kidzdoc Reads Globally in 2015: Part 1

Currently reading:

    

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Completed books:

January:
1. Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers (TBR)

Books purchased or received in 2015:

January:
1. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2 Jan, Kindle e-book)
2. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin (2 Jan, Kindle e-book)

2015 Reading Globally Themes and possible reads from my TBR collection:

First quarter: Indian subcontinent



Aravind Adiga, Between the Assassinations
Tariq Ali, Night of the Golden Butterfly
Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age
Vikram Chandra, Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games
G.V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr
Roopa Farooki, Bitter Sweets
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
Intizar Husain, Basti
Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey
Uday Prakash, The Girl with the Golden Parasol
Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Kamila Shamsie, In the City By the Sea

Second quarter: Iberian peninsula



António Lobo Antunes, Act of the Damned
António Lobo Antunes, Fado Alexandrino
António Lobo Antunes, The Land at the End of the World
Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak
Juan Goytisolo, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife
Juan Goytisolo, Landscapes of War: From Sarajevo to Chechnya
Juan Goytisolo, The Marx Family Saga
Almudena Grandes, The Frozen Heart
Carmen Laforet, Nada
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic
Mercè Rodoreda, Death in Spring
Mercè Rodoreda, The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda
José Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda
José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
José Saramago, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
Llorenç Villalonga, The Dolls' Room
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game

Third quarter: Nobel Prize winners writing not in English

  

Knut Hamsun (1920), Hunger
Thomas Mann (1929), Death in Venice
Halldór Laxness (1955), Independent People
Albert Camus (1957), The First Man; Exile and the Kingdom
Ivo Andrić (1961), The Bridge on the Drina
Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), Nausea
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1967), The President
Yasunari Kawabata (1968), Beauty and Sadness
Pablo Neruda (1971), The Essential Neruda; Canto General
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), Collected Stories, Volume 1
Gabriel García Márquez (1982), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Of Love and Other Demons; The Autumn of the Patriarch
Claude Simon (1985), The Trolley
Naguib Mahfouz (1988), Midaq Alley; Rhadopis of Nubia
Octavio Paz (1990), The Labyrinth of Solitude; In Light of India
Kenzaburō Ōe (1994), The Changeling
José Saramago (1998), Raised from the Ground; Baltasar and Blimunda; The History of the Siege of Lisbon; Manual of Painting and Calligraphy; Journey to Portugal
Günter Grass (1999), The Tin Drum
Gao Xingjian (2000), One Man's Bible; Soul Mountain
Orhan Pamuk (2006), Snow; My Name Is Red; The Museum of Innocence; Other Colors
J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008), Terra Amata; The Giants; War; Fever; The Book of Flights; The Flood
Herta Müller (2009), The Land of Green Plums
Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), Captain Pantoja and the Special Service; The Green House; The Way to Paradise; The Bad Girl; The Dream of the Celt
Mo Yan (2012), Life and Death are Wearing Me Out; The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine

Fourth quarter: Women writing not in English

  

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins; She Came to Stay
Assia Djebar, Algerian White; Children of the New World; The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry
Diamela Eltit, E. Luminata
Annie Ernaux, Cleaned Out
Sylvie Germain, The Song of False Lovers
Marlene van Niekerk, Agaat
Miral al-Tahawy, Brooklyn Heights
Delphine de Vigan, No and Me

2015 American Author Challenge

  

January: Carson McCullers, Clock Without Hands
February: Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
March: Richard Ford, Independence Day
April: Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
May: Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
June: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
July: Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
August: Larry McMurtry William Faulker, The Sound and the Fury
September: Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
October: Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
November: Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
December: E.L. Doctorow, The March

2015 British Author Challenge



January: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
January: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
February: Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger or The Paying Guests
February: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
March: Daphne Du Maurier, ?Rebecca
March: China Mieville, The City & the City
April: Angela Carter, ?Nights at the Circus
April: W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
May: Margaret Drabble, ?The Radiant Way
May: Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest
June: Beryl Bainbridge, Master Georgie
June: Anthony Burgess, ?Earthly Powers
July: Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
July: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
August: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
August: Graham Greene, The Quiet American
September: Andrea Levy, Fruit of the Lemon
September: Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
October: Helen Dunmore, The Siege
October: David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
November: Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
November: William Boyd, An Ice-Cream War
December: Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
December: P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens

Recommended reads for the CanLit 2014 2015 Challenge (by Canadian LTers) (books in bold are ones that I'm most interested in reading):

   Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (Joyce, Nancy, Cait and Cyrel)
   Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (Cait and Joyce)
   Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (Tui)
   Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (Joyce and Nancy)
   Anita Rau Badami, Tamarind Mem (Tui)
   Anita Rau Badami, Tell it to the Trees (Cait)
   John Bemrose, The Island Walkers (Lori)
   Marie-Claire Blais, The Day Is Dark and Three Travelers (Suz)
   Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road (Suz and Cyrel)
   Joseph Boyden, Black Spruce (Suz and Cyrel)
   Wayson Choy, The Jade Peony (Nancy)
   Michael Crummey, Galore (Sassy)
   Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy (Suz, Cait, Tui and Zoë)
   Suzanne Desrochers, Bride of New France (Zoë)
   Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (Nancy)
   Kim Echlin, The Disappeared (Cait)
   Timothy Findley, The Last of the Crazy People (Lori)
   Timothy Findley, The Piano Man's Daughter (Tui)
   Timothy Findley, The Wars (Suz and Joyce)
   Kenneth J. Harvey, Blackstrap Hawco (Sassy)
   Tomson Highway, Kiss of the Fur Queen (Joyce and Tui)
   Helen Humphreys, Coventry (Tui)
   Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames (Tui)
   Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden (Tui)
   Wayne Johnston, Baltimore's Mansion (Tui)
   Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Cyrel)
   Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (Joyce)
   W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (Tui)
   Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (Tui)
   Mary Lawson, Crow Lake (Lori)
   Linden MacIntyre, The Bishop's Man (Suz)
   Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief (Cait and Nancy)
   Beatrice MacNeil, Where White Horses Gallop (Nancy)
   Rabindranath Maharaj, The Amazing Absorbing Boy (Cyrel)
   Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey (Tui)
   W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind (Tui)
   Lisa Moore, February (Cait)
   Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Suz)
   Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (Cyrel)
   Alice Munro, The View from Castle Rock (Cyrel)
   Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost (Joyce)
   Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (Cait)
   Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
   Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table (Suz)
   Jacques Poulin, Mister Blue (Suz)
   Timothy Taylor, Stanley Park (Joyce)
   Kim Thúy, Ru (Suz)
   Michel Tremblay, The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant (Lori)
   Jane Urquhart, Away (Tui)
   Jane Urquhart, The Stone Carvers (Tui)
   Ronald Wright, What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order (nonfiction) (Tui)

TBR Books to Read in 2014 2015



Tomes (500 pages or more):
      Nicole Barker, Darkmans
      Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins
      Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast
      Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
      Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting...
      Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí
      David Grossman, To the End of the Land
      Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name
      George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
      A.J. Liebling, Just Enough Liebling
      David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography
      Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
      Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
      Patrick O'Brian, Picasso: A Biography
      Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul
      Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
      William Trevor, Selected Stories
      Patrick White, The Vivisector

Non-tomes (less than 500 pages):
      Stuart Altman and David Shactman, Power, Politics and Universal Health Care: The Inside Story of a Century-Long Battle
      Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
      Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak
      Amiri Baraka, Tales of the Out & the Gone
      Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
      Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco
      Jean Echenoz, I'm Off and One Year
      Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
      Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
      Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
      Paul Farmer, Haiti After the Earthquake
      Juan Eslava Galan, The Mule
      Jerry Gentry, Grady Baby: A Year in the Life of Atlanta's Grady Hospital
      Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome
      Juan Goytisolo, Forbidden Territory and Realms of Strife
      Juan Goytisolo, Juan the Landless
      Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris
      Jonathan B. Imber, Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine
      Robert Klitzman, When Doctors Become Patients
      Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One
      Charles Lemert, Why Niebuhr Matters
      David A. Mendel, Proper Doctoring: A Book for Patients and their Doctors
      Simon Mawer, Mendel's Dwarf
      Claire McCarthy, Everyone's Children: A Pediatrician's Story of an Inner City Practice
      Ian McEwan, Atonement
      Andrew Miller, Pure
      Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
      Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood
      Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
      Laura Katz Olson, The Politics of Medicaid: Stakeholders and Welfare Medicine
      Brian Orr, MD, A Pediatrician's Journal: Caring for Children in a Broken Medical System
      Orhan Pamuk, Snow
      Roy Porter, Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad Doctors and Lunatics
      Graham Robb, Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
      Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir
      Mario Vargas Llosa, The Green House
      Richard Wright, Black Boy

Planned reads for January:

Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity
Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome
Intizar Husain, Basti
Jonathan B. Imber, Trusting Doctors: The Decline of Moral Authority in American Medicine
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Marlon James, A History of Seven Killings
Hannah Kent, Burial Rites
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
Rohinton Mistry, Swimming Lessons: and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag
Carson McCullers, Clock Without Hands
Kamila Shamsie, A God in Every Stone

2014 was a modestly successful reading year for me. I kept my 12 year streak of reading 100 or more books alive, after I read a flurry of books in the last three months of the year. However, I failed to make a significant dent in my TBR pile, and I read far fewer memorable books than I did in previous years.

I hope to do a much better job tackling my TBR collection in 2015, thanks in large part to several LibraryThing group reads in 2015: Reading Globally, as all of the quarterly themes are highly interesting to me (and I'll lead the Iberian literature theme in the second quarter of the month); the Booker Prize group, as I'm the primary administrator of that group; and two challenges created by members of the 75 Books group, which I'm also active in: the American Authors Challenge, and the British Authors Challenge.

I had intended to read heavily from my TBR pile in 2014, and read one book of Canadian literature every month, but I failed badly on both of those counts. So, I'll try again in 2015, and hopefully I'll be much more successful this time around.

Welcome back! I'm hoping to do a better job with author challenges this year...

>10 drneutron: Thanks, Jim! The second version of the American Author Challenge is considerably more interesting to me than the first one, and the British Author Challenge is very compelling as well.

I'll be interested to see what you pick in those two challenges! Happy New Year!

>12 maggie1944: Happy New Year to you too, Karen! I've listed the books I plan to read for those challenges in messages #4 and #5 of this thread.

I'll be following your many adventures (bookish and otherwise) again this year, Darryl!

>14 katiekrug: Thanks, Katie! I'll follow your thread and exploits as well. I also hope that we'll be able to meet up for a pitcher or two of Pimms in London in 2015.

I mentioned on my initial Club Read 2015 thread that I was also going to post favorite slow cooker, oven and stove top recipes, and I'll include them here as well.

Hi Darryl! I lurked on your threads some in 2014 and I thought I'd be polite and introduce myself this year. I live in Tennessee now, but I spent about 4 years in and near London so your thread topper has a nostalgic feel for me.

I liked A Golden Age when I read it a couple of years ago and Burial Rites is on my radar so I'll be curious to see what you think of them if you do get to them as planned in January.

I've also been lurking in your 2014 threads and will do so again in 2015.

Hoping you have a wonderful year in 2015, reading and otherwise!

>16 cbl_tn: Hi, Carrie! I'm glad that you introduced yourself, and I'll follow your 2015 threads as well. London has replaced San Francisco as my home away from home, so I thought that a photo of a sunrise in London was a good one to open the first thread of the coming year.

I'm glad that you liked A Golden Age. I read the second novel in Tahmima Anam's Bangladesh Trilogy, The Good Muslim, a couple of years ago, and I loved it, so I wanted to read the first novel as well. I'll have to find out when the last of the trilogy will be published.

Rachael (@FlossieT) spoke very highly about Burial Rites when we met in Cambridge earlier this year, and I tend to like the books that she's the most fond of, so I'll read it for Orange January.

>17 kiwiflowa: Hello, Lisa! I'll follow your 2015 threads closely, as I suspect that we share similar tastes in books as well. I hope that you have a productive and enjoyable year, too.

Happy 2015 reading Darryl. I'll do my best to follow through the year this time... leaving a star for now and returning in January.

>18 kidzdoc: I wish you a good reading year too, Nathalie! If I stick to my plans 2015 will be a much more satisfying year than 2014 was.

Well, needless to say, I am aiming to be cuckoo for books this year. Apart from my recent book funk (which quite frankly, I hope never to experience again) I am gagging for books. And I am resting assured that or thread will provide. Even if it is ready way before 2015....*not saying a word*

First point of call for me Doc, this year.

Goes without saying that I am glad to see you back.

Thanks for the support for the B.A.C this year. I would have been worried though had I not been able to interest you in an area of literature I know you're generally fond of.

>21 LovingLit: Hello, Megan! I'm also chomping at the bit to get started on my 2015 books, even though I'm enjoying the ones I'm currently reading. I'll probably get started on at least one of the January books this weekend, after I finish The Axeman's Jazz and The Old Child & Other Stories, but I'll be sure that I don't finish any of the 2015 books before New Year's Day.

Even if it is ready way before 2015....*not saying a word*

Hmph. Last year (or perhaps in 2013) I caught an earful from LT's favorite curmudgeon for waiting until New Year's Eve or New Year's Day to start my first thread, and now I'm getting grief for being an early bird? *grumbles bitterly*

>22 PaulCranswick: Welcome, Paul! I'm just as glad to see you here. I'm eager to get started on the British Authors Challenge, as well as version 2.0 of the American Authors Challenge and Reading Globally. The selected books in the AACII and BAC are highly interesting to me, as are the Reading Globally quarterly themes, and participating in those group reads will allow me to knock out a few dozen of the TBRs that are highest on my priority list.

I hope that you're enjoying your weekend, and that you have a pleasant week ahead of you.

Hi Darryl, found you and . I still have to do some reading for the 2014 challenge.

>24 Ameise1: Happy Saturday, Barbara! I hope to finish my two remaining books of 2014 no later than tomorrow, and start on my first 2015 book on Sunday or Monday.

>25 kidzdoc: Darryl, I've to finish two books and an audiobook to reach my target. :-)

>26 Ameise1: Go, Barbara! I'll be rooting for you to finish those three books.

Happy New Year, Darryl! Hope it's a great one for you and your family and all your patients!

>28 tloeffler: Happy New Year to you too, Terri! I and my family are doing well, and I'll see my parents, brother and aunt a week from today. It's been a very difficult winter for the children that have been hospitalized on our service, though; both RSV and influenza have hit with a vengeance this year, as the kids have been sicker and staying in hospital longer than would be the case in most years. When I left yesterday I only had four patients, but all of them were infants with RSV bronchiolitis, and three of them were quite ill. I wouldn't be surprised if at least two of the three will still be there when I return to work on Tuesday.

:(

The Orange January/July group, which focuses on books that have been chosen as finalists for the Orange Prize, now known as the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, has become very quiet over the past year. I'd like to see this group return to its former high level of activity, and since I have over two dozen unread Oranges in my TBR collection I'd like to read at least one Orange every two months.

