Wandering_star in 2014

Hello everyone and welcome to my 2014 thread! 2014 will be my sixth year on Club Read. As always, I'm looking forward to discussing my reading, hearing about what everyone else has read, and failing to dodge a few book bullets.

Oh yes... book bullets. I moved into a new place in October, and haven't unpacked all of my books. Instead I decided that I would fill one bookshelf, and then wait until I'd read through a shelf's-worth of books before unpacking another box. Not only have I not cleared a shelf, but now all the shelves have books lying horizontally on top of the books that I unpacked. I must be doing something wrong...

Top ten reads of 2013

It's not been a brilliant reading year, in either quality or quantity, but the year was bookended by two standout reads: New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani, which I read in January, and My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which I read in December. Both fiction by Italian authors, but quite different - New Finnish Grammar is a slightly experimental work, about an amnesiac struggling to learn Finnish (presumed to be his native language) and return to his self, and My Brilliant Friend is a classically told story of two young girls growing up in a poor district of post-war Naples. Both blew me away.

In fact, it's been a rather European year of reading. Another Italian author in the top five is Italo Calvino with his Complete Cosmicomics, delightful short stories with a scientific flavour. Also:

Portrait Of The Mother As A Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius - a novella about a young German woman walking through Rome, set during WWII
The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé - funny/surreal short stories
Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy - trapped in a nightmarish totalitarian world

And the fiction category is topped off with The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The non-fiction I've most frequently quoted from/recommended to others:
Delusions Of Gender: how our minds, society and neurosexism create difference by Cordelia Fine
The Party: the secret world of China's Communist rulers by Richard McGregor

Most fun read: Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Book bullets - January

Building Stories by Chris Ware - because of review/interview
The Ministry Of Guidance Invites You Not To Stay by Hooman Majd - because of review - purchased (Kindle 99p)
Life In The Cul-de-sac by Senji Kuroi - mentioned by arubabookwoman on rebeccanyc's 2014 Club Read thread
Three Weeks In December and Anubis - recommendations on my Secret Santa by diana.n
The Polyglots by William Gerhardie and the novels of Saiichi Maruya Grass for my Pillow or Singular Rebellion - recommendations on my Secret Santa by yarb
Joan Silber - Fools and Ideas Of Heaven - Cariola's Club Read thread
Charles Todd's Ian Rutledge series of detective novels - NanaCC's thread and discussion
To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild - mentioned by fannyprice
The Serialist by David Gordon - from the Paris Review's What We're Loving
The Orenda by Joseph Boyden - The Economist's Prospero blog
The New Dead (zombie anthology) - bragan's thread
Bloodlands - I've read multiple positive reviews but the discussion on labfs39's thread finally tipped it onto the wishlist

Jan
added to wishlist: 15
added to TBR: 14
read: 12

Book bullets - February
Hild by Nicola Griffith - from the Paris Review's What We're Loving
Mo' Meta Blues by ?uestlove - from the Bookrageous podcast (episode 58)
The Lonely Planet Food Lovers' Guide To The World - seen in a bookshop
Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdic - Nicholas Lezard review
Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America by Jon Mooallem - from 99% invisible podcast
The Night Guest, The Dig and Down To The Sea In Ships - recommended by Maggie Ferguson
An Unfinished Business - rachbxl's Club Read thread
Lessons From China - review - purchased

Feb
added to wishlist: 10 (25 for year)
added to TBR: 17 (31)
read: 7 (19)

w_s that's a brilliant idea for getting through your books, but I can see how it went awry. Did you finagle which books went on the shelf (books packed by subject matter), or was it totally random?

Looking forward to your reading.

I like your October plan, but not surprised by your results. Somehow reading works to undermines reading plans.

I'm glad that you liked My Brilliant Friend since it's on my TBR shelf.
I don't think I would have the self-discipline to clear my TBRs the way you plan to. I'd probably want to find a particular book, and it would be at the bottom of the last box, and I'd get distracted by millions of other books in the boxes before I got to it, and soon my shelves would be full again.

Just trying to catch up on the group and already I've been hit by book bullets! A good start to the year!

Good luck with settling in at your new place. Will follow your reading with interest.

Hello everybody! I hope you're having a good 2014 so far. Sassy, I didn't finagle what would come out, it was pure chance. In fact, I only have about half my cookbooks and I am sure one box is half magazines... but I'll just have to keep reading until I can open another one. Anyone care to take a guess on what month that will be?! Perhaps October?...

My first book of 2014 is The Last Of The Vostyachs by Diego Marani, which I picked because the same author's New Finnish Grammar was one of my standout reads of last year. That was a book which played with ideas about language and culture, memory and identity, through the story of a man who has lost his memory but who from superficial clues is believed to be Finnish, so he learns Finnish in an attempt to regain his lost self. The summary of The Last Of The Vostyachs sounded equally promising - a man is released from a Siberian gulag, and turns out to be the last member of his tribe and the last speaker of Vostyach. When he returns to his homeland and speaks his native language for the first time in twenty years, all of nature starts to listen.

Unfortunately, although the themes of this book are about language and culture, the story itself is somewhere between academic satire and black farce, without the courage to carry through any of its ideas. Very disappointing given the wonderfulness of Marani's other book.

"Your language has never known the dizzying heights of universality. No one studies it, and all you can do is to repeat it among yourselves, because it tells of a tiny country no-one knows. To communicate with the rest of the world you have to learn another one, you have to venture out among words which are not your own, which you have borrowed from others. Like second-hand clothes, they are not tailormade for you. They are too loose, or too tight, faded from use; they turn you into perpetual refugees."

2. Alif The Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

I got this because it was a Kindle Daily Deal, the title rang a bell, and the synopsis looked interesting. It turns out to be YA fantasy, which is a genre that I read from time to time, but rarely one that produces books I love. However, the themes and setting of this one were unusual enough to make it an interesting read, and I'd definitely recommend it for people who enjoy this genre.

Alif, the eponymous hero, is a hacker living in an unnamed but repressive Middle Eastern emirate. He earns his living helping various clients to bypass internet censorship from across the Middle East. He has lots of online friends, including one young woman who he has met and fallen in love with - but in real life, her social status is too far above his for a match to be possible, and one day she tells him that she is engaged to someone else. In a passion of unhappiness, Alif somehow manages to write a programme which will recognise her style however and under whatever name she tries to contact him - then realises that this would be a gift to the authorities. His beloved also manages to send him a package, which turns out to be an ancient book which opens up magical powers. The authorities are after this book too, so Alif has to go on the run. He is helped in this not only by human friends but by djinns and other spirits; but the authorities too have some magical forces on their side.

As well as the setting (physical, social and political), and the fantastical creatures inspired by Islamic folktales and myth, I liked the way that magic and technology were interwoven in this story - the information in the magical book would have been interpreted as spells in an earlier era, but is now interpreted as computer code.

"So. This one knows a thing. Or two." It snapped its mouth shut, the knives in its jaws slamming together like a trap.
"He doesn't know anything." The man glared at Alif with unconcealed fury.
"I'm an idiot," Alif agreed meekly.
"No. This one has a tang about him." The beast sniffed the air near Alif's neck. "Copper wire and rare earth elements and electricity. He barely smells of mud at all. Why are you here, chemical man?"
"I'm - " Alif fought the terror that made answering seem like the easiest way out. He retreated into the things that he knew. Diminishing helixes and parabolas appeared in his mind, and he remembered that one could avoid faulty output by adding a new input parameter.
"Who wants to know?" he hazarded. When the beast merely blinked, he grew bolder. "Why should I answer your questions if you won't answer mine?"

That is a nice quote from the Marani book. Alif the Unseen sounds like a great find.

I've got Alif the Unseen on my kindle and am intending to read it!

Listened to a good Kazuo Ishiguro short story on the New Yorker fiction podcast - "A Village After Dark", a story which manages to be eerie and science-fictiony in a very subtle way.

Also finished 3. Without Anchovies by Kok Yee Chua, a book of short stories from Malaysia which I downloaded for the Reading Globally Southeast Asia theme read in quarter two last year, but didn't get round to. The collection is mainly ghost or crime stories with a few slice-of-life vignettes thrown in. Unfortunately, I can't really recommend it. The stories themselves were unoriginal and one-dimensional - the plot of most of them could be summed up in a sentence, and the end was often not much more than a punchline.

For almost an hour, our kite floated free in a bright blue evening sky. You were entranced by its freedom. The smile never left your face. You've no idea how fast my heart beat whenever we stood close together. Then the wind suddenly became stronger, and dark clouds swirled above. It was as if an evil bomoh envied our carefree happiness and decided to ruin it by summoning a storm.

I like the quote.

Thanks for the link to the short story - I love Ishiguro and am so excited to give it a listen!

Glad you like the quote, Dan. I always try and pick a quote which is in some way representative of the book, whether in style or theme. Sometimes it's very easy, the sentence just jumps out at me while I am reading. Without Anchovies was one of the ones where it was harder, because there wasn't really a strong style or theme. But I thought I would go for one which had a slight Malaysian flavour.

I meant to mention when I posted the link to the short story, that it made me wonder if Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go would be worth reading - if it had the same light-touch eerieness. Although in the commentary on the podcast the story is compared instead to The Unconsoled.

I found the eerieness in The Unconsoled to be a bit on the heavier side!

Interested to read your thoughts on Diego Marani - I didn't manage to keep up with Club Read properly so had missed that one of his books was one of your favourites. He's a colleague of mine (though I've never met him, or not to my knowledge), and I was meant to be doing a training course run by him in a couple of weeks, on Language and National Identity, but I'll be on leave - shame, as I was looking forward to it.

Looking forward to reading about your reading again!

Rachel - what a fantastic course that would be! I hope it will happen again at a time that you can make. It's an interesting subject anyway but I would love to hear his take on it.

4. Secret by Philippe Grimbert
Why acquired: don't remember where the recommendation came from.

This is a work of fiction, but one which draws closely on the facts of Grimbert's family history and early life. Like his protagonist (also surnamed Grimbert), PG was fifteen when he discovered his true family history, which he describes as a series or patchwork of secrets rather than just one. I got this information from an interesting interview with Grimbert here - which contains quite a lot of spoilers, although this is not really the sort of book which is spoilt by knowing the story, as the style of the telling is also important.

In the book, our young narrator imagines his parents' story, then re-imagines it after he knows the truth. It's very simply and sparely told, and reminded me a bit of The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, which I know a lot of readers on LT loved. So for those readers I would probably recommend this book. Unfortunately, there is something about the style (for both books) which doesn't really work for me. The rave reviews for this book say that it exposes the impact that keeping secrets has on the family - it didn't really achieve this for me, but I think that's more because I didn't really click with the style of writing.

Louise was no longer telling me about an anonymous mass of victims but about herself, her tortured body, scarred during the war by a new singularity: that badge, so heavy it emphasised her limping walk. She told me of the words that wounded her, the humiliating notices, the closed doors, the forbidden seats. Her surprise, when it became compulsory to wear the star, at the true identity of some of her neighbours: the grocer at the end of the street, with his very French surname; the retired couple next door; the neighbourhood doctor; even the unpleasant pharmacist whom she had throught anti-Semitic. The yellow stain distinguished them to others but also allowed them to recognise each other, binding together a community that, because it was hiding itself, had sometimes not realised its own existence.

Did you read Secret in the original French? If not perhaps the translation had something to do with the style.

Hi Barry! I read it in English, but I never felt conscious that I was reading a translation - as can happen sometimes if it's not a very smooth one. I think it's more likely that the style chosen by the author was just one which didn't suit me.

5. Instead Of A Letter by Diana Athill
Why acquired: I like the author

About 18 months ago I read Athill's Instead Of A Book, a collection of letters between her and an acquaintance who became a friend. In my review of that I said, essentially, that I wanted to be friends with Athill. This book pretty much makes me feel the same way.

Instead Of A Letter is an earlier book, written when Athill was 43. It's mainly a memoir of her youth - a happy, upper-middle class childhood (country mansions owned by grandparents, staff, governesses and outdoor pursuits), equally happy and more adventurous university years, then heartbreak followed by years of depression and finally the very beginning of what would turn out to be a long and successful career in publishing. Athill adds a final couple of chapters about her state of mind at the time she was writing, and her great happiness to have found love at last (I think this part of her life is captured in detail in a later memoir, Make Believe), so that it's not too grim a conclusion.

For most of this time, there isn't a lot to distinguish Athill from other well-brought-up girls making their way in life - so why is it that she comes across so charmingly? I think it's because she is so very honest about herself and her feelings and reactions. She recognises the privilege of her upbringing and is glad that she grew up to be able to see beyond the received snobberies and prejudicies of her 'set'; but she also feels lucky to have experienced that charmed childhood. For most of the time she is able to take delight in the small things around her, in pictures and music and exploring the places where she lives, and this too makes her delightful. In many ways too the memoir is about the importance of people to each other - the lover who helped her to question the attitudes she was brought up with, the aunt who "gently, diffidently, ... dropped crumbs of poetry or romanticism or liberal opinion among the paths" of young people (and taught Athill herself to love painting), the friends who helped her through the difficult times. Finally, she's a great writer.

Despite this, I think the book is probably too insubstantial to be a good introduction to Athill. I have a couple of her other memoirs, including Stet (about her time in publishing, and I think the best-received of her books) which might be a better place to start.

During that time my soul shrank to the size of a pea. It had never been very large or succulent, or capable of sending out sprouts beyond the limits of self, but now it had almost shrivelled away. I became artful in avoiding pain and in living from one small sensation to another, because what else could one do when one had understood that, as far as one's personal life was concerned, one was a failure, doomed to be alone because one did not merit anything else, and when every day a part of one's job was to mark the wartime papers?

>21 wandering_star:, Nice review. Instead of a Letter is the only thing I've read by Athill so far but I completely fell in love with her through this one book! I think you're right about part of her charm being that she understands the privileged circumstances of her life. It wish more prominent people in the UK had this kind of self awareness!

6. (ahem) Emily the Strange: Dark Times

I've only ever known Emily the Strange as a cartoon character used to sell merchandise - but probably my favourite of such things - so when I saw an Emily the Strange book on a market stall I was intrigued enough to pick it up. The story is that Emily goes back in time (in her patented Time-Out Machine) to 1790 to try and save a young relative with whom she has many things in common. All this told in sassy teen speak, with plenty of exclamation marks, margin drawings and footnotes. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it!

CALEB: Keep your nerve, Miss Emily! You'll be in Salem in ten minutes or I'll dig you up myself!

Yes. Yes. Relax and enjoy the ride, I told myself. If for some reason your fake-dead Great¹⁰-Aunt doesn't revive and break out of her false-bottomed coffin so that the two of you can time-travel to Salem, Great¹⁰-Grandpa can always exhume you.*

*Oh, man. I LOVE the fact that I can write sentences like that about my family!

Hmm - can't get superscripts to work - should be Great to the power of 10.

Char - so glad you had the same response! You should try Instead Of A Book which gives a really strong sense of her personality. (Do you Kindle? If so I could lend you my copy).

I also listened to another podcast story, this time City Lovers by Nadine Gordimer. Another good story, but not as well read as the Ishiguro I think.

Gah, that's the second Kindle lend offer I've had on LT this week! Thank you, but I have to decline. My Kindle stance has been that they are the work of Satan.........but the idea of being able to lend and borrow with people all over the place is tempting......:-)

Sorry..... didn't mean to be one of the dark forces tempting you ;-)

Ooh, I didn't know you could do that! (Lend on kindle). See, Char? If you get a kindle I'll lend you We Need New Names... How does it work, w_s?

Am intrigued by what you both say about Diana Athill - I'm going to have to look into her.

7. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

I bought The Glass Room after seeing several very positive reviews of it both on and off LT. The story sounded intriguing too: in the 1920s, a wealthy couple build a modernist house, the ground floor a daring one-room glass box. This is a symbol of hope - the glass room represents transparency, clarity, modernity, moving away from tradition and superstition to rationality - reflecting the personal and political status of the family (newlyweds, recently emerged from the war to end all wars and determined to make their identities as citizens of the new country of Czechoslovakia). Unfortunately, the husband is Jewish, the continent is about to be plunged back into darkness and superstition, and all the hope will be dissipated. The novel follows the house through all the political changes of the century, seen in the lives of its occupants.

Unfortunately... I hated it. I thought the symbolism was heavy-handed and overdone, there were too many cliched characters or plot developments, and far too many coincidences (I never understand why novelists think that they can make coincidences OK by having characters in the book remark on how unlikely they are, which happens a lot here). Overall it felt like a book written so that book groups would have some nice discussion topics.

I also rather objected to the sexual politics and serious male gaze problem. We're all used to reading books in which every single female character is introduced in terms of whether they are attractive or ugly. I could probably have lived with the fact that despite thinking it's terribly daring in its sexual explicitness, both female characters who transgress sexually come to bad ends, and the men all wish for nice enlightened girlfriends who won't mind their infidelities. But the thing which finally tipped me over into proper crossness was comparing two scenes which occur in the second half of the book - a rape, and a scene in which a woman pressures a man into having sex with her. Both are told from the male viewpoint. The first is rather eroticised, while in the second we are told how much the man is suffering, feeling like he's suffocating in a sweaty armpit. Gah.

Rachel - I haven't tried it, but I believe you can do it via the email address of the other Kindle user. There is a limit on the number of times each book can be lent.

ETA: sorry, on doing some research it turns out this is only available in the US. There you go, Char, a source of temptation removed!

Wow...we certainly had different opinions about The Glass Room! I may have to re-read it, to see if my lofty opinion of it still holds true.

I liked The Glass Room better than you did, but the coincidences drove me crazy too!

I got distracted by the thought of sharing on Kindle! What I actually meant to say earlier was that I had a similar reaction to Secret, which I read in French, although not to The Last Brother, which I loved (in French). Interestingly enough, I felt the same, however, about another of Natacha Appanah's books I tried to read last year, also in French (La noce d'Anna, didn't finish it). It's another that uses the same device, a narrator looking back on events, and as with the Grimberg, I felt completely disconnected from it; it just didn't work for me at all.

I found another of Mawer's books, Trapeze, to also be disappointing.

Adding on to what I said above, although I liked The Glass Room when I read it, it has faded in my memory and I haven't had any urge to read any more Mawer.

The Athill book sounds interesting - an addition to the book list I think.

>28 wandering_star: I hope you put your review of The Glass Room on the book page so that I can thumb it. I agree with everything you say about it and wish I was able to express it so well.

(In my short comment about it in the Europe Endless challenge group I was trying to be polite because so many people raved about the book.)

Your review of The Glass Room has a killer start to the second paragraph, that made me sit up as I read it.

I'm afraid The Glass Room did the opposite of grow on me - I gradually became more annoyed with it. I do wonder whether it would have been different if I'd been reading instead of listening to the audiobook - I think when you're reading it's easier to skim if you're not into a scene, but perhaps also you notice repetition more when listening? I was recently reading an interview with someone, I think a writer who was involved in turning one of her books into a screenplay, and she commented that it was very different because if you have two scenes in a film which are making the same point, the audience get bored, whereas in a book you can have more redundancy.

Rachel - 'disconnected' is a very good word to describe how I felt about Secret.

