Meredy's 2015 Reading Journal: Part II

Here begins the second half of the year. My list for January through June is reproduced below, and the links go to the old thread; but all new posts will be here.

There are no spoilers in my reviews.

Solid star (★) = 1 star. Open star (☆) = ½ star. Post references are links. Reviews are posted on the works pages as well as in this thread, and I'm tickled to death when someone gives me a little thumb now and then.

To jump to the end of this post (which will grow long in time), click this link to message #2 and scroll up.

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Links to reviews from January through June jump to old thread.

January

• A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics, by Donald Richie (2007), 1/6/15; 73 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 12.
• WordPlay, by Glenn Bassett (2013), 1/3/15; abandoned after 11 of 308 pages (3.6%; not rated); comments: post 13.
• Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan (2001), 1/6/15; 404 pages (★★★★); review: post 30.
• Euphoria, by Lily King (2014), 1/11/15; 261 pages (★★★☆); review: post 28.
• In Praise of Shadows, by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1933), 1/15/15; 48 pages (★★★☆); review: post 24.
• Last Night in Montreal, by Emily St. John Mandel (2009), 1/16/15; 247 pages (★★★☆); review: post 38.
• Fever Dream, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (2010), 1/21/15; 544 pages(★★★☆); review: post 35.
• Under the Dome, by Stephen King (2013), 1/21/15; 874 pages (★★★☆); review: post 37.
• The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman (2015), 1/28/15; abandoned after 39 of 329 pages (11.8%; not rated); no review.
• A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand's Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, by Andrew MacGregor Marshall (2014), 1/29/15; 329 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 46.

January totals: 8 books finished (2670 pages); 2 books abandoned (50 pages)

February

• The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief, by Ben MacIntyre (1997), 2/1/15; abandoned after 74 of 295 pages plus backmatter (25.0%; not rated); no review.
A new category: suspended--not quite abandoned (and tracked but not counted):
• The Spinoza Problem: A Novel by Irvin D. Yalom, sidelined 2/4/15 after 17 pages of 317. Possibly may return.
• Orfeo, by Richard Powers (2014), 2/10/15; 369 pages (★★★★); review: post 41.
• Cold Vengeance, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (2011), 2/17/15; 356 pages (★★★☆); review: post 40.
• Two Graves, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (2011), 2/24/15; 484 pages (★★★☆); review: post 51.
• The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse, suspended 2/25/15 after 35 pages because it requires too much concentration for me right now. May resume another time. Note: This edition in English was published in 1969.
• Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers, by Amir D. Aczel (2015), 2/27/15; 224 pages plus backmatter (★★★); review: post 71.

February totals: 4 books finished (1433 pages); 1 book abandoned (74 pages)

March

• We Need New Names: A Novel, by NoViolet Bulawayo (2013), 3/3/15; 297 pages (★★★★); review: post 72.
• The Singer’s Gun, by Emily St. John Mandel (2010), 3/6/15; 288 pages (★★★★); review: post 87.
• The Bellwether Revivals, by Benjamin Wood (2012), 3/14/15; 420 pages (★★★); review: post 77.
• Without You, There Is No Us, by Suki Kim (2014), 3/16/15; 297 pages (★★★★); review: post 121.
• Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King (2013), 3/18/15; 531 pages (★★★☆); review: post 83.
• The Holy Thief, by Ellis Peters (1992), 3/23/15; 245 pages (★★★☆); review: post 85.
• The Lola Quartet, by Emily St. John Mandel (2012), 3/29/15; 279 pages (★★★☆); review: post 128.

March totals: 7 books finished (2353 pages); 0 books abandoned

April

• Rembrandt’s Nose: Of Flesh and Spirit in the Master's Portraits, by Michael Taylor (2007), 4/5/15; 163 pages (★★★☆); review: post 69.
• The Understory, by Pamela Erens (2007), 4/15/15; 172 pages (★★★); review: post 70.
• Me and Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald, by Judyth Vary Baker (2010), 4/16/15; 600 pages plus backmatter (★★★); review: post 82.
• Lexicon, by Max Barry (2013), 4/22/15; 390 pages (★★★★); review: post 76.
• Boston Strong: A City's Triumph over Tragedy, by Casey Sherman & Dave Wedge (2015), 4/25/15; 256 pages plus backmatter (★★☆); review: post 102.
• Our Game, by John le Carré (1995), 4/28/15; 302 pages (★★★☆); review: post 84.
• A Briefer History of Time, by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow (2005), 4/29/15; abandoned after 57 of 148 pages plus backmatter (38.5%; not rated).

April totals: 6 books finished (1883 pages); 1 book abandoned (57 pages)

May

• Trustee from the Toolroom, by Nevil Shute (1960), 5/4/15; 311 pages (★★★☆); review: post 92.
• The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, by Lance Dodes & Zachary Dodes (2014), 5/6/15; 161 pages plus backmatter (★★); review: post 107.
• White Fire, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (2013), 5/12/15; 368 pages (★★★☆); review: post 99.
• Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, by Erik Larson (2015), 5/23/15; 410 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 106.

May totals: 4 books finished (1250 pages); 0 books abandoned

June

• In the Wet, by Nevil Shute (1953), 6/1/15; 355 pages (★★★★); review: post 120.
• One Fine Day, by Mollie Panter-Downes (1947), 6/3/15; abandoned after 116 of 241 pages (48.1%; not rated; no review); comments: post 100.
• Revival, by Stephen King (2014), 6/6/15; 405 pages (★★★☆); review: post 115.
• Storm Front, by Jim Butcher (2000), 6/10/15; 355 pages (★★★); review: post 110.
• There Was an Old Woman, by Hallie Ephron (2013), 6/15/15; abandoned after 46 of 293 pages for being stiflingly inert (15.7%; not rated); comments: post 136.
• Lie Down with the Devil, by Linda Barnes (2008), 6/15/15; 318 pages (★★☆); review: post 135.
• Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher (2001), 6/19/15; 405 pages (★★★☆); review: post 157.
• Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice, by Adam Benforado (2015), 6/21/15; 289 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 171.
• Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher (2001), 6/24/15; 246 pages (★★★); review: post 163.

June totals: 7 books finished (2473 pages); 2 books abandoned (162 pages)

Half-year totals: 36 books finished (12,062 pages); 6 books abandoned (343 pages)

From this point on: reviews for listed books appear below, and links go to those rather than to the old thread.

July

• A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute (1950), 7/2/15; 351 pages (★★★★★); review: post 5.
• Summer Knight, by Jim Butcher (2002), 7/7/15; 246 pages (★★★☆); review: post 28.
• Death Masks, by Jim Butcher (2003), 7/15/15; 338 pages (★★★); review: post 35.
• Uprooted, by Naomi Novik (2015), 7/24/15; 439 pages (★★★☆); review: review: post 59.
• Pied Piper, by Nevil Shute (1942), 7/28/15; 306 pages (★★★★); review: post 61.
• Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry, by Taigen Dan Leighton (2011), 7/31/15; 266 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 64.

July totals: 6 books finished (2018 pages); 0 books abandoned

August

• The Girl with Seven Names, by Hyeonseo Lee (2015), 8/2/15; 296 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 58.
• Blood Rites, by Jim Butcher (2004), 8/4/15; 338 pages (★★★); review: post 60.
• Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, by Leonard Mlodinow (2012), 8/5/15; 272 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 78.
• Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch (1954), 8/11/15; 279 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 89.
• Life From Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness, by Sasha Martin (2015), 8/12/15; 346 pages plus backmatter (★★★); review: post 84.
• The Rabbit Back Literature Society, by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (2006/2013), 8/16/15; 345 pages (★★★☆); review: post 90.
• The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (1992), 8/23/15; 559 pages (★★★★★); review: post 81.
• The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, by Joseph Bédier; trans. Hilaire Belloc (1913), 8/23/15; 96 pages (★★★★★); review: post 203.
• On the Beach, by Nevil Shute (1957), 8/25/15; 320 pages (★★★★★); review: post 75.

August totals: 9 books finished (2883 pages); 0 books abandoned

September

• Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis de Bernières (1994), 9/4/15; 435 pages (★★★★★); review: post 205.
• Dead Beat, by Jim Butcher (2005), 9/10/15; 512 pages (★★★☆); review: post 95.
• Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan (2012), 9/12/15; 288 pages (★★★☆); review: forthcoming.
• Proven Guilty, by Jim Butcher (2006), 9/20/15; 547 pages (★★★); review: post 145.
• Fallen Land, by Patrick Flanery (2013), 9/22/15; abandoned after 67 of 406 pages; just not into it right now (16.5%; not rated); comments: post 98.
• Places of the Heart, by Colin Ellard (2013), 9/30/15; abandoned after 160 of 226 pages plus backmatter (70.1%; not rated); comments: post 206.

September totals: 4 books finished (1782 pages); 2 books abandoned

October

• Reamde, by Neal Stephenson (2011), 10/3/15; 1044 pages (★★★★); review: review: post 170.
• Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King (2014), 10/7/15; abandoned after 89 of 437 pages; no appetite for it (20%; not rated).
• Far Tortuga, by Peter Matthiessen (1975), 10/12/15; 408 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 132.
• White Night, by Jim Butcher (2007), 10/18/15; 404 pages (★★★); review: post 145.
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot (1872), 10/22/15; 837 pages (★★★★★); review: post 193.
• Sweet Caress, by William Boyd (2015), 10/29/15; 450 pages (★★★); review: post 140.

October totals: 5 books finished (3143 pages); 1 book abandoned

November

• A Share in Death, by Deborah Crombie (1993), 11/3/15; 259 pages (★★☆); review: post 141.
• Blue Labyrinth, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (2014), 11/6/15; 403 pages (★★★☆); review: post 144.
• The Cavalier of the Apocalypse, by Susanne Alleyn (2009), 11/9/15; 249 pages plus backmatter (★★★☆); review: post 169.
• Palace of Justice, by Susanne Alleyn (2014), 11/16/15; 298 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 169.
• Plainsong, by Kent Haruf (1999), 11/22/15; 301 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 158.
• Most Secret, by Nevil Shute (1945), 11/28/15; 310 pages (★★★☆); review: post 160.

November totals: 6 books finished (1820 pages); 0 books abandoned

December

• Small Favor, by Jim Butcher (2008), 12/3/15; 541 pages (★★★☆); review: post 171.
• The Shelf, by Phyllis Rose (2014), 12/11/15; 238 pages plus backmatter (★★★★); review: post 217.
• Crimson Shore, by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (2015), 12/19/15; 337 pages (★★☆); review: forthcoming.
• 600 Hours of Edward, by Craig Lancaster (2012), 12/27/15; 338 pages (★★★☆); review: post 211.
• Winter Solstice, by Rosamunde Pilcher (2000), 12/29/15; 504 pages (★★★★); review: post 197.
• A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, by E. L. Konigsburg (1973), 12/31/15; 201 pages (★★★★); review: post 214.

December totals: 6 books finished (2159 pages); 0 books abandoned

2015 Year-End Stats

Books finished: 72 (monthly average: 6)
Pages (including parts of 9 books abandoned): 26,526
Average books per week: 1.4 (finished)
Average pages per week: 510 (total)
Average pages per book: 359 (finished)

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[Reviews owed: 2.]

Placeholder post.

I've just given Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice five stars and am working on my review. To everybody who shared their enthusiasm for it, thanks: you were right.

Oh, good! I'm really looking forward to your review!

A Town Like Alice (1950), by Nevil Shute (5 stars)

Six-word review: Resourceful young woman meets challenges boldly.

Extended review:

Can a story be warm without being sentimental? Can it be sweet without being saccharine or cloying?

Nevil Shute's 1950 novel A Town Like Alice answers those questions with a resounding yes.

Can it also be rugged without being harsh, emotional without being manipulative, unhurried without being boring?

(Full review here.)

>5 Meredy:
And another great review. I think Mr. Shute would like it.

>6 suitable1: Thanks very much. I hope you didn't mind following the link. Posting in just one place is a lot easier, especially when I catch small errors later. And it keeps the thread shorter.

>7 Meredy:

A link within LT is fine with me. I rarely follow external links.

>5 Meredy: I enjoyed your review, so glad you liked the book. I would suggest Pied Piper as another good Shute to read if you can find a copy.

>9 NorthernStar: Thank you. My library has Pied Piper, so that'll be my next Shute.

I agree with everything you said in your review. That accepted racism that you mentioned at the end is the one thing that prevents me from recommending A Town Like Alice to all and sundry. It is reflective of the time and place, but it is not comfortable to read. Still one of my all time favourite books.

On a personal note: We have had some terrible family drama going on at home, and it is costing hugely in terms of time and money, not to mention taking an immense emotional and physical toll over a long period of time. And it's far from over; but in the past two weeks we have passed a major crisis point and survived it.

So I've been thankful to have some absorbing reading to help me to little escapes--the Dresden Files have been just the ticket--and to have some help and reminders to take a longer, wider view, such as a well-timed book on Zen.

Even the mental focus it takes to write reviews has been a saving grace. For that amount of time, I'm concentrating on one thing of my choice and not being pounded by another.

I now have Pied Piper in house and also Dresden 5 and 6.

Oh, dear! I'm so very sorry to hear this. Let us know how the Green Dragoneers can help (and if that's best done by encouraging you to read, then please assume that Jill needs to hear feedback on whether she should read beyond the first book in the Dresden File series. Because you come at it from a different perspective than most of my acquaintance.)

>12 Meredy: Hugs and well wishes to you, glad you are surviving, keep on keeping on because we are all rooting for you and for peace and well-being in your life. Glad Dresden is giving you a bit of an escape, I know he does that for me, too.

>13 jillmwo: >14 MrsLee: Thank you, my dears. Your sympathetic encouragement and some good book talk mixed in with the usual helpings of banter are all I would ask. I've been very silent on these matters over many months because it's all too personal and difficult. But some of the best medicine has been freely given right here under the LibraryThing banner, and especially in this warm old pub.