Here is the latest list of my unread Orange books:

Orange Prize winners:
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2005)
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007) (I thought I had read this, but apparently I haven't)!
The Road Home by Rose Tremain (2008)
Home by Marilynne Robinson (2009)
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2014)

Orange Prize shortlisted books:
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2001)
The Siege by Helen Dunmore (2002)
The Accidental by Ali Smith (2006)
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (2007)
Scottsboro by Helen Feldman (2009)
The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey (2009)
Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver (2013)
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (2014)
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014)

Orange Prize longlisted books:
Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros (2003)
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (2008)
The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer (2008)
Evening Is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan (2009)
Intuition by Allegra Goodman (2009)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2010)
The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton (2010)
The Still Point by Amy Sackville (2010)
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (2010)
The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen (2012)
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (2012)
Lamb by Bonnie Nazdam (2013)
The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber (2013)
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (2014)

Looking forward to following you again in 2015 Darryl! (And maybe a real life meet-up or two as well).

>30 tloeffler: Yep.

>32 SandDune: Same here on both counts, Rhian!

Lurking around all the newly starting threads, I can't believe I didn't stumble across your threads last year, it looks like a smorgasbord of good reading is due to be happening. Looking forward to following along with you!

I'll be reading The History of Love for my Orange Jan read, looking forward to reading more Krauss and it's been on my tbr pile for a very long time.
Your reading year looks very interesting, hoping I can keep up.

Hi Darryl! Lots of potential you have here!

Darryl, I wish you a lovely weekend.

I hope your Holidays have been relaxed, and best wishes for a peaceful New Year.

Looking over your lists, we have an amazing overlap of books on our TBR shelves!

Regarding your proposed January reads, I've read both The Calcutta Chromosome and Basti. (My review of Basti is on the book's LT page. I read The Calcutta Chromosome back when it was first published, and I remember liking it very much. I suspect it will be right up your alley--from my vague memory of it I would call it medical science fictionish. I haven't picked my Indian subcontinent book(s) for Reading Globally yet, but have gathered a virtual list of those I have on my shelf.

Never Let Me Go is my least favorite Ishiguro. I would even go so far as to say I did not like it. I'll be interested in what you think. I'll be reading When We Were Orphans for the BAC in January.

I've been eyeing A History of Seven Killings on Amazon since in first appeared, but have so far restrained myself from one-clicking, so that's another one I'm interested in your views on.

In response to your questions on your last 2014 thread--I'll definitely be visiting City Lights next month.
My son lives on 3rd Street (Ave.?). I don't know what the area is called, it's a few blocks off Newark Ave. He walks to the Grove Street PATH station to get to work (he works on Times Square).

Happy 2015 thread, Darryl! Here we go! New beginnings, my friend.

Glad you'll be joining us for most of the AACII. I plan on starting my McCullers in a week or so.

Great to see your new thread, Darryl.

I'm already trying to resist several book bullets and it isn't even 2015! I am not going to buy A Golden Age for my Kindle now... no no no... too many unread books (actually I guess I should be blaming Carrie for saying it is good, but it's on your list, so you are both in trouble.)

New Treads. Hi. Good luck with the TBR!

>34 evilmoose: Hello, Megan! I recognize your cool username, but I didn't follow your thread this year, either. I looked at your profile page, and we do share a good number of books, so I'll definitely follow your thread in 2015.

You may also be interested in the Reading Globally group if you aren't already a member. It will focus on literature and nonfiction from the Indian subcontinent in the first quarter of 2015, and fellow 75 Books member Rhonda (@banjo123) has already set up a thread for this theme:

Jan-March 2015: The Indian Subcontinent.

>35 avatiakh: I look forward to your comments about The History of Love, Kerry. I read Nicole Krauss's subsequent novel Great House, and I enjoyed it.

I wonder if Belva (@rainpebble) would be interested in taking over the role of administrator of the Orange January/July group, now that Jill (@mrstreme) is no longer active on LT. She's been the most consistent member and best cheerleader of it over the past two years.

I just created a thread for Orange January 2015: http://www.librarything.com/topic/185164

>36 The_Hibernator: Thanks, Rachel! I think I'll be much more successful in my TBR reduction plans in 2015, thanks to the Reading Globally, American Authors 2.0 and British Authors challenges.

>37 Ameise1: I hope that you had a good Saturday, Barbara, and that Sunday is just as good. Are you off from school duties next week?

>38 arubabookwoman: Happy Holidays, Deborah! I worked three days Christmas Week (Mon, Tue, Fri), and after my preceding Hell Week this current week was a walk in the park in comparison. Hopefully the coming week won't be too bad, either. I hope that you're enjoying the Holidays as well.

I'm not surprised that our TBR shelves overlap, as our literary tastes coincide as closely as anyone else in this group.

At least one 75er, possibly Gautam, one of the few other physicians on LT, highly recommended The Calcutta Chromosome to me a couple of years ago, after I mentioned how much I liked Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, the first two novels in the Ibis Trilogy by Amitav Ghosh. (BTW, I see that Flood of Fire, the final novel in the trilogy, will be published this spring in the UK and in the summer in the US; I'll get it as soon as it comes out in the UK.) I read your review of Basti, which I think I received as part of my NYRB Book Club subscription in 2013.

I decided to renew my Archipelago Books subscription for a full year, as nearly all of the forthcoming 10 books look interesting to me. I can't remember if you are or were a subscriber as well, along with ?Anne, Ellen and Rebecca (@rebeccanyc).

I posted the novels from the Indian subcontinent I'm most interested in reading in the Reading Globally group thread. I also own several nonfiction books that I'd ideally like to read, including The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen, so I'll post those there this weekend, along with recommendations of books from the region that I've especially enjoyed, including the two novels by Ghosh, Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam, and Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka.

I'm sorry to hear that Never Let Me Go is your least favorite Ishiguro. The only other unread book I own by him is The Unconsoled, which Rachael (@FlossieT) gave me several years ago. That book is over 500 pages though, and Rachael was lukewarm about it, so I'm not chomping at the bit to read it. His new novel, The Buried Giant, will be published in March in the UK and US; if I'm somehow able to get an Advance Review copy of it, at Strand Book Store or elsewhere, I may read it in place of Never Let Me Go.

I've heard good things about A History of Seven Killings, so I'm eager to get started on it, possibly as early as Monday, and I'll definitely bring it with me when I travel to Philadelphia next weekend. It's just over 700 pages long, so there is no chance that I would finish it before January even if I started it next week.

I look forward to your purchases at City Lights next month, and I'll be interested to see if you display more restraint than I do. If you go in the morning and see Scott, an African American man who works at the front counter and plays some fabulous free jazz, please tell him that Darryl from Atlanta said hello!

I know exactly where your son lives! An old girlfriend of mine lived on Brunswick Street, which parallels Newark Avenue and intersects 3rd Street. She lived almost directly behind Pecoraro Bakery, a fabulous Italian bakery that is probably close to, if not over, 100 years old. The bakery makes the best sausage bread, pepperoni bread and pizza bread I've ever eaten. The key is getting there early, as it makes a limited number of baked goods on the premises every morning. I haven't been there in several years, and I might be tempted to go there the week after next if I travel to NYC, as it's within walking distance of the Grove Street PATH station, as you said.

Sigh. I miss Jersey City and NYC...

>39 msf59: Thanks, Mark! I'm raring to go, and I'm eager to get started on Clock Without Hands. I own the Libary of America edition of McCullers's Complete Novels, and Clock Without Hands is the only one of the five in this collection that I haven't read yet (I think it's her last novel as well).

>40 cushlareads: Hello, Cushla! I haven't read A Golden Age yet, so I can't possibly be blamed for your interest in it. However, I will take blame for recommending the second book in Tahmima Anam's Bangladesh Trilogy, The Good Muslim, which is the follow up to A Golden Age.

>41 BBGirl55: Hi Bryony! I hope that you're doing well, and that 2015 is a good reading year for you. Hopefully we can meet again next year.

>42 kidzdoc: Oh brilliant, I hadn't realised that group existed, but it sounds just my cup of tea. Thanks for the suggestion.

>45 evilmoose: You're welcome, Megan! After I looked at the books in your LT library I thought that you would be interested in the Reading Globally group.

Can I implore you to read Never Let Me Go ? definitely gives you something to think about .... having already read that will try read Remains of the day for BAC

>42 kidzdoc: Darryl, I don't work next week. So thete is plenty of time to finish my 2014 challenge and move on with the 2015 one.

If I can manage it, I'll try to join in the Orange January reading. My reading list is full already, but I'll try to squeeze in either Five Quarters of the Orange or Home from my TBR stash.

Verso Books, "the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world", is currently offering its e-books on sale from now until January 1st. Several of these books are ones I've seen at City Lights Bookstore but didn't buy, so this sale was too good to pass up. I bought 21 e-books for $43.80, and ordered an additional free e-book of selected excerpts from the 100+ books that were published in 2014:

Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control
Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America
B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste
Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings
Daniel Barenboim, Music Quickens Time
Carla Blumenkranz, et al., Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Juan González and Joseph Torres, News For All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the
American Media
Alfredo Gutierrez, To Sin Against Hope: How America Has Failed Its Immigrants: A Personal History
Anabel Hernández, Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers
Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity
Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
Óscar Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail
Hsiao-Hung Pai, Scattered Sand: The Story of China's Rural Migrants
Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland
José Saramago, The Lives of Things
Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations
Nadya Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek, Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj
Daniel Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right
Verso Books, Verso 2014: Free Ebook Collection

Here's a link to the sale: All ebooks are 90% off until Jan 1st!

>47 roundballnz: Yes you can, Alex. It is extremely unlikely that I'll find a copy of The Buried Giant in January (although it is possible that Strand Book Store in NYC, which is known for offering unread Advance Review books for half off the cover price, might have it), and even if I do I would like to read Never Let Me Go this year.

Remains of the Day is one of my favorite 20th century novels, and it's easily the best book that Ishiguro has written.

>48 Ameise1: Excellent, Barbara! That gives you four days to finish those last two books. Good luck!

>49 cbl_tn: Very good, Carrie. I hope that we have a strong turnout for Orange January.

Verso Books looks like an amazing resource. It gives me hope to know that such an organization lives, and hopefully thrives today! I no longer expect myself to be able to read dense political literature as my adult onset attention deficit and my isolation from intellectual discussions means I'm easily persuaded to chase squirrels. But I am glad to know authors continue to write history from the left.

>52 maggie1944: I completely agree with you about Verso Books, Karen. I've purchased several Verso print books before, and fortunately I signed up to the publisher's e-mail list, which is how I found out about this amazing sale. I'll have to go back and do the math, but I'll bet that I saved at least $200 by buying the electronic versions of these books!

ETA: I should have also mentioned that most of the print books from Verso are 50% off until January 1st as well.

I had mixed feelings about The Unconsoled--very interesting and well-written, but it was also surrealistic, which I frequently don't like, or maybe just don't get. Since I'm inferring that you frequently like the surrealistic, I'm guessing that you might like The Unconsoled. There's also a lot about music and creativity. On the other hand, I found Never Let Me Go to be warmed over science fiction. There was nothing wrong with it, it was easy to read, but there was nothing to make it stand out in memory. I agree with you that Remains of the Day is a masterpiece, and if someone is going to read only one Ishiguro, that should be the one.

Wow--I followed the link to Pecoraro's and see that it must be around the corner from my son's apartment. He lives on Third between Monmouth and Coles, and it looks like Pecoraro's is also between Monmouth and Coles. I'll be sure to let them know about it. They eat out (or take out) a lot, and they might already have discovered Pecoraro's. When we were there in November we ate at a good hamburger place in their vicinity on Newark, but the name escapes me now.

I'll probably be restrained at City Lights in January (even though my Thingaversary is January) because of luggage weight issues. I'll be sure to look for Scott and say hello if I see him. The last time I was at City Lights was 1969, and when we were there, Ferlinghetti himself was sitting in the back reading (I'm sure the store was quite a bit smaller then than it is now).

I like Archipelago Books a lot, too, but have never subscribed, primarily because they are sometimes heavy on poetry, nonfiction prose, and short stories, all of which I have difficulties with. On their forthcoming offerings, I would love to get the two by Tarjei Vesaas (his The Ice Palace was one of my best books of 2013). I have, but have not read volumes I and II of Knausgard's My Struggle, and might get to them this year. I loved A Time for Everything.

Thanks for the head's up on the Verso sale. I saw several books I'm interested in, but for the moment my eyes glazed over when I saw there were twists and turns on how to actually download them from the site (as opposed to one-click at Amazon, which I've thoroughly mastered).

I agree with >54 arubabookwoman: that Ice Palace is a fine read. I bought my copy in Shakespeare and Co, Paris, some years ago. I need to read some more Vesaas.

You've got some gems in the Orange Prize list too.

I shall look forward to your reading thoughts in the New Year Darryl.

Darryl, I've done a lot of lurking in previous years since I've seen you around the threads. Always impressed by the calibre of books you read especially with such a demanding career as well. Just wanted to let you know that I'll be following along this year. :)

Officially leaving my star(s) on your new thread. Happy 2015, Darryl!

I've finished what should be my second to last book of 2014, The Old Child & Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck, which was a bit of a disappointment compared to her excellent novel Visitation. I'm nearly halfway through The Axeman's Jazz by Ray Celestin, which is very good so far. I should finish it tomorrow, and then I'll start on my first book of 2015 (I haven't decided which of my planned January reads to pick up first).

>54 arubabookwoman: Interesting comments about The Unconsoled and Never Let Me Go, Deborah. I'll plan to read Never Let Me Go next month, but I'm now considerably more interested in reading The Unconsoled than I was before, as I do like surrealist literature. BTW, City Lights Bookstore has an entire bookcase dedicated to Surrealism, which is in the front portion of the store directly across from the cashier's desk.

I'd be surprised if your son hasn't been in Pecoraro's already. The aroma from its ovens in the evening and early morning hours was intoxicating, and he may be close enough to it to be able to get a whiff of it, either from his flat or on the walk to the Grove Street PATH station.

From what I understand City Lights has expanded in size since 1969, as it bought the shop adjacent to it, within the same building. I think that "new" portion houses the upstairs Poetry Room and the offices for its employees.

I've seen Lawrence Ferlinghetti at least twice as he entered the bookstore while I spoke with Scott. It's probably been four or five years since I've seen him, which is no surprise as he'll turn 96 on March 24th (I share a birthday with him, and with at least two LTers, Cait (@Cait86) and our own Rhian (@SandDune)).

Ah, I thought you had a subscription to Archipelgo Books, but I wasn't sure. I want to start reading Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series relatively early next year; I own Books 1 and 2, and I'll request Book 3 as my free book that comes with a year long Archipelago subscription.

There are the next 10 forthcoming Archipelago books, according to the publisher's web site:

A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Faik Abasıyanık
Time Ages in a Hurry by Antonio Tabucchi
Selected Poems of Corsino Fortes
Bitter Life by Josep Pla
This Life by Karel Schoeman
My Struggle: Book Four by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Absolute Solitude by Dulce Maria Loynaz
Tristano Dies: A Life by Antonio Tabucchi
Private Life by Josep Maria de Sagarra
Broken Mirror by Elias Khoury

I would have bought the books by Abasiyanik, Tabucchi (2), Pla, Knausgaard, Maria de Sagarra and Khoury, and possibly the one by Schoeman as well, so it made sense to subscribe for a year, and get the 20% discount, free shipping, and the extra book.

I'm completely unfamiliar with Tarjei Vesaas, so I'm glad that you've enjoyed his work. It's not unusual that the order of forthcoming books changes during the year, so I wouldn't be completely surprised if I end up with one or both of his books next year.

I'll download the Verso books I bought to my Kindle tomorrow, and let you know if I run into any problems. I don't think I will, though, as I've been able to download the free monthly e-books from the University of Chicago Press, which have a similar format.

My eyes are also glazing over, as I see that it's after midnight.