8. The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar

This originally got on my wishlist from fannyprice's review a few years ago, and more recently was recommended to me by a couple of RL friends. It's rather lovely. A graphic novel set in 1930s Algeria, focused on a rabbi, his beautiful daughter and their cat - who gains the ability to talk after eating the family parrot. Perhaps due to this original sin, the cat immediately uses the ability to run rhetorical rings round the rabbi, contradict and lie, in a very funny way. It also muses on how it's changed since it became able to speak - developing perhaps a more human nature. (See for example the page below).

If this was all there was to the story, it would already be charming. But despite the few words and light-hearted approach, we really come to care about the family as it goes through some major events, as well as getting a good sense of life in the Jewish community and how it lives with both Arab neighbours and the French colonists, which gives the story more depth and will make it worth reading again.

My husband has read that series and seemed to rather like it, but the library only has it in Dutch, so I can't :(

Nice review of The Rabbi's Cat, Margaret. Several other LTers have highly recommended it, so I'll look for it soon.

9. The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

Last year, I read and enjoyed Beauman's first novel, Boxer, Beetle, a rather chaotic but surreally funny book. This is his second, and it's a lot better - just as surreal and funny but much more coherent. Although still not coherent enough to lend itself easily to summarising... Like Boxer, Beetle, though, it's ultimately about the triumph of human nature over cold rationality - told through the story of Egon Loeser, a hapless avant-garde artist, obsessed with sex and his play about a great set designer of the past, at both of which he is singularly unsuccessful. Over the course of the book, Egon makes his way from Berlin via Paris to LA in pursuit of a woman. It's the 1930s, so many of his Berlin acquaintances are moving in the same direction - but Egon's trip is much more madcap and less serious, particularly after he arrives in California, when his adventures take on a tinge of that famous product of American modernity, pulp: leading to a mix of Lovecraftian horror, hardboiled characters snagging dames, and mad-scientist science fiction. A romp.

Loeser could still remember the first time he had heard of this new drug ketamine. Everyone had taken the train up to an estate north of Ritterbrücke that belonged to somebody's absent parents. It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon.

>39 wandering_star:, I'm so glad you liked it. I was thinking I'd like to read it again soon!

>29 wandering_star:, thank goodness for that!

Nice review of The Rabbi's Cat *adds to wishlist*

I have to confess that I do read e-copies of graphic novels - the images are beautiful on my i-pad. Unfortunately The Rabbi's Cat isn't available through the online shop I use, Comixology.

Loved The Rabbi's Cat, and it was fannyprice who led me there too. Your review does a good job of capturing it.

The Teleportation Accident had been on my kindle since last February - this review may actually push me into reading it sooner than later... And thanks for reminding me again of The Rabbi's Cat - it had fallen off my list lately and should get back there...

Nice review of The Teleportation Accident, Margaret. I may add it to my TBR list, as I've had it since shortly after the 2012 Booker Prize longlist was published.

Just catching up - and a run of three great reviews that all interested me:

The Glass Room and The Rabbi's Cat are both on my wishlist already. The former is available on audiobook at my county library - and having taken on board what you have to say I now quite confused as to whether I still want to read it or not. I'd originally added it after reading the many good reviews it has, including those of people whose judgement I respect on LT... I also think you should post your review up on the book's page as it will only add to the debate on it. Some really different opinions on that one!

Glad you loved The Rabbi's Cat as it looks so, so good.

Really nice review of The Teleportation Accident. I enjoyed it a lot when I read it quite recently, and I'm impressed at how succinctly you managed to convey the essence of it in your review. A romp indeed!

Thanks for all the comments - I'm especially glad to be pushing The Rabbi's Cat up wishlists. Paul, I remember you commenting on my Boxer, Beetle review how much you'd liked The Teleportation Accident! Did you see he has a third book coming out in May? Wonder if he'll be able to maintain the quality. I'll be wanting to read it, of course. I went and had a look at the other reviews of The Glass Room and they are quite varied! I thought the one that said 'the sexiest literary read of the year' was a bit odd. I feel bad about posting something which is essentially a grumpy rant, though...

10. Patriot of Persia: Muhammed Mossadegh and a very British coup by Christopher de Bellaigue

I was going to start this review by commenting that there were two misleading things about the title: the first is that this is in fact a biography of Mossadegh's life rather than an account of the coup, the second that the description of the coup itself focuses on the CIA role without any mention of UK involvement (although there is coverage of the British persuading the US that a coup was necessary). But as I looked for the touchstone I discovered that the US subtitle of the book is "MM and a tragic Anglo-American coup", different in both tone and content from the UK one.

Anyway, to the review. In some ways this has quite an old-fashioned approach to biography writing, literally starting with Mossadegh's birth and ending with his death, and packing the author's analysis quite closely around the facts of Mossadegh's life. This is exacerbated by de Bellaigue's style of writing, which is fabulously elliptical and impressionistic - especially in the early chapters I felt that other biographers would squeeze a paragraph out of the information he was putting into a sentence.

Six-foot-three of glowering, muscle-bound ambition, Reza Khan crushed the shell of Qajar power. He wrote no foreign language, and barely his own; his culture was cards and wenching, though later he acquired the genteel vices of opium and extortion. ... Iran seethed as he started his ascent. Banditry and insurgency threatened the whole flimsy structure. It was one of those times when the Persian longing for a strongman capable of dragging the country back from the precipice seems like the summit of logic and good sense.

de Bellaigue loves a good anecdote, quote or nickname (Brainless Shaban, Icy Ramazan, Sugar-lip Zeynab) - anything that creates an image in the reader's mind. All this makes the book an enjoyable read, although there are a couple of downsides - because it's so elliptical there were times when I would have liked a statement to be more backed up with argument (eg, in above, 'the Persian longing for a strongman'?), and I occasionally worried that I was coming away with an impression of what had happened rather than detailed knowledge.

But in any case, the story is interesting and important. Overall it's a portrayal of Mossadegh himself, with plenty of complexity and contradictions. de Bellaigue shows us his strong adherence to his values and integrity, his love for political theatre, his vision but also his fussiness over details, and demonstrates how these made Mossadegh so popular among the Iranian people but also so frustrating to his political colleagues and opponents, and how it led him to miss opportunities to make compromises. de Bellaigue thinks, for example, that it would have been possible to reach an acceptable compromise with the British over Anglo-Iranian Oil (now BP) which would have met Iranian requirements and averted the coup. That doesn't mean that the book is not critical of the UK and US approaches, far from it. But reaching a compromise would actually have achieved Mossadegh's ends better than nobly standing above the fray. Certainly, without the coup, the modern Middle East could look very different.

Wealth distribution; a military under civilian control; modestly enhanced rights for women in the face of clerical unease; these were the most visible parts of a modernisation programme which would have brought Iran substantially closer to a secular, constitutional regime. The final year of Mossadegh's premiership is a salutary episode in modern Middle Eastern history - an opportunity spurned because of the British obsession with lost prestige and the American obsession with Communism.

Isn't The Rabbi's Cat wonderful? I finally read the first volume just before Christmas (which reminds me - it really, really needs to go back to the library today!) I'm thinking I might get it for my mum; she's quite a keen (albeit unadventurous) reader, but she's never read a graphic novel since she has a mental block about, er, 'comics' (they're for children, and even then they're of questionable value). I don't think she'd be able to resist the cat, though...

Great review of Patriot of Persia, Margaret! I'll add it to my wish list.

Fascinating review of Patriot of Persia. Have you read the fictional The Colonel, which takes place somewhat later but looks back at the coup?

Wonderful review of Patriot of Persia. :) Although I would not have expected it to be about Britain based on the subtitle - the plot being British does not necessary mean that Britain was even involved (well -they were here but still) plus in a different edition, the book had a different subtitle - I hate publishers doing this but having two of them makes it clearer what the books is about sometimes...

Excellent review of Patriot of Persia Yet another shameful example of US and UK actions in the Middle East.

^...it's quite a list...

Great review of Patriot of Persia.

Shameful and ultimately disastrous.

Enjoyed your review. I wonder how much this book really captures Mossadegh.

Rebecca - I haven't read The Colonel, but I started reading Missing Soluch by the same author and found I got quite bogged down. Have you read both, and if so is the style similar in both?

No, I haven't read Missing Soluch. I would say about The Colonel that it was sometimes hard to tell what was going on because it kept jumping back and forth in time and interspersing memories with what was going on in the present. But I found it moving and compelling, nonetheless.

11. Dare Me by Megan Abbott

For the last two weeks I have mainly been reading Bleak House. I'm really enjoying it, but a few days ago I decided I needed something else a little bit lighter. I started a couple of books but the writing couldn't stand up to Dickens' majestic prose. In the end I settled on this book about a high-school cheerleading squad, because the narrative voice was so thoroughly opposite to Dickens - sardonic and eye-rolling, but also a real sense of power and pride from wearing the cheerleader armour.

After a game, it takes a half-hour under the shower head to get all the hairspray out. To peel off all the sequins. To dig out that last bobby pin nestled deep in your hair.
Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales.
You're really just trying to get your heart to slow down.

To this tight-knit girl gang who rule the school corridors, a new coach arrives. Rumoured to have taken her last cheerleading team to the national semis, but to the girls the more important thing is that they can't fluster her by being teenage mean-girls, as they can almost anyone else.

Dare Me began blisteringly well, but tried to fit in too much. This meant the impact of the writing dissipated and as the story became increasingly unlikely, I cared less and less about the twists and turns. I feel that I could have believed any two of the three main strands: the coach who faced down the girls with her own control and confidence; the flaky coach who became inappropriately close to the schoolgirls she was responsible for; and the death and its consequences; but all three was overkill.

"real sense of power and pride from wearing the cheerleader armour" - great way of putting it.

de Bellaigue thinks, for example, that it would have been possible to reach an acceptable compromise with the British over Anglo-Iranian Oil (now BP) which would have met Iranian requirements and averted the coup.

Interesting review of Patriot of Persia. It's always fascinating to see how such events can change the course of history.

real sense of power and pride from wearing the cheerleader armour" I wondered what the fascination was.

12. Bleak House by Charles Dickens

It's always difficult to know how to review something like this, an acknowledged classic which so many people have read and thought about before me. It may be even harder with Dickens - there is too much story to summarise easily, there is so much in the book that I could talk about, and my responses aren't straightforward either.

So perhaps I'll just talk about my experiences of reading this. It's amazing to think that I was reading it for seventeen days with very little diversion, and that it kept my interest for all that time. I originally started listening to it on audiobook* but had to do too much rewinding and puzzling over meanings, so I ended up listening to the audiobook on my commute and reading those sections of the book in the evenings. This really worked for me - the audiobook carried the story along and pointed up the humour, and the re-reads helped me to understand the structure and narrative.

(*I would highly recommend the Sean Barrett/Theresa Gallagher recording. Barrett is wonderful, making the different characters into real personalities - his reading definitely added to my enjoyment. Gallagher is good too, although slightly less strong on the accents and occasionally not handling the Victorian sentences well.)

The book has quite a number of of-its-time flaws, particularly its sentimentality and the two irritatingly saccarine heroines (although plenty of interesting female characters in other roles). There were definitely a few bits where I thought, people had longer attention spans in the days when they had to make their own entertainment. But its characters really inhabited my mind for the time that I was reading it. There is so much which is memorable, from comedically horrible characters to the endearingly flawed ones. I won't forget Boythorn's warning sign to the neighbour he's fighting with: "The blunderbuss is loaded with slugs" - or the repeated metaphor comparing the predatory lawyer Vholes to a cat watching the mousehole. I am sure that I will meet people in the future who remind me of some of the meaner characters. I hope I always remember Dickens' humanity and care for every human being, and refuse to treat anyone as a means to an end.

I would certainly like to read some more Dickens. Great Expectations next, perhaps.

Like a dingy London bird among the birds at roost in these pleasant fields, where the sheep are all made into parchment, the goats into wigs, and the pasture into chaff, the lawyer, smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind but not consorting with them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature that he has forgotten its broader and better range, comes sauntering home.

To round off January, I read a good short story by Ted Chiang, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" (text), which looks at what we gain and lose from new communication technologies, in a smart and original way.

I have still to read Bleak House It took you 17 days, I wonder if that is about average.

I hope in the future you meet characters who are not so mean.

Hah Barry, I meet lots of non-mean people but I do think that Dickens' baddies have such memorable and recognisable traits that they may crop up from time to time in real life.

I can't believe you've finished Bleak House already! Interesting to read what you say about deciding to use the book as well as the audiobook. As I've said in several posts on here recently, I've been listening to it for a shamefully long time, and although I'm enjoying it tremendously I keep getting a bit lost. Just this morning I decided to take it in hand, and I read a cheat's version on the internet, a chapter-by-chapter summary (stopping when it was no longer familiar) to refresh my memory and see where to pick up. I've started listening again...but I was wondering whether it might be a good idea to get hold of a paper copy as well to make life easier. I think I'll follow your example.

As for Great Expectations, I listened to that (Martin Jarvis) and didn't have any of the problems we both encountered listening to Bleak House (I did end up buying the book, but only because I was close to the end and went away for the weekend without the audiobook by accident, and couldn't wait to finish it!)

Thanks for the review and quote, it's wonderful! I read Great Expectation and liked it but found it rather depressing, so I didn't run to get another Dickens. Now I want to read Bleak House.

You've made me want to dig into another Dickens. I always enjoy myself, but it's daunting to start one of those doorstoppers.

Interesting comments about Dare Me.

Rachel - it was so helpful to read back through, as I frequently picked up things which I'd missed. I skimmed through some of the denser parts (or ones with more annoying characters! - especially the very pompous preacher who could go on at great oratorical length without every actually saying anything).

13. Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey - ER book

This work of feminist sci fi has a palindromic structure, weaving together the stories of several women in a complex way. Gradually we come to understand how the women's stories are related - and to see the common themes which join them, themes of freedom and dependence, love and maternal responsibility, the nature of home and the need to travel. Another major theme is what different languages are able to express - there are cruel languages in which it's impossible to say that you are free, and gentle languages which can't explain slavery.

It's a story which is sometimes hard to follow - after three chapters I turned back to the beginning and took notes, which is something I've never done before - but I felt that I needed to do that to get the most out of the book. I enjoyed the challenge of making the pieces fit together, as well as meeting the smart, intrepid women and their friends who feature in the book. The worldbuilding was good too - an interesting range of societies, sketched vividly without too much description.

It's not a perfect book. Some of the ideas were a bit clunky (there's a chapter actually titled "Women who transgress", for example), although not bad by the standards of the genre. A bigger problem for me was the utopianism - even though I know that it's ridiculous to criticise feminist SF for being utopian, that's what it's there for! But I guess I just don't believe in human nature being any better than what we see around us - and certainly not in a culture which doesn't even have words for nastiness. And I was more interested in the build-up than the resolution of the stories. But I enjoyed reading it, and would recommend it to someone interested in the genre.

I have decided to start writing this in the mountain language. I know enough by now. I cannot keep thinking in the language of cruelty in which I was born, and sailor talk doesn't have space for what I want to learn, even if there were a sailor here to teach me the rest of the words. But here in the mountains they have names for the things I want to become: happy, secure, gentle, kind, good. I will learn the subtle words, the nuances of meaning, and I will be able to think thoughts I never thought before, dream dreams I never dreamed before.

I haven't read Dickens since high school, but I've had it in mind to read Bleak House for a few years, so I appreciated your review. I also bought A Tale of Two Cities, which I did read in high school or earlier, after reading other books about the French Revolution. It has the distinction of being the only book whose opening and closing lines I know by heart!

I read A Tale Of Two Cities when I was at school too! I can't say I remember all that much about it, other than the opening lines and what Sydney Carton actually does ;-)

Hi Wandering! Finally catching up and enjoying your thread, as I did last year. Yay my library has The Rabbi's Cat. That one sounds fun.

55 Paul - yah - in fact that could be a separate thread right?

wandering you are killing my TBR pile. You are so dangerous.

Black Wine - Your review does not quite inspire me enough to get this book.

74> Same for me, it does sound a bit simplistic in its ideas.

About the language theme, if you're interested you could look up "no word for X" on Language Log for a bit of fun.

I read recently that George Bush (not sure which one) once said that the French had no word for entrepreneur, which is rather funny since entrepreneur is borrowed from the French :-P

Ooh, haven't looked at Language Log for ages, thanks for the nudge.* Yes, and this book goes further than the "this word is untranslateable" to the idea that the concept is inexpressible. The book's definitely not for everyone.

Merrikay - sorry ;-) I've started keeping a list of books added to my wishlist this year (msg 2) and just realising how dangerous my leisure hours on LT are...

*ETA: I especially like the one about 'a vice which cannot be translated in any European language'.

76> Thanks for the link, that is an interesting reversal of the "no word for X" meme!

George Bush (not sure which one) once said that the French had no word for entrepreneur, which is rather funny since entrepreneur is borrowed from the French That's too funny. I'd go with the younger one. When he was president I had a daily calendar of his malapropisms and other mangled language.

>78 SassyLassy:, Oh dear me. ROFL. That has got to be the younger. 41 was far too intelligent to make a mistake like that.

I've always enjoyed the GWB entrepreneur story, but snopes says that it isn't true. http://www.snopes.com/quotes/bush.asp

80> Ah, I guess it was just too good to be true :-) Thanks for the clarification!

80 oh dammit. It was such a great story. There are so many, who would someone make one up?

14. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

This is a collection of short stories, set in Pakistan. Each story's protagonist is in some way linked to the same wealthy landowner, whether they are his extended family, workers on his rural estates, or social contacts of his in the city. The book does an excellent job of describing the different worlds, and finding sympathetic stories in each one. In particular, we see how every life is boundaried by its network of relationships to others - how those relationships evolve over time and pull in both directions. Towards the end of the book I realised that pretty much every story deals with someone who attempts to move from one world to another, and fails. I suppose this is an accurate description of what living in a feudal system means - you are tied to your place by the nature of the relationships you have with other people, and you can't move between worlds. But it meant that cumulatively this was a sobering read.

Nawab would fly down the road on his new machine, with bags and cloths hanging from every knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be flappng numerous small vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.

15. The Curse Of The Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill

This is the fifth in the crime series featuring Dr Siri Paiboun, chief coroner of Laos in the late 1970s, reluctant shaman and crime-fighter. Well, fighter of all things bad, including corruption, stupidity and bureaucracy - all of which there are plenty of in newly Communist Laos. This is quite a charming mystery series, similar to but with a bit more edge than the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books. However, my favourite feature of the books is Siri's network of friends, some in high places and some in low, and how they work together to get the right results. For most of this book Siri is on his own up in the highlands, so that element is missing. This made it a bit less enjoyable for me. But I think that Cotterill wanted to set a book among the Hmong, as a way of telling their story to his readers - a laudable aim and something he does effectively. So for that, Siri had to be away from the city.

It was a mansion barely in the mood for visitors. If the front door hadn't been open and the front step littered with shoes paired off like parentheses, Phosy and Dtui might have given up on the place. Instead, they walked up the two large steps and peered inside.

Enjoyed your thoughts on In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. I've been meaning to read that for a while. It sounds sad, but lovely.

Yes, nice review of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. It's book I would love to get to, but probably never will, or who knows. I've read quite a few other reviews, but yours give a new and different aspect to it.