>12 Meredy: Sorry to hear you have some family drama on-going. I hope this will not affect the production of your most excellent six-word reviews.

I am sending large quantities of good thoughts and support in your direction.

I hope your drama becomes less dramatic, and that you can continue to find some distraction in reading and reviewing.

I hope the drama settles out, and that the books and chat here continue to help get you through. Pied Piper should be a good comfort read. And Dresden is a good escape from real life.

Thank you all so much. The book on Zen is also doing me good. I used to sit daily and attend a sitting group every week, as well as doing a lot of related reading, but I fell away from it. Now I've begun again, gently, with very much older back and knees. Coming back feels like a sort of homecoming.

I'm glad you have good things to make the difficult ones more manageable. Best of luck with the drama, and we will keep your seat warm and waiting any time you need to pop in for distraction!

We have seat warmers? Who knew!

Smurfs have their uses!

Meredy, I hope you find many wonderful books to help you through this difficult time.

>21 suitable1: it's The Green Dragon. Keeping things warm should never be a problem :)

>24 imyril:

We have cats for that duty in this house.

Just adding my good wishes, and hoping that the drama is over soon.

Hoping things get better for you soon, best wishes.

Summer Knight (2002), by Jim Butcher (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Dresden tackles supremely powerful magical forces.

Extended review:

I've made it to book 4 in the series, and I must agree with the cheering squad: author Jim Butcher does hit his stride with this one. There's a kind of calm confidence of style, like that of an athlete who's done his stretching and warming up and now proceeds to his performance with masterly control that looks like relaxed ease.

Not that Butcher is quite in the "masterly control" league. It's just an analogy.

(Full review here.)

>28 Meredy: I love how you educate me in your reviews! :)

Well, okay, @Meredy, maybe I'll go try out Summer Knight. I think I only read the very first one in the series. Oh, wait, that's a book bullet, isn't it?

>29 MrsLee: That's nice to know.

>30 jillmwo: Yes, or possibly a book arrow or even a book magical zap. (I would never think of such a thing as a book spitwad.)

I do think that the second and third books supply, in retrospect, significant (though not indispensable) background for the fourth, and I'm not sorry I read them. I enjoyed them. It's just that Butcher does seem to take a leap at number four. I hope he can sustain the gains.

Meanwhile, I've just brought Naomi Novik's Uprooted home from the library.


All: Again, my thanks for your good wishes. Things are still getting worse, actually, in ways I didn't even imagine. I'm coping as best I can, and both reading and readers are helping a lot.

(Edited to fix wrong post reference.)

>31 Meredy: Glad your books are providing the kind of emotional lift you need, and yes, writing and talking about them soothes as well!

On that note, my return to the GD has been inspirational for me as well, so CHEERS!

>31 Meredy:, I will say that I thought the way magic was explored in Uprooted was quite satisfactory. Not too simple, not too bewildering. I hope you enjoy it!

>31 Meredy:

ohhh, I thought that all she had out was the Temeraire series.

Death Masks (2003), by Jim Butcher (3 stars)

Six-word review: Magical monster chase featuring religious McGuffin.

Extended review:

I went straight from the preceding book of the Dresden Files series to this one with nary a pause for breath.

Death Masks launches Harry Dresden on yet another dependably fast-moving, action-packed investigative adventure in the realm of magical and mythical beings, this time on the trail of a stolen religious relic. Some of those beings are agents of evil, and not just ordinary human Adolf-Hitler-type evil but capital-E Evil right out of the bowels of Hell.

Evil forces notwithstanding, this Dresden yarn is not quite on the epic scale of Summer Knight. Still, the plot is layered deep in the fallout from that conflict while introducing new villains and enlarging the dimensions of Harry's life.

(Full review here.)

MY husband and I have a standing movie date at home on Saturday night. Our divergent tastes mean it can be hard to find something we both like. He's suffered through a lot of slow, stuffy dramas for me, and I've endured a lot of explosions and car chases for him. Sometimes a stupid sci-fi B movie just suits both of us as a mindless escape, and sometimes we get to see what both of us call a "real" movie that entertains with substance plus well-acted characters and an actual plot.

Last night we sat through a stinker called Jupiter Ascending. When it was finally over (how can two hours last so long when you're not at the dentist?), there was a pause, and then he said, "Maybe it was a self-published movie."

>36 Meredy: I have heard that Jupiter Ascending is dreadful from others and they were Sci Fi movie nerds.

I think I would agree with the implication of your husband's suggested categorisation of the movie.

>37 pgmcc: I was seduced by the fact that there were some real actors in it. What in the world were they doing in it, slumming? The movie was mostly sfx and filler, and the parts that weren't were pretty dumb. There were also some odd continuity breaks that no one bothered to explain.

But never mind--we'll do better (or worse) next time.

The people behind the aforementioned movie had been responsible for The Matrix so the expectations of a huge success were high. However, the movie was and continues to be universally panned.

>39 jillmwo: Well, I guess I just didn't do my homework. Usually I make a good check of reviews. We saw this one previewed a week ago and it looked like a qualified ok (meaning probably stupid but adequately entertaining escapism). I still rent Netflix DVDs. Come Saturday night, this is what I had in house (along with a couple of foreign films that would have suffocated my husband), so we decided to go for it. A good reminder to renew my vigilance.

@Meredy, if you are looking for a more intelligent Sci Fi movie you might try ex machina. I would be interested in your views on it.

>41 pgmcc: Thanks. I've just put it high in my queue.

I just got around to watching Ex Machina last week. Was rather impressed.

Assuming it has a good ending, Naomi Novik's Uprooted is going to get a pretty good review from me.

>36 Meredy: This may be my favourite film review ever. So succinct, so nuanced, and so spot on. I know a couple of people who loved that film, but they throw their hands up and begin any comments with a shamefaced 'don't get me wrong, it's terrible...' As far as I can grasp, the main pleasure is watching how much scenery Eddie Redmaybe can chew despite his youth. Many fine British actors develop that skill, but I understand he's off to a flying start.

I have two book reviews pending right now:

Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
Pied Piper, by Nevil Shute

I am not going to wait until I have a dozen in arrears.

>45 imyril: Thank you! For succinctness, though, you can't top the Four Word Film Review (http://www.fwfr.com/default.asp), which was actually my inspiration for my six-word reviews. I tried pretty hard to contribute to the FWFR site, but I just couldn't cram enough into four.

>46 Meredy: you know, I think I prefer your 6 words - it lets you add nuance.

Six words give Meredy more scope.

Yes, even in that context I had to add 50%. I always use too many words. Give me a 1000-word limit for an article, and it's going to come out to 1700. I greatly admire the ability of some to put complex thoughts into simple language and to think in phrases or sentences instead of paragraphs and entire essays. It's looking like I'm not going to learn that art in this lifetime.

>48 SylviaC: bravo!

>50 imyril: Oh! You're right!

>48 SylviaC: Sorry, I missed that at first look, but (bowing) thank you.

>50 imyril: >51 Meredy: Thank you. (Blows kisses.) My talents tend toward the succinct.

(>52 SylviaC: Let's see you keep it up.)

Will a haiku do?
Six becomes a dozen, yet
So few syllables!

Whoa, this one's on a roll.

Wow, I need 300-500 words (and lots of parentheses) when I'm talking to people!

46> I'm excited to see what you think about Uprooted!

The Girl with Seven Names (2015), by Hyeonseo Lee (4 stars)

Six-word review: Escaping the world's most repressive nation.

Extended review:

Every book I read and every documentary I see on the subject of North Korea adds something to my awareness of the profound apartness of this appalling, frightening country. Here's one such passage from this memoir of a young woman who left her homeland in 1997, at the age of seventeen:

One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you're abusing someone else's, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist. This is also why most people escape because they're hungry or in trouble--not because they're craving liberty. (pages 288-289)

Hyeonseo Lee's memoir of her early life in the claustrophobic realm ruled by the Kim dynasty and her subsequent defection through China to South Korea is an absorbing, affecting, and above all authentic-sounding personal and social history. Fear, brutality, corruption, and privation shape her destiny alongside courage, resourcefulness, the love of family, and the kindness of strangers.

(Full review here.)

Uprooted (2015), by Naomi Novik (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Young witch battles all-consuming evil force.

Extended review:

I found many things to like about the novel Uprooted. Here are some of them:

It's absorbing and fast-moving.
• The main character, Agnieszka, faces a high-stakes challenge with no assurance that she can muster the resources to enter the battle and stand a chance of prevailing.
• There are plenty of gray areas, ambiguities, and seeming contradictions to keep things from becoming dull or predictable.
• The plot develops quickly but without the sort of haste that shortchanges depth. There is adequate depth and complexity for a novel of this type.

It offers an interesting account of magical practice, sources, and effects.
• We view the experience of learning to control and use magical powers in a way that feels more believable than Hogwarts, even if a tiny bit less fun.
• The aspect of relationship between magical power and the land adds a meaningful dimension.
• The subjective experience of casting spells jointly with another wizard is expressed as an intriguing and not always welcome kind of intimacy.
• The idea of what appears to be left-brain versus right-brain magic is new to me and is shown evocatively.

Best of all, the author writes with conviction. She believes in the magic she's describing and the world she creates.

(Full review here.)

Blood Rites (2004), by Jim Butcher (3 stars)

Six-word review: New complications for Harry's hyperactive life.

Extended review:

Dresden Files episode number 6 introduces a lot of backstory, some of it answering questions previously raised and some delivering surprises.

Not that there's much time for quiet revelations in the accelerated pace of this sanguinary tale. The cinematic opening propels us straight into action, and fight scene after fight scene begins to tax my endurance. I yearn for a little quiet reflection and wish Harry would take up yoga or Zen just to give my respiration a break.

But I suppose I have the rest of my reading pile for that sort of thing. You don't read the Dresden Files for the philosophy.

The case on which Chicago's only consulting wizard is here engaged takes Harry Dresden into the world of X-rated movies. A producer's crew are being killed off by an evil-eye curse, and only Harry--aided by his cop friend Murphy and a couple of denizens of the magical world--can put a stop to it. In the process, Harry is entangled in several new or dramatically changed relationships that promise to figure in future installments.

(Full review here.)

Pied Piper (1942), by Nevil Shute (4 stars)

Six-word review: Old man, young children, wartime odyssey.

Extended review:

In Pied Piper, Nevil Shute explores some of the same themes I've met in others of his novels. As in Trustee from the Toolroom, he shows us an ordinary man who faces an extraordinary situation and rises to meet it. As in A Town Like Alice, he depicts wartime circumstances that force a motley group to undertake a very, very long and arduous journey and call on an unlikely person to assume the role of leader. In this case, the man is elderly and not physically strong, and the group consists of children stranded in occupied France. As in both A Town Like Alice and In the Wet, the author uses the narrative device of having a relatively uninvolved third party relate the tale that was told to him and/or bear witness to the main character's progress over time.

I never read anything by Nevil Shute prior to April of this year, and this was my fourth of his novels. His writing expresses a spirit of adventure and a kind of down-to-earth honesty that I find engaging on both an intellectual and an emotional level. I also tend to trust British authors, and especially those of fifty or more years ago, to render the language with confident command and graceful style. Their education shows, as does their knowledge of the classics. I know I'm in good hands: my time will be well spent and my attention rewarded.

As this novel progressed and our main character, John Howard, took on greater and greater challenges, I began to hope for a certain kind of ending.

(Full review here.)

Pied Piper is one of the very few Nevil Shute books that I haven't read yet. I do have a copy of it in my bookcase, waiting to be read. Sometime. Sigh.

I may have to quit following this thread. I feel that must have a target painted on.

Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry (2011), by Taigen Dan Leighton (4 stars)

Six-word review: One minute of being a buddha.

Extended review:

This is exactly the sort of thing that I love about Zen:

Pay attention without judgments, or when making judgments, not making judgments about that, simply acknowledging a judgment about judgments without making a judgment about judgments. (page 54)

It's the paradoxical appeal of paradox. I can't resist it.

For the number of books I've read about Zen and the amount of instruction I've listened to, I probably ought to feel much more confident of my understanding than I do; and yet it isn't about achieving understanding (or anything else)--an attitude that Suzuki-roshi calls "gaining ideas" (ideas of gain) and this author labels "consumerism": trying to get something in return for our efforts. Rather, the focus of this book, if I dare to state my interpretation, is simply and completely "just sitting."

It's Taigen Leighton's way of presenting that, the teaching he imparts around it, that struck me in just the right way at just the right time with the reading of this book. I can't say whether it might do so for anyone else. That's my experience of it.

Serendipity led me to East West Books in Mountain View on July 5th. I hadn't been in the store in more than a year, and I hadn't sat with a Zen group in ten or more. I came out with a book (I always come out with a book), and this happened to be it. I don't even know what made me pick it up, other than the fact that I expect never to run out of questions, and so the title attracted me.

(Full LibraryThing review here.)

>64 Meredy: I enjoyed your review. Would it be un-Zen of me if I were to judge it to be very good? I could of course just sit here and let it be. If I were to do the latter would I be being more Zen, Existentialist, or both?

It appears you are not the only one with questions.

I'm now back up to an ominous seven unreviewed books:

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
Under the Net
Life From Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness
The Rabbit Back Literature Society
The Secret History
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
On the Beach

Three of those got 5 stars from me.

I think it's time for some light, noncerebral reading again. Cue Jim Butcher.

Meanwhile, I have Corelli's Mandolin on deck.

>65 pgmcc: I think you meant that for me? Assuming yes, thank you. I note that this author declares himself to have some favorites, so even though a hair's breadth separates heaven and hell, I think I'll allow myself the risk of liking things.