>55 Caroline_McElwee: Hi, Caroline! I'm glad to hear that you liked Ice Palace as well. BTW, the flagship branch of Foyles on Charing Cross Road at one time had a rack of Archipelago books in the old bookshop. I've only been in the new store once since it opened in ?June.

Yes, several of those Orange books are high on my TBR list, so I'd like to read at least half a dozen of them in 2015.

I'll make at least two or three trips to London next year, so hopefully we can meet up then. I'll soon start looking at the upcoming plays at the National Theatre, the Almeida Theatre and elsewhere, find out which ones I want to see the month, and request time off from work so that I can see as many as I can, probably in March or April.

>56 jolerie: Welcome, Valerie, and thanks for the stars! I'll follow your 2015 threads as well.

>57 EBT1002: Hi Ellen! Now that my Eagles have been eliminated from the NFC playoffs I'll root for your Seahawks, especially if they play the hated Cowboys. Congratulations to the team for securing home field advantage throughout the playoffs.

The NFC South is a joke. The Carolina Panthers (7-8-1) won the division by blasting the home town Failcons Falcons this afternoon 34-3 in Atlanta. The Eagles (10-6) finished with three more wins than the Panthers, and they soundly beat them 45-21 during the regular season, yet they will stay home and watch the Panthers host(!) a wild card game next week.

I'll also root for the Steelers, as I became a fan of the Black and Gold during the four years I went to Pitt for medical school.

>51 kidzdoc: I think you are right with Remains of the Day one of the few where I have seen the movie but not the book ....

>51 kidzdoc: I haven't seen the movie version of The Remains of the Day, Alex. However, I hardly ever go to the cinema or watch movies on television or online, although I have seen two or three National Theatre Live rebroadcasts in my local arts cinema in the past two years, and Bianca and I went to the BFI Southbank in September to see the restored version of the classic 1931 Fritz Lang drama M, which starred Peter Lorre as a child mass murderer.

Am I only allowed to enter Darryl-world if I promise to read globally? Cos if that's the case, I'd better be refused entry - I'm going to be so specific in my reading I will only read books set in my hometown ;)

Fiction Top 10:
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel
Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
Amos Oz, Between Friends
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Niall Williams, History of the Rain
Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

Nonfiction Top 10:
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Dr. Mütter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Jordan Goodman, Paul Robeson: A Watched Man
Robert Hughes, Barcelona
Alan Johnson, This Boy: Memoir of a Childhood
Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones
Eric Lax, The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle
Darian Leader, Strictly Bipolar
Catherine Musemeche, Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery
Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona

Fiction Honorable Mention Top 5:
Ray Celestin, The Axeman's Jazz
Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer
Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Anthony de Sa, Kicking the Sky
Birgit Vandebeke, The Mussel Feast

Nonfiction Honorable Mention Top 5:
Burton Batt, Christmas in Purgatory: A Photographic Essay on Mental Retardation
Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Randy Christensen, M.D., Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them
Julian Mash, Portobello Road: Lives of a Neighbourhood
Guthrie Ramsey, The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop

Best Novel Published in 2014: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Best Nonfiction Book Published in 2014: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Best Debut Novel: The Shock of the Fall

Best Memoir: How I Became Hettie Jones

Best Poetry Collection: Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box

Best YA Book Published in 2014: Brown Girl Dreaming

And, finally, The Best Book of the Year: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Congratulations to all of the winners!

>61 lunacat: Not only do you have to read globally, Jenny, you also have to eat globally. Those who do not consume diets rich in foods from the Indian subcontinent in the first quarter of the year, and from the Iberian peninsula in the second quarter, will be warned, suspended, and expelled in that order.

Great best of list, Darryl! Glad to see All Quiet on there, since it made my top 5. I am also particularly interested in the Mengestu (although I wasn't bowled over by his last book) and the Flanagan. I have still yet to read Coetzee.

>64 msf59: Thanks, Mark! I loved Mengestu's debut novel Children of the Revolution (published as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears in the US), and I admired more than liked How to Read the Air, but All Our Names was much better than his sophomore effort.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a classic, and I'm thankful that Bianca gave it to me. The Narrow Road to the Deep North was a worthy winner of this year's Booker Prize, and it was the best book from the shortlist that I've read (I probably won't finish Ali Smith's How to Be Both, the only shortlisted book I haven't read, before the end of the year).

I'm definitely a Coetzee fan. In addition to Waiting for the Barbarians I also enjoyed Disgrace, Life & Times of Michael K, and Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life, but I was much less fond of Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man.

Well I can't guarantee the reading globally but I can certainly contribute to the eating globally. I ADORE Indian food and will happily launch into that challenge with both feet. Ooooh, I can dig out my friend's Indian cookbook - I want to get better at cooking and this will be ideal.

>66 lunacat: Great, Jenny! There are dozens of recipes from the Indian subcontinent in Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian cookbook, which I bought earlier this month, and I'll give some of them a try in the coming weeks. The Indian Almond and Cashew Nut Soup looks particularly enticing.

Your book of the year is sitting at the top of my tbr early in 2015 pile Darryl.

Great list! I am definitely going to add Dr. Mütter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine and a few others to my list. I don't know why, but I became very interested in books about medicine and biology this year. Blood and anything medical makes me queasy in real life, but reading about it is fascinating!

With apologies to ESPN and alumni of SMU, UConn, Iowa State, and other universities with dreadful football teams:



Bottom 10 Books of 2014:

Peter Apps, Before Ebola: Dispatches from a Deadly Outbreak: A self absorbed and incredibly annoying journalist writes about himself and his journo colleagues instead of the Ebola outbreak that unfortunately did not fell him. This is easily the worst Kindle Single I've ever read.

Norma Cole, Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside: A completely inscrutable collection of poems, which probably should have come with mescaline or synthetic marijuana as a comprehension aid. Here's an example:

Blackberry bushes beside the freeway. Ajuga (bugleweed). Without
leave. Howl, Homer. Sylvia rode up on her bike smiling younger than
springtime. A child is able, hears music as other music.
I wasn't sleeping. The government begins without bees, rocks,
figuring out how much time's gone by by how cold the coffee gets.
Now is the cover of your pen and ink. Names the human project:
earmuffs: shamrocks: a verbal gap. In the early part of the morning a
small hole in the ceiling, a foot pulls up into the hole, ceiling covers
over paradise or charade. You never hear from her. Picking up tissue
from the floor. Transport. They can't stand and shoot. And talk
to each other (even) can't talk to each other, as I said. Up-coming
passages. Epistle of forgiveness: spat on the hair, spat on the faces,
spat on the other foot. Mount Brake-up or Back-up. Heals the words
in her foot. She got plenty. To be or not the little dot bouncing
toward her.

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour: A self absorbed and incredibly annoying dentist from the Upper East Side of Manhattan ruminates about his difficult and unhappy life. This is one of the three books that were chosen for the Booker Prize shortlist that are included in my Bottom 10.

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: Another inexplicable choice for this year's Booker Prize shortlist, which should have been named We Are All Completely Full of Ourselves, narrated by an angst ridden middle class suburban American teenager with a most unusual sibling. This novel and the Ferris were perfect examples of why it was a huge mistake to make American novels eligible for the Booker Prize.

Howard Jacobson, J: A Novel: The noted comic writer tries his hand at a serious novel about a dystopian society, which the Booker Prize committee loved for some unknown reason.

James Kelman, Kieron Smith, boy: This was the biggest disappointment of the year for me, as I thought I would love this coming of age novel about a troubled Glaswegian boy.

Dany Laferrière, I Am a Japanese Writer: It's possible that Laferrière is correct, as this slight and far too clever novel about a struggling writer from Montreal who passes as a best selling author in Japan would probably make more sense in that language than it did in its English translation.

Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A pathetic collection of essays by an African American writer who needs to put on his big boy boxers and stop wallowing in ennui and self pity.

Quim Monzó, Gasoline: This novel by the noted Catalan writer received the lowest rating of any book I've read this year (one star). As I said in my review, "Gasoline was a thoroughly maddening read, as I found Heribert to be a useless, pathetic and intensely dislikable tortured artiste. This book was supposedly about the creative process in art, but none of its characters captured my attention or earned an ounce of sympathy from me."

Herta Müller, The Passport: Oof. Unremitting bleakness and despair prevail again in one of this Nobel Prize winner's early works, set in a Romanian town in which a German minority is cruelly persecuted ad nauseum. Reading this book was about as enjoyable as sticking my hand in a food processor.

The winner of the Worst Book of the Year Award is To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, due mainly to its mystifying choice for the Booker Prize shortlist.

>68 Caroline_McElwee: Excellent, Caroline! I hope that you enjoy Being Mortal as much as I did.

>69 rosylibrarian: Thanks, Marie! Dr. Mütter's Marvels was a fascinating and inspiring read, and Cristin Aptowicz's enthusiasm about her subject made it very enjoyable as well.

>70 kidzdoc: It's a shame that the latest by Kelman was so weak. I loved Not Not While the Giro and How Late It Was, How Late.

Ooh, some great recommendations, and some fantastic scathing reviews. I'm feeling inspired to create my own Worst Books of the Year list now.

>70 kidzdoc: Right, Maggie. Kieron Smith, boy was practically at the top of my TBR list for this year, as I had been very eager to read it after I bought it back in 2008. It was annoyingly repetitive, as Kieron used Glawegian words such as "ye" hundreds of times in the book, and revisited several topics multiple times. I loved the similar novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, which was also a dark coming of age novel about a troubled boy, set in Dublin, and I thought that I would like Kieron Smith, boy nearly as much.

I do own How Late It Was, How Late, and I'm still eager to read it despite my disappointment with Kieron Smith, boy.

>71 kidzdoc: Thanks, Megan. It's therapeutic to pull out the poison pen and eviscerate books that I dislike, especially ones that are nominated for major awards or are overhyped. I miss reading Richard Derus's scathing negative reviews in this group, and I look forward to his return for that reason, and many others.

>58 kidzdoc: "The NFC South is a joke."
Well, yes. I understand why the system is the way it is, but it seems somehow wrong that a 10-6 team stays home while a team that finished the season under .500 gets to host. It's hard to know who to predict will win between the Panthers and the Cardinals. The latter have a much better record but they have been on the downswing. My Seahawks will play either Dallas (boo) or Detroit in the second round. I'm glad we get both a bye week (our regular season bye came very early so we can use this week for some healing of injuries) and home field advantage. No one wants to play in Seattle but we didn't want to play in Green Bay, either.

I love your best-of and worst-of lists. I don't think I hated To Rise Again at a Decent Hour quite as much as you did, but it fell SO far short of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and How to be both. They shouldn't even be in the same conversation.

I have Being Mortal on my wish list and hope to get it and read it sooner rather than later.

I gave Brown Girl Dreaming to my 12-year-old grand niece for Christmas and mentioned to her that I might like to borrow it when she is done. :-)

Darryl - I just stopped by to leave a star. You're going to need a new thread before New Year's Day! Good luck with your Super ambitious reading planned for 2015.

Wow Darryl you are off to a flyer for 2015 already. Great, great lists and being prone to a few of my own I will cogitate and make my own lists of best and worst.

>75 EBT1002: It's also wrong to leave home that 10-6 team over the 7-8-1 one when the one with the better record trounced the other in their only meeting (Eagles 45, Panthers 21). Then again, your Seahawks qualified for a postseason berth in 2010 after they won the NFC West with a 7-9 record, and proceeded to upset the Saints in one of the wild card games.

The administrator of this thread is a lifelong ABC member (Anybody But the Cowboys), so hopefully the Lions will send pretty boy Tony Romo and his squad home early. However, the 'Boys look as formidable this year as they have in a very long time, and I wouldn't bet anything against them (although Romo has a long standing history of choking in big games).

Green Bay finished undefeated at home this year, and Lambeau Field is a tough place to play in January, when the wind chill is often in single digits or less than zero F. However, the 2011 edition of the New York Giants beat the Packers and Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau Field in mid January 2012 on their way to their fourth Super Bowl victory, so it isn't an impossible task. If anything, I think I'd rather see my team play at Lambeau Field in January rather than CenturyLink Field.

I was all but ranting out loud when I read To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, as I absolutely hated it and its whiny, spoilt upper middle class American narrator. I was already unhappy when I found out last year that Ion Trewin, the administrator of the Booker Prize Foundation, and his team had decided to make American novels eligible for the award this year. My worst fears came to pass, as two awful books were chosen, which IMO meant that two far more worthy awards by authors from the UK and Commonwealth countries were passed over as a result. Sadly, Mr Trewin is terminally ill with cancer, so it looks as though someone else will take his place, if that hasn't already happened.

I hope that you enjoy Being Mortal as much as I did. Atul Gawande is a gifted writer, and he is just as good as a speaker. I'm sure that I've mentioned previously that I attended a lecture that he gave several years ago at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, after his book Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance was published. He was very comfortable at the lectern, and we had a very nice personal chat for a couple of minutes afterward. If I had to choose one writer to have dinner or watch a football game in a sports bar with, he would be at the top of my list.

Thanks for mentioning that you gave Brown Girl Dreaming to your grand-niece for Christmas, as it reminds me that I need to get back to a dear friend of mine and classmate from medical school, who asked me if I thought it would be an appropriate book for her daughter, who I think is 10 or 11 years old but is quite precocious.

>76 BLBera: Thanks, Beth! I have to go back to work tomorrow, so I won't be anywhere near as active on LT after today and until the weekend.

>77 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul. It helps that I'm off for a few days and that I haven't traveled to visit my parents in Philadelphia or my best friends in Wisconsin at the end of the year. I look forward to your year end lists as well.

Meredith (@Mabith) from Club Read astutely pointed out that I incorrectly listed Brown Girl Dreaming in my Top 10 Fiction list, as it is a memoir in verse. So, I've updated my Best Books of 2014:



Fiction Top 10:
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, The Colonel
Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer
Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
Amos Oz, Between Friends
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Niall Williams, History of the Rain

Nonfiction Top 10:
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, Dr. Mütter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Jordan Goodman, Paul Robeson: A Watched Man
Robert Hughes, Barcelona
Alan Johnson, This Boy: Memoir of a Childhood
Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones
Eric Lax, The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle
Catherine Musemeche, Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery
Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona
Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

Fiction Honorable Mention Top 5:
Ray Celestin, The Axeman's Jazz
Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others
Anthony de Sa, Kicking the Sky
Birgit Vandebeke, The Mussel Feast

Nonfiction Honorable Mention Top 5:
Burton Batt, Christmas in Purgatory: A Photographic Essay on Mental Retardation
Susannah Cahalan, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Randy Christensen, M.D., Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them
Darian Leader, Strictly Bipolar
Guthrie Ramsey, The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop

Best Novel Published in 2014: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Best Nonfiction Book Published in 2014: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Best Debut Novel: The Shock of the Fall

Best Memoir: How I Became Hettie Jones

Best Poetry Collection: Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box

Best YA Book Published in 2014: Brown Girl Dreaming

And, finally, The Best Book of the Year: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Darryl, impressive plans (oh, so organized!) for 2015, and a great wrap-up for 2014. Dropping a star, and wishing you HNY and happy reading!

>81 lit_chick: Thanks, Nancy! I hope that you have a Happy New Year, too.

I have to agree with you about J: a novel. I didn't really see why it was a Booker contender either and I usually am a sucker for a dystopian novel. Have your read his earlier books?

Starred you, Darryl. Here's hoping I'll be able to do a better job of keeping up with your threads in 2015 than I did this year!