Also - I like that idea of listening to and reading the same book. Then the reading instantly becomes a re-read and you can focus on the writing instead of the anticipation or taking in of new information - in theory. I'll have to think on that. I would be willing to try that with Dickens, but maybe an easier one.

Dan - that's a good way of looking at it. Although I think in this case, it might have been that the listening gave me the cadences and rhythm of the language, and the reading helped me to pick up some information I had missed. There was also one bit which was so exciting I had to furiously read ahead because the audiobook was too slow!

I don't normally post reviews of books which I haven't finished, but I wanted to say something about this one because it was so disappointing:

So I Have Thought Of You: the letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald is a very interesting writer - her novels have covered a huge range of subjects, and her writing delicately packs a great freight of information and emotion into deceptively simple sentences. I think reading letters can be a great insight into an interesting personality, so I was looking forward to these.

The first thing that took me aback was that they were arranged by recipient, not by date. I suppose the idea behind this was to give the reader a sense of the relationship between PF and the person, but - particularly without a chronology - it meant a lot of trying to figure out what was happening in PF's life at the time. The footnoting was erratic and seemed to be done more from a sense of 'I know what this refers to so I'll put it in' rather than from what the reader might need or want to know.

And then - it seems terrible to say this - most of the letters were really not that interesting! Soon after I started the book I was emailing my mother - I mentioned that I was just on the letters from PF to her elder daughter, and asked if my mum would like the book after me, if it turned out to be any good. My mum replied that she didn't think she'd be interested in her letters to me after a couple of weeks! - and I think she nailed the problem. About a third of the way through the letters to the younger daughter I started skipping, and then it was very difficult to stop. I am sure there were some interesting letters in the pack, but they were buried in dross. A better book would have had a shorter selection and more explanation of the context.

16. The Last Policeman by Ben H Winters (audiobook)

Henry Palace is the last policeman (or at least, the last policeman who cares) because the world is ending. In six months, a massive asteroid will crash into the earth, and those not killed in the impact will have to endure a post-apocalyptic winter. Depending on their character and personality, people have responded by 'going bucket list', turning to drink and pills, indulging in criminality, or - in a small proportion of cases - just trying to get on with life as normally as possible. When Palace develops suspicions about what looks like a suicide by hanging, he can't interest any of his superiors in the case. But he joined the force to support justice, so he carries on doggedly doing his duty.

What I liked about this: the premise is interesting and quite competently executed. The author must have thought hard about how people might react in such extreme situations, and he conveys this without too much heavy-handed explanation. One touch for example was that the government had legalised cannabis and whacked up the penalties on all other sorts of drugs, to try and keep most people on the soft stuff. Unfortunately the crime story itself is kind of clunky. I think this would be a good film (complete with manic pixie dream girl love interest - she just wants to write poetry!) - certainly a better film than it was a book.

17. The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie

Most of the poems in this book are short, lyrical nature poems which also read like metaphors for something profound and human. Very beautiful, and much to find on re-reading.

Glamourie

When I found I'd lost you –
not beside me, nor ahead,
nor right nor left not
your green jacket moving

between the trees anywhere,
I waited a long while
before wandering on: no wren
jinked in the undergrowth,

not a twig snapped.
It was hardly the Wildwood,
just some auld fairmer's
shelter belt, but red haws

reached out to me,
and between fallen leaves
pretty white flowers bloomed
late into their year. I tried

calling out, or think
I did, but your name
shrivelled on my tongue,
so instead I strolled on

through the wood's good
offices, and duly fell
to wondering if I hadn't
simply made it all up: you,

I mean, everything,
my entire life....either way,
nothing now could touch me
bar my hosts, who appeared

as diffuse golden light,
as tiny spiders
examining my hair....
what gratitude I felt then -

I might be gone for ages,
maybe seven years!
- and such sudden joie de vivre
that when a ditch gaped

right there instantly in front of me
I jumped it, blithe as a girl -
ach, I jumped clear over it,
without even pausing to think.

Thank you for posting the Kathleen Jamie poem which I really enjoyed.

Thanks for your comments on The Last Policeman. What a shame it didn't quite measure up - it sounds like an intriguing premise.

88 - LOL - I like your mom!

A few days ago, I happened to pick up 18. Ian Rankin's Mortal Causes, not realising that it was years since I'd read any Rebus. It was so good, and when I finished it it was early Sunday morning, the weather outside was awful and it had been a really busy week, so I went straight back to the shelves and found 19. Strip Jack by the same author, lay back down on the sofa and read it straight through.

Mortal Causes is the sixth Rebus book and Strip Jack the fourth. I think I got into Rebus fairly close to the end of the series, and certainly hadn't read such early ones before. Rebus' character is still developing, so we get more information about him, whereas in the later books his traits are well-established and we just see a collection of behaviour. The impatience with authority, at this point, is more a need to do and check everything himself; there is no drinking alone listening to rock music, although Rebus is struggling internally with the nature of his relationship. The sense that the straight world often behaves as immorally as the criminal world, just more legally, is already here although handled more lightly than in the later books (from what I remember).

Meanwhile the crime stories, though very different, are both good. In Mortal Causes, a body is found underneath Edinburgh, and bomb threats are being made against the Festival. But is it just kids on a rough estate, internecine gang warfare or genuine sectarian terrorism? This book also provides an important bit of back-story in the relationship between Rebus and gang leader Big Ger Cafferty, which remains important throughout the series. Strip Jack starts with a respected local MP being found in a brothel - it smells like a set-up to Rebus so he stays close to the MP, and indeed bad things soon start to happen.

He kept moving, the most difficult kind of target. He was trusting to his instincts; after all, he had to trust something. Dr Curt was in his office at the university. To get to the office you had to walk past a row of wooden boxes marked with the words 'Place Frozen Sections Here'. Rebus had never looked in the boxes. In the Pathology building, you kept your eyes front and your nostrils tight.

Book bullets - March

Red Or Dead by David Peace, Local by Brian Wood, The Unwritten by Mike Carey, The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story by Vivek Tiwary, The Rook by Daniel O’Malley - recommended on Bookrageous podcast, episode 64

(Purchased, from same podcast: Essex County, The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire)

Watching The Door by Kevin Myers - recommended on A Good Read podcast

I seem to have added 30 books to the wishlist already this year, and the same number to my TBR. There'll be some more this month too as I am going to New York at the end of March - already planning which bookshops to hit ;-) and of course, taking an empty bag to bring back the new acquisitions...

The Burglary: the discovery of J Edgar Hoover's secret FBI by Betty Medsger - the Free Library podcast

The Golem and the Djinni, Artful, Nigerians In Space - seen in bookshop

Book bullets - April

The Queen's Bed: an intimate history of Elizabeth's court by Anna Whitelock - rmckeown's review
Journey To A War - Auden and Isherwood - rebeccanyc's thread
A Spy Among Friends - fannyprice's thread

20. The Cruise Of The Cachalot: around the world after whales by Frank T Bullen

This is an 1898 memoir by a sailor, about his almost two years on a whaler. I think it must have been recommended in Philip Hoare's Leviathan or, The Whale, an erudite and fascinating book about whales which was one of my favourite reads of the year, as it's an unlikely book for me to have downloaded even as a free Project Gutenberg read.

I am very glad of the recommendation, as in many ways this was a fantastic read. A trifle long, so towards the end it dragged a little, but it was a great, gripping boys-own adventure story; a fascinating insight into life at sea at that time; with vivid descriptions of natural beauty which reminded me of scenes from the film of Life of Pi; and heart-in-mouth moments of danger at sea (from the waves, the animals, and occasionally each other). Bullen is a very engaging character, friendly, open and bemused by the fact that his fellow sailors don't take any interest in what's going on around them. At one point, taking the watch at night, he sees a whale and giant squid fighting - he goes off to wake the captain, thinking he'll be interested, and gets a cursing for his trouble.

I really would recommend this, although I think once it starts to drag there is no need to press on - it will be more of the same till the end.

There was an upheaval of the sea just ahead; then slowly, majestically, the vast body of our foe rose into the air. Up, up it went, while my heart stood still, until the whole of that immense creature hung on high, apparently motionless, and then fell - a hundred tons of solid flesh - back into the sea. On either side of that mountainous mass, the waters rose in shining towers of snowy foam, which fell in their turn, whirling and eddying around us as we tossed and fell like a chip in a whirlpool. Blinded by the flying spray, baling for very life to free the boat from the water with which she was nearly full, it was some minutes before I was able to decide whether we were still uninjured or not.

21. The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

This is a great, moving graphic novel (or short story) about a man who is about to become a father, but has never quite come to terms with the loss of his own father when he was a boy.

It starts with several pages with no words at all: here are the first few frames.



An interesting story, and I really like the drawing style, whose sketchy nature also suits the narrative, of a man who's not really sure what he's doing with his life and why. The ending was a little too pat, but despite that, I'd recommend this.

The Cruise of the Cachalot sounds interesting

I am constantly amazed at the variety of genres within graphic books. I'm having fun discovering them and have reserved this one.

Just back from a two-week trip to North America - mainly in New York, but with a couple of days each in Washington DC and Toronto. Despite the very late arrival of spring, it was a fantastic trip - catching up with many friends, walking around the cities (which is something I love to do, and miss - Beijing, where I live, is not at all a walkable city), eating good food, and appreciating much craft beer and extraordinary facial hair (I never knew Toronto was such a hipster city). During the trip I felt like I wasn't buying as many books as I normally do when in the US, although when I unpacked I turned out to have 14, which is a decent haul.

I seem to be part-way through rather a lot of books so nothing much to review at this point, except a few stories:

Galatea by Madeline Miller, a Kindle Single - like her The Song Of Achilles this is based on Greek myth, in this case a feminist retelling of the Galatea/Pygmalion story. I really liked The Song Of Achilles because it felt like a fresh way of telling a classical myth to a modern audience, but Galatea was less successful - perhaps because there are quite a lot of feminist retellings of Greek myths, and this did nothing to stand out; perhaps because the story (man carves beautiful statue, falls in love with it and brings it to life) doesn't need very much digging to find a feminist subtext.

The Spectacular by Keith Ridgway, another Kindle Single, this one about an author who is disillusioned with his literary acclaim but lack of commercial success, and decides to write a bestseller. He hits on the eye-catching topic of a terrorist attack on the London Olympics, but finds that he's not the only author to have had this idea. I enjoyed this one - witty, well-written and with a nice punch at the end.

Several stories from periodicals, of which the best was Ron Rash's Where The Map Ends, about two runaway slaves.

And I finished Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors, a collection of very short fictions and poems which I've been dipping into for months. Most of the fictions are gently dark fantasy, some funny, with a few myth retellings. There was a bit too much Lovecraftian pastiche for me, but I do like stories where magic exists in a world that looks like ours, such as "Chivalry" in which an elderly woman buys the Holy Grail from a charity shop. When she got home, Galaad was waiting for her. He was giving the neightborhood children rides on Grizzel's back, up and down the street. "I'm glad you're here," she said, "I've got some cases that need moving." To be honest though, the stories are pretty variable and often too short to be much more than a punchline. The only reason I'm keeping the book is for one great story, "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories", in which an English writer, in Hollywood to work on a screenplay of one of his books, encounters a mysterious elderly man at his hotel.

25. The Children's Book by AS Byatt

What a read. The Children's Book is about the lives of an interlocking group of families in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. The central family is the Wellwoods, artistic and Fabian, with many children swirling around Olive Wellwood (a writer), her husband Humphry and her sister Violet. Other families are linked to them by family, friendship or shared interest. The stories are densely told, in prose which is as ornamented as the art of the Victorian era but at the same time, every word seems to be absolutely essential to the depiction of these complex characters and their relationships with each other.

I think this book is really about creation. The creation of pieces of art: stories, theatrical events and physical artworks. Byatt's writing vividly conveys both the beauty and impact of the art and the visceral hunger of the artist to create, and to draw inspiration from everything around them. The political ferment of the time and its desire to create new kinds of people, of societies, of relations between the sexes. And above all, the creation of individuals: the way that parents try (and fail) to shape their children's lives, and the way those children create themselves into the adults they become. Of course, the other side of creation is destruction, and we see plenty of that too - the genius artist who destroys his own masterpieces, the destruction of people's lives by the thoughtless or evil actions of others, the destructive ferment of anarchism. And at the very end, the First World War.

So this book is also about the period of time in which it was set, a time in which so many of the changes which have created our modern world were set in train, but perhaps also a world of hope and possibility, whose gilded nature was impossible to recover after those four years of blood and devastation.

I found this a wonderful read. It reminded me a little of my experience of reading Byatt's Possession when I was about 18, which I felt really opened my eyes to the richness and depth of good writing (as opposed to just reading for the story). I thought several times while I was reading it that I shouldn't waste any time reading books that didn't thrill me like this one did. At one point I got a bit annoyed that it was only shortlisted for the Booker, until I found out that the winner had been Wolf Hall (what a year!).

Incidentally, the cover is excellent. A turquoise Lalique brooch, surrounded by curlicues and ornamentations which somehow bring to mind both William Morris and the Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the key settings in the book. And on the back, a faint black silhouette against a dark blue background, of WWI soldiers marching raggedly across the battlefields.

For the coal, Peter Grimwith told his daughter, had once been living forests - forests of ferns as high as trees and brackens as fat as barrels and curling things that were scaly like snakes. And they were sunk and compacted into ancient mud. You could find the ghost of a leaf, millions of years old, or the form of a thirty-foot dragonfly, or the footprint of a monstrous lizard. Most wonderful was the idea that their vegetable death had only been suspended. The three damps were the exhalations of the gases of their interrupted decay. ... He brought home in his pocket, from time to time, a coal with a fernleaf apparently incised in it.

Oh, what a great review - I feel swept away! Thank you for reminding me that I really wanted to read this book!

26. The Beginning Of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

There are really two stories in this book - the story of the Reid family, a father and three children whose mother has left without warning or explanation, and the story of pre-revolutionary Moscow in the early twentieth century, with its political fervour, traditional customs and complex social relations. The two stories are brought together in the person of Frank Reid, a Russian-born British printer, who seems always slightly out of place whether people are treating him as English or Russian. The contrast between England and Russia is one of the subtle themes of the book, as is the difficulty of two people ever really understanding each other. Perhaps these two themes go some way to explaining Frank's wife's mysterious disappearance.

Frank walked past the coal tips and the lock-up depositories through the cavernous back entrance of the station. Inside the domes of glass a gray light filtered from a great height. Not many people here, and some of them quite clearly the lost souls who haunt stations and hospitals in the hope of acquiring some purpose of their own in the presence of so much urgent business, other people's partings, reunions, sickness and death.

The most immediate pleasure of the book comes from the depiction of Moscow. Fitzgerald must have done lots of research but sneaks it into the pages almost in asides, so you feel that it's assumed you know as much as she does. "Like all merchants, and all peasants, Kuriatin was obsessed with the chance to cut down trees." At one time we see Frank looking for a sledge "with a driver who was starting work, and not returning from the night's work drunk, half-drunk, stale drunk, or podvipevchye - with just a dear little touch of drunkenness."

There is also a certain social comedy, especially seen in Frank's habit of floating disconnectedly through complicated social situations. "In the confusion, which rapidly became the monotony, of loss it was something to have a fixed point when things must change or be changed, if only by the arrival of Charlie, That was not quite the same thing as wanting him to come, but it meant that Frank had to make arrangements and give instructions, two ways of bringing time to order." My favourite character is Frank's precocious daughter, whose matter-of-fact approach to life can be seen as a reaction to her father's passivity.

It was only in the last few chapters that the book became fully-formed for me, as they reveal all the unseen threads which Frank has been ignorant of. I was most struck by one amazing chapter which is mainly a description of the family's tumbledown dacha, but at the same time (it seems to me) a description of Russia. It ends with a rather surreal scene which is perhaps the pivot of the book, loaded with political, symbolic and poetic weight which suddenly makes everything make sense.

Enjoyed your excellent review of The Children's Book. I was also mightily impressed with Possession when I read it seemingly centuries ago.

You've reminded me of how much I enjoyed reading The Children's Book. Will you post your review of The Beginning of Spring on the book's page? You made me want to read it. I do have one of Penelope Fitzgerald's books around here somewhere. I should read it.

What a read... that sums up The Children's Book entirely. I really liked your discussion about creation and destruction as themes. Reading Byatt makes the reader slow down and consider what she is saying, and the reward is usually being dazzled by her amazing writing. That cover was remarkable, wasn't it?

Penelope Fitzgerald is someone I am always meaning to read and somehow never do. You may have just tipped me over to her with the Moscow aspect of your review.

I am so glad that other people liked The Children's Book as much as I did! I have posted the review of The Beginning Of Spring.

Indeed, following those two reads I've had to ditch a number of other books as they just didn't stand up in comparison. However, I did enjoy a short story, The Gorgon by Tanith Lee (text here) - a really good, and unexpected, retelling of ancient myth (read this instead of Galatea!)

And as usual to get out of a reading slump, I turned to a detective story: 27. The Naming Of The Dead by Ian Rankin. Days before the Gleneagles G8 summit, a man falls to his death in an apparent suicide, and the bloodstained clothing of three different victims is found at a macabre beauty spot. The higher-ups try and shut down any investigation - the suicide victim was an MP and the Scottish authorities don't want a negative story to overshadow the summit. Of course, this doesn't stop Rebus and Siobhan Clarke in their quest to do the right thing. At some points the book did feel a bit formula, but it was a good mystery and a gripping read.

28. The White Family by Maggie Gee

The patriarch of the family is Alfred White, an elderly park keeper. One day, he collapses at work. His family come together around his hospital bed: but they are bridging all sorts of divides to be there. The eldest son, Darren, flies in from the US with his super-groomed third wife. Despite his success and fame as a crusading journalist, he still broods over the rod-of-iron parenting he received from Alfred. Daughter Shirley doesn't need to work - she was left well-off by her husband's will. And the youngest, Dirk, is a neo-Nazi who hates Shirley's (black) boyfriend Elroy.

From the cover blurb of this book you would assume that it was all about racism. Actually, it's also about changing gender roles, class relationships, gentrification and decay of the inner city - all kinds of social change. The amazing thing in a book with those themes is that the characters all seem like real people, not caricatures or cliches. And they are all, if not sympathetic, at least understandable. We see at least some good in almost everybody. Even with Dirk, we see that the hatred comes from a place of fear and confusion: and in a way, he is right to feel those things. Social change has winners and losers, and it's clear that the losers are the poor and unskilled, whatever their background. Alfred, just as unskilled, was able to work as a park keeper for more-or-less his entire life. We are also shown how the Victorian era, despite being the high point of Empire, also saw public projects like parks and libraries which made a positive difference to the lives of poorer people.

A bit of a tough read, but a good one - despite a few weak patches, including the ending.

Several of the family members - May (Alfred's wife), Shirley, Elroy and Dirk, also feature in The Flood, which I read a couple of years ago - an apocalyptic story set after this one, in a slightly parallel-universe London.

That is an interesting review. Sounds like a great book. How was it a tough read? Excellent analysis.

I just meant tough because of the subject matter, particularly the racism - even the characters who think of themselves as most liberal and open-minded demonstrate compromises, prejudices and embarrassment at various times when trying to deal with issues around race relations. It's the kind of book that makes you ask yourself questions about your own behaviour.