>66 Meredy: Your assumption is correct and I apologise for my numerical typo.

Yes, I enjoyed your review.

I am impressed with your industrious reviewing. I have to admit that I have left some reviews too long for me to remember enough to write a review. I am a bad person.

>67 pgmcc: It's because I swore an oath. It was, I think, at the beginning of 2013 that I made a pledge to review every book I read, meaning every book I finish. The discipline of keeping that pledge has been good for me, even though I find it burdensome when I fall behind. I posted eight of them in the last day or two of 2014.

Even when I don't write a review at once, I usually have some notes--scanty ones, on the book pages and/or bookmark or library slip, and sometimes more extensive ones in a little working file that I'll later copy and paste from. I never compose a review here on a LT page for fear that it'll all disappear when I'm seconds away from posting.

I'm looking forward to your review of On the Beach.

>68 Meredy: Still impressive.

I remember your posting a bunch of reviews at the end of the year.

I tend to write my longer posts and reviews in a Word document for the same reason as you. I learnt that practice on LiveJournal where I lost posts for various reasons before clicking "post".

Hooray! Back to Butcher! I'm in the middle of Turn Coat, but it is my audio book and I haven't been very good about finding time to listen lately.

I've just finished my fourth five-star novel in a row. I've never had a run like this before. It's wonderful, but . . . after all this fine cuisine, I need a Big Mac.

Was it Corelli's Mandolin that gets a five star? Or one of the titles listed in #66?

>73 jillmwo: Yes, Corelli's Mandolin. And the three preceding it: The Secret History, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, and On the Beach.

All my reading is listed with ratings in the first message of the thread. This year I've split my comments between two threads, but the list at the top is cumulative.

On the Beach (1957), by Nevil Shute (5 stars)

Six-word review: Disturbing apocalyptic vision still delivers chills.

Extended review:

Like a number of other novels of Nevil Shute, On the Beach is a moving tale of ordinary people jolted out of the normal course of their lives and into something--this particular something very dark and troubling--that they must somehow face and cope with.

Here, the Northern Hemisphere has been obliterated by nuclear war and its radioactive fallout, and weather patterns are inevitably carrying the lethal airborne particles southward. Australia is among the last places to be visited by the deadly cloud.

The main characters are an Australian naval officer and his wife, an American captain of a submarine, and a young woman he meets in Melbourne. The story is set in 1963, a few years into the future from the time of its publication in 1957. I was a young schoolchild in 1957, and I remember having air raid drills in school--duck and cover, file out of the classroom in an orderly fashion and stand against your locker, get under something. Civil defense sirens were tested every week in our city, and every week the radio broadcast a test of a civil defense alert that would sound in the event of an emergency. In 1957, before Sputnik, before escalation of the war in Vietnam, before the Cuban missile crisis, there was the terror of the Cold War. Shute's imagined eruption of a third world war and its aftermath must have been all too plausible to those who had lived through World War II and found that the hoped-for era of peace had been dashed on the rocks of international politics.

More than half a century later, it still resounds with a chilling relevance. At a time when the news is full of panicky, overreactive shootings of civilians by cops, of cops by civilians, and of civilians by civilians, it's easy enough to envision a chain of major events set off by accident, a series of mistakes compounding, with irrecoverable, irreversible global consequences. In the end, everybody pays--at the mercy of a natural process after all.

What's so striking about this novelist's depiction of a world in its final stages is the relative calm of those who are facing it. There is little in the way of hysteria, and even denial seems for most to be a deliberate, conscious turning away from awareness rather than an inability to acknowledge what is about to occur. Seeming like madness at first, denial eventually becomes a saving grace. People appear to be able to hold two incompatible notions at the same time, acting as if the one were true even as they recognize the other.

An important theme is the stabilizing effect of routine and structure. This appears to hold true across all social classes, from the habits of the distinguished retired gentlemen at the club to the tram driver who keeps showing up for work. Taking courses in skills that they will never use, harrowing fields that will never be planted, following the rules of professional conduct to the last even when there will never be any call to answer for breaking them: abiding within these principles points to the strength of an inner moral sensibility and the compelling power of human dignity that transcend the eradication of everything we are. There is no comforting sense that life goes on and that someone will remember us; there is no assurance of any future beyond one's own consciousness. And yet even on the last day someone is still buying garden furniture and putting out plantings that will bloom in the spring.

That made some sense to me. I recalled that on the morning of 9/11/2001, I heard the news of the attacks in New York and Washington as I was getting ready for work on the West Coast. That morning my department director came around to our cubicles to see that everyone was okay. He told me, "Go home if that's what you need to do to take care of yourself." I said, "No, I need to be here doing normal stuff." Sticking to routine seemed to be a refuge, the closest thing to a feeling of safety that I could embrace on that horrifying day.

Shute's gift for making his settings compellingly vivid, supported by technical details that make his stories sound like conscientiously recorded histories, provides a solid grounding in authenticity. As a result his fictions have the ring of truth even when impossibly set in a future time. This, his best-known novel, allows us to both picture and ponder the unthinkable, and the hope it leaves with us is that even in the face of the ultimate disaster our humanity might be the last thing to go.
 

The novel doesn't explain the title, but Wikipedia does: the phrase "on the beach" is a Royal Navy term that means "retired from the Service."

Excellent review! I wish I could give it four or five thumbs up, instead of just one.

I was in school in the 70s, and while the Cold War may not have had the immediacy that it did in the 50s and 60s, we still grew up with the awareness that the future was very delicately balanced, and the belief that a nuclear disaster was more likely than not. In On the Beach, the balance has tipped and set into motion a chain of events that ends in catastrophe.

Shute maintains an inexorable sense of impending doom, as his characters carry on with their lives as normally as possible. I wish that the end of the world would be so civilized. I liked the way that he portrayed the different ways of coping with the disaster, without resorting to the usual murder and mayhem. The almost surreal auto race was a brilliant touch.

>76 SylviaC: Thank you, Sylvia. One thing that I do think would happen, but that doesn't happen in Shute's novel, is that there would be an epidemic of gallows humor as people coped in the most down-to-earth and human of ways, making every sort of horrid joke about death and cataclysm--and laughing at them.

Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (2012), by Leonard Mlodinow (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Something about how our minds work.

Extended review:

While I'm reading one of Leonard Mlodinow's books, I always enjoy a pleasant, even exhilarating, sense of understanding the workings of some very complex process.

Afterward I can't remember the explanations or even necessarily what it was that was being explained. But I invariably come away full of the conviction that there are sound, rational answers to the questions raised and that the author knows what they are. If this sounds a little too much like taking things on blind faith, I try not to let myself be too disturbed by that. After all, I did follow the reasoning at the time, and I am no physicist or mathematician or psychologist.

So: I liked this book, much as I enjoy most books I read that explain something I didn't already know about the workings of the mind, and it has probably added something to my understanding; but apparently it has done nothing to increase my retention of a certain kind of content.

>75 Meredy: Great review of On the Beach. Too good for my liking. I am now suffering from a book bullet wound.

(You have no idea how difficult I am finding it not to comment on how accurate you are when you "Shute".)

>78 Meredy: If you enjoy books about the workings of the mind I would suggest you would like Wilful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan.

The Secret History (1992), by Donna Tartt (5 stars)

Six-word review: Marked forever by one evil deed.

Extended review:

I recently read The Rabbit Back Literature Society, by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen. On the cover of the hardback edition is a blurb that says: "Mixes the small-town surrealism of Twin Peaks with the clandestine-society theme of Donna Tartt's The Secret History." --The List (UK)

Having enjoyed Rabbit Back, I found this tantalizing. I hadn't read The Secret History, but I'd read The Goldfinch and, despite some exasperation with its bloated size, I was willing to take another chance on its very capable author. So on my next visit to a real brick-and-mortar bookstore I purchased a copy in order to make a small but not negligible statement with my $16.00.

And here's my conclusion about that blurb: comparing Rabbit Back to this feat of fiction is sort of like saying "If you liked Disney's Aladdin, you'll love the Mahabharata." There's a difference of at least two orders of magnitude.

Which is not to fault Rabbit Back for being what it is, but only to say that these are not two things of a kind except in the merest manner.

In fact, as I (inevitably) allowed my mind to riffle through apt comparisons, the first phrase that occurred to me was "a high tale of love and of death." That's from the opening line of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, in the classic 1913 translation by Hilaire Belloc of the twelfth-century legend. Even though the two works are superficially nothing alike, I find the latter to be a more apt parallel for Donna Tartt's first novel than the lightweight, whimsical, and ultimately unsatisfying Rabbit Back.

Both Tristan and Iseult and The Secret History are deep dramas of passion and error, of flawed humanity and its sometimes beautiful waywardness. Both possess a mythic quality of fatefulness and inevitability. Both deal in the big questions and in how people answer them with their deeds, their minds, their souls.

It would not do to take the comparison too far. The medieval tale has had a lasting effect on our Western culture and its literature that no contemporary novel is likely to have. It is short, 96 pages in my Dover edition, compared with 559 for the Tartt novel. And its principals are led by love and by a code of honor that has little in common with a misguided impulse to murder in the name of loyalty and self-preservation. Nonetheless, The Secret History strikes a resonant chord, perhaps because it too is a tragedy, and perhaps because there lurks behind it a sense of deities at play, amusing themselves with the sufferings of their mortal playthings, unhampered by any constraints that resemble human morality.

As in The Goldfinch, the author has a spellbinding way of depicting the inner life of her main character. I found myself asking the hard question: under those circumstances, how far might I have gone? How sure am I that I would not have done what they did, would never have fallen under the sway of a charismatic leader? What makes me think that I am any less flawed and weak than those who allowed themselves to commit that one evil deed?

The intoxicating and morally disfiguring experience of admission into an exclusive circle dominated by an aberrant personality: this is territory that has been explored many times. Other recent ventures into this terrain include Dismantled, The Bellwether Revivals, and The Likeness. None that I have seen is rendered more compellingly than The Secret History, a tale of love and death that is not unimaginably remote from where we live.

>79 pgmcc: Many thanks, Peter.

Such restraint is unbecoming in a wounded target. Let's see a little retaliation, shall we? Oh, wait . . .

>80 pgmcc: Ok, got me, maybe. At least I'll take a good look. I've read so many books in this category that they do tend to overlap, but that's an interesting subject. At a quick glance, it seems to follow the Gladwell formula of story, story, story, story, with just a little bit of discourse tying the stories in to a premise, as if it were a TV documentary with a voice over. Did you find that it really had substance?

Life From Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness (2015), by Sasha Martin (3 stars)

Six-word review: Food blogger's autobiographical odyssey of cooking.

Extended review:

When you publish a hardcover book under the auspices of a distinguished organization such as the National Geographic Society and sell it for $25, you're playing with the big boys. This sort of presentation sets readers' expectations. And so it's best if your work can stand up to some pretty close scrutiny.

I'm sorry to say that in my opinion this book doesn't stand up nearly as well as it ought to.

Sasha Martin seems like a likeable person who's had a hard struggle and has a dramatic story to tell, and I don't want to be mean to her, but I was underimpressed by the writing. I'd say it's well enough suited to a blog, which by its nature tends to be hastily written and transitory (in a deathless sort of way, like a newspaper article dashed off by deadline and then permanently archived), but making a book of it should have entailed an active coauthor.

Let me say that I liked the premise, that of preparing a recipe from every country in the world, one per week, alphabetically, and blogging about the experience, even if it does strongly echo Julie Powell's Julie and Julia. Putting the cooking project into a real-life context supplies a narrative thread that binds it together. It also gives the reader some vicarious experience, as does any memoir, and a way of finding common ground with the author that makes the ambitiousness of the undertaking seem a little less intimidating. I wouldn't want to underestimate the magnitude of the challenge that Martin undertook or the story she has to tell.

But this is a review of the book and not of either her life or her culinary prowess.

I also enjoyed the depiction of Sasha's mother, a unique character unlike anyone I've ever known on either side of the sanity line, who gave her daughter a bizarre but certainly colorful upbringing. The circumstances of Martin's tumultuous history engaged my sympathies. And, because I grew up in Greater Boston and lived for a time in Boston's Italian neighborhood in the North End, I felt a connection to the setting.

However, the defects of the writing itself were too conspicuous to overlook or brush aside. I found them so frequent and so frequently obtrusive that it was impossible to relax and enjoy the book the way I can when an author lets me know that I can trust her grasp of the language. Granted, I tend not to be a very forgiving reader; I expect an author to earn my careful attention by producing better-than-competent prose. Not every author can choose to be brilliant, but any author worthy of publication should be able to avail herself of adequate editorial support to avoid the flaws I see here.

Curiously, Martin's acknowledgments credit quite a number of helpers on the reading and editing side. So why, then, does the book read like the work of an unguided amateur?

I'll give examples.

• "bombastic"
p. 28, "the bombastic babble of a language the girls would never learn"
p. 41, "she yearned for the bombastic kitchen of her childhood"

What in the world does she think it means?

Here's what it does mean, courtesy of Dictionary.com:

bombastic
adjective
(of speech, writing, etc.) high-sounding; high-flown; inflated; pretentious.

This is the kind of thing we often see when a writer lacks a reader's command of the language. It's as if she had overworked her thesaurus without quite understanding that most synonyms aren't really synonyms and that it makes a difference which one you choose. The result is apt to sound embarrassingly juvenile, like that of someone whose writing was praised by a high school teacher and who never developed very far beyond that.

• "fawn over"
p. 35, "the women fawned over Mom's widening belly"
p. 36, "Mom waited for Oliver to fawn over me, but he never came."
p. 245, "Mom stayed another week to help me and fawn over Ava"

Whatever she may think it means to fawn over someone, that's not what you do with a baby (or a belly). Dictionary.com explains this idiom:

fawn
verb (used without object)
1. to seek notice or favor by servile demeanor: The courtiers fawned over the king.
2. (of a dog) to behave affectionately.