I dutifully browsed the Verso pages but alas, the two books I was interested in weren't available as ebooks and so weren't only £1, and I didn't want to read them enough to pay over £5 for a print copy. But at least I can say I tried!

Crud. This hasn't been a good afternoon and evening so far. I took a nap after lunch, woke up feeling woozy and nauseous, and I've vomited twice since then, presumably as a result of a case of viral gastritis that I picked up from one of the hospitalized patients that I took care of last week. I'm feeling nauseous again, so I'm brewing a mug of ginger tea now, and hopefully I can keep it down. I go back to work tomorrow, and I would hate to call out sick if I don't have to.

>83 jolerie: I don't see why J was a Booker Prize contender either, Valerie. The jury included some very curious novels in the longlist, and several of them were shortlisted as well. Fortunately, like the much maligned 2011 Booker jury, they ended up choosing the best book for the award in the end, IMO.

ETA: I've read two of Jacobson's other books, his Booker Prize winning novel The Finkler Question, which I liked more than most people, and No More Mr. Nice Guy, which I loathed. I have two of his earlier novels, Kalooki Nights and The Mighty Walzer, which are destined to be culled early next year, and a collection of his journal articles titled Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It, which I'll keep, as I enjoyed the first two or three articles I read in it.

>84 cameling: Hi, Caroline! I hope to see you here more often in 2015, too.

>85 lunacat: Well done, Jenny. I'm glad that you looked at the Verso e-book offerings, even if you didn't find anything to your liking. Luci and I, at least, made a killing there.

Hmm...I've now purchased at least 45 books this month. Maybe I shouldn't go book shopping next month.

Sorry you are sick Darryl. Get better soon.

Glad I'm not the only one who can do that kind of book buying!

Get better soon!

>87 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks, Caroline. I'm hopeful that I can ride this out, especially since I don't have any long calls at work this week.

Glad I'm not the only one who can do that kind of book buying!

Yep. I may have several good traits, but restraint in buying books isn't one of them.

ETA >88 The_Hibernator: Thanks, Rachel!

Sorry to hear you aren't feeling well, Darryl. My husband came down with something over Christmas and was not a happy camper. I will assume that, as a doctor, you are much less given to whining and feeling sorry for yourself than he is :)

Hope you're feeling better soon, Darryl.

>90 katiekrug: Thanks, Katie. I'm sorry to hear that your husband has taken ill, and I hope that he's on the mend.

I hope that I'm not prone to feeling sorry for myself when I'm sick, especially since I see hospitalized children every day at work who are far worse off than I am or ever have been. Kids, especially young ones, are tough and resilient, and even when they feel bad they want to smile, play, and enjoy life as fully as they can.

>91 cushlareads: Thanks, Cushla. I'm no longer feeling nauseous after the mug of ginger tea, so I think the worst of this brief illness is behind me.

Yep, he's fine now. It was a weird, brief thing. But you would think he was at death's door, the way he carried on for those 12 hours ;-)

>93 katiekrug: LOL! Hopefully you won't contract The Wayne's near fatal illness, Katie.

Sorry to hear you don't feel to well get better soon. It looks like your set for a good year of reading.

95 posts already? You aren't giving a woman a fighting chance here, chum! Sorry you have Le Crud.

>95 BBGirl55: Thanks, Bryony. I feel vastly better now than I did an hour ago.

I think I am set up for a good year of reading! I can hardly wait to get started, although I'm enjoying my last book of the year, The Axeman's Jazz by Ray Celestin. It's a debut novel based on a historical event, the murders committed by the Axeman of New Orleans in 1918 and 1919. It's very well written, with interesting characters and historical detail which is quite accurate from what I know and remember (I lived in New Orleans from 1978-1981 and I've been back there twice in the past three years, so I'm very familiar with the Crescent City). Rachael (@FlossieT) gave me a copy of it when we met in Cambridge in September, and even though I'm less than 2/3 of the way through I'm absolutely loving it, even though I normally don't read crime novels.

>96 tiffin: Le Crud seems to be on the way out, so I'll go to work tomorrow, which will make it much easier to keep up with this thread, Tui!

97 sound very good. I hope to get my main current read done before the year is out.

>99 BBGirl55: It is, Bryony. Celestin is currently working on a sequel to The Axeman's Jazz, which will be set in Chicago in the 1920s and include some of the main characters in this book, one of which is legendary jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong.

100 posts before the year even peeks over the horizon!! Of course, I should have expected this from you. *Sigh* If only I weren't afraid of missing something by skimming... You are right about the Orange January/July threads. I don't think I visited them at all this year, and certainly didn't consider the prize lists when choosing my reading. I will try to help brighten things up over there. I love your lists...especially the "Worsts". I'm not really surprised at a few of those titles; the hype was beyond belief, and that's always a bad sign in my opinion.

>101 laytonwoman3rd: It's crazy isn't it, Linda?

I've discovered a significant number of new authors (Kamila Shamsie, Madeline Miller, Maggie Gee, Barbara Kingsolver, Aminatta Forna, Eleanor Catton et al.) and favorite books (Burnt Shadows, The Song of Achilles, The White Family, The Lacuna, The Memory of Love, etc.) as a result of reading books chosen for the Orange Prize longlist, which has expanded my reading, along with comments from members of the Orange January/July group. That group should be much more active than it currently is, and I'm happy to do whatever I can to promote it.

I preferentially chose books that were heavily praised or won critical acclaim, including How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, which has an average rating of nearly 4½ stars on LT, and the Booker Prize nominees. I agree with you on overhyped books, including the execrable novels Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore.

YAY! I finally caught up with your 2015 thread! I really should stop visiting thread in reverse order. I never seem to catch up with the popular threads - like this one - using this method of thread management.

Oh.... The Axeman's Jazz book has a very intriguing cover. it's actually eye-catching. Curious to learn what you think of it.

I am looking forward to following your reading this year. You have so many books listed that have caught my curious eye. I am going to attempt to be a more frequent visitor to your threads but something tells me the next couple of weeks are going to be a little bit crazy around here! ;-)

>60 kidzdoc: - the movie adaptation (1993) of The Remains of the Day is amazing - says one who has never read the book but seen the movie twice. I can only say that one cannot go wrong when a movie stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

I hope you are feeling better soon. It is no fun being sick.

>102 kidzdoc: My own view (and supported by statistics gleaned from the group I hasten to add) is that men don't read enough female writers. The ladies usually read more female than male authors but the difference is not as distinct as it is with the chaps. The Women's Prize has been tremendously successful in giving sufficient exposure to some wonderful writers.

>104 PaulCranswick: Hmmm There is a prevalence of male writers in my book collection & reading, but its not intentional ( we all know the guy who WON'T read female writers). sometimes I think the low numbers are due to language/rhythm thing if that makes sense at all.

>103 lkernagh: YES I love that Movie ......

Hi Darryl. Checking out your new thread . . . Happy 2015!

>103 lkernagh: I'd agree that The Remains of the Day is a really excellent film.

Going back to your Booker shortlist discussions my end of year assessment for my current course is to rewrite the Booker Prize guidelines and to argue the case for a winner based on a shortlist of a number of books from my course and one book of my own choosing. At the moment I'm thinking that that book will be The Remains of the Day, so that's what I'll be re-reading in January for Paul's challenge.

Hmm, I'm not sure if my reading has a male/female slant or not. I wonder if there is a gender-bias in peoples' bias (I appreciate that sentence makes no sense), ie if a man is more likely to have a gender preference to his reading one way or another, or if a woman is.

Found you Darryl! 100+ posts already?? As you're feeling sick I'll let you off. Hope you feel better soon.

Hi Darryl, I missed your bout with Le Crud and am glad it passed quickly. I'm glad to see you reviving the Orange/Baileys Prize group. In 2014 I only read the winning book, A Girl is a Half Formed Thing, but I read 3 books in 2013 that ended up on the 2014 short list. This discussion reminded me that I wanted to read Burial Rites, which I see my library has in a Kindle edition, so I'll plan to read it in January.

Get well soon, Darryl.

Darryl, I am here with my star and find I am already over 100 posts behind. And I was hoping to keep up better this year!


>31 kidzdoc:: I love the Orange/Bailey Prize. I will revive my thread and join in again. I have The Ghost Road out and ready to be my first book of the year. I am going to "cheat" and begin early as I have already closed out my thread and 2014 reading.

>62 kidzdoc:: Love your Best of 2014 Books. I've read a few of them and look forward to reading more. Keep up the recommendations! As if I need more books to read…Ha!

How are you feeling today, Darryl? Ginger tea worked wonders for me too and I've at least kicked the cough. I'm now just trying to beat the cold to a pulp before tomorrow.

Thanks for your kind get well wishes, everyone! I've been completely back to normal since I went to bed last night, and I now wonder if something I ate made me sick (possibly the sablefish from Barney Greengrass?).

>103 lkernagh: Hi, Lori! I usually do the same thing, work from the bottom up, and I have the same problem, especially when those people or their followers are posting messages as I'm catching up on threads. Sometimes I'll skip to the top to read particular threads "out of order", though.

I had a very easy first day back to work, as I was finished by 3 pm, so I may finish The Axeman's Jazz as early as today. It has a very New Orleanian design to its cover, with the skull head adorned in a high hat. Oddly enough, even though it's set in early 20th century New Orleans the author is from London, and the book was published in the UK and won't be available in the US until next September, according to Amazon. I have a little over 150 pages to go, and if I was to rate it now I'd give it at least 4½ stars.

It will be crazy around here, but I think that the week between Christmas and New Year's Day is the busiest time of the year, as people juggle between the last threads of the current year and the first ones of the coming year, and as members decide to join new groups that they are interested in.

I will also follow your thread in 2015.

Thanks for mentioning the movie version of The Remains of the Day. Not counting the restored version of Fritz Lang's M, which I saw with Bianca at the BFI Southbank in September, the last new movie I saw in a cinema was Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore, which came out in the summer of 2004. I do love seeing plays, though, and I saw 17 of them in London last year, along with the rebroadcast of the brilliant National Theatre Live production of Frankenstein, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as the Monster and Jonny Lee Miller as the Doctor. I usually review the plays, jazz and classical concerts, and museum exhibitions that I see on my thread as well, although I didn't do as good a job of it in September as I had done for the rest of the year.

I am 100% back to normal now!

>104 PaulCranswick: My own view (and supported by statistics gleaned from the group I hasten to add) is that men don't read enough female writers. The ladies usually read more female than male authors but the difference is not as distinct as it is with the chaps.

I think that's right, Paul. I generally read about two books by male authors for every book by a female one. I'll have to check my statistics for this year, but it's probably about the same, somewhere between a 2/3 to 3/4 split in favor of the guys. And, for that matter, at least some of my favorite books by women writers have focused primarily on male characters, including Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna. Several of those favorite books have focused on female characters, though, particularly Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, The Spare Room by Helen Garner, and Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson.

I also strongly suspect that women readers are far more likely to read books by men than the other way round. In Club Read and in Belletrista, the now unfortunately defunct online magazine about women writers from abroad that several of us contributed to until two years ago, we talked about the effect that book covers can have on readers' decision to buy a particular book, especially when a book that a man might be interested in reading sports an unappealing "girly" cover.

>105 roundballnz: I suspect that my library is also tilted in favor of male authors by 2/3 to 3/4, if not slightly more than that. (I think I can use LT's Zeitgeist function to figure that out, right?). I also don't intentionally decide not to read a book because it's written by a woman, as the gender of the author is completely immaterial to me, but I think I'm more likely to be interested in topics that a man would write about, though. I'm not sure if I'm making sense here, as I'm not sure what I mean by this exactly; I'll have to give this a bit more thought...

>106 brenpike: Happy 2015 to you too, Brenda!

Oh dear, my mind went to dangerous places when I skimmed through and saw you said 'I usually work from the bottom up' and thought for one moment you were explaining your diagnosis methods, so a child coming in with respiratory issues or seizures would be subjected to the 'bottom up' school of treatment.

What can I say, I have a weird thought process :/

>107 SandDune: Thanks for seconding the movie version of The Remains of the Day, Rhian. Hmm...I may try to see it online if I have time in January.

That's an interesting course requirement; I'm certain that I would enjoy doing that. My first step would be to eliminate authors from the US for consideration, as they have enough native prizes that authors from abroad aren't eligible for, e.g., the Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Awards, the most prestigious awards in this country. Very few readers in the US are knowledgeable about the Booker Prize, unfortunately, so not many people here would care if an American book won the award, and the winning, shortlisted or longlisted books wouldn't receive any significant bump in sales as a result of their selection, at least not now. I can't remember if I've ever seen a sticker for a book I've purchased in the US which indicated that it won the Booker Prize; in comparison, the copy of Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano that I bought at City Lights a couple of weeks ago prominently mentions that the author is the "2014 Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature".



I think that The Remains of the Day is my all time favorite Booker winner, with Midnight's Children and Wolf Hall in the running, and not counting Troubles.

>108 lunacat: That's exactly what I was trying to say, Jenny! Male readers, I think, gravitate toward literary topics and themes that would be more likely to be written by male rather than female authors. I doubt that many men would reject a book that interested them solely because it was written by a woman, whereas I could see them rejecting a book that had a cover like this one:



I don't know what this book is about, but I wouldn't be caught dead reading it in public.

>109 souloftherose: Hi, Heather! Oh...yes, actually I'm still sick. *kaff kaff*

>110 lauralkeet: Thanks, Laura; whatever it was that made me ill yesterday is completely out of my system.

I definitely don't have enough influence to revive the Orange January/July group, but hopefully by mentioning it others will remember to participate in it, and tell others about it. I'm glad that you'll also read Burial Rites next month. I do have A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, which Rachael also raved about, so I'll read it in 2015 as well. I bought it at Foyles the day that I met you and the Viragoites there in March, and showed it to her when Fliss and I met her for dinner in Cambridge after the play that we saw in the West End.

>116 kidzdoc: Well to be fair, I wouldn't been seen dead reading a book with that cover either. I'd rather read Five-hundred and sixty nine shades of beige, or whatever it's called.

>111 Ameise1: Thanks for the tea, lemon and honey, Barbara! I'll brew some Earl Grey tea shortly, and have green tea with raw honey this evening, as I did last night not long before I went to bed.

>112 Donna828: Hi, Donna! I doubt that my thread will be this busy at any other time this year, so it should be easier to keep up from now on.

I'm glad that you'll revive your Orange thread. I don't own The Ghost Road but a prominent friend in this group gifted me Regeneration in 2013, and I plan to read it sometime next year.

I'll wait to close out my 2014 thread until tomorrow night, as I hope to finish The Axeman's Jazz no later than then.

>113 cameling: I'm feeling right as rain, Caroline! Thanks for asking. I'm glad to hear that you're doing better as well.

I was tickled by Rachael's comment on Facebook a few weeks ago about her plan to use Scrappy Doo type roundhouse punches to beat off the virus that was trying to fell her. I don't think it worked, though.

117??? Glad I didn't wait until 2015. Your thread is always worth following even if I have to resort to skimming sometimes.

>115 lunacat: Bad Jenny! We were taught to examine the patient from the head down, even if the presenting complaint had nothing to do with the head or neck. For example, I saw a young child today with acute gastroenteritis, with vomiting and diarrhea. I examined his mouth, and saw that he had thrush, which was completely unrelated to his GI symptoms, but did at least partially explain why he was complaining of mouth pain and a sore throat when he ate.