(double post)

Ah, of course. Think I'll give it a try.

Nice review of The White Family, Margaret. I gave it 5 stars, which may be a bit high, but I absolutely loved it.

ETA: Actually, I gave it 4-1/2 stars; that seems right.

Thanks Darryl. Have you read anything else by Maggie Gee? I think I have (somewhere) The Ice People and My Cleaner - I've seen My Cleaner described as being about the same issues as The White Family, but treated as a comedy rather than a tragedy, not sure how that would work out...

29. The Spectre Of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

This odd little novella has a compelling premise. It starts with the narrator remembering the time he killed a man. It was during wartime, but only the two of them were on the scene; it's one of the narrator's most intense memories, and one which comes back to him unbidden from time to time. One day, many years later, he picks up a book of short stories and finds the exact same scene described - but from the point of view of the man he thought he'd killed. The narrator tries to find out more about the author, whose name is Alexander Wolf - but he hears vastly different things about him. He's a cultivated Englishman who rarely travels abroad; or he is a wild, womanising Russian. All this happens in the first 10% of the book, and is then followed by a rambling, philosophical story of the narrator's life and a romance that he starts with a mysterious woman. He does meet Alexander Wolf by the end of the book, but the focus is not on the mystery but on the author's musings about, well, split personalities and mirror images, the impact of violent events on a person's life and character, the inevitability of death, the possibility of happiness in the face of the inevitability of death... what else have you got?

If you think that sounds interesting you'd probably enjoy this book. I found the sudden change of pace disconcerting, and wasn't very interested in the romance. I think I prefer my philosophy a bit better integrated into the story!

Assuming that the origin of this long chain of events was my outstretched hand holding a revolver and the bullet that pierced Wolf's chest, then in this brief space of time, as quick as a flash, a complex process was born, which could be neither foreseen nor accounted for by any human mind possessed of even the most powerful, grotesque imagination. Who could have known that the bullet's spining, instantaneous flight actually contained that town on the Dnieper, Marina's inexpressible charm, her bracelets, her singing, her betrayal, her disappearance, Voznesensky's life, the ship's hold, Constantinople, London, Paris, the book I'll Come Tomorrow and the epigraph about the corpse with the arrow in its temple?

It does sound like an interesting idea, but your description of the rambling nature of the book gave me pause. I think I'll pass, but I enjoyed reading about it.

>114 wandering_star: I haven't read anything else by Maggie Gee, Margaret. I'll probably buy My Cleaner, though.

30. Tooth & Claw by Jo Walton

For some reason, I have a very soft spot for dragons. I'm not that interested in fantasy, but anything featuring dragons just exerts a tremendous pull... Thinking about it, it may be because when I was younger I loved E Nesbit's The Last Of The Dragons and some others; which I've just discovered is available on Project Gutenberg and have downloaded.

Anyway, back to the subject. Even more wonderfully, these are dragons inspired by Trollope. Apparently the idea for the book came about because one day Jo Walton was reading Trollope when her husband went to work and Ursula Le Guin when he came home. He asked how the book was going and she said, "Good, but it doesn't really understand dragons."

So, there's a dispute over a will, poor relations, haughty ladies of the manor, innocently beautiful maidens, uncomfortable social situations. A few differences of course - in Victorian novels, when a character is ruined, they don't actually get eaten. And I loved the fact that when a young girl dragon gets too entangled with a man her scales change colour - so it's as difficult, and as important, for the great dragon families to avoid scandal as it is for any Victorian gentry.

A romp, with great world-building, engaging characters and a satisfying story.

Change, to these dragons, is something slow and steady as the erosion of mountains. Proposals for improvement are examined very carefully, and a lord could say that this matter of improved grazing methods might be something his grandson could profitably begin - and this when the lord is himself scarcely married. Yet somehow, despite the great demesnes these families hold, and the great influence they control in the Assemblies, progress in a different sense has swooped down on them at the speed of wings and not the slow considered creeping steps they would prefer.

@wandering_star, I was doing very well at reading selections from my own TBR list, and then I made the mistake of clicking on your thread. Now, of course, several titles must go to the top of the pile, and I've added a few more to the list, as well.

LT is dangerous that way.

Great reviews! I quit on Tooth and Claw a few months ago; maybe I just didn't go far enough.

>117 wandering_star: I suspect I will never read this book, but I loved your review, especially the linking of dragons and Victorian ways.

Just catching up! The Beginning Of Spring sounds really good.

31. London Belongs To Me by Norman Collins

London Belongs To Me covers two years, from Christmas 1938 to Christmas 1940. Momentous years for London, but it starts in a very un-momentous way, with an office Christmas party which includes a farewell to the loyal but invisible clerk, Mr Josser. Of all the characters in that chapter, I was surprised that the narrative then followed Mr Josser home - but I think I was meant to feel that way, as the point of the story is to look into the lives of the sort of people who go about their lives barely noticed - the quiet clerk, the ageing cloakroom attendant, the car mechanic whose abilities will never live up to his dreams. All these people live in the same building as Mr Josser, and (with the rest of their neighbours) we follow them for the next two years. It's a lightly written book, but in some ways all human life is here in these quiet characters, with all their human emotions, ambitions, loyalties and dreams. The author's real sympathy for these people comes through.

One of my favourite scenes was the one in which the Jossers meet their future in-laws for the first time. We see Mrs Josser in a complete panic about how to make a good impression - the other father is a country doctor, not a retired South London clerk. But when we meet the other parents, it's clear that they have been in just as much of a panic about the impression they will make on these glamorous city folk. Even though the dinner goes badly, my heart was warmed by the fact that Mrs Josser was not, in the end, shown up as she had feared.

London itself, in all its grimness and rich diversity, is almost a character in the book as well. It's a bit reminiscent of Dickens in this way, and in the detailed attention it gives to people's lives. (Also, the character names - Veesey Blaize, the lawyer, for example).

Dulcimer Street itself looked unusually drab and shabby when they got there. Now the commotion of the sunset was over and done with, the whole of London was glowing now longer. It was grey. And south of the river greyness seemed thicker and more opaque. There was none of the pearly greyness of early morning about it. It was a flat, dirty grey that seemed compounded of equal degrees of soot, nightfall and the littleness of man's ambition.

I can't remember if Charbutton's review spurred me to buy this or just pushed it to the top of my TBR, but either way thanks! - I really enjoyed it.

PS: no need to read the terrible introduction by Ed Glinert.

32. How To Paint A Dead Man by Sarah Hall

Three of the four interleaved stories in this book are artists. There is Giorgio, an Italian painter of still lives, rumoured to have been a wartime collaborator. We see him close to the end of his life, at a time when he is receiving letters from a young art student and fan, Peter. Peter's narrative takes place some years later, when he is a famous painter of the landscapes of his native Cumbria. The third artist is Peter's daughter, Susie, who photographs the human body in such close-up that it resembles the rocks and landscapes her father is famous for. Her narrative takes place a few years on from Peter's. The fourth story is that of Annette, a blind flower-seller who knew Giorgio briefly when she was a girl - she sells her flowers and sometimes tends his grave.

The writing in this book was great but overall I found it a frustrating read. The four narratives all seem to stop in the wrong place, and while there are glimpses of the links between the characters, these never really resolve into anything coherent. There are hints of themes of art, our expectations of artists, and loss. But again, I couldn't work out how this all fitted together.

Hall's The Electric Michelangelo was one of my favourite books of the year I read it, but none of her other books have been as good. I was especially disappointed by Daughters Of The North - this is better, but I don't think I'll read any more by her.

During the allied bombing, we watched our industrial architecture become shingle and relic. ... At that time I felt I could not record any item manufactured by human hand. Instead I turned to the objects of the sea. The paintings of this era were small in scale. All around was devastation, and I painted the shells I had owned as a boy. In the still-lifes they are blushing, as if more than calcium, as if more than invertebrate, and closer in texture perhaps to human ears.

33. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

The much-hyped thriller of the last couple of years ... I figure anyone who's going to read this already has a copy, so I won't bother with a synopsis.

Honestly, I was a bit disappointed by this. I read Sharp Objects last year and thought that as well as being a good thriller, it asked some really challenging questions about the way women and girls are perceived. Gone Girl certainly is a gripping thriller, particularly in the second section (I guessed the first 'twist' which happens at the end of part one), but I don't think it's any more than that. And really, the characters are so unpleasant (except poor Go) - not that I think all fictional characters need to be sympathetic, but I didn't particularly like spending time with this bunch!

Here in Missouri, the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember. Competition doesn't interest them. Amy's relentless achieving is greeted with open-palmed acceptance and maybe a bit of pity. It was about the worst outcome possible for my competitive wife: A town of contented also-rans.

>121 wandering_star: I read London Belongs to Me a few years ago, and loved it. The title on the edition I read was Dulcimer Street

>121 wandering_star: That sounds like a lovely book, somewhat outside my normal range, but one that I am tempted to read. I'll keep Nana's comment on the alternate title in mind.

>121 wandering_star: Sounds like an interesting book about an interesting period. On the other hand, your review of Gone Girl reinforces my prejudice against it.

Interesting books, that have been on my tbr for a while now, such as London Belongs To Me. Your review of The Children's Book, expresses exactly why I put it aside, namely the overbearing richness in detail, I may yet get back to it.

I wasn't very happy with The Bookshop, but will probably give other books by Fitzgerald a try.

Just catching up here. The Children's Book and The Beginning of Spring were two of my top reads from last year. Sounds like you liked them as much as I did. Here's to great books!

34. Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

Imagine that you have decided to take Stevenson's Treasure Island as your self-help book. Wait - imagine that you are a sociopathically un-self-aware 20-something, and you've decided to take Treasure Island as your self-help book. You work out that the book's Core Values are BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE and HORN-BLOWING, and you try and put them into practice in your daily life.

When our unnamed narrator attempts this, she rapidly brings chaos into her own life and the lives of those around her. This part of the book was hilarious - I laughed out loud every couple of pages, as her behaviour became bigger and wilder. But at some point the reader notices the clues scattered through the book, suggesting what she might have been like before she adopted this boldness.

If there was a problem with this book, it was the disconnect between the two sides of her personality. She's just so good at being a larger-than-life, monstrous character - it's hard to see how she transformed from someone so different. Worse, I can understand why she preferred the new persona, destructive and heedless of others as it was. I was a little disappointed by the resolution of the book, which leaves her wiser but more restrained: a nicer person to know, for sure, but a less fun one to read about.

But the twists in the book mean that I think next time I read it I will see more in it; and I am sure I will read it again.

Sometimes I consider BOLDNESS a quality one has or does not have; other times I think of BOLDNESS as a quality one chooses to cultivate or to let wither on the vine.

The book was recommended by the Literary Disco podcast.

The Sara Levine book sounds like fun.

Yes, it was!

35. Nairobi Heat by Mukoma wa Ngugi

Nairobi Heat is a crime novel, but an unusual one. The crime is the murder of an unknown young white woman whose body is found on the doorstep of a Rwandan immigrant, professor at the local university and internationally-recognised hero for his role saving people from the genocide. Detective Ishmael, an African-American, is getting no leads on the case until a mysterious phone call tells him, "The truth is in the past. Come to Nairobi". And, well, off he goes, slightly contradicting anything I'd ever thought about the funding available to US police departments... to uncover the baroque roots of the crime in a network of greed, corruption and vanity.

There is a lot which is interesting in this story, but it's a book of two halves - during the crime setup and Ishmael's initial arrival in Nairobi the author is good on what he calls the "racial math" (of the crime, of being a black detective in a "mostly white police force in a mostly white town", and of being an African-American arriving in Africa). But more or less the morning after his arrival in Nairobi Ishmael has acclimatised (he walks out for breakfast and stops at a stall to buy chapati and chai as if it's the most normal thing in the world), and then the book turns into a shoot-em-up international conspiracy thriller. I found this second half quite a lot less convincing, although it was still interesting to read about Nairobi (and another reader might have found this section more exciting than the set-up scenes in the US).

After three hours of house-to-house I was starving. I spotted some small boys roasting maize over a fire, went over and negotiated for two full cobs. Used to American corn, I took a huge bite only to find it so hard I thought my front teeth would break. One of the boys laughed, took the corn from me and showed me how to shell it, holding it with his left hand and picking at it with his right.

36. Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

Hark! A Vagrant is a brilliant online comic strip best known for its surreally funny takes on various topics of history and literature. I think it already has a lot of fans on LT, and I've definitely found reason to post some of the comic strips on other people's threads, from the comic about Dickens' fondness for meek and silent heroines to Dude watchin' with the Brontes.

This is a great collection. All the comics are available online, but it's good to support people whose work you like even if you can get it for free...

I won't say I understood all of the jokes - particularly the Canadian history ones but also some about books I haven't read, such as the Les Miserables strips. But sometimes a quick Google took me down a really interesting rabbit hole, such as the strip about the Incroyables et Merveilleuses, whom Beaton describes as the first hipsters...

37. Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo, a journalist, spent four years getting to know some of the inhabitants of one Mumbai slum - Annawadi, just across the road from the international airport and surrounded by 5-star hotels which offer a couple of ways of trying to inch up out of hopeless poverty - a few hours' work waiting tables on a busy evening, and the chance to make some money picking out the saleable items from what the wealthy people throw away. Boo's story focuses around a family of scrap-pickers, who through the grit and hard work of their eldest son are almost pulling themselves out of Annawadi. But their story, and the story of those around them, tells us that in places like this slum, even if you're lucky enough to have been born with brains, beauty, ambition or determination, and therefore have a tiny chance of being able to improve your circumstances, you have very little to protect you from the consequences of events which you cannot control.

I have started reading this book several times and stopped, put off by the novelistic style which seemed inappropriate for the subject. But I admire Boo's writing about poverty in the US, which I found to be thoughtful and sympathetic about the people she was writing about, so I finally tried again, and am glad I did. I realise now that Boo's intention is in fact to show that the people who live in the slum are not merely shabby figures who we guiltily hurry away from, even less just statistics, but are people like us with fully-formed inner lives, hopes and dreams and plans. It seems obvious put like that, but how often do we really think about people like this in that way?

"The big people think that because we are poor we don't understand much," she said to her children. Asha understood plenty. She was a chit in a national game of make-believe, in which many of India's old problems - poverty, disease, illiteracy, child labor - were being aggressively addressed. Meanwhile the other old problems, corruption and exploitation of the weak by the less weak, continued with minimal interference.

I bought Kate Beaton's book for the same reason and love having the comics around to page through.

>133 wandering_star: Hark! A Vagrant sounds great! Another site to keep track of (sigh).

>136 rebeccanyc:, Sadly she isn't posting a lot of comics lately. I actually stopped following the RSS for that site.

38. A Place Of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

I decided to read this now mainly because I was craving the third volume of Wolf Hall. This book, about the French Revolution, is equally interested in power and personal relationships, but it focuses on three people - Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre.

I don't think Mantel distinguishes much between the three in terms of their voice - there is the same elliptical, ironic tone of voice throughout - and this, combined with my very limited knowledge of the events of the French Revolution, meants that I found the early stages of the book quite confusing. I think I was probably 150 pages in before I really worked out the three different characters.

However, after that I could really start to enjoy the interactions between them, and especially the way that the power balance between them subtly shifted. Also, because of my lack of background knowledge, I found the political developments gripping - which made up for the sense that I was missing some of the ironic foreshadowing.

I very much enjoyed reading it, but I think it helped that I read a big part of it on two six-hour flights, which gave me time to get accustomed to the pace and style and really immerse myself. It is not one of those books that you can dip into for fifteen minutes here and there.

For me, the most remarkable thing about the book was the sense that you got that people were only very rarely in control of events. Desmoulins manages to spark the events of July 1789, and Danton believes in his ability to get what he wants through controlling the crowds, but the overwhelming impression is of people being dragged deeper and deeper into something with no way out - we see all the excuses they tell themselves, that just this one final act is required to set things right. When Desmoulins reprints Tacitus' account of the tyrannical reign of the Emperor Tiberius, as a reproach to Robespierre, that confirms to the reader that this is an account not just of one period of political persecution, but of many which have followed the pattern.

With such a rich book, I have to give two quotes:

'And you'll organize this, will you, Marat?'
'Oh no, it will just happen spontaneously. The people, you see, being in such terror, being so inflamed against their enemies - '
'Spontaneously?' Camille said. 'Oh, very likely.' And yet, he thought: we have a city that is in immediate peril, we have a populace that is enraged, we have a sea of futile unfocused hatred slapping at the institutions of state and washing through the public squares, and we have victims, we have the focus for that hate, we have traitors ready, to hand - yes, it became more likely, by the minute.

***

Robespierre was stopped in his tracks. This was the dearest wish of his heart: to ensure bread to those who had none. Every aim apart from this could be picked to pieces, hacked apart, assassinated. Surely this aim was simple, achievable? Yet he could not address the larger problem, because of all the petty problems that got in the way. He said, 'I wish I could do that. I wish the poor would be no longer with us. But we are working within the bounds of possibility.'

39. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

This is a Southern Gothic tale - about murder, but not exactly a mystery because the driving force of the story is not about who committed the murders (the victims two girls, vanished twenty-five years apart).

Instead, through the unfolding story of two men's lives - in the same class at school, neighbours and briefly friends, and twenty-five years later one the prime suspect and one the local policeman - we are asked about bigger questions of guilt and responsibility.

Larry Ott runs a garage but gets no customers, because everyone in town knows that he once took a girl on a date and she was never seen again. Silas Jones briefly escaped to the city but is now back, working his quiet beat in this small town, avoiding Larry like all the others - but it turns out that he knows more about that night, twenty-five years ago, than he is telling.

I'm not sure if I would recommend this book. It certainly kept me reading. I did feel that the themes and structure of the story were a little bit too obvious, but that may be because my brain had been tuned to Hilary Mantel for a couple of weeks. I love dense writing that I have to think about, but I will have to be more careful about what I read immediately afterwards - I also had to ditch several books in the wake of reading The Children's Book earlier this year, as they couldn't match up.

Soon the road bottlenecked down to a two-lane and the businesses became sparse, the sidewalks cracked, sprouting weeds, buildings posted, windows and doors boarded. He passed what used to be a post office. He passed a clothing store that had gone so long without customers it'd briefly become a vintage clothing store without changing stock.

Your review of A place of Greater safety reminds me that I must get to this one soon, but probably after Bring up the Bodies which is sitting on my bookshelf.

As I've said many times (and maybe too many times), A Place of Greater Safety is my favorite Mantel.

I really need to get to A Place of Greater Safety sooner rather than later.

I am also waiting for the third book in the Wolf Hall trilogy. I was going to say waiting patiently, but that would be a fib. :)

I loved both A Place of Greater Safety and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, but I read them far apart from each other. I've also had that let down of adjusting to less brilliant books after a perfect one. I think it should have an official name.

I think what I liked about Crooked Letter is the atmosphere of the rural deep South.

Enjoyed reading through your thread — at last. Several books caught my eye, but especially your mention of Hilary Mantel reminds me I need to read one of her books. A Place of Greater Safety sounds like a good place to start.

40. In The Woods by Tana French

This is the first of Tana French's books about investigations by the (fictional) Dublin murder squad. I've also read the second, The Likeness.