Anyone who looked at the manuscript could have checked these expressions. Anyone who claims professional credentials as an editor should have.

• inept figures of speech
p. 28, "The ingredients were the true stars, wheeled home from the market in Mom's old wicker baby carriage. Every time Grammie unloaded bagged fowl or severed artichoke heads from that unlikely chariot, my mother was thrilled."

This is a different kind of error, but again, the sort that good readers are less likely to make because they're more apt to have cultivated an ear for the language, and that in any case a sensitive editor should not have let pass. The problem phrase here is "unlikely chariot," and it's one of very many instances of a style that sounds florid and pretentious while at the same time eluding the author's control.

Chariots aren't likely or unlikely; likelihood is not a trait of chariots. As a metaphor it has no meaning. It does not ascribe to a baby carriage the secondary characteristics of a chariot that in some way relate to using it as a vehicle for groceries. That just doesn't make any sense. Chariots are considerably less suitable and common modes of transport for market purchases than baby carriages, which on the whole seem to me rather likely to suffice.

This is not to comment on the mixed metaphor involving stars in a chariot or the rather distasteful image of artichokes as having been guillotined.

There are many other semantic and figurative oddities; for example:
"Mom's earthen hair" (p. 48)
"Cartons of milk and juice stood at attention each morning." (p. 75)
"the sauce bright with disarming bursts of unadulterated tomatoes" (p. 149)
"At first the attention felt awkward, but soon I settled into the panoply." (p. 187)
"I spend hours looking for authentic, viable recipes, subsumed by the curiosities I uncover" (p. 261)
"I stand in the laminate glow of the doorway" (p. 295)--did she mean "lambent"?
"I notice that the family is becoming askance at my obsessive behavior" (p. 318)
"The Beards nod in pendulous enthusiasm." (p. 334)

Page 104 is practically a minefield:
"rounds of stinky cheese, which unapologetically buttressed thick pâtés and quivering gelatins"
"the food of Paris was heady and salacious"
"cathedrals that had taken half a millennia to build"
"Paris's unquestioning rhythm"

That's enough. Time for my favorite refrain: Where was the editor? Where was the editor? Where was the editor?

In sum: I wouldn't say don't read this book, especially if you're interested in international cuisine. I would say enjoy it for what it is, but don't expect too much. It wasn't really ready for prime time. Even if everybody raves over your quiche or your spaghetti sauce, that doesn't necessarily mean it's ready to be served at a white-tablecloth restaurant downtown.

>82 Meredy: Wilful Blindness really has substance. It has a fifteen page bibliography citing psychological research and documentation on the situations discussed, which include the Enron scandal, paedophilia in the Catholic Church in Ireland, an explosion at an oil refinery in Texas, and many other incidents that demonstrate the human tendency to look the other way.

In the book the author explains the findings of neurological research into the activity of the brain while people are involved in particular activities. These explanations are not simply hypotheses but are based the measurements of brain activity using fMRI technology that allows the researchers to map brain activity while a person is looking at images or taking part in some activity. This was particularly interesting in the chapter entitled, "Love is Blind", in which experiments discovered that when someone is thinking about the ones he or she loves the part of the brain that is activated is the same part that is stimulated by cocaine. In addition, not only is this part of the brain activated at such times but the enquiring and incredulous part of the brain is deactivated, i.e. we are not open to seeing faults in the ones we love.

Yes, this book has substance and I found it fascinating. There was so much in it I did not know where to start a review and hence it is one of the books that I have not managed to review in detail.

I would certainly like to hear your opinion on the book, but, no pressure.

>84 pgmcc: Ok. Well, then. Well, ok. I just ordered it.

It will probably go on the read-aloud stack because it's the sort of subject matter that interests both my husband and me.

>85 Meredy:

He sniggers as he carved another notch on the butt of his BB gun.

15 all at this stage of the game.

:-)

You're keeping score?

>86 pgmcc: You can make that two notches.

Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Picaresque adventures of a would-be writer.

Extended review:

One of the rules of improvisational theatre is to say yes--to go along with everything another suggests. Sometimes this rule is expressed as "Yes, and." Denying and blocking bring a scene to a halt; "yes" allows it to build.

Numerous times in reading Under the Net I had the feeling that the novel was working on the principles of improv comedy, and nowhere more so than in the passages pertaining to the kidnapping of the dog. The aftermath of that impulsive act colors the rest of the story and serves as an effective device for exposing character.

At other times, I was reminded of the delusions and paranoid fantasies of a Dostoevsky character, particularly Golyadkin in The Double. The inner life of the narrator and main character, Jake Donaghue, appears as quirky and self-contradictory as a creature of Lewis Carroll.

Jake is a semi-employed translator of French pulp novels who has been sponging off a friend and is suddenly evicted for reasons of disappointed romance. He thinks that he may be able to solve his homelessness and cash-flow problems with the aid of a former amour. His life is too complicated a history of mistaken choices and poor judgments to be readily untangled by his present behavior, but he flails on, vacillating between the philosophical and the comic. His remorse for past misdeeds is genuine, and yet his present conduct borders on the slapstick as much as on the poignant. Jake is a sympathetic antihero whose way of skating through life, tragicomic elements aside, raises interesting questions about the implausible possible.

One of the aspects that I took to heart is a lesson that I know I struggle with as much as anyone: the degree and depth to which one can hold to a conviction, a certainty, about which one is utterly wrong. Coming to terms with that unpalatable revelation is easier than recognizing it in the first place. Luckily for Jake, not all such epiphanies are painful in the end.

The Rabbit Back Literature Society (2006; English, 2013), by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Old mystery haunts exclusive writers' group.

Extended review:

Sometimes I wish novels came with an optional afterword that you could peek at only if you really wanted to know, maybe by wearing special glasses or holding the page up to a candle flame, what just happened there and why things turned out as they did. In my opinion, the practice of "leaving it up to the reader to decide" is an author's abdication of the agreement we implicitly make at the outset: I trust you as my guide and informant, and you show me a complete story, including all I need to know to make sense of it. Everything doesn't have to be spelled out, but I don't want whole puzzle pieces left missing.

Fiction in nontraditional formats doesn't promise this kind of resolution, but if an author invokes the conventions of traditional novel writing, I think he or she should live up to them. That's my opinion.

Here we have an intriguing, if lightweight, tale involving a very exclusive circle of writers, a set of peculiar customs and secret rituals, books with text that changes, the baffling disappearance of a celebrated author, and an old mystery that no one wants to talk about. The focal character's quest for a true history of events in the town of Rabbit Back, aided by a strange game in which players are forced to tell the truth as they know it, constitutes the main storyline.

When a novel is set in the ordinary everyday world we all live in, we have a pretty good idea of the limits of the possible. But when we're drawn into a world of the author's making, where our understanding of "the real" may be altered by another set of rules, we must rely on the internal logic and consistency of the story, maintained by the author's sense of fair play, to know what can and cannot occur. At the end of this story I was not satisfied that I did know what could have and must have happened. I wanted far more of an explanation than I got. I'd like a chance at that truth-telling game myself, just to have a clear sense of the payoff for my investment in the reading of this novel.

ooops

>90 Meredy: Excellent review. I loved the setting of Rabbit Back but, like you, was rather disappointed in the end by the plot. I also felt the romance was a case of middle-aged male authorial wish fulfilment But I'd definitely read more stories set in that world.

>92 Sakerfalcon: Thanks. I felt the same as you about the romance.

I'm currently working on my review of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, which turns out not to be as simple and straightforward as it might appear.

Did you guys know the cover glows in the dark? The hardcover dust jacket does, anyway. I have a library copy (but I've just ordered my own paperback so I can write in it). All those booklike rectangles on the cover light up. I'd venture to say that no booklover's shelves look like that--nor would Mr. Penumbra's shop--because there's too much free space and the arrangement is too careless; but it's still a cool effect.

>93 Meredy: I will look forward to that. I've been avoiding posts about it because I want to come at it fresh, but it is next in line on my TBR pile.

Dead Beat (2005), by Jim Butcher (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Halloween nasties challenge Harry and friends.

Extended review:

He just can't help himself. Jim Butcher. Like a hungry vampire, he gets hold of a word or expression and he just can't stop himself from using it over and over and over again. Repetitions swarm like swarms of swarming insects.

I can't be the only one who's bothered by this. Maybe, though, I'm one among a small number who make compulsive notes about it. Old editorial habits do die hard.

In the seventh tale of the Dresden Files series, which is replete with snarls (47 times) and growls (32) and numerous other animal-noise substitutes for "said," Butcher is plagued by hordes of word zombies, mindlessly commanded to appear in force.

And they do seem to be unstoppable.

Butcher has shed the very odd "quirked an eyebrow" that quirked several earlier volumes. Now eyebrows, which seem to have a life of their own, are constantly arching as if of their own volition: someone (usually Harry Dresden) arched an eyebrow (just one eyebrow) 25 times.

In fact, there's a lot of ocular activity. Someone blinked 54 times, 56 if you include "blinking." (I do most of my word checking and counting using Amazon's marvelous "search inside" feature; I don't actually log them all by hand. Honestly I don't.)

And despite all the noisy vocalizations, for some reason the author gets a run on "quietly" in dialogue tags ("he said quietly"). Not only does he use it 62 times--an average of once every eight and a quarter pages--but it appears six times on two facing pages (356 and 357) and four more over the next few.

Maybe it's unusual enough for anything to happen quietly in a Dresden book that it must be remarked on again and again.

Dammit, though, he gets the novels written--averaging more than one a year since the first of the Dresden Files series came out in 2000. If he doesn't take the time to go back and comb the text, refining it with judicious excisions and elegant variations, well, maybe that's the price of churning them out at a steady rate while compulsive types like me can't actually write to the end of anything and call it finished.

And I keep reading them, despite these quibbles, because they're entertaining escapism, done well enough to hold my attention and not insult my intelligence.

That's a kind of repetition I can applaud.

>95 Meredy: That is an interesting and entertaining review.

The repetition struck a chord with me. I have noticed it with authors, authors I like, and it not only applies to words, but concepts too. I did not keep note of the frequency, but in REAMDE and Cobweb, Neal Stephenson could not help mentioning Great Circles (concept in geometry of the circle and used in aircraft navigation) several times. I had the impression that he had just discovered the concept and wanted to spread the news to all his readers.

It did not stop my reading his books but it was an unnecessary and disappointing distraction.

>95 Meredy: It's odd, because I have been known to notice and dislike repetitions such as you mention, and yet, even after reading about you noticing them in these books, I don't! I wonder if it is because I'm listening to them at the moment instead of reading them with my eyes? Or perhaps I am living the tale and anticipating it rather than paying close attention since this is the second or third time I've read them?

I'm glad you are still finding some enjoyment in them despite their flaws. Please tell me you appreciated how Dresden pulled out the win at the end of this one? And Waldo Butters? You love him, don't you?

I'm letting Fallen Land go back to the library after only 67 of 406 pages. It's not that I have any fault to find with the book so far, not even a missed typo (except that it fails the "biceps" test on page 17). It's just that I don't really care to dwell right now on loss, disappointment, shattered dreams, and insanity. I'm dealing with enough of that as it is. Let me have the fairy-tale certainty of a mortal hero doing battle with monsters, evil wizards, and powerful supernatural entities, knowing that as long as it's written in the first person and there's another book yet to come in the series, he gets through it alive despite the odds.

>97 MrsLee: Indeed I do keep enjoying the Dresden books. I've just got numbers 9 and 10 in. We are beings of two very different temperaments, you and I, and we read with exceedingly different filters, so it might not be apparent to you that the kind of cataloguing I do is part of the entertainment for me. It doesn't exactly nullify the effects of certain irritants, but it does turn them into data instead of mosquito bites.

Are you referring to the dinosaur? That was great. And yes, Butters is an appealing foil. (I loved his line about the Jaguar.) I think Butters is there not just to supply an extra pair of hands and some specialized knowledge but also to stand in for us, the nonheroes, lest we start to take Harry's foolhardy bravery, romantic self-sacrifice, and phenomenal resourcefulness for granted.

>98 Meredy: Seeing some of the tags associated with Fallen Land here on LT suggests that it would be a heavy read. Too many --isms to deal with!

Have you considered the soothing qualities of a good Jane Austen novel?

>99 jillmwo: Actually, I haven't, not lately. I enjoyed the ones I read so very many years ago, even though in general I'm not fond of fictional romances, but I haven't been lured back. This might indeed be a good time to revisit Austen territory and see how different I find it now. Thank you for the suggestion.

Hm. To my own surprise, I don't read Austen as romance--I read it as humorous social commentary (even the oh-so-romantic Persuasion.

>101 Marissa_Doyle: Oops, I didn't mean that I place them in the genre classification "romance." I just meant that there are love stories in them and that I don't particularly enjoy love stories in fiction except as an occasional side dish.

I read her for her characterizations and in some instances, for the technique. I've been revisiting Lady Susan, one of her earliest works that didn't get published until well after her death. It really isn't a standard Austen work as there is no particular nuance to the characterizations. Nor is it particularly soothing. The title character is so very calculating. I assume that's why it doesn't get as much attention from Jane-ites -- it's not got a substantive love story. What's there is something needed for displaying the character of Lady Susan rather than being the focal point. But many Jane-ites are so used to the idea of loving her heroines that when they encounter the less enchanting ones (Lady Susan or Fanny Price), readers are disappointed.

All that said, it's an epistolary novel so watching *how* Jane Austen shifts view point for the reader and *when* she shifts view point is quite instructive. It's a study in contrasts and parallels, some of which resurface in S&S. For the record, if seeking a soothing read, I tend to prefer either S&S or Mansfield.