>117 lunacat: That cover was an extreme example of the point I was trying to make, as it looks like it comes from a chick lit book that a red blooded male wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.

>119 qebo: Hi, Katherine! I didn't create my first thread of 2014 until the 30th or 31st of December, so it's more than a little unusual that I started early this year and have so many messages before New Year's Day.

Thanks for the kind compliment! Skimming is definitely allowed, BTW.

Clearly I'm not going to make it as a doctor with my method of diagnosis ;)

To chime in conversation about books and covers, I wonder if with the rise of E-books that people can feel more "safe" in their reading choices without worrying about what other people are thinking of their choices. Off the top of my head...that Fifty Grades of Shadiness book seems to fit into that category. I know a lot of friends who secretly read it on their phones or whatnot but wouldn't be caught dead with it a hard copy in their hands and I can see why....

>121 lunacat: Ha! Your proposed approach to the patient may seem to be a bit ass backwards, Jenny, but as long as you cover all relevant areas it should work just fine.

>122 jolerie: I completely agree, Valerie. Several of my partners decided to read that book on their Kindles, as they didn't want anyone to know about their guilty pleasure.

I've finished my last book of 2014, The Axeman's Jazz by Ray Celestin (4-1/2 stars), so now I can focus on books for the New Year. I think I'll start with Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers, which I hope to finish by Friday.

Darryl,

This came my way today, might come in useful for your next trip : http://londonist.com/2014/01/alternative-tube-maps-coffee-shops.php

>125 roundballnz: Thanks, Alex! That map is fabulous, and I'll definitely save it for future reference.

Happy New Year! to you and the other early birds in Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia who will celebrate the stroke of midnight before most of us in North America wake up on New Year's Eve.

>116 kidzdoc:: "Male readers, I think, gravitate toward literary topics and themes that would be more likely to be written by male rather than female authors."

The question this comment raises for me is, "Is this because there is a natural preference for this, or because that's what they're fed as reading material and, therefore, are used to reading?"

Looking at my library statistics, the balance across time is almost exactly 2:1 male to female...pretty heavily weighted. However, during that period when we were involved with Lois (avaland) on Belletrista, female writers accounted for more than 50% of my reading and it has stayed pretty close to even since then. Yet, I haven't noticed any diminution of enjoyment in my overall reading experience. It makes me wonder whether, free of preconceptions or outside forces, the balance wouldn't simply mirror whatever the ratio coming out of publishing houses is.

Which, admittedly, is heavily male-biased right now.

Edit: But...I must say...I'd never be caught with that cover in public!! Or even around the house.

>114 kidzdoc: the last new movie I saw in a cinema was ... in the summer of 2004.
OK, but The Remains of the Day was released in 1993. :)
Anyway, just adding my voice to the recommendation. It's a fabulous film.

>102 kidzdoc: "I agree with you on overhyped books, including the execrable novels Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore."
You know, I read these three way back when and with each of them I was mostly bored. I know I really wanted to like Swamplandia! because of the Florida setting but I was fairly underwhelmed. I need to go back and see how I rated them. I'm finding myself musing about how susceptible I am to hype and how prone I am to mistrust my own reactions to a novel. I know this is a silly issue to have: one's reactions are one's reactions and to trust or not trust them makes no sense. But I think this is going to be my focus for 2015. I'm going to take the time to carefully consider my reactions and be absolutely certain that my comments and ratings (there is part of the problem -- having to quantify what is, for me, a qualitative experience) accurately reflect them. I think I'm pretty good at doing this but I do know I can get caught up in the hype of a book and think "well, I'm clearly just missing something here."

Thanks for a great discussion thread that is already off to a stellar start for the new year, Darryl. Your thread, along with that of a few others (I do still miss Suzanne), is one of my favorite places for thoughtful book conversation.

BTW, I purchased a copy of Being Mortal and plan to prioritize it for sometime in the first quarter of the year.

Happy New Year to you, my friend!

Oh, and: I loved the film "The Remains of the Day," too, and I echo the enthusiastic praise for Emma Thompson. I'm looking forward to reading the novel in January.

Darryl, I decided to track the ratio of male/female authors I read in 2014, and not surprisingly, I read books by male authors more than I did female authors. Not deliberately, but I think because I don't gravitate towards books with 'girly' covers either, I am less likely to read chick lit. I wouldn't be caught dead reading that book in public either, btw. Hmm... now that I've just said that I'm feeling guilty for being so shallow. *sigh* I shouldn't care what people think about my reading pleasures. But then again, I wouldn't be interested in reading that book even in the privacy of my bathroom.

May all your wishes come true.

Happy New Year from Atlanta, y'all!



I had a very busy day at work, as I discharged seven of my patients and admitted a very sick three week old baby girl that I had to spend a lot of time. It's not quite 8 pm here, but since I have to work tomorrow and Friday I'll turn in before midnight, and with any luck I'll sleep through the midnight festivities. However, I live close enough to downtown that I'll almost certainly hear the fireworks when the clock strikes 12.

>127 TadAD: Good to see you here, Tad!

The question this comment raises for me is, "Is this because there is a natural preference for this, or because that's what they're fed as reading material and, therefore, are used to reading?"

Good point. My suburban high school literature courses were heavily, if not entirely, tilted toward books by white male American authors, such as Shakespeare, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Upton Sinclair, et al. We certainly didn't read anything by authors of color, and I'm very hard pressed to think of a single book we read that was written by a woman. It wasn't until very recently, say the past dozen years or so, that I started reading books written by female authors to any significant degree, and most of my the older books in my TBR pile are heavily tilted toward male authors, whether fiction or nonfiction. I think that some of us may have read Roots by Alex Haley after the mini series came out, but if I remember correctly it was a supplemental project that was not part of the course curriculum.

I suspect that my library's male: female balance is about 2:1 as well, but even in the years that we were active in Belletrista I still read far more books by men compared to women. I'm a bit too sleepy now to calculate the male:female balance this year, but I'd bet that it would fall between 65-75% male.

True...the publishing houses and the leading sources of book reviewers are heavily tilted toward male writers, which makes the Orange Prize that much more important and worthy of promotion.

Having said that, I started reading Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers's final novel, on the metro ride home from work this afternoon. I'm maybe 10 pages in, and it's excellent so far.

If I ever read a book like that I'd have to tear off the cover, or hide it beneath one of those laminated paper covers that we used in elementary school.

>128 lunacat: Happy New Year to you too, Jenny! It should be just past 1 am in the UK, right?

>129 lauralkeet: OK, but The Remains of the Day was released in 1993. :)

True, but I started medical school in 1993, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I've seen fewer than five new movies in a cinema since then. I would like to see The Remains of the Day, though.

Here's to a happy new year for all of us. So sorry that you have to work tomorrow but that is good that you will get to visit with your parents for a few days.

>130 EBT1002: Nice comments, Ellen. I wanted to like Swamplandia!, A Gate at the Stairs and Freedom too, all for different reasons. I like books with quirky and weird characters, such as the ones in The Flying Troutmans, and I thought that Swamplandia! would be just as enjoyable as Miriam Toews's novel was. Wrong. A Gate at the Stairs was written by a professor at the University of Wisconsin, where my best friends live, and it was set in a liberal university town in the Midwest that was similar to Madison. I read it while I visited them over New Year's several years ago, and I eager talked to my best friend's wife, who is also an avid reader, about it. I hadn't read anything by Jonathan Franzen before I read Freedom, and I dove into it shortly after I bought the UK edition from a WH Smith at Heathrow Airport just after it was published. I can certainly say that I gave those books a fair chance, and if anything I tried harder to like them than most books I read, because of the hype that surrounded them, and the same holds true for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, and J.

Now that I've been on LT for several years and feel more comfortable writing reviews I find it easier to give my honest thoughts about the books I've read, although I still have a tendency to overrate them (or sometimes underrate them) by a half star or sometimes more. However, if multiple people whose opinions I respect and whose literary tastes are similar to mine rank a book highly, I think I'm far more likely to join them in their views on it and not trust my own judgment about it. That doesn't happen that often, though.

Thanks for the compliment about this runaway thread and the book discussions that take place here. It's definitely a group effort, and thanks are equally due to people like yourself who enhance these discussions. I still think of myself as a novice in analyzing books criticaly, since I don't have a strong literature background compared to many others in this group, and especially the members of Club Read.

I hope that you enjoy Being Mortal as much as I did.

Happy New Year to you and P.!

>131 EBT1002: You're in for a major treat with The Remains of the Day next month, similar to those who will read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for the first time.

>132 laytonwoman3rd: Happy New Year and good reading in 2015 to you too, Linda!

>133 cameling: I'd be interested to find out which 75ers read more books by women than men in 2014; I suspect that it would be far fewer than you would think. I would guess that Viragoites like Laura (@lauralkeet) and Heather (@souloftherose), and Orange Prize devotees like Belva (@rainpebble), read more female authors than male ones, but I would bet that others like yourself would tilt in the opposite direction.

That book cover I chose was an extreme example; I don't think many of us, male or female, would read that in public! I'll have to find a book cover that doesn't scream "chick lit" that graces a book meant for a general audience but would be likely to turn off potential male readers because it's too "girly".

>134 Ameise1: Happy New Year, Barbara!

>136 catarina1: Yes, Happy New Year to everyone! We had a brisk diuresis of our service today, and the night crew shouldn't get too many admissions tonight, so tomorrow will hopefully be a light day at work.

A public service announcement, from the doctors and nurses that have to work on New Year's Eve night and during the early hours on New Year's Day:

Darryl,



Happy New Year from your friend in Kuala Lumpur

>139 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul! And a Happy New Year to you, Hani and the girls.

Happily, I will not be one of those drunks having stopped drinking in 1983! Whew. But I know what you mean, I know have a very judgmental attitude towards drunks.

I too am off to bed early and hope to sleep through the noise of the new year, nonetheless, I do wish you a very nice New Year's Day, and I join in your hope that it will be a very light day. I hope the baby girl makes it, too.

Take good care of yourself!

Happy new year Darryl!

>137 kidzdoc: I think everyone can be influenced by the opinions of those they respect. When people I respect love a book that I only liked, I'll generally assume I was in the wrong mood.

Some people are highly susceptible to influence, like my boyfriend. I told him Les Miserables was my favorite book and he read it and raved about it the whole time. It was his first-ever classic. It was rather sweet and funny at the same time.

Happy New Year!

Hi Darryl - hope you are asleep and happy new year!

I just did a quick check of my male/female author split last year, and ended up at 8 female out of a **pathetic for me** 21 books read - so just under 40%. That's a bit higher than I'd expected.

And my contribution to the analysis of overhyped books is simply "bleagh" to Freedom, and to Josh Ferris's first book about working in an office, both of which I had high expectations of. I haven't read We are all Completely Beside Ourselves yet but bought it on my Kindle, and will let it sit there quite a while longer. I know all these books have had mixed opinions on here, not uniformly bad ones, but hype and me often don't go well together.

Welcome to the world, 2015!



It's 15 minutes past midnight on the East Coast of the US. I thought that I would be asleep by now but I'm still awake. I'll turn in now, though, as I have to be up by 6 am. I'll catch up here after work.

Darryl,
I have to admit that I left your thread to last..............147 posts???? and it's only the 1st today!

- However, in regards to the vegetables - Nope, I don't think you like more than I do LOL - I do like SOME varieties of pumpkins and squashes, but just not all. I DO like brussels in "bubble and squeak" and I have to say your roasted cauliflower in this simple marinade just looked absolutely delicious.
I really do believe that the passionate foodies under us should make more use of the kitchen thread this year, so that we can pass on these lovely recipes to each other.

- Enjoyed your 2014 lists quite a lot, especially your comments. So, so.......Herta Müller and the association with the foodprocessor - LOL. Nevertheless, I do hope, even so that you had this incredible bad experiences with her earlier works, that you still consider to give her newer novels a chance.

I was absolutely delighted to see that you put All Quiet on the Western Front on your Fiction Top 10 list and I definitely have to get to read The Mussle Feast.

Burial Rites is a wonderful book and I hope you will enjoy it.

>51 kidzdoc: I agree with you that Remains of the Day is definitely Ishiguro's best book, also I loved Never Let me Go for very different reasons. I will listen to When We Were Orphans for the BAC this month, once I finished Tortilla Flat which I quite enjoy.

I am a glad to hear that you recovered from another infestations of "critters" from your patients. Also I have to admit that this is really something that worries me. Hm, maybe we have to start to look for a more suitable, protective work outfit for you, to reduce the number of infections you catch on a regular basis, Darryl. As I am intending to reduce my mountain "wool" drastically this year, I am sure that my imagination will help me to create something suitable for you Mr. Morris :)!

On a different note!!



I wish you a wonderful, adventurous and happy New Year, Darryl!

Looking forward to follow your commentaries, travelogues, cooking exploits and of course not to forget your thoughts on books, for another year.

>138 kidzdoc: Ha ha ha, nice graphic. I managed to stay out of a hospital last night, so I'm off to a good start. Happy New Years!

Happy New Year, Darryl. I hope you're feeling better. Regarding women writers, interesting discussion, and one that I have frequently. It's amazing how much disparity there still is in anthologies. And I won't even mention, race or sexual orientation representation.

Here's a link I posted a while ago on the topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/books/review/gender-genre.html?emc=edit_bk_201....

VIDA has interesting information, always.

I just did a quick count of books I can recall reading last year and I was 22/15 Male to Female authors.

However most of my female reads were part of a series and my male authors were stand alone books. Not sure what that says about my reading though. Maybe nothing?! I don't think I consciously consider whether an author is male or female but perhaps I do subconsciously.

Happy New Year, Darryl, and happy first thread of the year!

I'm happy to hear that your illness was so short-lived, too.

>135 kidzdoc: Regarding the reading during Belle days, you read more than I do so, perhaps, the book bullets found in those pages...plus the additional ones Lois would push in an email...had less of an impact upon your total reading.

Regarding your high school reading—first, am I allowed to poke some gentle humor at your sentence (my emphasis), "...books by white male American authors, such as Shakespeare..."? *grin*

Anyway, being a jerk aside, I'm sitting here absolutely determined to remember one book by a female author assigned as reading during high school. So far, I'm failing. There were plenty I read, but none that I remember being assigned.

Edit: Frankenstein

My author breakdown for 204 (64 books; the other 12 were magazines) is:
male fiction: 9
male non-fiction: 20
female fiction: 18
female non-fiction: 13

If I count number of books rather than number of authors (i.e. multiple-count some authors), it skews the fiction a bit more. Dunno what it says that the ratios are almost flipped for fiction and non-fiction.

Whew. Got to the end of your thread for now, a cruel burden for so early in the year. Off to enjoy this splendid day. Have good visit with your folks.

Happy New Year, Darryl!

Adding to the New Year felicitations Darryl.

Happy New Year, Darryl. I hope it's a quiet day at the hospital today and all you hear is laughter from your patients and coworkers. I love that public service announcement gif.

Happy New Year!!

I'd be interested to find out which 75ers read more books by women than men in 2014; I suspect that it would be far fewer than you would think.

I was rather intrigued, so I examined my library composition and my reading over the past three years. Rather surprisingly, my reading stats over the past three years are:

2014 F=29; M=48
2013 F=56; M=48
2012 F=32; M=44

My overall library composition is: F=51.12%; M=48.88%. My 2014 predominately male author reads can be attributed to two authors: 8 books written by Andrea Camilleri, as part of his Inspector Montalbano series and 4 books written by Alexandre Dumas as part of his D'Artagnan Romances series. In 2013, I read a number of Neil Gaiman books as part of the Sandman series group read so my reading numbers tend to get skewed a bit by male author series reading. I think if I can make an effort to a more 50/50 balance between the two, then I am doing pretty good.