The thing which seems to set these books apart from other psychological thrillers is that they delve into the dark and complicated psyches of the detectives, rather than the criminals. So it is with In The Woods.

Our narrator, Rob Ryan, is the only survivor of a mysterious incident which ended with two children missing and the third, Ryan, found covered in blood and with no memory of events.

Ryan has successfully kept this fact from his superiors on the force. So when a dead girl is found twenty years later in the same location, he does not reveal this connection and ask to be taken off the case.

Perhaps this explains some of the mistakes that are made during the investigation - but all the detectives involved have their own past history, and that plays a part too.

This was an amazing read, complex and gripping. You certainly shouldn't pick this book up if there's somewhere you have to be in an hour! As good as The Likeness; I am looking forward to reading the third.

All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space. I thought of the dark strata of archaeology underfoot; of the fox outside my window, calling out to a city that barely overlapped with mine.

41. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Earlier this year I read Bleak House, listening to the audiobook during my comment then reading over the same passages in the evening. I did the same with Great Expectations, although in fact I don't think this was necessary - the narrative structure of GE is much simpler (one narrative, in chronological order) and there are fewer lengthy descriptive passages. I found myself reading ahead of the listening - although the audiobook was very well read by Anton Lesser.

Great Expectations is the story of Pip, a blacksmith's boy who one day is given a mysterious message by a lawyer - he has "great expectations", because an anonymous benefactor wants to support him. Pip, who is in love with the adopted daughter of the town's great house, assumes that this is the source of the money. He disappears off to London to become a gentleman, and live on his expectations. We see very clearly how others' views of him change (or don't) when he suddenly becomes a man of potential wealth - for the theme of the book is the folly and shallowness of judging someone by their monetary value rather than their person. Unfortunately, Pip too falls into this habit, coming up with all sorts of excuses to justify his behaviour. All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make as good money!

I found this a gripping read. It's a mark of how much Dickens has seeped into English culture that I knew what the big reveal was going to be, but even so the way that events developed surprised me. Similarly, the most memorable images from the book are ones which I already knew about - Pip's meeting with the convict Magwitch on the marshes at the start of the book, crazed Miss Havisham living in her rotting wedding dress for twenty years - but they were vivid and fresh when I came to them. Pip, with all his flaws, is an engaging character, and there are plenty of great supporting characters from honest Joe to the vilely self-satisfied Pumplechook.

I think, though, that Bleak House has much more emotional weight on me - when I think about that book I can still feel, viscerally, the horror of being entangled in false hope (from a long-running legal case), as I felt when I was reading it.

Any recommendations for what Dickens to read next?

David Copperfield is my favorite.

42. Gulag: a history by Anne Applebaum

I've been reading this on and off for a long time - it's so dense, and the story it tells so horrifying, that after reading a few chapters I would have to set it aside for a bit. It's an exhaustive history of the Russian Gulag - from its origins to its eventual dissolution. Applebaum has made extensive use of archive material but also of a huge number of gulag stories, to tell both the bureaucratic and human sides of the story. This echoed but also fleshed out some of the impressions I had from reading, for example, Evgenia Ginzburg's memoir of her gulag experience.

Given the amount of information in the book and the length of time over which I've read it, I can't hope to give a useful summary, but these are some of the key things I'll remember:

- Applebaum argues credibly that the purpose of the gulag quickly moved from re-education to economic productivity. Prisoners were often permanently resettled (eg on release they would get "wolves' passports", meaning they couldn't live near any major city). There was a labour crisis in the Russian far north - which needed to be solved to produce the coal, gas, oil and wood, needed for the Five Year Plan. So tens of thousands of prisoners were settled in areas which could barely support human life (there is one story about a complaint because the prisoners were being made to eat outside, and their food froze while they were eating it). In fact, partly because of the difficult environment and partly because of the treatment of the prisoners, the gulags ended up being tremendously expensive and unproductive.

- The constant cycles of repression - arrests, releases, re-arrests. After Stalin's death, when the camps started to be closed and former prisoners were asked to appear for their rehabilitation hearings, some would turn up with warm clothes and crying relatives, assuming they’d be sent off again.

- The incredible levels of bureaucracy - different work norms and rations for different kinds of prisoners and different tasks (for example, one work norm for shovelling snow made a number of distinctions between the type of snow). These could be the difference between life and death.

- The big projects which are Kafkaesque in their horror and overwhelming pointlessness. Stalin seems to have been slightly obsessed with canals, and when the USSR had to stop using slave labour to cut timber because of a threatened international boycott, many of those people were put to digging the White Sea Canal, more or less by hand, across “a landscape largely composed of sheer granite”, with makeshift materials (such as pickaxes which were “slices of barely sharpened metal, tied to wooden staves with leather or string”.) Stalin had decreed it would be built in 20 months - in order to do this, it was built too shallow for most boats, leaving it hardly used. The so-called Road Of Death, a railway across the Arctic tundra, is a similar story; it had around 100,000 people working at one time, using wood instead of steel because of supply problems. Over 4 years 700km, just over half of the full distance, was built, with tens of thousands of lives lost. On Stalin’s death the project was abandoned (the port that the railway was to lead to hadn’t been started yet).

- The dehumanising conditions the prisoners had to live in. A prisoner who'd been told there was something for her was disappointed to see letters from home instead of her bread ration - and then horrified by her own reaction (it was six months since she’d heard from her family). The dehumanisation is especially visible in the tiny, desperate survival strategies of the ones who lived. An American prisoner counted the steps in his cells, worked out how many there were to a kilometre, and started imagining walking, across Moscow, Europe, and finally back home to the US; he also, very slowly, learnt the ‘prison alphabet’ (letters spelt out with taps on the wall) and realised that the man in the next cell to him had spent three months trying to ask who he was. Female prisoners remember making buttons from chewed bread and needles from fishbones, and cutting fabric by running a lighted match along folded cloth (significant, as the dehumanising effect of ill-fitting, tattered clothes was commented on by several gulag stories). One prisoner believed she had stayed alive because she managed to get hold of a bowl, which meant that she could get the first portions, with the fat floating on the top of the soup.

A very important book, especially with Applebaum's closing point that this kind of dehumanisation has been a feature of many other conflicts in the past and will be so again in future.

I've given up on Lorrie Moore's A Gate At The Stairs. This book is enjoyable in very small doses, because of the great writing.

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

But the book seems to have no focus or story. It's not that nothing happens - I don't mind books like that, if the other elements are right - but halfway through, I felt like the story, characters and themes were still being set up. I found myself reading in smaller and smaller chunks so I could just enjoy the writing rather than getting frustrated with the lack of focus. Then I had a quick look at the other LT reviews and concluded that it probably wasn't going to get so much better that it was worth persevering!

Fascinating comments about Gulag: A History, Margaret. I know that Rebecca thought highly of it, so I'll have to move it a bit higher on my wish list.

I loathed A Gate at the Stairs, BTW.

Thanks for validating my decision to ditch it, Darryl! ;-)

Excellent review of Gulag: A History, Margaret. I have had it on my wishlist for a very long time and you have rekindled my interest. You might find Anton Chekhov's Sakhalin Island interesting (but very, very detailed) in its portrayal of the precursors to the gulags, with very similar goals and practices related to the formation of northern settlements.

Ditto what Linda said about your review, and yes, I did think highly of Gulag: A History myself. And I've been meaning to read Sakhalin Island since before you read it, Linda, but more so since you did!

Thanks, Linda and Rebecca. I've read an extract of Sakhalin Island and I did enjoy it, but I don't know if I'll get round to reading the whole thing.

43. The Gate Of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald

How does Penelope Fitzgerald do it? This is a light, apparently simple novella about the unlikely love between a monkish scholar and a young woman "not of the marriageable class" (it's 1913).

But there is much more to think about in the book than that would suggest. Fitzgerald spins out the mystery of love into wider musing about what is observable and understandable, and human folly in both thinking that ultimately, anything can be described, explained or otherwise made predictable.

She does so in an incredibly subtle way, a word or line here and there going to build up the theme. There's also a lovely mystical edge, and a sharp (but equally subtle) sense of humour. The act of students scribbling down lecture notes is referred to as having "an element of sympathetic magic".

In this passage, a man is preparing to tell his father, a vicar, that he has become agnostic.

At this point he saw that he would have to start the discussion at a different point altogether. It was absurd for him to sound as if he was lecturing his father. What he really wanted to explain, stage by stage, was how the crawler across lawns and reliable Sunday choirboy who had sung, with all his heart's conviction

Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed

had become what he now was, a man with a mind cleared and perpetually being recleared (because there was a constant need for that) of any idea that could not be tested through physical experience. There were no illusions left there now. The air was pure. But it had happened gradually, and although Fred wasn't much given to talking about himself he would have, on this occasion, to account for himself gradually. He would have to describe for his father, step by step, how he had expelled the comforting unseen presences which, in childhood, had spoken to him and said: Give me your hand. What is completely described, however, he kept reminding himself, is completely explained.

Note, for example, the reference to no illusions being left - but Fred is shortly to be struck down with an inexplicable but overpowering love. I like, too, the "however, he kept reminding himself", which both shows us Fred's nervousness about the conversation and subtly undermines the rest of the sentence - Fred's described all this to himself, but still isn't really convinced by his own explanation.

You make The Gate of Angels sound very appealing. I may have to give this a look. Penelope Fitzgerald is a writer I am unfamiliar with but based on that quote I like her style.

I have a stack of Penelope Fitzgerald and am planning to read one soon--you've helped with my selection. Thanks!

Someone gave me Fitzgerad's The Bookshop years ago, and I remember being underwhelmed by it, but your review makes me want to try her again.

The first two Fitzgeralds I read (The Blue Flower and The Bookshop) I was very underwhelmed by, but as her books are usually so short, and her reviews so good, I had a go at a third, and finally clicked with her style. I think you have to do quite a close reading, and look out for what is not being said, and what is being hinted at, as well as what's actually there. I would like to go back to the first two and try them again.

>158 rebeccanyc: Ditto. I remember thinking it a bit twee. The Gate of Angels sounds interesting, though.

44. An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd

Coincidentally, a very timely read. I didn't know when I picked up this book that it was about World War One, with the narrative starting in June one hundred years ago. It looks at the futililty of war through the story of one little-known aspect of WWI, the East Africa campaign between British and German protectorates.

According to Wikipedia, the German aim for this campaign was to divert allied troops from the fighting in Europe, and they achieved this to the tune of 400,000 men brought in from elsewhere; 600,000 African fighters were also drawn in on the Allied side. Death rates were high.

The title comes from a letter, used as an epigraph, from a British soldier on his way out to the fighting in 1914 - he quotes a senior officer as saying the war will only last a couple of months, because of the heat: "we will all melt like ice-cream in the sun". In fact, the fighting continued on until a couple of days past the Armistice, when news of the war's end finally reached the East African troops.

The novel shows every possible human consequence of the war, in a way which manages to be darkly funny and ultimately moving. Farce is provided by the outdated social attitudes and hierarchies of the Europeans, but in a way that doesn't let the reader forget the harsher consequences of the war - the posturing is all the more ironic given the very real horror of the backdrop.

One of the main characters is an American called Temple Smith, whose farm is expropriated at the start of the fighting by German troops led by his next-door neighbour, who apologises for the inconvenience and behaves, Temple thinks, "like a man who'd come round to reclaim a book he'd once lent". But four years later, when Temple can finally return to his property, he finds that the departing troops have fouled the house and desecrated a grave; such has been the dehumanising effect of the last few years.

"They'll be on the beach by now," Bilderbeck sneered. He took out his map from his pocket and smoothed it on the ground. Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it didn't possess. "Coconut groves," it said in large letters. The phrase sounded pleasant, restful. It gave no indication of the tangled choking undergrowth they had clawed their way through at noon.

I've read a couple of books by William Boyd before and never really clicked with them, but this was excellent.

>161 wandering_star: I already have this one on my wishlist, but your review would have put it there. I haven't read anything by Boyd, although I have one on my kindle titled Restless.

More than 20 years ago, a man I thought I was interested in recommended William Boyd to me, so of course I ran out and bought several books by him; I think I read Brazzaville Beach but it is so long ago I don't remember it. And it didn't inspire me to read the other books I had bought. But this one sounds intriguing.

>163 rebeccanyc: Brazzaville Beach is problematic and poorly written. Boyd phoned in that one. His usual interest in the ramifications of colonialism is there, but the novel reads as colonialist itself.

a man I thought I was interested in
Joe Queenan has a very funny chapter in One for the Books about judging potential paramours by their reading tastes. One woman comments that she never should have accepted a second date with a man who named A Separate Peace his favorite book.

>164 LibraryPerilous: Hmm, maybe I should try Boyd again. I also own Armadillo, The Blue Afternoon, and The New Confessions -- which of those would you recommend?

That is funny about One for the Books -- this was, perhaps fortunately, a man who seemed not to be interested in me, although he was interested enough to recommend books!

>165 rebeccanyc: Hmm, the only one of those choices with which I'm familiar is Armadillo, and I've not read it. The New Confessions sounds interesting.

I read A Good Man in Africa and skimmed Any Human Heart around the time I read Brazzaville Beach. I wonder if my opinion that Boyd explores the problems of colonialism would hold up to a reread almost 20 years later.

ETA: This sounds fun: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/william-boyds-solo-is-boldest-...

Boyd is one of my favourite authors, although some of his later work might make me question that. Of the three you have >165 rebeccanyc: I would go with The New Confessions.
>166 LibraryPerilous: You have me wondering about a reread of Brazzaville Beach which I thought was excellent when I first read it. On another Boyd theme, have you read Any Human Heart? Logan Mountstuart (great name) is not a likeable character, but it is an excellent portrayal by Boyd.

>167 SassyLassy: I've been pondering rereading Brazzaville Beach myself. I was in high school when I read it, and I read it while sunning on a beach. My perspective might be different now. I've only skimmed Any Human Heart, but it looks excellent. And Logan Mountstuart is a great name! Plus, I want to try his Bond novel, Solo, and @wandering_star's review of An Ice-Cream War makes it sound promising.

The TBR and to be reread piles are endless, aren't they?

I think I've read three other Boyds, but I can't remember any of the names! One was set in the Philippines, one was about a dictator, and one featured a Jane Goodall-like character.

I've just managed to work out that the last of these is Brazzaville Beach, but the other two I'm not sure about.

In fact, if you'd given me a list of titles I would have said I'd read Any Human Heart and Armadillo, but I can't square the synopses with what I remember of the book...

I do, however, have The New Confessions so maybe I'll try that soon.

45. The Emperor Of Ice-Cream by Brian Moore

More ice-cream and another war, this time WWII as experienced by Gavin Burke, a Belfast boy on the cusp of adulthood. Inarticulately ambitious but too easily distracted to study hard, he ends up as an air-raid warden, in a city which so far hasn't seen enemy planes. This is really a coming of age book, and is perfectly well done, but didn't work for me because of my total lack of sympathy for the main character (and sneaking suspicion that the reader was meant to find him sympathetic, through his pretentious dithering about the kind of person he wants to be). Most dated (the book was published in 1965) is his relationship with his girlfriend, whom he treats terribly - awkward encounters followed by long periods of time where he ignores her - she sticks by him, and ends up being criticised for being shallow and conventional.

He who fights and runs away. A coward's excuse. The grown-up world was no different from school, it was a world where bullies came out best, where excuses satisfied no one, least of all one's self, where cowardice corroded one's soul and left one sick. Sick, he went toward Sally. In his heart, he had already lost her. Sooner or later, some more powerful male would take her from him. He knew, as Yeats knew, that the rough beasts, the John Henrys, are always with us. They, not he, would prevail.

However, I would recommend this book to someone who enjoys this sort of angry young man novel. It is well-written and I did read it to the finish.

I haven't come across The Emperor of Ice-Cream before. I used to like Brian Moore a lot back in the sixties, but I don't think I want to go back again. Some of his characters are really unlikeable and - grubby is the best word I can think of to describe them. Good for you for sticking with it.

I have Brian Moore's The Magician's Wife and honestly I cannot remember whether I have read it or not. Maybe I should . . .

A few things to update, and a definite theme in my recent reading, of watching TV/theatre interpretations as well as reading the book.

First of all, The Tempest (which should be book number 45 as I actually finished it before The Emperor of Ice-Cream). My mum and I decided to read this together (but remotely, if you see what I mean). She was a much more conscientious reader than me, taking careful notes of the commentary and footnotes. I was reading on an e-reader, so I got a bit fed up with having to click through to the footnotes, and quickly decided that I was only going to look at the footnotes when the meaning wasn't clear. After that I really enjoyed reading it - the story is relatively simple to follow, and I liked the spirits and the lyricism.

The commentary in my edition (the New Cambridge Shakespeare) was quite focused on the way the play has been interpreted in performance, which helped me to see the different interpretations possible of different lines. But I would really have liked one which drew out the themes a bit more in the footnotes - can anyone recommend a good edition for this?

After reading it, my mum told me that the version with Helen Mirren as Prospera was available on YouTube, and we watched it together during my recent trip to the UK. This is slightly re-interpreted (eg some lines adapted to reflect the gender change, and the masque sequence is skipped - apparently this is quite a common directorial choice). Although there were some oddities in it, it was great to watch this after reading the play - for example, it helped to make more sense of the funny bits.

Also at my mother's, I read 47. The Terracotta Dog and watched a couple of episodes of the Italian Montalbano adaptations. The Terracotta Dog is the second in the series, and involves a rather convoluted modern-day plot (an apparent theft, where the items are subsequently found and yet a witness is murdered) which in the second half of the book gives way to a fifty-year old crime when the bodies of a young couple are found in a sealed cave). The second story was a lot more interesting, which meant that I felt the book had spent too much time on the set-up; although as usual the depiction of Sicilian life was interesting. I enjoyed the TV adaptations too, although the Montalbano in my head is not so young and handsome as the TV version!

He left the commissioner's house pleased - with the anchovies all'agretto, but also because he'd managed to obtain a postponement of the recommendation of promotion. There was no rhyme or reason to the arguments he'd cited, but his superior politely pretended to accept them. Could Montalbano very well have told him that the mere idea of a transfer, of a change of habits, gave him a fever?

48. Wolf Hall and 51. Bring Up The Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

I was inspired to re-read these after seeing the RSC production of both plays which is on in London at the moment.

In order to pack in all the story, the plays essentially show only the key interactions - Cromwell with Henry, Anne and Katherine, and a few other scenes which move the story along.

I really enjoyed watching the plays, because they took a lot of the dialogue directly from the books, so they had the same intelligent, sardonic tone. But they were very wordy (and I was sitting near the back of the stalls), so there didn't seem a lot of space for acting to add to the experience, if you see what I mean. So it's a little difficult for me to judge the overall quality. The direction seemed to me a little bit conservative, apart from the speed with which one scene succeeded another, which did give a sense of Cromwell's centrality to the action.

Reading the books immediately afterwards highlighted their richness - you could get a very enjoyable and intelligent play by focusing just on the story, but in the book there is so much more, about Cromwell's character, about all the wider political consequences of what was happening, about the changing relationships between people. I don't have anything very smart to say about the books, as this was a pure pleasure read for me.