The Biceps Test

Whether by training or by temperament, I seem to be especially sensitive to patterns of repetition not only within but across books. Sometimes they're entirely random (three books in a row, with nothing else in common, had bagpipes in them, and in two they were playing the same tune).

For reasons I cannot fathom, book after book that I've read lately has made mention of the biceps, a muscle of the upper arm. And they're not just books of a certain kind, in which musculature might be presumed to figure significantly in the story.

"Biceps" is the Latin name of that arm muscle, and it is singular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biceps

I've noticed that very often the s, which is part of the word, is treated as a plural suffix and is omitted when the usage is singular. The word appears as "bicep." But the whole singular form of the word includes the s, just as in "lens" (we don't say one len, two lens) and "asbestos" (asbestos is, not are).

Here are some instances of both correct and incorrect forms that I've seen recently:

biceps - correct
Jim Butcher, Fool Moon, p. 211
Jim Butcher, Dead Beat, p. 348
Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty, p. 244

bicep - incorrect
William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms, p. 219
C. J. Sansom, Dark Fire, p. 454
Stephen King, Under the Dome, pp. 347, 530
Patrick Flanery, Fallen Land, p. 17
Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin, p. 17
Jim Butcher, Fool Moon, pp. 173, 230

Note that one title appears on both lists.

In Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan uses "biceps" as a legitimate plural on page 118, as does Sasha Martin on page 254 of Life From Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness. I'm sure there'd be more examples if I searched. Why all this preoccupation with naming the muscles, anyway? In my opinion there's a balance to be sought with precision of details: enough, and they evoke sensory realism; too much, and they call distracting attention to themselves.

Because this word crops up so frequently, I've come to think of it as "the biceps test," even though I'm not exactly sure what's being tested. Maybe the vigilance of the editor. In Fool Moon, though, I'm guessing that the author wrote it the same way all three times and an editor either corrected two or discorrected one.

At any rate, now that you're sensitized to it too, what do you see?

Incidentally and unrelatedly, another one that trips a lot of people is "kudos." It's the singular form of a Greek word meaning "praise," analogous to "mythos" and "ethos" and "chaos." We don't have one kudo and many kudos, any more than we have one chao and many chaos (no matter how it seems sometimes).

End of language rant for the day.

 
(Edited to fix touchstone.)

Honestly, Meredy, when I write my Jane Austen book, I'm sending the ms to you prior to publication for review and clean-up!

>104 Meredy:

kudo to you for clearing up the chao.

>106 suitable1: No, no! Meredy deserves more than one kudo! She has earned many kudoses!

>105 jillmwo: Sure, that would be interesting. I'd even give you a break on my usual rates!

>106 suitable1: I depend on you for just that sort of thing.

I see now that the word I just coined, "discorrected" (how did I get along without that word until now?), ought to be "dyscorrected." I intend it to mean what an editor or other manuscript checker does when his or her change introduces an error--alters something that was right to make it wrong. To me this is the greatest editorial sin, far worse than missing things or imposing arbitrary, unnecessary corrections. I'm sorry to say that many writers I've known have learned faulty constructions from editors who were prone to dyscorrections.

Oh, dear. REAMDE just failed the biceps test on page 373.

>107 SylviaC: Thanks, Sylvia, I needed that.

>104 Meredy: I can't remember who drew my attention to it, but I've been noticing the biceps thing for a while now. And WRT to dyscorrection, if I were an author and I realised that an editor had done that to my work I'd be furious. But I suppose there isn't really any recourse in that situation, given how hard it is for authors to get published at all.

>110 Sakerfalcon: In some of my Rex Stout, Nero Wolfe novels, they have added in some of his letters to the editors/publishers of his works. He is giving them what-for because of some uneducated suggestions they have made to him about corrections needed in his books. I think I've read some letters by J.R.R. Tolkien in the same vein as well.

Rex Stout wrote his books in one go. No rewrites, etc. One draft, he was done. I wonder how they would hold up to Meredy's scrutiny? :)

>109 Meredy: Yes, the great circle gets a mention in REAMDE. Several mentions if I recall correctly.

>112 pgmcc: Oddly, Stephenson gets runs on some of the same words that I've seen beleaguer the prose of both Jim Butcher and the Preston & Child team. Is there some sort of secret contest that gives awards for working in the greatest number of instances of, say, "padded" or "sported"?

>111 MrsLee: That's all but incredible, that Stout published his first drafts. Not that plenty of published books don't sound like first drafts. But his are, as I recall, much smoother and more cohesive than I would expect to result from a one-pass process, even though I did suspect him of using a certain amount of boilerplate. Maybe they were really, really well outlined. I haven't read a Rex Stout in something over 30 years, though, so I don't know what I'd find now.

One reason I like to read older works is that they were actually proofread and, usually, edited, because that was just a standard, nonnegotiable part of the publishing process; there was no spellchecking and (hah) "grammar-checking" software. No software at all. I see a typo now and then, in, say, a 1930s edition of Scott or Eliot, but no grammatical errors. Not so today, when so few authors can handle the subjunctive or even reliably achieve subject-verb agreement. In general, or at least in my experience, British authors continue to have better command of their grammar than Americans.

>110 Sakerfalcon: It is infuriating. The fact is that there's no certification process for editors; practically anybody can call herself an editor and start marking up other people's work. The range of competency among self-styled editors is very broad, and few writing managers in a typical workplace even understand what an editor does, never mind being qualified to evaluate it.

The term "editor" actually covers a surprisingly wide variety of functions in relation to publishing. I'm talking about manuscript editors and copyeditors, who these days may be expected to be hired by and paid by an author before a work ever gets to a publisher, and not the people who select books for publication or oversee the production process.

Many many years ago a senior faculty member at a university had me proofread the thesis she was submitting for her doctoral degree. I was shocked at how many errors I found. (If I had not marked/corrected would they have counted against her?)

>111 MrsLee: Good for him for speaking his mind! And that is pretty amazing about his writing process.

>113 Meredy: There is definitely less emphasis on teaching grammar at school now. We had one class a week in my first year at secondary school (age 11-12; 30 years ago now!) which gave us a good grounding, but after that English lessons focused on composition and literature. When I reached A level (age 16-18) about once a month someone in my class would ask the teacher to go over the use of the apostrophe (to my frustration, as I'd learned it so long ago and remembered it). It is quite shocking that there's no professional standard required of (copy)editors; but that does make it less surprising that so many mistakes are found in published works.

115> I don't think most students learn much grammar at all. I happened to go to a private middle school that was very heavy on grammar (we had an hour and a half of English every day), and the teachers kept warning us that most other people in high school would not know grammar. They were right. High school teachers would spend maybe a week on it at the beginning of the school year, but it would never be in depth. I was probably one of the few students who knew what a preposition was and could recognize it on sight (thanks middle school teachers!). Then there were the students who didn't know that contractions were different than possessives.

I'm a college freshman, so this was pretty recently.

>107 SylviaC: - should that be kudi?

>116 pwaites: - Back when I was in school we didn't have formal lessons in grammar, and if I hadn't taken French I wouldn't have known what a noun or a verb was. My mother, a former English teacher, would often correct some of my worst faults (and still does). Not that the corrections made any difference. Because I have always been a compulsive reader and was raised hearing decent English my grammar was better than most (which isn't saying much). Then, several years ago, I was put in the position of having to teach a college business English course every year. Fortunately I have a good text book, instructor keys, and the ability to read faster than my students. My English is improving. Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

You'll like this, @MrsLee.

I attended a monthly writers' club meeting tonight. Some members came in costume for an annual book-related costume competition.

One very tall woman came in carrying a long, decorated staff and a bag. I didn't think anything much of it. But when it was time to show off costumes, she pulled out a life-size plastic skull (just like the one I use as a drawing model) and lit it up with some sort of arrangement of orange lights glowing inside.



I said, "It's Bob!"

Then she stood up and put on a long black caped raincoat and a broad-brimmed black hat--and when she turned around, she was wearing a McAnally's T-shirt.

I clapped and cheered for her. Alas, she didn't win, but I congratulated her afterward anyway.

>119 MrsLee: I love her! What a fun costume, and how nice it must have been for her to be recognized. :) Now I need to go look for a McAnally's T-shirt.

>119 MrsLee: She said it came from a website that sells Dresden fan paraphernalia. I guess there was a TV show--? I don't know; I don't watch TV. It just seems more likely that merchandising would come after a show or movie than after a book or series these days.

(I sure wish he'd chosen another spelling, though, such as McInally. I keep saying it the wrong way in my head. In fact, Butcher seems to favor offish spellings of a lot of names.)

I'm returning McDonald's Luna: New Moon to the library unread. Not only is the four-and-a-half-page character list daunting right up front (most of them with weird names and many that look similar to one another) but I can't stand another present-tense narrative so soon after the last couple. I think I'll relax with the next Dresden instead. I'm up to number 9.

Incidentally, Far Tortuga passes the biceps test on page 303. But I'm more than a little bemused: what is it about that muscle that makes everybody want to mention it?

>121 Meredy: is it the only socially acceptable muscle anyone can remember?

The ones that leap to mind for me (runner) are my glutes, but talking about bottoms takes any narrative in a whole new direction...

>122 imyril: Well, I don't know. There's the triceps . . .

Perhaps it's because biceps are immediately recognizable as a muscle family, carry no particular or unfortunate innuendos, and is a word easily typed on a keyboard (more evenly alternating keystrokes between hands). Triceps needs to be typed with greater use of the left hand. Sometimes those nearly invisible kinetic aspects present a greater cognitive load. (Said half tongue-in-cheek, half not.)

>120 Meredy: I've seen the TV show, a one season only series. It was OK, but the books carry the tone much better.

>124 jillmwo: I wonder if your hypothesis has a corolary that left handed authors use triceps more often than biceps.

>121 Meredy: I blame Popeye.

>127 Jim53: That's an actual lol, Jim.

Oh, sure. Blame Popeye. Not the canned spinach that may be the real source of concern here. Poorly packaged spinach, at that. Those cans bend under any kind of pressure.

But those biceps . . .

>130 Meredy: Control yourself! This is a family show.

The experience of reading Far Tortuga is more like that of viewing a painting than has been the case with any other novel I've ever read.

What sort of painting? My intellect wants to say Impressionist, or even Romantic, like this, by J.W. Turner (1840):



but my intuition says Henri Rousseau (1910):



This is not because of the sensory effects, although they are almost painfully vivid, as if ringing brightly through the sheen of a drug that heightens awareness; but because of a quality of isness that can't be achieved with complete sentences and conventional grammar and typography.

It's not much use to look for a story here. There pretty much isn't one. Some guys in the Caymans go fishing for turtles and run into trouble. Or rather, there is drama, but there's not much that resembles a plot. There are certainly characters. And themes. Most of all, we have setting, setting, setting. Not described so much as evoked. Recreated. That's the mastery of it.

The work is probably brilliant; it's been called so by far better qualified readers than I. For my part, I can appreciate its beauty and admire its execution, but I don't like it very much, and I don't want to read it again. Similarly, I've stood for long, thoughtful views in front of this painting (John Singleton Copley, 1778):



but I wouldn't want to live with it.

>132 Meredy: So, it is not a page, "Turner", then?

(I could not resist.)

The first book of fiction I read that had virtually no plot but which I still loved was The Gormenghast Trilogy, the first two books especially. The third volume suffered from the author's illness. What I found compensated for the lack of plot was the characterisation, the humour and the unpredictable similes.

Thanks to a book bullet from @pgmcc, I'm observing Hallowe'en with a collection of very creepy stories by Thomas Ligotti called Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (that's actually two collections under one cover). As a rule, I prefer long fiction, but it seems to me that the short form usually works best for horror fiction and weird fiction.

After tonight I'll probably take a break from it.

Perhaps characteristically, for me, I think what I've liked best so far (less than halfway through) is his essay explaining how to write a horror story. It's tongue in cheek--you can't really read that and then expect to be able to sit down and write a horror story--but I enjoyed his analysis of what he does, much as I've enjoyed Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition."

>134 Meredy:

I find his stories can be a bit intense and one needs to take a rest between them.

His essay on writing horror stories indicates he dislikes Gothic tales and then he goes on and produces Gothic tales.

I feel I am in one of Ligotti's tales at the moment as I have two cats beside me and they are climbing onto the keyboard and forcing me to delete their epistles and retype my own words.

NPR (National Public Radio) talks about that book in today's post:

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/31/450887561/three-horror-classics-rise-from-the-grav...

I know you two have been talking about the enjoyment to be found in Ligotti's short stories, but I can only handle the Gothic in small doses.

>137 jillmwo: Another good reason to go for the short form. And it does seem to me that creepy ideas are typically not big enough to sustain a full-length novel, especially when they rely on a shock factor.

>137 jillmwo: & >138 Meredy: I tend to agree that the short form is best for creepy stories.

One of the things I like about Ligotti's stories is not the shock factor or the up front story but rather the things his stories call into question in relation to society and what the real horrors of society are. I think many of his stories are a mirror on society and the grotesqueness of his imagery is simply a tool to emphasise the issues he his trying to highlight.

I finished Sweet Caress, by William Boyd. It was impressive in its way, in its scope, its feeling of authenticity, and its interwoven threads, but I'm sorry to say that it just didn't move me very much. The main character, Amory Clay, never seemed real to me, and so I didn't greatly care what happened to her. I put the book aside for a couple of days and didn't miss it, but I came back and finished it anyway just because I hoped for more before the end.

A Share in Death (1993), by Deborah Crombie (2½ stars)

Six-word review: Bland whodunit misses Golden Age target.

Extended review:

Appearing to aspire to the formula of the great detective stories of an earlier age, the Kincaid-James series starter never gets very much beyond the humdrum.

The writing is competent enough, and the puzzle and the red herrings are adequate. But it takes a very long time to get going, with way too much background on too many characters and way too much amicable hobnobbing among them without anybody saying "Holy cats, that means one of us is a murderer!"