Happy New Year, Darryl!

Wishing you all the best in 2015, Darryl!!

Yikes. I can't find my thread...

We didn't have many patients today, but two of the ones I had this morning were very sick. I transferred one of them to the PICU this afternoon, and the other one (the 3 week old baby I mentioned yesterday) is holding her own, but her long term outlook is grim.

Catching up...

>141 maggie1944: Well done on having over decades of complete sobriety, Karen! The night team didn't admit any inebriated kids from the ER last night, to my knowledge, but there were two teens this morning there with "behavioral issues", which one of my partners and I suspected was a code phrase for "drunk as a skunk".

One of the physician assistants on the GI service worked with my team on New Year's Eve last year, and this morning she told me that she and the supervising physician admitted a baby late that night who was obtunded due to an alcohol overdose. Her parents gave a blow out party in which most of the adults were drunk, and one of them fixed a bottle of formula for the baby, using powdered milk and "water" from the refrigerator. That person, who apparently had also been drinking, chose a bottle of what looked to be clear liquid, and used that to make the formula. The baby took it well, then vomited and became unresponsive. As you can probably guess that "water" was actually vodka, so the baby was completely drunk. Fortunately the baby vomited once or twice and eliminated a good portion of the alcohol; otherwise the parents might have had to plan a funeral for the little one. The PA said that it was difficult to obtain a history from the parents that night, as they were bombed as well. I think I'll add them to the list of nominees for Parents of the Year for 2014.

Sadly, that baby girl was born with a lot of problems, most of which can't be fixed. She is stable for now and will almost certainly "make it" in the short term (i.e., discharge from the hospital sometime next week), but I'll have to have a discussion with the parents about eventual withdrawal of care, along with the palliative care team, tomorrow.

>142 The_Hibernator: Happy New Year, Rachel!

I think everyone can be influenced by the opinions of those they respect. When people I respect love a book that I only liked, I'll generally assume I was in the wrong mood.

I agree. There are some books that I liked less than others who I respect did, and sometimes that is due to me reading it too quickly, or not being in the proper frame of mind for it. If I'm completely out of step with everyone else then I'm more likely to think that I'm wrong, but sometimes I'll read reviews or comments that are in step with mine, which help to confirm my opinion of that book.

>143 bohemiangirl35: Thanks, Sacil! Happy New Year to you, too.

>144 BBGirl55: I hope that you had a Happy New Year, Bryony!

Sorry to hear about your little patients.

>162 kidzdoc: obtunded
Now there's a useful word.

Though a sad word when applied to an child inflicted with such irresponsible parents.

Happy New Year, Darryl! I resolve to follow your thread a little more closely.

What would be interesting is if LibraryThing allowed you to set a cutoff year for the male/female calculation. The statistics it generates now are insensitive to time and we probably all agree that older books were predominately male-authored. However, wouldn't it be cool if we could say, "Show me the ratio for books written post-1980" or whatever year?

I think I'll send in a suggestion to Tim...not that I think it will happen...

Oh, I don't like those stories about very sick children with parents who are to blame. How you do the job that you do, I have no idea, but I respect you so very much for doing it, Darryl.

>145 ronincats: Thanks, Roni!

>146 cushlareads: Unfortunately I didn't sleep well last night (just over 4 hours total), as I was thinking about that poor little baby. However, those late night thoughts made me realize what was the cause of her presenting symptoms, and when I spoke with the consultant today she agreed with me.

I tallied the number of books I read by male and female authors in 2014, and it was significantly more unbalanced that I thought. I finished 105 books, and of the 103 books that were written by a single author, 80 of them were written by men and only 23 by women, which is just under a 78%/22% split.

>148 drachenbraut23: Happy New Year, Bianca! I thought that you decided to ignore my threads in 2015. I hope that you're enjoying your time off from work with your son and parents.

You may be right that we are equally fond of vegetables. The preparation of them is very important to me, as I can barely stomach overcooked or poorly prepared veggies.

I agree; I'll definitely post recipes to The Kitchen thread as well. After reading Madeline's comments about potato latkes, and my reply about borscht (yum!), I'd love to try making it in the next few weeks.

I didn't get to The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller last month, but I'll probably read it during the third quarter of 2015, when the Reading Globally group will focus on Nobel Prize winners who write in languages other than English.

The Mussel Feast was very good; I think you'll like it.

I'm looking forward to reading Burial Rites. Rachael (@FlossieT) was very fond of it, which makes me that much more eager to read it.

Although I appreciate your concern about my health, I think I'm less likely to become ill than most of my partners and physician and nurse colleagues, and I think the episodes of vomiting I had on Monday were not caused by a viral gastritis, as I had originally though. Those of us who work in children's hospitals are constantly exposed to sick kids with infections that caused them to be hospitalized, yet we are only rarely felled by those pathogens. I think I've only taken four or five sick days in the past 10 years, so I'm hardly ever sick enough to miss work. 2014 was a good year from a respiratory standpoint for me as well, as I only had one mild asthma exacerbation that I easily managed without needing to see my internist or go to my local ED.

>149 rosylibrarian: Well done, Marie. The hospital is no place to be over the holidays! (And that includes those of us who work there.)

>166 TadAD: One immediate issue will be publication date.

Happy New Years! Sounds like a rough night of work. That poor baby!

I try to balance out male/female writers, but my stats show that my books are still 62% male.

Dude. How do you expect a mere mortal to keep up with you when it is only the first day of the New Year and you already have 170 posts?!? Sigh. Good thing I like you. : ) Best wishes for a happy, healthy 2015 filled with good friends and books. : )

I was curious so I just tallied up my 2014 stats. Female authors outnumbered male authors in fiction 56 to 48, and male authors outnumbered female authors in non-fiction 21/15. One of my fiction reads was written by a husband and wife team, and two non-fictions were poetry anthologies that included poems by both men and women.

Woo! It looks as though I may not have to work tomorrow, since our inpatient census is so low. As long as the night doctor doesn't get hammered with admissions I'll be the first one to be called off, since I had to work over the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

>150 BLBera: Happy New Year to you too, Beth! I've been back to completely normal since late Monday night, and I now suspect that I ate something that didn't agree with me.

Thanks for posting the Gender Genre article from the NYT; I missed it entirely, even though I subscribe to and read the print edition of the Times seven days a week. I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of #ReadWomen2014; has anyone else?

>151 lunacat: I don't think I consciously consider whether an author is male or female but perhaps I do subconsciously.

I think I can honestly say that the gender of an author has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to read a book, consciously or subconsciously, as the topic of the book is what is of interest to me. I've read plenty of outstanding books written by women, of course, so I have no bias in selecting a book based solely on the writer's gender.

>152 scaifea: Happy New Year to you, Tomm and Charlie, Amber! I hope that your case of conjunctivitis has improved, and that your two guys will be spared from contracting it.

>153 TadAD: Hmm...good point, Tad. I had heard about some of those Belletrista books, from other LTers or seeing them in favorite bookshops (City Lights, London Review Bookshop, Foyles, et al.).

What? Shakespeare isn't American??? (Good pick up.)

We're about the same age, if I remember correctly, so I'm not surprised that your high school curriculum was apparently completely bereft of women authors, too. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter would have been a great choice, amongst others.

Happy New Year, Darryl! Hope you got some serious R & R in today, along with some sleep.

>154 qebo: Nice breakdown, Katherine, and one that is slightly surprising to me. I would have guessed that you read significantly more books by male authors than female ones, so well done on proving me wrong.

>155 ffortsa: Today was a beautiful day in Atlanta, too. I'm sorry that I was stuck inside the hospital with sick kids, and missed the New Year's Day sale at Book Culture (as I'm running low on reading material). :-(

>156 jnwelch: Happy New Year to you and Debbi, Joe!

>157 Caroline_McElwee: Happy New Year, London Caroline!

>158 cameling: Happy New Year, Boston Caroline! One of my partners and I brought in leftover desserts, and several of us in my group who had to work today had tea and cheesecake from Junior's and postre chaja, a delightful cake made by the Uruguayan maid who my partner and her husband employ.

>159 crazy4reading: Happy New Year, Monica!

Of the 60 books I read in 2014 24 were written by male authors and 36 female that's a 40/60 split. In addition 8 of the books were written by the same male author as I was reading a crime series so there may have been an even bigger imbalance if not for that.

Of the 6 planned reads I have for January it's an even male/female ratio so maybe this year I will have a better gender balance.

>162 kidzdoc:..Oh, my! What a terrible thing to happen to an innocent child. Yikes!

>160 lkernagh: Happy New Year, Lori! I like your idea of looking at your gender breakdown over several years; I'll do the same this weekend or early next week. I suspect that I read a higher percentage of books written by women from 2010-2012, when I read books longlisted for the Orange Prize much more often that I've done in the past two years.

>161 EBT1002: Thanks, Ellen! I love that photo of Seattle.

>163 Ameise1: Thanks, Barbara. The 2 year old that I transferred to the PICU should do well, but I can't say the same for the 3 week old baby.

>164 qebo: Obtunded is a useful word, but it's one that I rather not apply to any of my patients. I didn't see that child or her parents, as I was visiting my parents in early January (and had brunch with Judy & Jim at The Noho Star on New Year's day), but I assume that she made a full recovery.

>165 Carmenere: Happy New Year, Lynda! I'll follow your thread more closely as well this year.

I'm hoping that if you and I are ever anywhere near each other, this is the year we can finally meet. I just want to thank you for caring so much about these kids...

>166 TadAD: That would be interesting, Tad. I suspect that it would be easier said than done, though.

>167 scaifea: Sorry, Amber. I don't share my most tragic cases here, or with family and friends, as they are often too disturbing for them to read or hear about. I made the mistake of mentioning a couple of patients who were on my mind to an LTer over lunch several years ago, but each time I talked about them her eyes welled with tears, so I stopped talking about them.

I've been falling asleep as I've typing the past few messages, so I'll call it a night and catch up tomorrow.

I picked up a second wind, so I'll finish replying to the rest of the messages (thanks for keeping my thread toasty warm, everyone!).

>169 qebo: One immediate issue will be publication date.

Hmm. I'll have to think about that a bit more, I'm too tired and/or not smart enough to understand it now.

>170 banjo123: Happy New Year to you too, Rhonda! New Year's Eve was a bit hectic, as I was trying to get out as many kids as possible, but one of my partners, who was on call and not me, asked me to see that baby for her, even though she wasn't busy, so it made my day a much longer and worse one.

I'll have to look at my Zeitgeist and my reads from past years tomorrow to see if I can pick up any trends about my male:female reading ratios.

>171 Berly: Heck, I can't even keep up with my own thread, Kim! I'm glad that you like me enough to follow along. :-)

Happy New Year to you and your family!

>172 cbl_tn: Congratulations for reading more books written by female than male authors, Carrie! I'll pay closer attention to my 2015 reads, although I won't necessarily make any adjustments or changes to my plans.

>174 msf59: Happy New Year, Mark! I worked from 8 am to 4 pm today, so I didn't do any significant reading as I had hoped. If the night continues the way it is there's a good chance that I won't have to work tomorrow, though, and I'll then be off for six days in a row (Fri-Wed)...actually, make that seven days in a row, as I made a switch at the request of one of my partners to work her shift on Friday in return for her working mine on Thursday.

>176 kiwiflowa: Of the 12 books I plan to read in January, seven were written by women, so that's a good split I'd say.

>177 Whisper1: Right, Linda. That is far from the worst thing that I've ever seen happen to a hospitalized baby, though.

>179 drneutron: I hope that we can meet this year too, Jim. I'll almost certainly be in Washington for the American Academy of Pediatrics' National Conference & Exhibition from October 24-27. I'll probably take a couple of additional vacation days then, and hopefully be able to meet you and Madeline then.

It's an honor to take care of sick kids and care for them and their often worried families. I'm grateful that God gave me the opportunity to make a difference in these kids' lives.

Hi Darryl. Looking forward to following your travels and reading. Your Reading Globally plan looks fun.

YIKES.....I promised myself I would not look at 2015 threads until today, and now I'm starting off way behind. Love the gender discussion...it made me go check my stats. I had 113 total for 2014, and only 30% were male authors. I'm not sure any were conscious choices, and many were books that I "HAD" to read due to review commitments for Maine Readers Choice Awards panel.

I lurked a lot on your threads last year but really lost track of many people in the last quarter. Taking care of a 90 year old Mom about 600 miles away, a 59 year old "developmentally disabled" sister-in- law on the west coast, as well as trying to visit with a gorgeous new grandson in Virginia didn't leave me much time for anything on LT or the blog.

You have a spectacular list of proposed reading and I can't wait to see what people think of some of them. As many others mentioned above, I have come to respect LT readers and their assessments of books that I might never have considered, to the point that I even will give a second look at books I've initially abandoned. Here's to a terrific reading year.

>181 kidzdoc: While Book cataloguing holds publication date, Origin language, etc I don't think they hold sex indicator, so short of creating a tag/categories in your library not sure there is a way to easily get a grasp on your library or reads.

Took a crude test myself making assumption based on name of Author, sitting at about 30% Female 70% Male, about right with my reading tastes.

all of this assumes all that all Authors are of course binary in relation to sex - but that is another subject

I do wonder how all the literary end of year articles get their numbers then ??? Hmmm

Happy New Year Darryl and Happy Reading!

I am without words re. that poor baby. But can I please quote Jim in >179 drneutron:: I just want to thank you for caring so much about these kids...

Re. New Year drunks: drunk people generally scare me, always did, and there's often an atmosphere of violence in places where many people drink too much alcohol. For example I'll never set foot on the Oktoberfest (Munich beer fest) again. Big Christmas markets in the evenings can also be quite unpleasant. And that's one reason why I always preferred staying at home on New Year's Eve. Just can't deal with it and never thought drunk people were funny.

I never took took count of male/female authors or country of origin (unless it was a special challenge) or skin color. I thought about doing that last year, but then realized that my reading is already quite balanced and that I'll just continue that way.
But when you said somewhere above that at school you mostly read white male English/US authors, I remembered that the first novel we read in my English Oberstufe class (senior year), when we had reached a level of English sufficient for "real" literature, was Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland. My teacher clearly moved off the usual track which would have been Shakespeare.

>185 roundballnz: You can get a statistic on M/F for your whole library by going to the home page, clicking on stats/memes and then selecting Male or female? from the list on the left. It depends on individuals completing the information on the author pages of LT so may be partially incomplete.

My total library is 61% male but in 2014 80% of the books I read were by women (I track that on a spreadsheet along with other stuff because I'm a spreadsheet geek). Looking back to when I started tracking my reading with the group my reading used to be biased towards male authors and has slowly gone the other way! I'm surprised it was 80% female in 2014 as I wasn't intentionally reading more books by women.

Hi Darryl, just weighing in on the gender stats. My 2014 reading was 73% female, and in the ~7 years I've been keeping track it's usually been at least 2/3 female. It helps that I read at least one Virago Modern Classic each month.

My library is also 66% female, which is about right considering it is a catalog of what I've read, not just what I own. And again, with nearly 300 Viragos on the shelves ... well.