One thing which seeing the plays did add, though, was about the relationship between Cromwell and his son Gregory. I hadn't remembered this from my first read, but the play brought out the way that Cromwell deliberately raised his son to be sheltered from the brutal power plays and to have a softer understanding of the world. Then I was able to see this when reading the books.

49. Hyperbole And A Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened, by Allie Brosh

This was an LT recommendation. Reviews I've read here had already directed me towards the blog of the same name, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be being updated these days. I liked the blog so I snapped this up when I saw it in the Blackwells on Charing Cross Rd, which is having a half-price sale on everything in the shop in advance of moving to a new location. (I managed to walk away with only five books - how's that for willpower? Although it helped I was there on the last day of my UK trip, so I had an idea how heavy my suitcase was already going to be...)

Like the blog, the book had some extremely funny stories about Brosh's life (now and as a child) - which had me snorting with laughter even when I was reading it in public - as well as some more serious subject matter such as her depression - something in the way Brosh expresses herself manages to make this both funny and really moving, as well as being a very good description of what depression feels like. Similar, but not quite as serious, is "Motivation", where Brosh explains that she can only motivate herself through a combination of fear, shame and panic - unfortunately this is one of the sections which is new for the book, so I can't post my favourite frame, in which Brosh's better self says sternly "you can't have any chocolate chip cookies until you do x", and she looks up cheekily and says, "I can, though". So recognisable! I have great respect for anyone that can stick to a self-made rule about rewards for good behaviour - I never manage it.

50. Port Vila Blues by Garry Disher

The hero of this thriller, Wyatt, is a highly skilled thief. At the start of the book, he burgles a safe in the house of a corrupt politician. But as well as the kickback money he knew would be there, he finds a beautiful Tiffany brooch, and takes that too. However, the Tiffany brooch was previously stolen by a gang which has carried out several heists, so when they find out that the brooch is back on the market, they suspect that one of their number is ripping the others off. They need to trace back who it is - but Wyatt, inevitably, is in their path. This was a fantastically plotted thriller which would make a great film - but despite a veneer of political commentary (the gang turns out to be made up of crooked cops), it isn't much more than that. Recommended for a quick read, but not as interesting as I was expecting for a book published by Soho Crime.

If he were to rely only on himself, Wyatt would be wealthy, known to no one, bothered by no one, as close to a perfect life as he could want. But he never could rely only on himself. There was always someone to please, bully, coax or manage, and inevitably one of them let him down. They made mistakes or got greedy or didn't like the way he wouldn't have a beer with them afterwards. Their life stories padded the daily newspapers, notable usually for some act of viciousness or stupidity that ended in a remand cell or on a slab at the morgue.

Great to catch up with your reading. The Tempest is one of my favourite Shakespeare's.

Ditto what Barry said about catching up with your reading, and that must have been fun seeing the plays of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and reading them together.

I am quite jealous about the plays. I loved the books.

It was a deep immersion into the world of Mantel's Cromwell! It was very interesting reading Wolf Hall straight after seeing the play as I could pick out the bits which made it into the script. With BUTB I wasn't completely sure if a line was familiar from the theatre or the last time I read it.

52. Hart & Boot, and other stories by Tim Pratt

I bought this because I read the title story, "Hart & Boot", in The Best American Short Stories 2005, and it's brilliant - the author takes the basic facts from the life of a real-life female outlaw Pearl Hart and her associate Joe Boot, and turns them into a perfect little magic story with a very sassy heroine.

Unfortunately, Hart & Boot is by far the standout story in this collection. These are good urban fantasy short stories which would appeal to anyone who likes Neil Gaiman, but I had had higher hopes.

Despite this, I'd recommend the collection to fans of the genre. Pratt's approach often puts modern twists on traditional mythologies - "Bottom Feeding" adapts the Irish tale of the salmon of wisdom into a southern tale, making the salmon a catfish; in "Terrible Ones", it's time for the Furies to be pensioned off and a young dominatrix is chosen to replace them.

Pratt's approach is summed up by a line from "Bottom Feeders": It wasn't like in stories, where things were neatly explained, where the mystery had a function, however obscure, where the operations of the supernatural could be explained. This was something else. Something magical, but incomprehensible, which was perhaps the nature of real magic. This sometimes means that the stories feel a little thin - the premise can be boiled down to a one-liner - but when they work, they are satisfying in the way they explain just enough without showing all the workings.

There are several stories which manage to build an epic-scale world in just a few pages: the final story, "Dream Engine", is like reading a China Mieville novel in twenty pages, but I also enjoyed "Komodo" (whose narrator is a woman with the ability to make humans into low-level immortals, but is also a story about friendship and loyalty), and "Cup and Table", the story of a motley group of people on a quest to the end of the world:

"I thought you were evil," Sigmund said, lightheaded from blood loss and exertion, more in the now than he'd ever felt before, the scent of pines and the bite of cold air immediate reminders of his miraculously ongoing life. "I mean, you're made of evil". "You're made mostly of carbon atoms," Carlsbad said. "But you don't spend all your time thinking about forming long-chain molecules, do you? There's more to both of us than our raw materials."

53. The Spire by William Golding

Above a medieval cathedral, a spire is rising. The spire is the brainchild of the cathedral's Dean Jocelin, who saw it in a vision as representing the pinnacle of prayer. But he wants it built higher than anyone has ever heard of building, and the master builder is worried that the cathedral's foundations won't hold it. Other members of the cathedral chapter oppose the cost, the disruption, and the builders' bad behaviour within the church and in the town. But Jocelin ignores them all and orders the master builder to continue. As the spire rises, Jocelin's obsession grows - and when a couple of events make him question his judgement and faith, obsession begins to tip into madness.

Although told in the third person, there is something of the unreliable narrator about this book, as we follow Jocelin throughout - piecing the true story together from the occasional thought that he immediately tries to shut out, or the things that others say to him. The book starts in the joy of realising his vision and becomes increasingly intense and claustrophobic. We see the cathedral building almost as a living creature, as it grows the spire and as the pillars groan under the weight - and we also see glimpses of life outside the cloister, in the town.

There are hints that the building of the cathedral is bringing a sort of modernity to the town, which made me wonder if as well as being about pride and hubris, it was also about other kinds of change - the book is so expressionistic that you can see all sorts of metaphors in it. There are moments of real beauty and real horror, all seen through the darkened glass of Jocelin's mind. In particular, as his madness grows he increasingly finds peace by going to the top of the tower, and the descriptions of him looking down over the countryside around him, never before seen from this angle, are wonderful.

His cheek was hard against the pinnacle and he knew he had not moved. But a sixth counter had appeared, had slid into view with another square of board under it. He knew he had not moved; but he knew that the tower had moved, gently, soundlessly up here, though down there the pillars might have cried - eeee - at the movement. Time after time, he watched the white counter slide into view, then disappear again; and he knew that the tower was swaying under him like a tall tree. Slowly he turned his eyes away and looked at the charcoal and drying puddles. I mustn't scream, or run, he thought. That would be unworthy of the vision.

Enjoyed your excellent review of The Spire

I'm glad that you enjoyed the RSC productions of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Margaret. I've read both books, and I saw Bring Up the Bodies last month. I liked the play, but the seats in the upper balcony of the Aldwych Theatre were as cramped and uncomfortable as any theatre I've been to in London, which greatly affected my enjoyment of it. I hope to see Wolf Hall in September with two members of the 75 Books club, who will be in London at the same time I will and are also avid theatre fans, especially now that the runs of both plays have been extended to early October. However, tickets are completely sold out for Wolf Hall in September, and unless I can get a more comfortable seat I may wait until these plays (hopefully) travel to the US.

Great review of The Spire. Golding's To the Ends of the Earth trilogy is a favorite of mine, although Lord of the Flies is not.

Great to see a review of The Spire on here. I bought the book 5 years ago but have yet to read it and this is the first time I see anybody else mention the book here on LT. And excellent review as well.

I like your review of Golding's The Spire.

Good to catch up at last with your thread! Particularly interested by your reviews of Gulag: A History, An Ice Cream War, & A Place of Greater Safety. The latter was one of my failures earlier this year - and I blame it squarely on the shoulders of making a poor choice as an audiobook.

It is not one of those books that you can dip into for fifteen minutes here and there.

...And that was inherently my problem, as I listened in my car in snatches of 15-20 minutes. It is a desne and rich book that deserves better attention from its 'reader'. I would like to return to this book one day again and give it another go.

Darryl - yes, the Aldwych was very uncomfortable! I haven't been to a West End theatre for years, though, so I don't remember whether the less expensive seats are always like that.

Thanks for the kind words about the review of The Spire and especially, Diana, for the recommendation of To The Ends Of The Earth for me to read next. I haven't read any other Golding except for The Lord Of The Flies at school.

Paul - I really can't imagine trying to get through A Place Of Greater Safety in short bursts of audiobook! Good luck with it when you try again.

54. Knots & Crosses by Ian Rankin

This is the very first Inspector Rebus book. I have an omnibus edition (the first three), which comes with a short intro in which Ian Rankin says that he didn't think he was writing a crime novel. I'm not sure I believe this - an awful lot of the tropes are there - but it's certainly credible that this wasn't meant to be the start of a series. It reads more like a standalone psychological thriller with Rebus himself a key character in the crime, not just the detective. It was interesting to see Rankin's style when he was starting out. It's definitely become more streamlined over time, but this was a pretty gripping page-turner.

55. Marvels of a Floating City by Xi Xi

This book contains three long short stories, all written by Xi Xi (a Hong Kong writer) during the time when the UK and China were negotiating over the future of Hong Kong. They are concerned about Hong Kong's political and social identity, so it was very interesting reading them now given the current debates about this in Hong Kong, almost thirty years later.

I found the first story, Marvels of a Floating City, most striking. Apparently inspired by the advertising posters for a Magritte exhibition in Hong Kong, this story consists of very short vignettes, each matched with a Magritte picture on the left-hand page. The first vignette uses the famous picture "Castle In The Pyrenees" (a huge rock floating in mid-air, with a castle built on top of it) to introduce the 'floating city' - somewhere which perhaps shouldn't exist, whose future is uncertain, but whose people have, "on the sheer strength of their faith and will-power, strived to build a home fit to be lived in". A later vignette is paired with a picture called "The Healer" (arms, legs, a hat and cloak, around an open birdcage), and shows how the people of the floating city want to leave, because of the uncertain future, but have nowhere else they really want to go. It ends, "The inhabitants of the floating city are not migratory birds. If they leave, they will not be able to return. Can one just pick up one's walking stick and knapsack, and leave without looking back? Though the people of the floating city long to be winged pigeons, in their hearts they are repressed, caged birds".

The second story, "The Story Of Fertile Town", echoes this sense of unlikeliness and impermanence, while the third, "The Fertile Town Chalk Circle", is an ironic take on the Caucasian Chalk Circle story and a metaphor for the UK and China struggling over the territory of Hong Kong.

56. Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell

For annoying timetabling reasons, I had a seven hour wait in a very small airport. It was the end of quite a tiring weekend of mountain hiking, so I was tired and antsy. I knew I would need something easy to read which would not just keep my attention but distract me completely from my surroundings. Perhaps it's time, I thought, to crack open the first Sharpe book which I had sitting on my Kindle. (I haven't read Sharpe before, but have enjoyed the other Cornwell books that I have read, despite not being in the slightest bit interested in military history).

In this book, Sharpe is a private soldier in India. Fed up with the life, and especially with the overbearing bullying from some of his senior officials, he is considering deserting. So when he's asked to go on a dangerous mission to rescue a British spy from inside Tipu Sultan's fortress - or at least, get his information out - he thinks he might have a chance. But he's captured by Tipu Sultan's forces, develops a loyalty to the others on the mission with him, and is then along for the ride.

I know that Cornwell's books aren't for everyone, but this really hit the spot for me. And when I finished it, after I got home and was in comfortable surroundings, it was all I could do not to download the next in the series immediately.

57. Sam's Story by Elmo Jayawardena

Sam's Story is a winner of the Gratiaen prize for books in English from Sri Lanka, set up by Michael Ondaatje using his Booker winnings (a nice example of giving back). It tells the story of a young man, a little bit simple perhaps, who goes from his rural village to work for a weathly Sinhalese couple in Colombo. (From the biographical information, Sam's boss is very similar to the author of the book - so perhaps this was inspired by a real person working in his house, or an amalgam of several.)

We see the world through Sam's eyes, including his relationship with the people he works for, and his interpretation of their world; his friendships or enmity with the other servants; and the way that the civil war has affected his family. In fact the main message of the book is that the war has had the worst impact on the poorest people in Sri Lanka, not the families of the elite and the politicians who look after themselves rather than doing anything effective to make the situation better.

The story periodically verges on the sentimental (when the family dog is taken to the vet and pampered until it's better, Sam thinks back to the poor treatment his family would get from the village hospital) - but unlike a lot of books written by foreigners about Sri Lanka, it doesn't romanticise the situation of the poor. And although I have a low tolerance for sentimentality, the simplicity of the language counteracted it.

I felt sorry for our Boy. He was my good friend. He is a nice boy. I didn't know why he had to have special friends with people who threw bombs and killed our soldiers.

I think the Master's daughter knew that I didn't like this new visitor. She knew I hated their kind. Maybe that is why she tried to explain things to me several times.

She told me that everybody who belonged to that kind didn't throw bombs to kill soldiers.

'They are just like us Sam, most of them are very nice people.'

I silently listened.

'There is nothing wrong with Leandro and Janet and our friend here Sam,' she went on to defend them. 'These people don't throw bombs; they don't kill anybody. They are just like us.'

I never said anything to her. I only listened.

At the moment, I am also enjoying reading through my new Lonely Planet guide to Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest, planning my holiday there next month. We're going to drive from San Francisco to Vancouver. Any recommendations for suitable books to read along the route?

(I would also welcome recommendations for things to see and do, places to eat, and of course places to buy books! I am already super-excited about Powells, and Dog Eared Books and City Lights in SF. The first time I went to SF I bought so many books in City Lights that I had to post them back to the UK, and the woman in the post office asked me if I'd been studying there).

Good to catch up with your (varied) reading!

I'm encouraged by your review of Sharpe's Tiger. I too have yet to read any of Cornwell's Sharpe books, but have a couple on standby to read for when the proper occasion strikes me! They sound like fun.

As for your west coast road trip - very jealous!! Are you driving the return journey as well? I was going to recommend The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, but I see you already read it.

Just one way - flying back from Vancouver. Sorry to make you jealous :-p

58. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

The thought of trying to trying to summarise what happens in this book is making me tired. There's a 1960s story, in which a Hollywood fixer has to prevent the pregnancy of a young actress from damaging the publicity around a huge movie. This is interleaved with the modern day stories, where we see what has happened to the actress, her son, her husband, the fixer, his assistant, the assistant's useless boyfriend, a screenwriter pitching a movie to the fixer, the screenwriter's estranged girlfriend, and I think several other people as well.

OK, maybe that was a bit negative. In principle I like ambitious story-telling and I have no problem with jumping around between different narratives and timelines. And in some places, this book was excellent. The story could be compelling (especially in the 1960s - the modern-day stuff was a bit too 'messagey'), and I was interested enough to keep picking it up to read more.

But oh my goodness, I kept on wishing that the author would just calm down and stop trying to squeeze so much in. As well as the narratives we get a scene from a play, the pitch for a script, a chapter of a novel and another of a memoir... none of which add enough to the story to make them worthwhile. And the writing is just too much. Towards the end of the book I found this passage which encapsulates everything that I found annoying about the book:

But aren't all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos - we know what's out there. It's what isn't that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet legs - four states and twelve hundred miles traversed in an afternoon - but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope. There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant - sail for Asia and stumble on America - and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

The same thoughts in two pithy sentences would have been great. Instead, it's a game of let-me-show-you-how-clever-I-am, chucking in cultural references and ornate wording ('serendipitous savant'!) and shoehorning in a reference to the book's movie theme ('scarecrows and tin men') for good measure.

This is not a terrible book, but it could have been so much better.

Very interesting reviews of your recent reads.

I've not been to Millennium Restaurant in San Francisco, but I used to own their cookbook, The Artful Vegan, and friends have recommended it enthusiastically.

Also, I like Moon's travel guides for the US and Canada.

I love doing what Anne Fadiman calls "you are there reading."

Here are a few titles and authors. I didn't check your catalog to see if you've already read any of them.

Astoria, by Peter Stark: nonfiction about the exploration of the Pacific NW
Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso are my favorite Beats poets
Kate Carlisle writes a series of cozy mysteries set in San Francisco and featuring a book restorer.
McTeague is one of my favorite novels, but Frank Norris's style isn't for everyone. He's comparable to Upton Sinclair.
If you like sci-fi, The City, Not Long After and Golden State are interesting reads
The Maltese Falcon
Cool Gray City of Love
I've not read it, but Stairway Walks in San Francisco looks fun.
Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and sequels
Songs of Willow Frost for the Seattle location
Deborah Donnelly's Carnegie Kincaid series is set in and around Seattle.
Although the books aren't set there, Portland-based Tin House publishes good stuff.

At the moment, I am also enjoying reading through my new Lonely Planet guide to Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest, planning my holiday there next month. We're going to drive from San Francisco to Vancouver. Any recommendations for suitable books to read along the route?

(I would also welcome recommendations for things to see and do, places to eat, and of course places to buy books! I am already super-excited about Powells, and Dog Eared Books and City Lights in SF

Where'd You Go, Bernadette? is set in Seattle, and I think Wild: a Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed is set in both Oregon and California.

Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle is pretty great. Vancouver is absolutely dismal for book stores, so don't plan on buying anything here. If you go over to Victoria on Vancouver Island though, there are many fabulous bookstores.

Thanks for the ideas! Wild: a journey from lost to found was already on my 'maybe' list, so this is a good excuse to nudge it up. Millennium Restaurant looks good too, especially as Mr wandering_star is a vegetarian.

Chiming in as someone else envying you your great trip.

A few books that came to mind were:

The Silverado Squatters, an account of Robert Louis Stevenson's time in California on his honeymoon
Two Years before the Mast has a section on Richard Henry Dana's experiences in California in the hide trade, when California was still part of Mexico
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey will take you further up the coast (fiction)
The Living by Annie Dillard, a novel about early European settlers in Washington state was the first book that came to mind
The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy, a novel about Chinese immigrants to Vancouver between the world wars

As nickelini says, Victoria has great book stores. There is another town on Vancouver Island, Sidney, which calls itself "Canada's only Booktown" It has some great stores, all within walking distance of each other. You could take a ferry from Washington State or Vancouver to Sidney, drive up to Victoria, and take another ferry back to Vancouver. Even better, you could go further up the island to Nanaimo and still catch a ferry back to Vancouver. Then there are the gulf islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland. The west coast of Vancouver Island is also spectacular.

Looking forward to hearing all about your trip!

----
edited to correct touchstone

59. The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene

At the start of The End Of The Affair, Maurice Bendrix is walking across Clapham Common when he bumps into an old acquaintance, Henry Miles. Henry confides in Bendrix that he thinks his wife Sarah may be cheating on him. Bendrix encourages him to get a private eye to follow her - and when Henry refuses, Bendrix does it himself. Because, you see, Bendrix and Sarah have had an affair; it ended abruptly and Bendrix has never forgiven, nor got over Sarah.

