is as painful to read as it rings true. The same goes for his desperate, crude attempts at revenge. Unfortunately, Kadefors also has a tendency of writing stereotypes a lot of the time, and many secondary characters feel like flat clichés.

I listed to most of this during my long Fotrally, and as a book for such an occasion it worked well – substantial but not hard to follow, with a touch of simplification suitable for a tired head (It just so happens I listened to Kadefors during last year’s hike too!) 3,5 stars.

Congrats!!! 24 hours!!! You're crazy. I'm awestruck.

Super impressed with your Fotrally race results! That is awesome!!!

...... and you have hit me with the Octavia Butler book. I love the name Octavia. ;-)

Thanks cammykitty and lori! I must admit I'm pretty pleased with myself. Now the feet are alright for some (light) walking again too!

I'm about to wrap up this thread, getting long as it is. But I'll sum up my second quarter first!

My LT activity is still lower than I like, but readingwise I'm doing alright. i'm pretty much where I should be, and have been reading more than thousand pages more in the second quarter. It's been a qurter of highs and lows ratingwise, but the average is higher than ever, I think. Best of all - at the moment my TBR is actully reduced with five books since the start of the year! (In a few weeks there'll be the Ydre library summer sale, but still...)

Second quarter summary

Books read this quarter: 18
Pages read this quarter: 4656
Average rating this quarter: 3,81
TBR dent/bump by the end of quarter: -5

Reading this quarter by category:
1. Overestimating my ability: 1/9 (3/9 total)
2. Having children: 4/9 (8/9 total)
3. Being constantly tired: 2/9 (4/9 total)
4. Choosing books that are too thick: 5/9 (6/9 total)
5. Duty reading: 3/10 (4/10 total)
6. Working too much: 1/9 (3/9 total)
7. Social media: 2/9 (3/9 total)
8. Computer gaming: 0/9 (3/9 total)
9. Comics are not literature: 0

Best reads of the year so far:
I've given out three five star ratings so far this year: Vampires in the lemon grove shows a Karen Russell that delivers on everything she's promised, finding the balance of story and weirdness. Suddenly a knock on the door was just an embressment of riches, a zillion brilliant ideas packed into a slender volume - funny, disurbing and very human. And Wunderkind was the archetypical coming of age story, but in a completely fresh setting, that had me eagerly turning pages and going places I've never been before. Two duologies came close to full marks - The orphan's tales a caleidoscope of stories and weirdness, and the Eathseed books, sturdy warning bells mixed with the beauty of humanity prevailing. Bära mistel was a cruel little jewel of dependency and hate/love, and Pojkarna took a simple idea and just ran with it.

Worst reads of the year so far:
Quite a few sub par reads. The graveyard book felt lika a sloppy re-heated hash. The magician's nephew turned both me and my boy off Narnia. Fallet med de stulna smyckena was badly written and horridly illustrated. And The forest house was predictable in the etreme.

>262 GingerbreadMan:
That's amazing - huge congratulations!!!!! Hope your feet come back to their original shape and color eventually. :)