>180 kidzdoc: Since it's a reasonable assumption that there's a relational database running behind this site, it's actually trivial to do...I could probably write the code in 5 minutes. The real issue is whether it would be worth doing. The comments on the suggestion thread are along the lines of, "Why would I want that?"

From what I've seen over the years, that's the common reaction to any suggestion not mainstream. Everyone wanted a collections feature but all the other idiosyncratic things were mostly pooh-poohed because folks don't react well to anything they don't want personally. I guess that's to be expected. It seems like the whimsical stuff only gets in if Tim, et al. thinks of it and just puts it in without asking anyone.

I'm sorry to hear about that poor little girl, but I'm also grateful that she has access to doctors who care so much about her well-being and will be able to set up a plan whereby she doesn't suffer as she goes through whatever will come.

If you ever need an ear to vent/talk about your more difficult cases then please feel free to drop me a PM. I'd be happy to listen, and offer what small words of wisdom I can offer. While your job must give you huge rewards, the downsides are awful.

Woo! I was called off today, due to our low inpatient census, so my weekend begins a day early!



>183 Oberon: Thanks, Erik. My first trip of the year will be tomorrow, when I'll visit my parents in the Philadelphia area. Hopefully my first European trip will be in March or April, depending on what plays are on at the National Theatre and elsewhere in and around London. I haven't decided what my first Reading Globally book of the year will be, but I'm leaning towards Swimming Lessons: and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry.

>184 tututhefirst: Happy New Year, Tina! I haven't had time to look at more than a couple of the 2015 threads in the 75 Books or Club Read groups, so I'll catch up with them today.

Well done on reading so many books by female writers. I'm a bit disappointed in my 78%:22% male:female ratio from last year, so I'd like to get closer to a 60-65%:35-40% split in 2015. Fortunately there are a lot of TBR books written by women that I plan to (and am eager to) read this year, so that shouldn't be difficult goal to accomplish. I think I'll keep a running tally at least monthly, to see where I'm at throughout the year.

Wow, you were stretched very thin last year. I hope that 2015 is a bit easier on you.

Thanks for the compliment on my proposed reading lists. Hopefully this year I can read a good number of those books, instead of moving them forward from last year, as I did for the CanLit and TBR lists.

>185 roundballnz: I'll take a lot at LT's book cataloguing feature later today (it's only 7:30 am here and I'm working on my first mug of coffee, so I'm still a bit groggy). I've also catalogued my books on Goodreads, although I suspect that it has less functionality than LT does.

>186 Deern: Happy New Year, Nathalie!

I didn't want to give out too much information about that poor baby, but she has a very bad malformation that happened in utero, and even in the "best" case scenario she will never be anywhere close to a normal child.

I agree with you: drunk or otherwise impaired people can be very scary, especially when they get behind the wheel of a car. I noticed several erratic drivers when I drove home from work yesterday afternoon, including one who had difficulty maintaining his lane on the winding and hilly two lane road that runs past the hospital. I stayed well behind him (or her), and fortunately the traffic was light enough that he didn't hit any cars passing in the opposite direction.

I almost never go out on New Year's Eve, except for a couple of years when I went to jazz clubs in Greenwich Village with a girlfriend or a group of friends. We could take the subway to and from the clubs, so we didn't have to deal with any drunken drivers. Atlanta is essentially bereft of good jazz clubs, so I haven't been to any NYE jazz parties here.

I would expect that the reading lists in high school literature courses in the US have broadened significantly since I was a student in the mid to late 1970s, to include women, authors of color, and non-US authors. Well done on your literature teacher for choosing The Third Life of Grange Copeland.

>187 souloftherose: Thanks for that tip, Heather! I thought I had seen or heard that LT allowed you to look at the gender split in your library. I'll give that a try shortly; I'll bet that my library is somewhere between 70-80% male.

in 2014 80% of the books I read were by women

That doesn't surprise me one bit, as I followed your threads closely last year to see what you were reading.

I looked at my library, and of the authors whose gender is not in question a little over 73% of my books were written by men, so I was right. Oddly enough, Alina Bronsky, author of Broken Glass Park, is listed as being "Other / Contested / Unknown", which I don't understand.

>188 lauralkeet: Good morning and Happy New Year, Laura! I'm also not the least bit surprised that the majority of books you read last year were written by women, as I followed your threads as well. Do you have 300 Viragos in all, or 300 unread ones?

>189 TadAD: That's unfortunate that people's ideas about improving or enhancing LT are treated with such disdain. I've occasionally seen these comments and conversations, and I've been disappointed by the negativity expressed by some people.

>190 lunacat: Thanks, Jenny. That little baby's condition is a very sad one, although it is one that I will see at least a couple of times a year. None of the ones I've seen with it do well, and many of them don't live for more than a few months.

Thank you for your very kind offer. My partners and I end up talking about the most difficult or disturbing cases to each other, as our families and friends find these discussions far too distressing to hear about. I may take you up on that.

>168 kidzdoc: I never would ignore your threads, Darryl! They are far to interesting :).

Darryl, you dissapoint me - didn't you see my hint with "I have to reduce my wool mountain" - *big grin*
I am lucky to work in neonates as we are less prone to pick up "nasty bugs", also most of my collegues with younger children tend to be ill during the winter month.

I have ordered the Mussel Feast in German Das Muschelessen - and there you can see how much I follow my own New Years solution not to buy any books this year :(.

Hm, in regards to male/female author ratio - I belong into the group of more male authors, with roughly 60% male and 40% female.

If I am not mistaken you are off to see your family soon, so I wish you a wonderful time with your family.

Hi Darryl - Hooray for a long weekend. It's always hard for me to get back into the "work" mode after holidays. Sigh. I had my students read the articles about the disparity in reviews of women and men authors (we we doing a unit on gender), and the reaction was "so what?" for the most part.

I reviewed my own reading: in 2014, 70 percent of my books were by women, which is a little low. Usually it's higher. But I don't want to neglect other aspects either, so this year I'm going to make an effort to read more diversely in every sense of the word.

Have a great weekend and good luck catching up with the threads.

>175 kidzdoc: Surprised me a bit too, but the non-fiction is as I'd expect, because my interests tend toward science, but I prefer biology to physics, and I also read memoirs and biographies. In fiction, I am quickly put off by cardboard stereotypes of women, which may be why my reading skews to female authors.

>181 kidzdoc: publication date
The request stated in >166 TadAD: is for “books written post-1980 or whatever”, i.e. original publication date, which is a Common Knowledge field filled in by users. Gender also is CK, though perhaps easier to fill in. So the calculation is simple, but the data doesn’t necessarily exist.

>189 TadAD: pooh-poohed because folks don't react well to anything they don't want personally
Yeah, partly because it occupies developer time that would be better spent on My Pony, and partly because it might Change Things. e.g. when Tim experimented with displaying the original publication date prominently in parentheses, there was a freakout extending to 100s of posts, although this was merely a display thing, no change whatsoever to the underlying data or functionality.

>192 kidzdoc: Do you have 300 Viragos in all, or 300 unread ones? 296 in all, and *gulp* 202 tbr. Normally I just pick them up here and there, but I received about 20 last year from an LTer who was downsizing her library. I intend to read most of them, but realistically know I will never read them all.

Thanks to Heather I was surprised to learn how balanced my library is between male and female authors: Percent male: 50.71% : Percent female: 49.29%. I thought for certain I had a greater percentage of female authors.

Enjoy the visit with your parents, Darryl. Any meetups planned while you are in the Philly area?

After a quick look the percent male is 61.51% and the percent female is 38.49 of my library. It looks like I should put some more focus on the female authors :-)

So I am not far off even-Steven (and where does that phrase come from?). Male authors: 57.53% and female authors: 42.47%.

Asked and answered! Even-Steven: equal measures, fair shares, especially financial or value - earliest origins and associations are probably found in Jonathan Swift's 'Journal To Stella' written 20 Jan 1748: "Now we are even quoth Stephen, when he gave his wife six blows for one". A separate and possibly main contributory root is the fact that 'Steven' or 'Stephen' was English slang for money from early 1800's, probably from Dutch stiver/stuiver/stuyver, meaning something of little value, from the name for a low value coin which at one time was the smallest monetary unit in the Cape (presumably South Africa) under the Dutch East India Company, equal to about an old English penny. An expression seems to have appeared in the 1800's 'Steven's at home' meaning one has money. The alliterative (rhyming) sound of the expression would have made it a natural reference or paired words expression and ensured common usage. People like saying things that trip comfortably off the tongue. (ref Cassell)

>193 drachenbraut23: I did miss the comment about your "wool mountain", Bianca; sorry about that. When I typed that message I was very sleepy, after having had little sleep the previous two nights, so I didn't process that portion of the paragraph.

I'll be interested to get your thoughts on The Mussel Feast.

You're right; I'm flying to Philadelphia tomorrow morning to visit my parents. I'll stay there until Wednesday afternoon, so it will be a relatively short visit.

>194 BLBera: Thanks, Beth. I'm glad to be off today, and I'm looking forward to my visit with my parents. I essentially always have to work at least one five day stretch around Christmas or New Year's (I think I've had both holidays off in the same year only once in 15 years that I've worked at Children's), but this year I ended up working during both stretches, although I was off on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which I appreciated.

Did that "So what?" reaction come from both male and female students? If so, was it more likely to come from the boys? Either way that's quite sad.

I'll probably make some minor adjustments to my 2015 reading plans in order to achieve a better gender balance. I'll pay closer attention to the male:female split throughout the year; I'll read more Orange books than I have in the past two to three years; and I'll be more thoughtful of the books I read for Reading Globally and for the upcoming Booker Prize longlist in particular, as I unknowingly tend to gravitate toward male writers preferentially.

>195 qebo: I tend to think of you, perhaps unfairly, as mainly a reader of nonfiction books, particularly in science, so I assumed (again, perhaps unfairly) that most of those books were written by men. When I read reviews of books or comments about them I don't pay much attention to the gender or even the names of the authors, except to see if they are authors I'm familiar with or have heard about.

>200 kidzdoc: perhaps unfairly, as mainly a reader of nonfiction books
It's about half & half. I tend to comment more extensively on non-fiction because I read in order to learn, and I review in order to remember. I may have a serious response to fiction, but this tends to be more emotional, and I'm less concerned about documenting facts.

>196 lauralkeet: I intend to read most of them, but realistically know I will never read them all.

Rubbish. If you read 20 Viragos a year, you'll be done with them in 10 years' time. As long as you don't buy any books in that time you'll easily get through all of them.

>197 Donna828: That's about as good a balance as you can get, Donna!

I probably won't see any LTers during this trip, since it will be a short one. I want to see an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art before it closes on Sunday, but both days this weekend are supposed to be rainy. If I do go on Sunday that would only leave me two full days to spend with my parents, on Monday and Tuesday, so I wouldn't want to spend them out of town in Philadelphia or NYC. If I do go to NYC I'd probably want to see an old friend of mine from the time I worked in a lab at NYU Medical Center in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before I went to medical school.

>198 Ameise1: At least your male:female balance is more equitable than mine, Barbara!

>199 Berly: Interesting information, Kim! Thanks for posting it here.

I need a nap; back later.

My male/female balance in my whole library is pretty close to even - 52% male/48% female. It might be different - I think it would be higher on the female side - if some of my Not Assigned would come out right (there's a bunch where I have one book, by one person, but the author that "shows up" on the Zeitgeist page is the disambiguation page which is always Not Assigned even if all the authors have the same gender assigned (see Arnold Toynbee)).

Haven't yet determined last year's ratio - it takes a download and some fiddling in Calc, mostly because of multiple books by one author (makes it hard to simply count).

I had a nice nap, and I think I'm ready for...another nap.

I subscribe to, and get alerts from, Atul Gawande's Twitter feed, and he just retweeted an article from CBS News, titled What President Obama is reading on his vacation. Here are the first three paragraphs:

President Obama is spending his Hawaiian vacation playing golf, getting together with high school friends and reading a handful of dark novels set in foreign lands, according to a book list released by the White House Wednesday.

The presidential reading list includes four novels: "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena," by Anthony Marra, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North," by Richard Flanagan, "Nora Webster," by Colm Toibin and "The Laughing Monsters," by Denis Johnson.

He's also selected two works of non-fiction for the trip: "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China," by Evan Osnos and "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" by Dr. Atul Gawande.

I love that he's brought quality books to read, which include two of my favorite books of 2014, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Being Mortal, and two books I own that I plan to read soon, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and Nora Webster. I think we should invite him to join LT after his second term of office ends, when he has more time to read and discuss books.

>203 jjmcgaffey: If I remember correctly I have 245 books whose author's gender is under question, probably due to that same disambiguation issue. It seems to me (knowing essentially nothing about computer programming) that this would be an easy thing to fix.

>202 kidzdoc: Rubbish. If you read 20 Viragos a year ...
Stop being so logical.

>205 lauralkeet: Sigh. Yes, dear...

Oh my. It's January 2, and I'm overwhelmed. Happy New Year, Darryl! Your thread is fascinating, but I can't keep up.
I will add the male/female ratio to my reading evaluation from last year.....
"the last new movie I saw in a cinema was" ---- Titanic or did that come before the Ring trilogy? I saw that.
Hope you're mending.
Love the President's reading list and your suggestion to enlist him here when he's finished this term!
I really think I have to get a copy of *Deep North* while I have Christmas $.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

Fascinating discussion I sort of kicked off on the statistics of men reading for men and women reading more women. It was a generalisation of course but - like >187 souloftherose: Heather I also love my spreadsheets and my earlier research did reveal this obvious trend.
I also agree that in the main the trend seems to be a subconscious one and certainly one I am trying to redress in my own reading.

Have a great weekend Darryl.

After a quick count of my 2014 reads - 55 female authors for the 103 books read.

I've felt compelled to count my male/female ratio as well. And discounting the two anthologies, last year I read 52 male to 28 female authors. That's a much bigger skew than I would have thought - I think helped by a few series I read being written by men.

I read 142 books last year. Ignoring 6 anthologies and 2 corporate authors, I read 105 books by women and 40 by men (with some double authors, single-sex or mixed). Considering only unique authors, I read 57 females and 35 males (even with my Kevin Hearne binge!). More skewed female than I'd thought. This is, of course, mostly fiction (because that's a lot of what I read), and many rereads (and a _lot_ of my comfort reads are by women. Not all, but a lot).

Books: 72% female, 27% male authors
Authors: 6162% female, 3837% male. Minor correction after I tidied up my data.

*waving* at Darryl before the thread is completely out of hand :)

Have a happy reading year in 2015!

Darryl, I wish you a fabulous weekend.

>204 kidzdoc: How fantastic that you can see what Obama is reading. Not that I'd follow his reading habits like a lemur, but it DOES tell you something about his reading habits. And he appears to read good literature. Unlike President Clinton being moved to action by The Cobra Event which was pure thriller fluff - and not even particularly well-written fiction. (It was written in the same tone someone would write non-fiction in, so it sounded a bit stilted.)

>204 kidzdoc: It seems to me (knowing essentially nothing about computer programming) that this would be an easy thing to fix.

Well, from what I've seen various staff members post, the answer is somewhat yes and no. There seems to be some difficulty in how they chose to store author data. Using author name as a key makes it difficult to separate individuals. However, switching to something unique creates difficulties for all the existing processes plus, I would assume, for moving mis-attributed books.

It's not insurmountable and I think they need to bite the bullet and just spend some time fixing this. I suspect that the current situation leads to several problems beyond just the male/female thing, but I also suspect its a massive effort of transforming data given 94,623,929 books.