I can't say I'll never try the rest of the series, which does seem to have been well enough received to have a long run, but I'll probably read a lot of other things first.

>141 Meredy: , I've read the first nine of these and have enjoyed the progress of Duncan and Gemma's relationship and roles. The first few are pretty underwhelming; I found they improved a lot starting with Kissed a Sad Goodbye. I'm a bit of a fanatic for reading in order, but if you're less so, and don't mind having to glean a few details that you missed, you might consider skipping ahead.

>142 Jim53: Thanks, Jim. That's a strong point on the plus side.

A point that I didn't mention on the minus side is the author's handling of children. It's very difficult to do well; even the masterly Stepen King is terrible at it. Cloying cutesiness is just as bad as rank obnoxiousness (as in the Amelia Peabody stories, which I quit after two for that reason and others). Here's Crombie on page 162:

"Because." Bethany spoke with the certainty of a seven-year-old's power over a younger brother, the wisps of brown hair escaping from her braid detracting not a whit from her command.

That's a just plain awful sentence, but the kid part of it is independently awful.

Those kids are transient characters, but Gemma is a single parent with a two-year-old, and that just about guarantees the reader's having to withstand a certain amount of "screen time" for dear little Toby.

I do follow series in order, though, like you, so it's either next or nothing. I'll sit with nothing for the time being. It's not as if my house were otherwise empty of books.

Blue Labyrinth (2014), by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Pendergast finally comes back to life.

Extended review:

The last few Pendergast books have seemed borderline insipid to me, despite some feverish action and weird over-the-top drama with the Helen story and the twins. It was as if--not uncommonly for series writers--Preston and Child were running out of steam with their protagonist, and maybe even turning to NaNoWriMo plot ninjas for their story twists. In fact, for a while I suspected them of willing him to die.

With this one, they seem to have resurrected the Pendergast of old, albeit channeling the spirit of Sherlock Holmes in a way that he never did until recently.

What's markedly different, however, is the project team. There's a fierce and very tight circle of partisan collaborators who are willing to dare anything and risk everything to save him when he is beyond the possibility of saving himself. These are characters we've seen in previous episodes, but bonded and coordinated now in ways they haven't been before. Even though I've happily admired Pendergast's prowess as the cat that walks by himself, I'm glad to see the extent of loyal collaboration on his behalf, which tells us more about his character than any amount of authorial description.

In this wide-ranging tale of witting and unwitting evil, madness, desperation, and revenge, Pendergast faces demons spawned by his personal and family history. Not without the almost obligatory underground chase (back in the museum once again), it also ranges from New York to California to Brazil to Switzerland and offers realistic-sounding glimpses of unknown landscapes. As is often the case, I find myself wondering if the authors have invented such places as the crimehold in Rio and the abandoned desert hotel, or based them on research, or visited them themselves. The descriptions always sound vividly authentic, a quality I value. I even appreciate the totally bizarre touches such as the room full of whale eyeballs, which is far too outlandish to be anything but real.

This installment also seems to have been blessed by tighter editing. There are relatively few conspicuous lapses aside from a heavy, and often not quite apt, use of -ing participles ("Moving quickly now down the hallway, she descended the steps..." [page 311]), which express simultaneity but here are used way too often to speed up depiction of consecutive actions. Nevertheless, I saw very little use of a wrong word, and "dogleg" occurred only once, and if anyone sported anything, it escaped my notice. Instead the story moved right along, held my attention, and proved a highly satisfactory page-turner just when I needed one.

What puzzles me, in the end, aside from a few loose ends (how did the turquoise actually come to rest where it was found?), is the title. Series books often have titles that seem only to label the volume and not to describe the contents, typically with some sort of overall consistency or recognizable pattern that distinguishes the series; but usually one can find some sort of connection to the novel, however tenuous (Cemetery Dance, White Fire). But here, even though a labyrinth would be entirely in keeping with the plot elements of many Pendergast novels (and the idea is enforced by the incorporation of a maze device at every chapter head), there is no labyrinth in this book, much less a blue one. The title seems arbitrary, a grabber, possibly even one forced on the book by a marketing team with little regard to fitness. (Were they drawing one from column A and one from column B?) I notice that the preceding book uses "white" in the title and the following "crimson," as if we were now going to borrow the palette of John D. MacDonald's color-titled Travis McGee series.

If we now have a Crayola box of Pendergast stories to come, that sounds fine to me. I'm still following.

Proven Guilty (2006), by Jim Butcher (3 stars)
White Night (2007), by Jim Butcher (3 stars)

Six-word review: Oh, dear, enjoyed and then forgotten.

Extended review:

I finished the eighth and ninth Harry Dresden novels eight weeks and three and a half weeks ago, respectively, and at the moment I can't remember a single thing about them other than that there was a lot of stuff with vampires, not my favorite motif. (I'm not going to cheat and look at the back covers.)

However, I do know (a) that while I was reading them, I amused myself by compiling exhaustive lists of maddeningly repetitive words and phrases, and (b) I found the books fun to read anyway.

So let's call these done and move on. I have book 10 on hand, somewhere beneath my library stack. It's nice to know it's there and ready whenever I am.

Oh, no, I did it too!--missed my Thingaversary. It was my fourth, on Nov. 15th. I saw it coming, and then I just . . . missed it.

I'll go to the end of the line of penitents and make my prescribed sacrifice.

Don't forget that part of your penance is describing it in detail so that the rest of us can learn from it ;-)

Well, it appears there's an epidemic of forgetfulness around here lately when it comes to Thingaversary celebrations. (Tsk, tsk. And to think it was @Meredy of all people...)

Missing one's FOURTH anniversary is particularly problematic. It's worse than forgetting your tenth (at least, insofar as I understand the rules).

What do I have to do, Jill? What, what, what? I can hardly stand the suspense.

>148 jillmwo:

I though you said, "It's worse than forgetting your teeth." I said, "right on!"

>149 Meredy: I can't remember all the particulars, but it seems to me that if one forgets one's fourth Thingaversary, the roombas mysteriously emerge from their closets and there follows a long period of atmospheric discomfort. (Rather like one of Thomas Ligotti's short stories...).

Get thee to a bookstore. That might help to fend off the darkness.

<shudder>

Here's your coat, purse and car keys! Go!!! Half a dozen titles will probably do you for a while.

Meredy! Meredy! Meredy! How could you?

I don't know. It was an accident. A mistake. And nobody around here reminded me, either. But it's my fault, and I'm so ashamed. Maybe I'll have to drive all the way to Mountain View just to go to an independent bookstore.

And it's not as if I weren't already in some disgrace for being behind by seven--no, eight! damn, my arrears list isn't even caught up--reviews. If I don't watch it, I'm going to end up spending another New Year's Eve churning out a half dozen or more tardy reviews.

I don't believe that I have ever heard of one's arrears list being in arrears.

Uh oh. I can hear @pgmcc polishing his slide rule and getting out the log tables...

Plainsong (1999), by Kent Haruf (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Caring about others makes people beautiful.

Extended review:

A young girl, pregnant, alone. Two curious young boys and their father, deserted by their depressed mother. A couple of old bachelor farmers who know cattle better than people. A woman who knows all of them.

Ordinary people, ordinary lives in a small town in the high plains of Colorado, working as they must, coping with loss, enjoying their small pleasures, doing their best. Loving what and whom they love, and dealing with trouble as squarely and pragmatically as they can.

In place of an epigraph between the title page and the half title page, we see this:

Plainsong--the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody or air.

The language is spare but unsparing. We see and feel with the characters as they face life, love, and death. There are experiences here that we haven't seen elsewhere, and they feel as real as memories.

One of the beauties of this book is that the heroine, if there is one at all, never steps into the foreground. She's just there, quietly doing what her heart tells her, making a difference. She rarely comes into full focus. And yet her role is crucial. I like how the author handled that, without fanfare. I also like his handling of the antagonist, without the contrived solutions of a conventional dramatic arc.

This book is a simple and unadorned melody set in the Great Plains of the western U.S., and, like the characters mirrored here, deeper and more complex than it appears on the surface.

I may have to quit reading this thread - too many bullets are hitting me.

Most Secret (1945), by Nevil Shute (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Authentic detail makes wartime drama vivid.

Extended review:

A born Englishman who has spent most of his life in France is able to pass for a citizen of both countries. In German-occupied France during World War II, this ability coupled with his industrial knowledge lights a fuse that has the potential to affect the outcome of the war.

Most Secret tells the story of a series of high-risk clandestine operations conceived and executed by people who don't look like heroes, seizing opportunities presented to them and doing their duty to the utmost. Shute's low-key, matter-of-fact style doesn't glorify the actors or dramatize heroics. Instead, it shows us people much like ourselves, doing what they do for reasons of their own, standing by their convictions and doing their part with no assurance that it will ever make a difference.

I suppose it might have done quite a lot to inspire patriotism and devotion to duty among the English and perhaps even the French during wartime, and it certainly took a fierce stand with respect to the Germans; but (for reasons I don't know) it was censored and withheld from publication in 1942 and not released until 1945, according to a Wikipedia article.

The amount of technical detail exceeds what I've encountered in other Shute novels, and, perhaps for that reason, the level of human warmth does not seem as high; but there are still engaging characters whose courage we can admire without feeling that their feats are beyond the reach of people like us. I enjoyed the novel and found few faults to criticize, but it wasn't a moving tale to equal A Town Like Alice or On the Beach, just to name two.

If Shute were alive today, there's one thing I'd like to tell him, having read several of his novels now, all or most of which include one or more American characters--namely, that Americans do not (and, I hope, never did) have a habit of prefacing their utterances with "Say." If he knew someone who spoke like that, I don't quite see why he felt compelled to inflict that grating habit on his readers.

>160 Meredy: I know I've read it, but I can't remember it at all.

>161 SylviaC: Sorry, I have an unfortunate habit of reviewing books without saying much of anything about the story. I should add this to my posted review.

This one involves a fishing boat named Geneviève that is commissioned into service in a secret operation to take out a German Räumboot in the harbor of a small French town. A man named Charles Simon, French by adoption but born and educated in England, is the key to this operation, aided by a crew of men with various strong motivations for taking part. One of them is a highly skilled industrial chemist who puts his specialized knowledge to use in arming a flame thrower.

Shute spend many pages giving us intimate backstories on the main characters, none of whom talks very much, if at all, to the others about what brought him to where he is and what he's doing. We see them work together, and we have the quiet private knowledge of each man's story--an approach that lends the tale distinction and poignancy.

Another reviewer has said that using a ranking naval officer as narrator keeps the main characters at arm's length. I disagree. I think it allows us to be told their personal histories from a practical yet sympathetic point of view without their disclosing them to one another. Shute uses a third-party device like this in a number of his novels, and I think it affords them both greater scope and a focused interpretation without resorting to a third-person omniscient point of view. It's part of what gives them their remarkable feel of authenticity.

I've now integrated those paragraphs into my review posted on the book page, and added this:

From Wikipedia I also learned that Geneviève is the patron saint of Paris, a symbolic point that would not have been lost on his original target audience.

I'm reminded of The White Rabbit, Tommy Yeo-Thomas, an Englishman bred and born who worked at one of the Paris fashion houses and became one of the leading agents of the French Resistance. Perhaps that's why the book was suppressed in '42.

>164 Marissa_Doyle: Hmm, perhaps you're right. I had supposed that the reason was political, but maybe it was thought that the book disclosed too much about what was being done by both military and civilian groups to resist the Germans. Perhaps it was kept back in order to protect the Allied efforts.

One thing I noticed in particular is that Shute never tells us what the special ingredients were in the oil used in the weapon. Maybe it's something he made up, and hence no details, but that doesn't sound like Shute to me.

I still don't remember it. I know that I read it, because I wrote the title in my little blue notebook, and I can actually remember borrowing the book from the library all those many years ago, but I have no recollection of the story. It clearly didn't make much of an impression. I do own a copy of it, so may reread it sometime.

I've read the first 58 pages of Dorothy Dunnett's much-admired The Game of Kings, a book bullet (naturally). I'm impressed, but also a bit overwhelmed by the muchness of it.

This might just be the wrong time for me to work my way into it, track all the players, and try to gain a grasp of the complex politics of 16th-century Scotland. I keep feeling a kind of vicarious exhaustion as I think of the author grinding out all those complex utterances rich with allusion to older literature in several languages. Dense, erudite writing seldom puts me off, but I may not have the concentration for it at present.

In its place I've picked up another BB: The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading, by Phyllis Rose.

The Shelf is a worthy read, and I'll definitely be reviewing it. I have continued to nibble away at The Game of Kings.

Meanwhile, Crimson Shore, the fifteenth in the Pendergast series, came in on my library request list, so I started it. By page 2 I was wondering if it's a hoax, and by page 30 I'm feeling like calling it the work of an impostor. Has something happened to the Preston-Child teamwork? Have they gone dry or daft? Are they breaking in an apprentice? Something is out of whack.

Besides, on page 9 Pendergast ordered a lobster roll at a seafood shack on the Atlantic coast, making my mouth water, and on page 10, instead of giving me the vicarious pleasure, he threw it away because he didn't know how to eat it. That ignorant, contemptuous gesture seems to me entirely out of character for a person as refined and cosmopolitan as he. And it's a hard blow to my regard for our hero.

The Cavalier of the Apocalypse (2009), by Susanne Alleyn (3½ stars)
Palace of Justice (2014), by Susanne Alleyn (4 stars)

I read these two back to back, something I rarely do with series novels. As it happened, they were both on my Kindle at a time when I felt like reading something on my Kindle. I finished the first, enjoyed it, and went right on to the second.

Actually I began with the third, Game of Patience,, which had the earliest publication date. I quickly discovered that the two later titles preceded the first in narrative chronology, and so I put it aside in order to start with the backstory.