This book pulled me in from the start. Bendrix narrates, in a tone that's full of bitterness but somehow very compelling. Perhaps it's because there is clearly pain behind the hostility and bad decisions. I found it both gripping and moving. However, about halfway through the narration switches to Sarah (extracts from her diary, which the private eye has stolen). At this point, the power of the story seemed to dissipate. Sarah doesn't come across as a very real person - she is either loving Bendrix or hating herself, which makes her side of the story much less interesting. And the closing act of the book, with its mysticism, is hard to make work for a modern (and sceptical) reader.

Still worth the read, though, for the first section.

He looked up at me with those red-rimmed eyes and said, 'Bendrix, I'm afraid.' I could no longer patronize him; he was one of misery's graduates: he had passed in the same school and for the first time I thought of him as an equal. I remember there was one of those early brown photographs in an Oxford frame on his desk, the photograph of his father, and looking at it I thought how like the photograph was to Henry (it had been taken at about the same age, the middle forties) and how unlike. It wasn't the moustache that made it different - it was the Victorian look of confidence, of being at home in the world and knowing the way around, and suddenly I felt again that friendly sense of companionship. I liked him better than I would have liked his father (who had been in the Treasury). We were fellow strangers.

60. Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, James E Falen translation

This went onto my wishlist after I read an article somewhere about how good the Falen translation was. I don't think I'd quite registered that this epic poem is almost always translated into rhyming poetry, with the same rhyme scheme as the original. (There is one prose translation, by Nabokov).

So when I started to read it, I found that my brain kept snagging on the strange turns of phrase that are necessary if you have to keep both the meaning and the metre of the original. I didn't think I could enjoy reading it either as poetry or as translation.

In fact, I might have given up on it if it weren't for finding a free downloadable reading of the poem (same translation) by Steven Fry (here). Well. That made all the difference. Fry's reading makes the meaning very clear, and brings the characters vividly to life. I thoroughly recommend it (and did I mention it was free?). I did go back to the book to check a couple of references, but I got much more enjoyment from the reading.

Incidentally, this blog compares different translations of the same stanzas, if you want to make your own mind up about the Falen translation.

>203 wandering_star: Oh, I'll have to look out for this translation and Fry's interpretation.

This is continuing a Pushkin theme today. An email from NYRB Classics advised me that their new translation of The Captain's Daughter is coming soon. Huzzah!

http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-captain-s-daughter/

I will not be able to resist a book that opens with a character walking across Clapham common. I read 8 novels by Greene a couple of years ago, but not that one; The End of the Affair

Thanks for the link to the Steven Fry reading of Eugene Onegin. I will make a point of listening to that.

61. The Harem Within: tales of a Moroccan girlhood by Fatima Mernissi

This was an early LT recommendation - from fannyprice, I think. And what a great recommendation. Fatima Mernissi is now a feminist academic, and in this book she recounts stories from her formative years, growing up in a harem in Fez, Morocco, in the 1940s.

The French colonists have had relatively little impact on tradition, but a wave of social change is sweeping across the Arab world, and many of the older women in the harem - Mernissi's aunts and cousins - want to embrace it. Some of Mernissi's uncles have already left the harem, tired of communal family life.

But for the ones who remain, the ways they can challenge convention are relatively limited - for some, merely abandoning traditional embroidery patterns in favour of a bird spreading its wings leads to criticism.

But Mernissi shows us very clearly that although these women have no power, they do have agency. They admire the new Arab film stars and singers, although they can only leave the compound to go to the cinema on very rare occasions. Cousin Chama tries to run past the guard to go to the cinema, and puts on plays on the terrace about early Arab feminists. ("The problem with some of Chama's favourite feminists, especially the early ones, was that they did not do much besides write, since they were locked up in harems. That meant that there was not much action to be staged, and we just had to sit and listen to Chama recite their protests and complaints in monologue.")

This is an easy-to-read memoir which is also an eye-opening insight into a world which is frequently misunderstood. I honestly think that everyone should read it - my aunt, for example, would never be induced to read a book if told it was about the early years of a feminist, still less a Muslim one, but I think that she would be fascinated by the stories and charmed by the style.

The terrace exit route was seldom watched, for the simple reason that getting to it from the street was a difficult undertaking. You needed to be quite good at three skills: climbing, jumping, and agile landing. Most of the women could climb up and jump fairly well, but not many could land gracefully. So, from time to time, someone would come in with a bandaged ankle, and everyone would know just what she'd been up to. The first time I came down from the terrace with bleeding knees, Mother explained to me that a woman's chief problem in life was figuring out how to land. 'Whenever you are about to embark on an adventure,' she said, 'you have to think about the landing. Not about the takeoff. So whenever you feel like flying, think about how and where you'll end up.'

62. The Encyclopedia Of Early Earth by Isabel Greenberg

Another charming read! This time, a graphic novel made up of intermeshing short fables. A young man sets out to find the missing part of his soul, but along the way he has many adventures and hears and tells many stories. (The setting is an alternative earth but some of the stories are recognisable from our own culture.) A very simple framework, done beautifully - witty and moving.

>207 wandering_star: The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood sounds fascinating.

I probably won't read it, but I enjoyed your excellent review of The Harem Within.

63. Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

A time travel romp. Doesn't quite fill the hole left by Connie Willis, who I think pioneered the idea of historians time travelling to study the past, but will do as a bubblegum version of the same. I thought it was rather charming how all the plot holes are simply ignored - much better than shoehorning in arduous explanations. I've bought the next two in the series.

64. A Mind Of Its Own: how your brain distorts and deceives by Cordelia Fine

A round up of the neuroscience about how the human brain filters and distorts reality, to make us feel better about ourselves, to save time, and because concepts are stored in "schema" - groups of related words and ideas, so if one word is activated all the other ideas in the schema are primed, and susceptible to being activated. It's well written, but anyone with any interest in popular neuroscience probably knows all this stuff already - if you listen to Radiolab (and honestly, if not, why not?) there'll be not much new here. I'd hoped for more from Fine, whose Delusions of Gender is a funny and passionate take down of the pseudoscience around innate gender differences.

65. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If I was Donna Tartt's editor I would have sent this back to her and asked her to halve the length of every scene.

Back from my trip, which was fantastic, including a lovely day out with Joyce in Vancouver. Thanks >197 LibraryPerilous: for the recommendation of Millennium, which was excellent. I didn't manage to get much reading done, though - too ambitious with the driving so we had some very long days, and between that and reading the guidebook, my attention span was pretty low. I mostly read articles which I'd saved to Instapaper - several years' worth!

And I finished 66. The Warden which I'd started reading before the trip. I'd been for a hike in the rain and come in soaking wet and in the mood for a hot bath and a Victorian novel - which seemed like a good opportunity to start on the Barsetshire Chronicles.

The Warden is the first in the series, but most people recommend starting with Barchester Towers as it's more accessible. Uncharacteristically I decided to be a completist and start with The Warden, which wasn't really a smart decision.

The plot of The Warden is about the warden of an almshouse, whose position is a sinecure. There is a media campaign against this injustice (which argues that the warden's salary is too great and the residents of the almshouse should receive more), and the warden is caught between his own conscience and the social pressure from his peers who want him to stand firm. A dry topic, although the social interactions were witty and enjoyable. I'll read Barchester Towers soon.

I am not sure though how Trollope has the nerve to caricature Dickens when he too goes on very lengthy detours, for example about the role of the media in the modern world!

Sir Abraham was a man of wit, and sparkled among the brightest at the dinner tables of political grandees: indeed, he always sparkled; whether in society, in the House of Commons, or the courts of law, coruscations flew from him; glittering sparkles, as from hot steel, but not heat; no cold heart was ever cheered by warmth from him, no unhappy soul ever dropped a portion of its burden at his door.

Good advice regarding the Barsetshire Chronicles. I've had a copy of Barchester Towers for years, but recently picked up The Warden so as to start at the beginning. I'll go ahead and read them out of order.

Now that is very odd: I loved The Warden when I read it (years ago) and then my progress of the series dropped off because I found none as good as The Warden.

I read The Warden in March, and found Liz's (lyzard) tutored thread very helpful. http://www.librarything.com/topic/140276

She also has one for Barchester Towers, which I hope to read before year end.
http://www.librarything.com/topic/144010

>212 wandering_star: You're welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed the meal.

Sigh. I keep meaning to get to Trollope . . . .

>215 NanaCC: - Thanks so much for that link - the thread was really interesting and illuminating. Is there a list somewhere (on the wiki?) of previous tutored reads? And would anyone out there be interested in leading a tutored read of something by Patrick White? (I've now failed to read two of his books).

I don't think I mentioned going to Powells in Portland. What an amazing bookshop! I liked this display:

>218 wandering_star: Is there a list somewhere (on the wiki?) of previous tutored reads? And would anyone out there be interested in leading a tutored read of something by Patrick White?

I would love to know the answer to the first part of that question myself. I would never have known about the ones for The Warden and Barchester Towers, if Liz had not commented on my thread. Perhaps one of our Club Read mates can let us know.

I've searched around - 2012 and 2013 tutored reads seem to be listed here, but nothing for this year.

We did tutored reads for The Warden and Barchester Towers because of the church backdrop, but after that it was agreed that the tutoring was not needed, and the rest of the Barchester series was done as group reads. We also did a tutored read of Phineas Finn, because of the politics, but that's been the only Trollope tutoring this year.

The tutored reads don't happen to any sort of schedule, but are just a matter of people agreeing such an approach would be useful. There isn't a list anywhere at the moment, but if one has been done for a particular book it will come up on that book's main page - you will find the thread(s) under "Conversations".

For the record, I always strongly recommend reading The Warden before Barchester Towers. :)

67. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

There is a 'twist' in this book, which I was aware of before I started reading. I don't think that spoilt my reading of the book, but just in case...

This is the story of an American family - one which, probably, would be no more than averagely dysfunctional, if it weren't for one thing - one of the two daughters, Fern, is a chimpanzee. (The story is narrated by the other daughter, Rosemary, and she refers to Fern simply as her 'sister' until quite far into the book.) For anyone who's seen the fantastic documentary, Project Nim, it won't be a surprise that at some point, Fleur gets sent away: but the focus of this story is what it means for the family left behind.

Here are some things my mother worked with me on, prior to sending me off to school: Standing up straight. Keeping my hands still when I talked. Not putting my fingers into anyone else’s mouth or hair. Not biting anyone, ever. No matter how much the situation warranted it. Muting my excitement over tasty food, and not staring fixedly at someone else’s cupcake. Not jumping on the tables and desks when I was playing. I remembered these things, most of the time. But where you succeed will never matter so much as where you fail.

I'd assumed that Project Nim was pretty much a one-off, but it turns out that in the 1970s, there were a number of experiments in which chimpanzees were brought up alongside human children. These stories lend themselves to big themes - including, of course, the relatively short distance between humans and animals, which the title of this book hints at. But We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves manages to handle the theme lightly.

For me, this was about much more than animal rights. The focus of the story was Rosemary. Her love for Fleur is an important part of who she is, but as long as no-one knows her story, she is able to get away from the 'monkey girl' teasing. What Fowler has managed to do is tell this unusual story in a way which makes sense to anyone who's ever felt out of place, anyone who's ever been a teenager wanting to fit in but also wanting to be true to themselves. I loved her voice - a combination of sardonic teenage bravado, bafflement and hope.

68. Sea Of Poppies and 71. River Of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

These are the first two books in a projected trilogy, known as the Ibis Trilogy after a boat which carries the people at the heart of the story - a diverse group, whose only connection is that they are linked in some way to the opium trade, growing it, trading it, growing rich from or addicted to it. The backdrop to the whole trilogy is the First Opium War - but we get into that more in River Of Smoke. Sea Of Poppies is more about introducing us to the cast, as they gradually congregate in Benares and set out for Mauritius.

I found this a delight to read. One of the themes of both books is the meeting and mixing of cultures, and one of the ways that Ghosh portrays this is through the way that languages interact and develop - how one language becomes mangled in the mouth of a speaker of another language, and sometimes becomes something completely new, a pidgin or creole. He also loves specialised languages (boats, food, botany, fabrics), so the book is a cornucopia of wonderful words. I love the fact that they aren't explained, but if you pay close attention you might get a clue or two later on - for example, you hear about people drinking simkin a few times before you are given the context to work out that this is an Indianised pronunciation of champagne.

The re-provisioning was quickly done, for the schooner was soon beseiged by a flotilla of bumboats: cabbage-carrying coracles, fruit-laden dhonies, and machhwas that were filled with goats, chickens and ducks. In this floating bazar there was everything a ship or a lascar might need: canvas by the gudge, spare jugboolaks and zambooras, coils of istingis and rup-yan, stacks of seetulpatty mats, tobacco by the batti, rolls of neem-twigs for the teeth, martabans of isabgol for constipation, and jars of columbo-root for dysentery; one ungainly gordower even had a choola going with a halwai frying up fresh jalebis.

In Sea Of Poppies, another important theme is how identity is defined. Almost everyone on the Ibis changes their identity in some way, becoming something new - whether voluntarily or not. This often involves leaving behind their community and perhaps even family, but also the social obligations that come with that. We also see clearly how anxious people are to pigeonhole others and keep them firmly within that set identity - they want you to keep wearing the clothes and using the language which is appropriate to your background or class. So these transitions are also a move towards greater freedom and autonomy.

I found this theme fascinating, and loved the individual stories and the way they were interlinked. As soon as I could, I started on the second in the series. The style of River Of Smoke is a little different - more of the storytelling is about setting the context, the events in Canton which led up to the start of the Opium War. Most of the characters, too, are different, and we don't get as much detail of their backstories - while I still enjoyed River Of Smoke, I did miss some of the people that we were introduced to in the first book, and wondered what was happening to them as they settled into their new lives in Mauritius.

I do hope we come back to them in the final book of the trilogy - I'm not sure how their stories can be resolved while also covering the way the Opium War develops.

69. Keeping Mum by The Dark Angels Collective

A couple of months ago, I bought the lovely Letters Of Note from Unbound (a sort of Kickstarter for books). A few weeks later, they had a special offer for previous customers, where you could download some of their ebooks for free. I picked a few that looked interesting, including this one - I was curious about a book written by a 'collective'.

Well, as it turns out, the 'collective' is a group of people who teach business writing, and the plot of this book was brainstormed on a flip chart before they all went off to write their sections. I didn't know this until after I had finished the book - it's in the afterword - but it did explain why the book had felt so shallow. There's a plot (woman dies in a hotel in Scotland when her family thought she was in France - she's also booked in under a false name; family explore her life and try to understand who she really was), and even a theme (secrets), but no depth or texture to the writing. What the collective approach couldn't explain is why the different characters' narrative voices were so samey, even though they were written by different people!

Occasionally, in the fossil record, we find that stages of plant evolution seem to be missing. Or from time to time, we find that a fossil of a plant from a later era appears amongst plants from an earlier time. But the important thing to remember is this: there is no such thing as an 'inconsistency' in the fossil record. There are only 'apparent inconsistencies'. The challenge for the scientist is to work out what really happened.

>223 wandering_star: Ghosh is a favorite of mine. I've been putting off reading the Ibis books until the final volume is published, but it's hard to wait. He says spring of 2015.

Pair his The Hungry Tide with Sy Montgomery's Spell of the Tiger for an armchair trip to the Sundarbans.

Ghosh is an author I keep meaning to get to after seeing lots of good LT reviews. Thanks for the reminder!

Not to break up the Ghosh love fest, but I had mixed feelings about the only book I've read by him, The Hungry Tide. I loved the sense of place but I felt it laid on the message too thick.

>227 rebeccanyc: Yuck, I hate it when a book does that. I was wondering whether to add Sea of Poppies to my wishlist, but now I'm not too sure.

>227 rebeccanyc: Actually I've always found Ghosh's work intellectually interesting but not necessarily a compelling read. I thought Sea Of Poppies was the best thing I've read by him so far - perhaps because he's got better at writing rounded characters, perhaps because there were so many characters it didn't matter. River Of Smoke was maybe a little bit message-y.

70. Life Sentences by Laura Lippman

I read this book less than two weeks ago, and I can't honestly remember more than the barest outline. A writer, whose third book has disappointed both readers and critics, discovers that a long-forgotten schoolfriend is at the centre of a famous case. Her child is disappeared, believed dead, and she has never given a word of explanation - serving seven years in prison instead of saying anything. Aha! thinks the writer, here's promising material for a book. Cue lots of discussion about who has the right to tell who else's stories, and a mystery which is suddenly and neatly tied up at the end of the book. There's nothing really wrong with this book - it's perfectly well-written, and I kept on turning the pages. But it wasn't quite interesting enough to be memorable.

But Tisha knew that people who meant no harm were often the most dangerous people of all, the real tar babies from which one might never disentangle. Reg and Donna were crazy, thinking that Cassandra could be managed in any way, that they could let her a little way in and then dissuade her from dragging them into the process of picking the bones of Callie Jenkins's life. That poor sad woman, always on the sidelines, waiting to be invited. Whatever she had done - and everyone assumed she had killed her baby - leave her in peace now, Cassandra. Leave her be.

I've been interested in trying something by Laura Lippman because she lives in Baltimore (I'm in DC) and some of my friends who live in Baltimore actually see her around at neighborhood events. Unfortunately none of her books that I've seen reviews of really sound appealing to me. Have you read and enjoyed any of her other works?

No - I'd heard quite a lot of buzz, which is why I picked this one up. I don't think I'll be reading another one of hers - it was a bit "book club", if you know what I mean.

Good to know. That's pretty much what I expected and why I've not made time for her books!

How's this as an image for LT? It's the outside of the library at Beijing Foreign Studies University, which teaches 60 languages.

A couple more:

Beautiful!!

Amazing! I wonder whether Edwin has seen it . . .

No, I have not seen it.

I teach freelance at Beiwai, but my classes are on the West Campus, while the library is on the East Campus, The photos are great, and definitely tempting to go and have a look.

In July, a friend introduced me to the librarian there, but I haven't been able to pursue that contact. I want to donate about 200 books in the Dutch language to the library.. Beiwai is the only university in China where students can study Dutch language and literature at MA and PhD level.

Over the past four years, I have donated more than 800 books in English, German, French and Chinese to the library of the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. This Spring the library of the Graduate School honoured me by adding a plaque with my name to the wall in the hall of the library. My name stands out as the only foreigner among some 30 Chinese companies and alumni who have made similar large contributions.

>237 edwinbcn: That's wonderful, Edwin.

Wonderful to have donated so many books!

Rather from the sublime to the ridiculous with my next review, 72. The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

This is, essentially, The Time Traveller's Wife as a serial killer novel rather than a romance. It's a great concept, and at the beginning I found the book gripping. But as the stories in the past grew longer, I grew less interested. I would have been happy with a jump-cutting thriller; I think this book fell down when it tried to be more meaningful, by trying to make the stories of the various women emblematic in some way of women's roles through time, and by throwing in awful pseudo-deep ruminations along the lines of: Inflate life vest. Fit the mask to your face. Assume the brace position. As if any of that would make a difference if the plane went down in flames. If only the rest of life had such facile placebos.

73. Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden

This novel, set in 1920s India, is the story of Sophie - a young, beautiful widow with romantic notions, who decides to eke out her small pension by living 'as the Indians do' in a small house on a hillside in Kashmir. The scenery around her is beautiful - and beautifully described - but her almost wilful refusal to acknowledge the hardships and brutalities of poverty lead her to break the unwritten rules of the village, and create resentment and hostility.

Godden herself spent a winter living frugally in a Kashmir village, and apparently made a few of the mistakes that she ascribes to Sophie. But in the book, Sophie is counterpointed by her daughter Teresa, a nervous and conservative child, but one who is painfully aware of the social lines which Sophie is crossing. This highlighted, for me, how much Sophie was choosing to ignore - about the world around her but also her own character. Despite this, Godden still makes her a rather sympathetic character - I couldn't work out how she'd done this until close to the end of the book when Sophie, thinking back on what she has done, reminds herself that at least she has never tried to force people into holes they don't fit into. And she is almost always able to see the best in other people - sometimes more so than they deserve.

I found this a very interesting read - it could easily be taken as a light account of a woman's misadventures in a foreign country, but actually there are more depths to it.

Also, I would love to read a story from Teresa's point of view.

"When I am well," she said to Teresa, "I shall be quite different. Everything will be quite different."
"How?" asked Teresa cautiously.
"I was insouciant - careless and indifferent," explained Sophie. "Now I shall live and work for other people... like the missionaries do."
"You have to train to be a missionary, Sister Locke says so," said Teresa dampeningly, but Sophie was not listening.
"We shall be poor like the Kashmiris," said Sophie, and her eyes began to shine. "We shall be poor and frugal. We shall toil."
"What is toil?" asked Teresa.
"Work very very hard," said Sophie. "Like that," she pointed to the working women and Teresa looked down at them with fear and distaste.

>240 wandering_star: Thank you for the review, this sounds like a fun and interesting read. I like the dialog you quoted.

74. The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

The True Deceiver is about two women - Anna Aemelin and Katri Kling. Both are loners in the small village where they live, Anna because she is too acutely aware of social ties and demands to be able to bear much company, and Katri because she scorns all social ties and niceties and is ostracised as a result. Anna is an artist, a prolific book illustrator whose work is hugely popular.

Over the course of one winter, a story develops between them, and that is the focus of the book. I say a 'story' because no other word seems to fit. It's not quite a friendship, not quite an employer/employee relationship, not necessarily even a relationship at all. But the two affect each other's outlook on the world, in a process which is sometimes painful for both of them.

Who is the true deceiver of the title? At different points in the story, both women can be - Katri deceiving Anna, with aims that are grounded in truth; Anna trying to be true towards Katri but having a deceitful impact. Katri tells a white lie to make Anna feel better - and questions her motivations for doing so. Anna tells Katri - don't force the truth on me, I prefer my illusions. A fascinating read and one that deserves a lot of thinking about.

"How it goes," Katri said, looking straight at Anna, her eyes at this moment deeply yellow. She continued very slowly. "Miss Aemelin, the things people do for one another mean very little, seen purely as acts. What matters is their motives, where they're headed, what they want." Anna put down her glass and looked at Mats. He smiled at her. He hadn't been listening. "Miss Kling," Anna said, "you worry about such peculiar things. If people come up with some pleasant way of helping or making you happy, then it's just exactly what it appears to be."

Nice review of Kingfishers Catch Fire. Why don't you add it to the book review page? There are only two reviews by others, that also praise the book.

This sounds very interesting.

Great review of the True Deceiver, a book I found very hard to describe!

Thanks Edwin - done!

I've had The True Deceiver on my wishlist for a while. Your review makes it even more interesting. Thank you.

75. The Wine Of Angels and 76. The Secrets Of Pain by Phil Rickman.

The Merrily Watkins mystery series gets quite a lot of love on LT, so I've picked up a few of the books - two are on my Kindle. I started the first book in the series, and found it a bit difficult to get into - I couldn't work out the relationships between the characters, and the book didn't quite fit my genre expectations. I was almost halfway through before it dawned on me that I'd accidentally started not the first in the series, but the eleventh... no wonder the author didn't feel the need to explain the characters, and felt able to play with the genre conventions. I switched over to the actual first in the series (The Wine Of Angels), and after reading that, went back and finished the other. It may not have been the most sensible of reading patterns, but it did mean that I could easily work out what I like and don't like about the series.

What I like:

I liked the way that both books played with supernatural themes, without quite committing themselves to an explanation. The Wine Of Angels is centred on a potentially magical apple orchard, and reminded me a bit of Graham Joyce in the weaving in of traditional English magic to the narrative. There is more of a rational explanation for the supernatural elements in The Secrets Of Pain, but at some point between books 1 and 11 Merrily seems to have become an expert in exorcisms, so there are also hints of things that exist which can't be explained scientifically.

I liked Merrily herself, and her group of friends. A vicar, she arrives in the village at the start of book 1, and is not at all sure what sort of welcome she is going to receive. By book 11 she seems to be a well-established part of village life. I also like the way that she is not a traditional sleuth, but somehow is always involved in working out what has really been going on, along with her village allies and the police.

While the books are long, I liked the pacing once I got used to it - a slow build-up with lots of different threads, and then a gripping end.

What I didn't like:

The main thing I didn't like was that both books end with the tension being ratched up in exactly the same way - with Merrily's daughter Jane being at risk of sexual violence. Maybe that's just an unfortunate coincidence, but if a third book plays the same trick I think I won't bother with any others.

As a middle-class townie myself, it also slightly grated that both books had quite an emphasis on all the bad things brought by incomers to the village, who all miss the point of the rural traditions whether they are trying to embrace them, demolish them or sell them. I guess that probably is part of rural life in the UK today! and of course, Merrily and her daughter are incomers too. But a little bit less of village politics would suit me.

78. The Arrival by Shaun Tan

This beautiful book is a story told entirely without words. A man leaves his family and travels to a new and strange land. At first, everything is baffling and hard to understand, but gradually he meets other immigrants who tell him their stories and help him find his way - and by the end of the story he is helping others to do the same.

My very favourite spread in the book is when the man is being processed by immigration - in a note, Tan says that much of the imagery comes from photographs of Ellis Island. On the left-hand page, you see twelve frames of the man trying to communicate his story, with increasing desperation. On the right, twelve frames which are close-ups of hands, picking up files, sorting through papers and stamping documents.

Unfortunately I can't find a picture of this on the internet, so here is the scene of the man moving into his first accommodation in the new city.

#248 - that looks amazing. I'm going to look for this.

79. Home by Marilynne Robinson

"Home to stay, Glory! Yes!" her father said, and her heart sank. He attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his eyes were damp with commiseration. "To stay for a while this time," he amended, and took her bag from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand.

They say that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. This book explores both aspects of that - the welcome, and lack of other options. Glory is a rather naive and idealistic young woman ("she was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children"). After a spell as a teacher, she has returned home - ostensibly to look after her ageing father, but partly because things haven't gone too well for her in the outside world. Some time after Glory's return, her prodigal brother Jack comes home too - after an absence of 20 years. But can home and family remedy their problems? No. The three people in the house are all acutely aware of each others' unhappiness and the reasons for it - but are unable to speak about any of this, so the awareness only makes the unhappiness even more bitter.

I think this is the saddest book I have ever read. The writing is very beautiful and full of subtle meaning - but it took me days to read the last 50 pages because I kept wondering if I really wanted to continue. And I think that slowness of reading made me more likely to object to aspects of the story - is Jack really a believeable character, for example? And I got quite annoyed with Glory for spending so much time weeping silently instead of trying to DO SOMETHING about it all.

So, um. I would recommend this book - and will keep it to read again. But you need to make sure you are in the right frame of mind to handle it.

>249 Nickelini: - yes, do!

Whoops, forgot to review 77. When The Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad by Mona Yahia. This is a fictionalised memoir of the life of an Iraqi Jewish family in 1960s Baghdad. At the start of the decade, one-sixth of Baghdad is Jewish. But over the years there are several revolutions and coups, each seeming to make the situation of the Jewish community a little more precarious. By the late 1960s, the grey Beetles of the security forces are seen everywhere, and most Jewish families are either plotting to leave, or arguing about whether they should do so.

For weeks now, no family has fled. The detention of eighty Jews during their failed escape in October has discouraged the rest of us from similar undertakings. Moreover, the icy winter in the northern Kurdish provinces seems to have paralysed illegal traffic with Iran. Seeing no prospects of departure in the near future, my parents purchased two low-priced rugs for the living-room, finally had the leaking tap in the toilet repaired, the fractured window pane in the kitchen replaced. Their deeds spoke for them. They had resigned themselves to the idea of spending one more winter here.

There are some very nice touches in the way that this story is told - for example, a recurring theme of being caught between languages as the young Lina first has to study multiple alphabets, and later marks her alienation from Iraqi society by gradually reducing her Arabic vocabulary, letter by letter, and scratching out from her schoolbooks all words that evoke homeland. The changes of regime are illustrated by the new names of streets and bridges, and in a scene of Lina's father moving several pages of his stamp collection into another drawer which is full of stamps of the Iraqi monarchy, one generation further back.

An interesting story, simply told.

>248 wandering_star: I really like Tan's work. I think Lost and Found is my favorite.

I'll look out for that. I've only read this, and Tales From Outer Suburbia (also great).

>252 wandering_star: That does sound interesting.

I seem to have had quite a bumpy year in terms of keeping this thread up-to-date - lots of long gaps, and here's another one. This time I have a reasonable excuse, though, as in the last month I have been offered a fantastic opportunity to spend three months in Tokyo, and have packed up and moved over! This has kind of limited my reading, although I am getting settled now and will soon be back at my books. Anyway, here are some fairly quick reviews of the books that I have read.

80. Monstrous Beauty by Marie Brennan

A collection of seven short-short stories, inspired by fairy tales - Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty & the Beast, and so on. I am used to reading feminist retellings of fairy tales, but here there was both a feminist and a horror twist. The wicked Queen, for example, eats Snow White's heart to keep her young - and the seven dwarves bring her back to life as a beautiful zombie. I enjoyed these, although it's probably better to read them one at a time as a quick and effective chill - read all at once they are a bit too samey, maybe because of the very short length. This was an Early Reviewers book.

They tell their tale to all who pass through, but most princes and knights and wandering adventurers dismiss their words as the superstitions of credulous peasants (forgetting that their own peasants' tales set them on their road to begin with), or else assume that the villagers do not want the curse lifted - for then they would lose the one thing that distinguishes their collection of squalid hovels from the thousand others like it.

81. The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant

Another fairytale-adjacent story here. Pia, who is ten, lives in a small town in Germany with her German father and English mother. She's a bit of a loner at school, where only "Stink Stefan" is prepared to be friends with her. But as Stink Stefan's parents don't care about him at all, the two of them can wander around town and have adventures. One of their favourite adventures is to go to old Herr Schiller's house and listen to him telling scary folktales. When one of their classmates, Katharina Linden, disappears, it almost seems as if this could be another scary folk tale - except for the reactions of the grown-ups in the town. And then another child disappears, and Stink Stefan and Pia decide that they need to get to the bottom of what is really happening...

This was a pretty good read. Pia's narration is very believable - knowing that there is something serious up, but not quite knowing what it is or whether it differs from the scariness of the folktales - and not quite being able to work out what is behind the words of the grownups. The book also balanced out the pace, letting you get to know and care about Pia and Stefan, before getting to the gripping denouement.

That sounds exciting! Have fun in Tokyo!

82. Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

The fourth in the Rivers of London series, crime-solving in the magical world within modern London. I think I've said before that I love the worldview of this series. The magical rulers of London are all linked to its rivers, with the King a rural Briton who runs things upriver, and the Queen a Nigerian matriarch who looks after Central London. That just seems so right - for London to be represented by its working-class British traditions and its modern diversity. And this one is set in a council estate near Elephant & Castle, which used to be my patch of London. The plots are not the strongest point (probably a good thing in this case as I accidentally skipped the third book in the series). But I hugely enjoyed this. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's reading of the audiobook is excellent too.

83. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker

A mind-reading golem and an all-powerful jinni become friends in late nineteenth-century New York (where else). This book more or less had me at the title/premise, but it's really well-done. There are nice portraits of the Jewish and Syrian communities which the golem and the jinni live within. But even better is the unlikely friendship between the two beings: the golem, created to obey orders - but now masterless - and the jinni, a free spirit trapped in human form. There's something here about free will and intention - the golem has to learn to look at people's actions, rather than their thoughts, to identify whether they are threatening to her or those she loves. I am hopeful of a sequel.

84. Prospero's Mirror by AN Donaldson

An enjoyable MR James pastiche, lent to me by a friend who knows the author. Towards the end of his life, MR James is contacted by a friend who says, "I have a dark wonder you might illuminate". The dark wonder turns out to be an obsidian mirror with mysterious lettering around the edge, but investigating it brings James to the edge of madness, as it has many people before. "When I come up here I am reminded of what, as a historian, I should never forget. That the past is always underneath us - and all around us - just out of sight. Sometimes perhaps, where really old things are, that thinnest crust of the present can break, and the vast depths of the past will come pouring through.

>258 rebeccanyc: thanks!

Tokyo! How exciting! I hope you really enjoy it.

You're in Tokyo as well! Perhaps we should organize a meetup for Tokyo LT-ers! I met my first LT-er, dcozy, back in September and it was fun!

Yay! That would be awesome.

Very belatedly, I have celebrated my Thingaversary! Nine books this year so I got myself:

Three books on Japan:
Tokyo: a view of the city by Donald Richie
Showa 1926-1939 by Shigeru Mizuki
Granta 127: Japan

Three non-fiction:
How To Speak Money by John Lanchester
The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani
Among the Hoods: My Years with a Teenage Gang by Harriet Sergeant

Three fiction:
Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
The Monster's Lament by Robert Edric
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison

85. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The basic thesis of this book is that there are two systems which guide our reactions to things - "fast thinking", which is instinctive and automatic, and "slow thinking" which is the thought processes we are conscious of. These can be quickly illustrated by asking first, what's 2+2, and then, what's 17x24. Other examples of "fast thinking" include reading someone's angry expression, seeing whether something is close by or far away, and doing things of which we have a lot of practice (eg driving under good conditions).

"Slow thinking" takes attention and can be disrupted when that attention is drawn away. The problem is, "fast thinking" takes a lot of shortcuts - and can determine our reaction to something, even if we ourselves believe that it is a "slow thinking", rational response. Stereotyping is an obvious example of this; but Kahneman explains many other ways it happens, such as what he calls "answering an easier question" - if asked "how much would you contribute to save an endangered species", we answer the question "how much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins". This explains why people can give vastly different answers to the same question, swayed by their current mood.

Kahneman's aim is to help us understand the dynamics of "fast thinking" so that we can catch ourselves doing it, and therefore compensate for our initial reactions. As part of this, each chapter has some "sample sentences" at the end which give examples of how we might speak about each kind of thinking (eg: "The question we face is whether this candidate can succeed. The question we seem to answer is whether she interviews well. Let's not substitute.")

When this book came out it sparked a lot of articles. It turns out that most of them came from the first two parts of the book (which describe the two systems of thinking and some of the common biases). This meant that at first, I felt that the book wasn't saying anything new that hadn't been covered in the articles I'd already read. Later on, though, the book became a bit more statistical, and a bit more detailed about the processes which lead to bad/lazy decisions - which was newer information to me. (Hmm, could all the journalists have only read the first 150 pages?). At this point it started to feel much more useful. Overall I think it is worth reading - I felt that it went a layer deeper than many of the other pop neuroscience books I have read. And it is a very easy, fluent read (aha! perhaps I'm falling prey to the bias of cognitive ease...).

The idea of Thinking, Fast and Slow is intriguing. I haven't thought about thinking before from this standpoint!

86. The Brothers by Asko Sahlberg

This book is from Peirene Press, which specialises in translating contemporary European novellas. It's Finnish, set shortly after the end of a war in which Finland passed from Swedish to Russian rule. It may be a novella, but it's also a compressed epic. The actual time period covered is just a few days, but it's a few days in which years of chickens come home to roost. There are bitter disputes between brothers, people turning out not to be who they thought, dispossessed family members gaining their revenge, plots being laid and inheritances being lost. All told in a tremendously bleak Scandinavian style. The house looks bigger than it really is, silhouetted against the forest, magnified by the dark. He knows its precise size, of course, and how much grief and disappointment it holds.

Despite the clean and minimalist writing style, it's impossible for the book to completely avoid a tinge of melodrama - but I enjoyed it, in a way I wouldn't have enjoyed an epic-scale retelling of the same events.

I enjoyed Thinking Fast and Slow even though some of it was familiar, especially the way Kahneman let the reader try to figure out some of the puzzles. The Brothers sounds intriguing; I haven't heard of Peirene Press.

Glad to see you back with the reviews. My wife reckons I don't do fast thinking so perhaps I don't have a problem.

Nice one Barry!

87. Company Of Liars by Karen Maitland

This is a historical novel, about a motley group of people travelling together for safety through mid-C14th England, a country being struck down by a combination of crop failure and pneumonic plague (more infectious than bubonic). Our narrator is a pedlar of holy relics, and there is also a storyteller, a magician, a healer, a young couple, two minstrels, and an unearthly young girl. The pedlar and the magician, of course, deceive people for a living - but as you might guess from the title, all the others turn out to have their secrets too.

The story was pretty fast-paced, and the description of a land locked down in famine and pestilence seemed pretty convincing.

Even when there is no desperate cacophony of bells echoing from the village, even when there is no thick yellow pall of sulphurous smoke, you learn to recognize the warning signs. The mills, standing like watchtowers, are silent, their sails still and locked, no rumble of the grinding stones or procession of chattering women passing to and fro with their family's flour. ... More chilling are the mills which are not silent, where sails spin out of control and you can feel the vibration of the grinding stones under your feet. The ghost mills, where the stones grind and grind, but no flour trickles out. Where sails and paddles batter themselves to splinters, because there is no one left to stop them.

But there were a couple of things which meant that the book didn't really connect with me. Firstly, it's just relentlessly, horribly bleak, with little modulation - odd for a book where one of the central themes is about the need for hope (the pedlar claims he sells hope, the magician scorns it - because hope means depending on something outside yourself, and therefore disappointment). Secondly, I didn't care about any of the characters. Their secrets, such as they are, are often guessable, and they aren't the same as the depth and realism which create a rounded character whose fate you get invested in.

>270 wandering_star: Wondering what to do about this book. I love reading about that period, when famine and pestilence stalked the land (not sure what that says about me) and I don't even mind reading about dislikable characters, but being able to guess their secrets would be a problem. Still though, I may give it a try and think about it in relation to Morality Play and The Corner that Held Them.

I could be tempted with Company of Liars thanks for the review

I finished the next book on 1 Jan so please come and join my 2015 reading here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/186390.

I am hoping that 2015 will be a better reading year for me. When I looked back over this year's reading, I had a handful of 5 or 4.5 starred reads, but only three which still stand out in my mind at the end of the year. (Sea of Poppies, the re-read of Bring Up the Bodies, and The Children's Book - all traditionally-built, well-written, slightly epic stories). Looking back at the top of this thread, I can see that the good books I read in 2013 were more memorable than most of the ones I read in 2014.