I wish I could say I've never made a similar mistake in software, but I can't. :-)

>215 TadAD: I think they need to bite the bullet and just spend some time fixing this
They started to, with the disambiguation page, and then... nothing further. So I'd suppose a can o' spaghetti.

Happy long weekend, Darryl. With the new flu epidemic in the news lately resulting in the deaths of a few young kids, I wondered if any of the more serious cases have had to be admitted to your hospital.

>204 kidzdoc: Yay for Obama! He's got to be the most intellectual prez we've had for a long, long time. Great books he picked. I love your idea of inviting him to join LT once his second term is done.

Hello from rainy Philadelphia! I flew from ATL to PHL this morning, and arrived at my parents' house just after noon. I'll catch up here, take a nap, and try to catch up on everyone else's threads after dinner.

In keeping with my new tendency to sustain strange orthopaedic injuries I did something to my right shoulder cuff as I was lifting my carry on suitcase from the overhead compartment as we landed. The luggage wasn't heavy, but the wheels somehow got caught in the door of the bin, and when I pulled it out I felt something pop in my shoulder, which was followed by a moderate amount of pain. It's still very sore, but I seem to be able to move my shoulder in all directions, so hopefully it's a minor injury.

I think I'll cancel the guardian angel subscription I've purchased for Caroline, and apply it to myself.

Even though I slept during most of the flight I did manage to read a good portion of Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers, which will be my first book of the year, which is excellent so far. It's her fifth and final novel, and I've read and enjoyed the first four. If I don't finish it tonight I'll definitely do so tomorrow.

>207 LizzieD: Your thread is fascinating, but I can't keep up.

That makes at least two of us, Peggy...

You're asking the wrong person whether Titanic preceded the Ring trilogy. I know that Leonardo di Caprio starred in Titanic, but that's all I can tell you.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North has appeared on several Besr of 2014 lists in this group, including mine. I hope that you buy and read it soon.

I'm nodding off, so I'll check back in later.

Enjoy your visit with your parents!

>219 kidzdoc: Oh, Darryl, what a mess. Get well soon.

Yikes! I'm already intimidated. Dropping a star and hoping to approximate being able to keep up.

Oh, Darryl, stop hurting yourself like this! Sheesh!

Seriously, though, I hope, as you say, that it's a minor injury that heals up very quickly so that you can enjoy your time with your family.

Happy New Year! Sorry to read of your shoulder injury, Darryl.

I kept track last year and my ratio of male and female authors tended to be about equal, though it ended up with a few more books written by men.

207 titanic was before lord of the rings.

I belive the last film I saw at the cinema was Catching Fire. Female to male ratio I know for a fact I read more male authors.

ouch! I hope your shoulder heals soon!

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is on my list for the month as well.

My library contains: Percent male: 46.62% : Percent female: 53.38%. I'd call that pretty even.

>219 kidzdoc: Hmm, perhaps you should not be licensed to carry luggage.

My library is Percent male: 52.13% : Percent female: 47.87% but in 2014 I read 59% women authors. But I have to say I don't pay much attention to who's written a particular book. Happy New Year Darryl.

>162 kidzdoc: That story about the baby is totally horrifying and terrifying. I'm glad it sounds like she is going to be okay, but lord have mercy.... that is a party that perhaps shouldn't have happened.....

Sorry to hear about your shoulder and I'm off to check out my stats for male/female split with regard to reading.

The most interesting questions do pop up on your thread! Food, library and reading balance, movies, all sorts of stuff.

Sorry to hear about your shoulder - hope it heals quickly. If it's a minor nagging pain - do go to a chiropractor or a massage therapist and get things straightened out. Shoulder pain is a real nuisance (still dealing with the aftermath of something-or-other, myself).

Last movie I saw in a theater was Frozen, at Christmas a year ago. I loved it. Before that...I don't remember, I don't think we did a Christmas movie in 2012 but I don't remember why, and that's basically all the theater movies I see. Saw Avatar in 3D, a few years ago. I do watch a few more on DVD, on my TV or at my parents', but...my TBWatched pile is pretty huge too (though not a patch on my TBR pile).

Happy New Year, Darryl! I've been out of town since 12/27, visiting my brother and SIL in New Hampshire, hence the delayed greeting. Got you starred now and will be interested to see what you're reading and what you think of it.

>23 kidzdoc: Hmph. Last year (or perhaps in 2013) I caught an earful from LT's favorite curmudgeon for waiting until New Year's Eve or New Year's Day to start my first thread
hehe, I recall.
I had you pegged as my team mate for holding out until the new year back then. But you bolted and left me in the dust. At least RD was happy :) One year I will surprise myself and start off a thread as soon as the Good Dr opens the new group.

>204 kidzdoc: I love what Obama is reading too, and that Atul Gawande is spreading the news :) I heard him on our National Radio a few weeks back. His long talk caught my ear when he mentioned family in poor rural India, and that he was a doctor. I wondered what the chances were that he wasn't Atul Gawande!

Hi Darryl ... so sorry to hear about your injury! I hope you're feeling better today. FYI, I finished and reviewed Men We Reaped, if you want to check it out on my thread.

I'm on the scoreboard, as I just finished my first book of the year, Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers's final novel. It was very good and beautifully written, but I'll only give it 4 stars. I'll write a review of it later today or tomorrow.

My right shoulder is still sore, but it feels much better today than it did yesterday and I have full range of motion with only minimal discomfort. When I tore my left rotator cuff a few years ago it felt much worse on the day that I sustained the injury, and extending it caused moderate to severe pain, so I'm encouraged that this is only a minor strain.

It rained here most of the day yesterday, and today looks to be an even worse day, with continuous rain, high winds and unusually warm temperatures, so I'll pass on going to the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art I had planned to see. Today is the last day of the exhibition, so hopefully I'll be able to see it elsewhere.

>235 kidzdoc: Glad to hear that the shoulder is improving. I look forward to reading your review of Clock Without Hands as that is one of the McCullers books I have not yet read.

>208 PaulCranswick: Your comment did generate a very good discussion, Paul! I plan to explore my own reading habits in more detail, as I suspect that I subconsciously read books written by men when I have a discrete list of books to choose from, whether it's a list of finalsts for a literary award or a list of books I've chosen to read, e.g. for a challenge or theme on LT. I noticed in 2013 that I read nearly all of the Booker Prize longlisted books written by men before I read a single one written by a woman, and that may have happened last year as well. If this is true I'd like to make myself aware of this bias, and balance out my male:female reads this year, including your British Authors Challenge.

BTW, I have Moon Tiger on my Kindle, so I'll start reading it today or tomorrow.

I'll leave spreadsheets to you, Heather and others. I don't think I've created a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in at least a decade.

>209 brenpike: Well done, Brenda! I'm feeling like a bit of a dinosaur, as it seems as though I had the worst male:female imbalance of anyone so far.

>210 evilmoose: At least your skew toward male authors isn't as bad as mine was, Megan.

>211 jjmcgaffey: That's interesting, Jennifer; for some reason I would have thought you would have been closer to a 50:50 split, although I have no idea why I would have thought that.

>212 alcottacre: Too late, Stasia. This thread is already out of hand. I'm just glad that I managed to get one book read before it's time to make a new one.

I hope that you get some reading in during your academic break. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if you wanted to avoid reading much of anything.

>213 Ameise1: Thanks, Barbara! I hope that you're enjoying your weekend as well.

ETA: Do you know what type of bird that is?

>214 The_Hibernator: I love that the media reported the books President Obama brought with him on holiday, and that I own four of the six books. One former LTer whose taste in books parallels mine recommended the other two books, Age of Ambition and The Laughing Monsters, so I'll add them to my wish list.

>215 TadAD: Oof. I hadn't thought about the nuts and bolts of reclassifying nearly 100 million books! I wouldn't be eager to take on that task.

>216 qebo: So I suppose this isn't a high priority for the LT brass, then. I can live with that.

>217 cameling: Thanks, Caroline; my "weekend" will end up being seven days in length, as I won't have to return to work until Friday. We did have a lot more patients hospitalized with influenza than usual from late November through December, although there was a significant drop off during Christmas week. Our outbreak in the Deep South preceded those in the rest of the country, so we're tailing off while cases in the Northeast and elsewhere are picking up.

>218 jnwelch: I agree, Joe; President Obama would seem to be far more of an intellectual than nearly all of the other presidents that have served during my lifetime. He would be a great addition to LT, and if he were to join this group I think he'd give Paul and Amber a run for their money for the most active thread.

>220 arubabookwoman: Thanks, Deborah. As my parents get older these visits become more meaningful to them, and to me. I may take a quick trip to NYC on Tuesday to see several exhibitions at MoMA, but otherwise I'll spend my time entirely with them, my mother's younger sister and my brother.

>221 Ameise1: Thanks, Barbara. I'm feeling much better today, so I think this was just a minor injury.

I'm considering changing my user name from kidzdoc to klutzdoc, given my litany of musculoskeletal injuries over the past few years.

>222 AuntieClio: Welcome, Stephanie! I hope to be able to keep up with this thread as well.

>223 scaifea: Thanks, Amber. I'm going to look at post-holiday sales and order the same model of guardian angel that Caroline has.

>224 tymfos: Happy New Year to you too, Terri! Have you had or will you get snow or ice from this current weather system? Well done on having a much more equitable male:female split than I did.

>225 BBGirl55: Thanks, Bryony. I'm useless when it comes to knowing about contemporary movies, other than what I read about them in the newspaper.

>226 banjo123: Thanks, Rhonda. It's a rainy day here in Philadelphia, but my shoulder is only slightly achy. I'll definitely take it easy over the next week and take at least one Aleve a day to help decrease inflammation.

I look forward to your comments on The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

I haven't yet decided which book I'll read first for the Reading Globally first quarter challenge, but I suspect that it will be A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie. I loved her most recent novel, Burnt Shadows, which IMO should have won the Orange Prize the year in which it was eligible.

>227 Whisper1: I'd say so, Linda!

>228 qebo: LOL! You're so mean, Katherine!

>238 kidzdoc: You called it - I have read next to nothing on my break. This happens every time. By the time I am ready to start reading, my break is over!

>229 brenzi: Happy New Year, Bonnie! It's good to see you here. I think I may have a hidden bias in the gender of the author of the books that I buy and read, even though I'm a fan of the Orange Prize and one of the few active male members of the Orange January/July group. I don't expect that I'll achieve a 50:50 split this year, but I'd like to have more equity than I did in 2014.

>230 EBT1002: That is a horrifying story, Ellen, but it's far from the worst I've heard of or been involved in. She apparently made a complete recovery, unlike other abused or neglected kids I've taken care of, some of whom met with the worst possible outcome.

>231 jjmcgaffey: Most of the interesting comments and discussions that pop up here are due to comments made my someone other than me, I think; Paul was the one who started the male:female discussion. Everyone else contributes to it, so I have all of you to thank for that!

I've become a frequent flyer at the large orthopaedics group in the hospital that is adjacent to the one I work at. I know two of them from residency, including the guy who saw me when I tore my left rotator cuff, so I'll see him again if I need to (and I suspect that I won't).

If I watch movies it's nearly always at the home of my close friends in Madison, when we watch DVDs with the kids, such as Ice Age. That only happens once every year or two, though.

>232 Cariola: Happy New Year, Deborah! I'll follow your 75 Books and Club Read threads closely, of course.

Happy Sunday, Darryl! Hope you are having a good time in Philly. I am starting Ballad of the Sad Cafe today. I do not have much interest in the NFL this weekend. I bet you would LOVE to see the Lions beat up on Romo & Co. That is unlikely, but you never know.

Have you read Men We Reaped? I just snagged it on audio and it has been on my To-Read list, since it came out.

>233 LovingLit: Hi, Megan! I remember that we were two of the holdouts at the end of 2013, despite peer pressure from Richard and others. I was off from work when Jim created the 2015 group, unlike last year, and I was especially eager to get going on my 2015 plans, so those were the main reason that I started a thread as early as I did. Have you created a thread yet?

Thanks for mentioning that you listened to Atul Gawande on the radio, as it reminded me that I wanted to listen to his Reith Lectures on the BBC during this break.

>234 lauralkeet: Thanks, Laura; I'm definitely feeling better today. I'll check out your review of Men We Reaped after breakfast.

>236 alcottacre: Thanks, Stasia. I'll probably review Clock Without Hands this afternoon. I've now read all five of her novels, and I'll probably read at least two or three of them again in the near future.

>242 alcottacre: I don't blame you for not wanting to read on your academic break. I almost never read for pleasure between semesters as an undergraduate or medical student, as my brain needed the rest!

I'll check back in, create a new thread, and do my best to catch up with everyone else's threads after breakfast (someone is cooking something down there!).

>244 msf59: Good morning, Mark! I would love nothing better than a Lions' beatdown of the Cowboys. Actually my biggest wish came through on New Year's Day, when the Oregon Ducks destroyed the Tallahassee Thugs (FSU).

I look forward to your comments on Ballad of the Sad Café; I'd love to read it again soon.

I haven't read Men We Reaped yet. I do have it on my Kindle, though, so I could read it this coming week.

I loved Salvage the Bones. I think you were a fan too, right? I am looking forward to seeing what she does next.

BTW- Brown Girl Dreaming was wonderful. It's nice to get a new voice from someone of color.

Darryl - where have you been all my life?!

Not quite accurate for am pretty sure that in past years I've stopped by a time or two (and may even have left a comment), but I've never read a thread of yours all the way through before. Very interesting discussions going in here. Will try to keep up.

Checked my author gender count which turned out to be 55.7% male and 44.3% female overall and in 2014 66% of my authors read were female while a paltry 33% were male. Am pretty sure they were not conscious choices gender-wise as I pretty much pull books off the shelf as they rise to the top of the TBR pile. Library books are another thing altogether but there weren't really very many of them.

Hope you enjoy your trip and recover from your travel injury quickly.

>247 msf59: You're right, Mark, I was a fan of Salvage the Bones. I just read Laura's review of Men We Reaped; since I have it on my Kindle, and didn't bring Trusting Doctors with me, I'll read it this week.

One of my unstated goals for 2015 was to read one work of fiction and one work of nonfiction by authors from the African diaspora. So, I'll read Men We Reaped and A History of Seven Killings, which I did bring with me, this month.

>248 Fourpawz2: Ha ha! Welcome, Charlotte! I've been here...

There have been numerous interesting discussions over the past years here, which are mainly due to my friends who post here. I'm happy to be a host to these discussions, and contribute whenever I can.

I am going to be more cognizant of the gender of the authors of the books I'll read this year, and see if that makes a significant difference in the male:female balance during the year and at its end. I think it will.

Thanks for asking about my shoulder. I took one Aleve last night, and I haven't taken anything yet today. It's mildly sore, but I can rotate my shoulder in all directions without difficulty. Hopefully it will be my only musculoskeletal injury of the year.

Hi Darryl - Enjoy your visit. I hope your shoulder heals quickly. You DO have good discussions here. In the discussion of gender in the articles I posted, one writer also pointed out that writers of color are also neglected, so gender is not the only thing we need to focus on. I am unfamiliar with McCullers' final novel, so will look forward to your comments. I think I've read her other books. I'll have to check.

>250 BLBera: Good point, Beth. I've been pretty lax about reading books written by authors of color, especially those from the African diaspora, so I'll make this an explicit goal of mine this year.