The setting is Paris during the French Revolution, a time of political turmoil and much shedding of blood, with the fanatical partisans of the Republic seeing foes everywhere, not only among closet royalists but even among less extreme advocates of their own cause.

Aristide Ravel begins as a political pamphleteer at a time when anonymous screeds of dubious veracity play a significant role in public affairs. A gruesome discovery causes him to be drawn into a police investigation of a series of bizarre murders. His participation is critical to the solution. In due course, if reluctantly, he becomes an assistant to the police inspector. Their work takes them into all quarters of Parisian life during one of the most turbulent periods of its history.

Alleyn's narratives have a strong feel of authenticity to them, a quality that I value highly in fiction. Despite a few traits that began to get on my nerves--particularly Ravel's recurring habit of mentally chasing something he can't quite remember, which suddenly becomes clear just in time to furnish a major clue--I liked the detective hero and the mysteries he solves. I will be continuing on to the third in the series.

REAMDE (2014), by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

For a long time I wouldn't look at Neal Stephenson's REAMDE because I found the title irritating. But a good reader from around these parts made it sound pretty attractive, so I finally dug in.

When I'd made it to the 1/3 mark, I wasn't sure this one was going to catch hold of me just then, maybe demanding more concentration than I could muster. Surprisingly, it did. I'm not into video gaming, not in the least, although I mostly get the concepts (from early computerized RPGs I did play maybe 30 years ago, and from roughly 20 years working in high-tech). At that point I remarked that the plot was entertainingly unpredictable, and there were several appealing characters. The style is much more accessible than that of, say, Snow Crash. I decided that I was probably going to make it through all 1044 pages.

By the end, I could say that I enjoyed it enough to give it 4 1/2 stars. On later reflection, though, I had to take that down to 4. Once the grand finale was past, I found that I was bothered by the way Stephenson set up so many characters with a ton of background and, shall we say, screen time and then just let them disappear. And yet, with all that, there are principal characters who last right through to the end without our getting much or any background on them at all. That disproportion seems to me to be a structural flaw big enough to affect my rating.

When it comes to tech-savviness (damn, that looks weird--I don't think I've ever seen it written down before), I fall somewhere in the range between "I know enough to get it" and "I'm ignorant enough not to know whether this is real or just a plausible invention." So when Stephenson writes about such things as teenage Chinese video gamers mining virtual gold for profit and computer game players running elaborate hierarchies of automated characters, I'm not sure whether I'm learning something (because it really happens) or being treated to a logical but imaginative extension of what actually goes on in computer-based fictional environments. But while I'm reading the book, I do feel as if I were being let in on whole secret worlds and allowed to glimpse the workings of covert operations.

The same goes for Russian criminal organizations, Islamic terrorist cells, and gun-toting off-the-grid denizens of remote Idaho homesteads, all of which figure in this complex yarn of justice, loyalty, and revenge. Not to mention adventure and romance. And pursuit. And international intrigue, twenty-first-century entrepreneurship, and several varieties of smuggling. And gun culture and gun violence. Also Chinese society, U.S.-Canadian border activity, and Midwestern extended-family relationships. And much, much more.

Somehow, a thousand-plus pages didn't seem too long. The story held my attention. I was pleased with the ending, which on some level reminded me of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, although I've never seen G&S (or anybody else, for that matter) deliver such a protracted shootout.

Small Favor (2008), by Jim Butcher (3½ stars)

Although Harry Dresden and his associates continue to blink, arch eyebrows, quirk various facial features, snarl, growl, pad, and stalk at a rate unequaled in any other reading matter in my experience, not to mention a lot of lip chewing, biting, and pursing, and moreover to do an uncanny amount of speaking quietly, and I think I'm really going to come to loathe Molly Carpenter, I am still getting a kick out of the series.

This was book ten, and I have just ordered in numbers eleven and twelve in order to make sure I have a couple of fun, fast, absorbing reads on hand for those late-night emergencies.

Just don't ask me what it was about. I'm afraid I've forgotten already.

When did we discontinue the six-word review?

Oh, they're still in my mental template, not discontinued. But I'm in serious catch-up mode now, and those represent a lot of overhead. I spend a disproportionate amount of time on them, sometimes as much as a quarter of the time it takes me to do an entire review. I've just brought my titles in arrears from ten down to six. I really, really don't want to be stuck doing eight on New Year's Eve again.

>170 Meredy: Great review. I have given it a thumbs up. I loved the G&S comparison.

I am glad you enjoyed the book.

>174 pgmcc: Thank you! It would be a spoiler to say why, but I hope just making the comparison isn't. And of course I have you to thank for pushing me to read it.

>175 Meredy: I would not push so hard for his next one.

Well, nothing like reading one of Meredy's reviews (See #169 above) then going over to Amazon to learn more about the series, and learning that the first (chronologically speaking) is available for free today! (And because Meredy gave the second one 4 stars, plunking down a quick 4 bucks to buy it as well.)

This is a dangerous place to visit.

Jill

>177 jillmwo:
+1

>177 jillmwo:, >178 suitable1: Cool! I hope you enjoy the hit. No doubt the author will be pleased.

It may be worth noting that Susanne Alleyn was the last to post in my 2014 journal thread. She didn't care for my review of another of her novels, which happened to be the first of hers that I'd read. It took me a while to come to the Ravel series, and as always I tried to give it as honest and fair an appraisal as I could.

>176 pgmcc: If you mean Seveneves, yes, thanks, you've already warned me off that one, and I'm not planning on reading it.

>179 Meredy: Well, not only did I get hit with that book bullet for The Cavalier of the Apocalypse but I turned right around and made my book group buy it as our January selection. So that gives @Meredy an additional set of notches on the pink elephant book bullet gun...

(You know those old jokes, right? How do you shoot a blue elephant? With a blue elephant gun. How do you shoot a pink elephant? You grab the pink elephant by the trunk, hold his nose 'til he turns blue, and then you shoot him with the blue elephant gun...)

>180 jillmwo: ah yes, memories of fourth or fifth grade.

>181 Jim53: I never claim to be a true intellectual. The inner child is always lurking about...

>181 Jim53: I seem to recall flaming ducks.

>182 jillmwo: Why should those be incompatible?

>184 Jim53: Let's just say that I've known few intellectuals who really possessed the capability of play. Most of them (in my experience) are very hard working and tend to be very serious about their fields. I'm just a dilettante.

And you need to respond to @suitable1's comment about flaming ducks, because I want to learn what's behind the phrase, flaming ducks. What were you up to in fourth grade? Or should I go bribe @suitable1 in order to elicit the story?

>185 jillmwo: As I recall the sequence:

Q: Why do Zambian ducks have webbed feet?
A: To stamp out bush fires.

Q: Why do Zambian elephants have flat feet?
A: From stamping out flaming ducks.

Q: How does one get an ostrich into a match box?

A: Take the matches out.

Q: How does one get four ostriches into a mini car?

A: Two in the front and two in the back.

Q: How do you know there is a elephant in your fridge?

A: Footprints in the butter.

Q: How do you know there are two elephants in your fridge?

A: You can hear them talking.

Q: How do you know there are three elephants in your fridge?

A: You can't close the door.

>185 jillmwo: Hugh has got it, except I was in fourth grade before Zambia achieved independence; I think it was just African ducks.

Wheee! It's a joke-off. Prizes will be awarded.

>185 jillmwo: That's sad. I've known some people that I regarded as intellectuals, and most of them have had a deep and delightful sense of humor. Those who take themselves too seriously and are all about their precious dignity seem to me to lack a quality that's necessary for balance and perspective, and can you really be an intellectual without that kind of discernment?

Thanks for all the additional notches to the old BB gun. Almost as good as the Brave Little Tailor--seven at one blow!

>187 pgmcc: Irish elephants must behave differently from New England elephants. Where I come from, it's

Q: How do you know there is a elephant in your fridge?
A: You can smell the peanuts on his breath.

When I was about 9, sometime before Sputnik, this was pretty funny.

>189 Meredy: You do know of the farm in South Africa's North-West province allegedly called Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein (two buffalo shot stone dead with one shot spring), don't you? Unfortunately, the nearest name on any map is a simple Tweebuffelsfontein.

>187 pgmcc: Here we fitted 4 elephants in a mini.

>188 Jim53: Me too; evidently our humour developed slowly at school.

>189 Meredy: not sure I could have come up with it on my own, but I definitely remember the peanuts on the breath.

Middlemarch (1872), by George Eliot (5 stars)

Six-word review: Humanity closely observed and lovingly rendered.

Extended review:

No author has ever been so unfailingly compassionate toward her characters. Even the weak, vain, and reprehensible ones are human, their flaws and vices a matter of degree and nothing black or white. With her gift of insight, George Eliot shows us their hearts, and with her faceted mirrors she casts their reflections onto us. Her capacity for rendering inner lives that ring with truth is unsurpassed.

Middlemarch is the name of a fictitious small English town of the early nineteenth century. Subtitled "A Study of Provincial Life," the narrative follows several characters whose stories are intertwined. Like so many other British novels from serious to comic, it seems to focus greatest attention on two things: marriage and money. But Eliot does not use stock characters or easy clichés. The idealistic young woman, the obsessed cleric, the troubled doctor, his indulged, imprudent young wife, and all the others, both major and minor, possess the particularity that confers verisimilitude and the universality that speaks to readers across time, space, and circumstance.

Here is a small selection of quotes that illustrate Eliot's style, her wit, and her warmth. I read a Kindle edition, so I can't supply page numbers; I'll give chapter references instead.

• Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them. (Book I, Chapter I)

• "He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader. (Book I, Chapter VIII)

• And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. (Book I, Chapter IX)

• Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse. Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them. If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look judicial. Such joys are reserved for conscious merit. (Book II, Chapter I)

• It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required. (Book II, Chapter IV)

• [O]ne's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated. (Book II, Chapter IV)

• [I]t was plain that a vicar might be adored by his womankind as the king of men and preachers, and yet be held by them to stand in much need of their direction. (Book II, Chapter V)

• Besides, he was a likeable man, sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to our friends. (Book II, Chapter VI)

• There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet. (Book II, Chapter VII)

• ...the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. (Book II, Chapter VIII)

• If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. (Book II, Chapter VIII)

• We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves. (Book II, Chapter IX)

These are but a sampling of the first two books of eight. I won't go on, as I could do for pages, but I must add this beautiful evocation of two people falling in love:

• Each looked at the other as if they had been two flowers which had opened then and there. (Book IV, Chapter IV)

Eliot's words are, to me, the superlatively rendered expression of a sublime sensibility. I won't try to persuade anyone of that who doesn't see it the same way. I'll just say this: when I have no more than five stars to award to a novel like Middlemarch, it's hard to give that many to anything else.

>I read Middlemarch about fifteen years ago and was surprised how much I liked/appreciated it. I remember a few of those items that you quoted, particularly the young lovers as opening flowers and the world as an udder. She seemed to cherish individuals even as she illustrated the vacuity of most. I liked The Mill on the Floss just about as well; I remember writing a paper on it a million years ago, assessing the stages of moral development of several characters.

I've been meaning to read Middlemarch for a while. Maybe it's time to get to it sooner...

Several of us decided to read it together earlier this year. I'm not sure who else finished it. We started it in the middle of March.

>194 Jim53: I liked The Mill on the Floss, too, but it did end sadly, and the tragedy that unfolded hung on a social convention that's very hard for us to relate to now.

I'll lead cheers for Silas Marner any day--a beautiful book ruined for so many by school assignments.

Winter Solstice (2000), by Rosamunde Pilcher (4 stars)

Six-word review: As the season turns, lives turn.

Extended review:

Within the scope of my reading experience, Winter Solstice is a rarity: a feelgood book that is not sentimental or saccharine. It is neither cute nor cloying, does not insult the reader's intelligence, and strains credulity only as much as absolutely necessary without doing it gratuitous violence.

I loved it, and it did make me feel good.

Perhaps this is characteristic of the novels of Rosamunde Pilcher, but I wouldn't know, never having read any before. Nor would I have been inclined to believe someone who tried to tell me that I wouldn't hate it just because they didn't. That's as sure a way as any to guarantee that I'll never pick it up.

I'll thank my fellow GDer @SylviaC for the right push at the right moment, but I think it was also a happy stroke of timing that the suggestion touched me in a weakened state and found me susceptible.

And, of course, it was seasonally appropriate.

At the halfway point, I described the book as Mystery in White meets Miss Buncle's Book, only much deeper, warmer, and without the diversion of a murder. By the end I wouldn't change that description very much, except to say that the character of Elfrida Phipps is as charming as any I've met this side of Dorothy Gale. She's what Amelia Peabody should have been and what the likes of Scarlett O'Hara, just to name one, never could be. It would be rudely condescending to tag her with such epithets as "spunky" and "quirky," although she is certainly a distinct individual. She's not so much impulsive as guided by a confident inner light, which shines out through a very open heart. And yet she is no saint and nobody's fool. Like everyone in the book, I find her irresistible.

The setup is conventional: a group of people in a country house, this one in northern Scotland, snowed in together and making the best of it. The characters themselves are warmly likeable even as they struggle to overcome difficult and painful life situations. Passing the winter solstice together and then Christmas, they achieve together what none could manage alone: the lightening of burdens by love and simple affection.

How this comes about held my delighted attention for 504 pages. And the ending is just right. I'm not taking off any points for contrivance and lucky coincidence, nor am I going to list the few small defects I noted (or one character's incredible faux pas that the author let pass). What, after all, matters most about escapist reading? Right. The escapism.

And so, reluctantly, I leave Elfrida and Oscar and their impromptu family in their snowy Scottish village and head back to my version of the real world. But I do, honestly and not sappily, feel as though I'd made a friend.

>197 Meredy: I think I just took my final bullet (I hope) of the year. Thanks, I think. And I hope 2016 is kind to you and yours.

>198 Jim53: It appears to be available at BN as an ebook for $2.99...just sayin'...

Winter Solstice is a Kindle daily deal today, and so is Coming Home, which is the only other Pilcher book I've read that is in the same league.

I found that Elfrida's character is what really makes the book special. She is someone who I would love to have as a real-life friend. I described her in my review as "optimistic and caring, and just the slightest bit disreputable. She embraces life, and makes the most of whatever comes her way." I'm glad that this book was exactly what you needed this Christmas!

And you, >200 SylviaC:, just made another sale. I'll be saving that one up for when I need it. (Thanks for your tip, >199 Marissa_Doyle:.) >198 Jim53:, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and thank you for your good wishes.

Coming Home is a longer book, and is spread out over 10 years, encompassing WWII. It took me a while to get going, but eventually I just wanted everyone to leave me alone so I could find out what was going to happen next.

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult (1913; 12th century), Drawn from the Best French Sources and Retold by J. Bédier; Rendered into English by H. Belloc (5 stars)

Six-word review: Very old, very beautiful, very rich.

Read this medieval romance for its beautiful language and for its place in our history.

I purchased a paper copy of The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, the 1913 translation by Hilaire Belloc, so I could enjoy it in comfort, away from anything that plugs in. I grew up reading stories like that, written like that, alongside the King James Bible.

Some of the most beautiful English in existence is in the King James version of the Bible, released in 1606. For poetry and cadence, a well-told medieval tale comes behind it, but not by far. The marvel of the Belloc treatment of Tristan and Iseult is not only that someone could still write like that in the twentieth century or even that it could still be published--because in 1913 there was still a traditional very high literary standard--but that a hundred years later someone is keeping it in print. It begins:

My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult; how to their full joy, but to their sorrow also, they loved each other, and how at last they died of that love together upon one day; she by him and he by her.

The story tells how heroic Tristan, sent to fetch the fair Iseult as bride of his uncle King Mark, unwittingly shares a love potion with her. The two are thus powerless to resist an adulterous affair, forcing them to deceive good King Mark and draw down calumny upon themselves. What happens then and how it all turns out are not just part of the story but part of our heritage as speakers of English.

You can also find this work online, thanks to Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14244/14244-h/14244-h.htm#link2H_4_0005

More to come before year's end. Damn. I used to do my term papers the same way in school: run them right down to the wire. I suppose I ought to have learned better by now.

Corelli’s Mandolin (1994), by Louis de Bernières (5 stars)

Six-word review: Much more than romantic wartime drama.

Extended review:

Things I loved about this book:

1. The drama of intertwined lives and how the consequences of one's choices cascade across other people and future generations.
   
2. The theme of history rooted in place--the way a sense of place informs the lives of those who live in it and links them to their collective past. The residents of Cephallonia (Kephalonia) draw a strong sense of identity from their ties to fabled Ithaca, Odysseus, and the ancient gods of Greece.
   
3. The idea of roots growing together.
   
4. The character of Corelli.
   
5. The narrative scope and depth. The penetration of character. The breadth of characters. The journeys of the imagination into inner lives, including those of known historic figures such as Mussolini.
   
6. The depiction of characters coping with loss, injustice, and simple dumb error, as everyone must who lives in the world.
   
7. Using virtually unintelligible old English in dialogue to convey the effect of an educated officer trying to communicate with the inhabitants by speaking ancient Greek.
   
8. The Anvil Chorus in the latrine.
   

Somewhere in the second hundred pages, I bogged down and nearly gave up. But I was led on by the promise of something fine, and I wasn't disappointed. The ending has something of the same poignancy that I found at the end of A.S. Byatt's Possession, which, after all the breadth and complexity of the plot and the multitudinous characters, was the part that stayed with me: a satisfying payoff for the investment of my time and attention, and a place that we couldn't have arrived at by a shorter route.

I was bothered by a few little things--little, but perhaps not trivial--including a surprising misquotation of the famous Schubert Lied, "Gretchen am Spinnrade." And the present translation, alas, failed the biceps test on page 17. But rather than enumerating the lapses I wish someone had caught, which I tend to do only with books that tip my balance scale too far toward the don't-like side, I'll share a few of my favorite quotes:

[Concerning a young woman named Lulu, daughter of Metaxas, whose family concerns are on a par with matters of state] God knows, one is only young once, but in her case it was once too often. (page 26)

Moreover, the captain was possessed of a deep curiosity, so that he could sit with unnerving patience watching Pelagia's hands doing the formal dance of the crochet, until it seemed to her that his eyes were radiating some strange and potent force that would give her fingers the cramps and cause her to lose a stitch. 'I'm wondering,' he said one day, 'what a piece of music would be like if it sounded the way your fingers look.' She was deeply puzzled by this apparently nonsensical remark, and when he said that he did not like a certain tune because it was a particularly vile shade of puce, she surmised either that he had an extra sense or that the wires of his brain were connected amiss. The idea that he was slightly mad left her feeling protective towards him, and it was this that probably eroded her scruples of principle. The unfortunate truth was that, Italian invader or not, he made life more various, rich and strange. (page 207; I recognize this as a description of synesthesia)

[Dr Iannis, speaking of Italian invaders] One can only forgive a sin after the sinner has finished committing it, because we cannot allow ourselves to condone it whilst it is still being perpetrated. (page 281)

'Very well,' said Weber, and he closed his eyes and prayed. It was a prayer that had no words, addressed to an apathetic God. (page 324)

There was always the sea, the source of Cephallonia's being, but also the source of all its turbid past and the strategic significance which was now a curious memory, the same sea that in future times would cause new invasions of Italians and Germans who would be roasting on the sands together and leaving films of moisturizing oil upon the water, tourists puzzled by the empty and surmising gaze of elderly Greeks in black who passed without acknowledgment or a word. (page 343)

This was a beautiful read, costing a little bit of effort, perhaps, but worth it.

Places of the Heart (2015), by Colin Ellard (not rated)

(an Early Reviewer selection)

Six-word summation: Interesting concept falls short of promise.

Extended comments:

The premise of the book--namely, that human beings are affected by the built spaces in which they live and move, and that those effects can be studied and described--attracted me. I have always tried to remember that every structure I see around me, no matter how ugly, represents what somebody at some time thought was a good idea; but the fact is that many of them are and maybe always were antithetical to human physical and psychological comfort.

However, I bogged down with the reading of the book and was unable to finish it. I got to page 160 out of 226 (followed by backmatter)--that's about 70 percent--and couldn't make myself go further. So this is no better than a partial review.

Normally when I abandon a book I don't think it's fair to write a review at all, but in this case I have an Early Reviewer commitment to fulfill, albeit belatedly. I won't rate it in stars, though, because that does require completion. So please take this as a limited review based on a partial reading; it's possible that the last 66 pages would have left me with a different impression.

Why couldn't I push on through? It wasn't that some of the ideas seemed too off-the-wall for me, even if they were, or that some explanations seemed contrived to fit a theory and failed to take reasonable alternatives into account, although those things were part of it.

It was the writing.

Consider this 83-word prodigy:

The burgeoning new field of neuroeconomics, for example, is largely founded on the notion that a human being's behavior only follows logical principles so far and that a fully nuanced understanding of how we decide what to do must also take into account our peculiar status as a biological thinking machine, built to survive by means of the principles of natural selection, and subject to biases of various kinds that, though they may not conform to pure logic, have probably encouraged reproductive success. (page 19)

Or this, weighing in at 84:

There is little doubt that the impulse to build large, expensive structures whose size, might, and decoration far exceed their functions as buildings springs in part from the same kinds of motivations that cause birds and other animals to build elaborate structures in an attempt to woo mates or that cause the largest members of a social group of animals to achieve social dominance while rarely needing to use teeth or claws to defend their right to occupy the top of a dominance hierarchy. (page 159)

Tell me those don't awaken your inner editor.

I'm no slouch with respect to long sentences and complex sentence structure myself--attentively grammatical, to be sure, but admittedly a bit of a trial to read; however, they seldom survive a first draft. On rereading I usually find that I can break them down into two or even three shorter sentences without any loss to the sense or flow or interrelationships of the parts. In my opinion, this type of intervention ought to have been high on the priority list of the editor; but of course I don't know what the manuscript looked like before the editor laid a hand on it.

These two more or less random examples illustrate what sounds to me like stuffy and pretentious writing, with an emphasis on showy language and overblown rhetoric--and this remark comes from someone who likes academic writing, leans toward that style herself, and as an editor prefers to work with it. This document made all my editorial sensors twitch.

At some point early on, I said facetiously that it was almost as if the author had been handed a thousand vocabulary cards and promised points for every one he worked in.

Style of delivery aside, I had issues with the content based on its own internal logic. Some assertions and apparent conclusions struck me as incompletely thought through. The author offers hypotheses that lead to his predetermined conclusions and does not appear to consider any others. For instance, in a chapter called "Boring Places," he describes a building in an urban downtown block whose external design on one side consists of a long, blank wall. It's boring. People hurry past it. There's nothing to linger for or look at. He cites an analyst's observation that passersby on the sidewalk speed up when they pass a featureless facade. But wait. In an earlier chapter he talks about how we are constitutionally wired to seek safety over exposure--a wall at our backs and a secure place from which we can see danger approaching: prospect and refuge. A long blank wall offers noplace to hide or withdraw into--no protection. Wouldn't you rush on by? I would. But the author seems not to remember his own earlier discussion.

Many interesting and even engaging ideas are presented here, such as a connection between lack of education and lack of architectural aesthetics, for one, and the pervasive influence of Walt Disney on our culture, for another. He describes virtual environments and "sentient homes" that he finds appealing and that I think are creepy. At some point I began to wonder if he had an interest in selling them.

Well before the end, however, I lost patience with the airless, labored prose. I can't help speculating that, as with far too many other books, the author ran out of steam a little too soon and rushed his book into print when what it really needed was a little time to cool and then one more rewrite from front to back. An editor ought to have told him so. But that's not my task, and so I concluded that I'd given it long enough. I hurried on past the wall.

>204 Meredy: But you always do such thoughtful and lengthy reviews! That along puts you ahead as a useful source of information about titles.

Please note as well that I generally wouldn't look at Winter Solstice but given that both you and @SylviaC find it to be worthwhile, I may have to get ahold of it. The two of you can work out who gets credit for that particular book bullet!

Happy New Year (whenever it arrives in your West Coast corner of the world)!

>197 Meredy: Winter Solstice is my very favorite Rosamund Pilcher novel thus far. SylviaC gave me Coming Home last year in SantaThing, and I was supposed to finish it before this year's, but found I couldn't focus with all the holiday cheer around. So, it will be my first in 2016. Not all Pilcher novels are in the same class. Her most renowned, The Shell Seekers, is to me a depressing and dreary tale. I have read two of her short stories, loving one and despising the other. Kind of like Daphne du Maurier in that respect, although the tone and content are nothing alike!

>207 jillmwo: That's easy, Jill. Credit Sylvia with the bullet and me with the ricochet.

And thanks for your kind word. Sometimes I do let them go with a brief swipe. Once, when I was seriously behind, I did a hasty catch-up of nothing but the six-word reviews, and people objected, so I don't do that any more. Probably.

>208 MrsLee: I get that comparison, all right. It seems that you can't generalize across her novels the way you can with so many authors; the range of variance is much wider for those two than for most. I caught the Kindle deal for Coming Home yesterday, and I think I'll stop there with Pilcher.

I do have four titles to go to complete my year's commitment to reviews, but I'm going to be short by at least two--maybe three, if I finish another book today. Given the snarls and tangles that have confounded my recent life, I'm going to forgive myself for that. But I will make them up--I will, I will, I will. They'll be here in this thread, not the 2016 one.

@Meredy, I hope you have a fantastic 2016. I have enjoyed your reviews and comments in 2015 and am looking forward to more of the same.

600 Hours of Edward (2012), by Craig Lancaster (3½ stars)

Six-word review: If Edward can change, anyone can.

Extended review:

The main character and first-person narrator is Edward Stanton, a 39-year-old man who has Asperger's syndrome and OCD. His daily existence is governed by a system of rigid, interlocking rules and rituals. How and why he begins to break their hold on his life, without ever setting out to do so as a matter of intent, is the substance of this novel.

Change, when it comes to him, is gradual but real. We see how important his habits are to him, how they comfort and protect him, and yet we also see how they enslave him. Without ever explicitly saying so, Edward appears to begin to see it too.

Despite initial appearances, the most important word in this book is not "data," nor is it "facts." The most important word in this book is "yes." "Yes" occurs one hundred times, most of them spoken by Edward. The "yes" is his salvation.

This was a selection in my husband's and my weekly read-aloud series, and it worked very well for that. At a pace of an hour and a half a week, we live with a book, even a short book, for a long while. In this instance it was a measured, sustainable getting-to-know, and I was happy to spend that sort of time with Edward.

It's not a perfect novel. There is, as I find in far too many contemporary novels even in the absence of compulsive characters, a little too much showing; we could stand a bit more telling. The amount of repetition, however faithful it may be to Edward's character, becomes grating. (Partway through, I joked that it reminded me of a NaNoWriMo novel whose author is padding to make a daily word count--and yes, it turns out that NaNoWriMo is where it got its start!) In places, the quantity of detail is maddening, especially when it comes to football games. It's rare for me to skip any words in any book, but I had to.

And I was surprised to see that Edward received what I consider a very bad piece of advice from his therapist at the end; I don't believe that any real mental health practitioner would have said what she said.

However, I enjoyed Edward's story, and I liked the way it ended. Our data are incomplete. But they are sufficient.

2015 Year-End Stats

Books finished: 72 (month average: 6)
Pages (including parts of 9 books abandoned): 26,526
Average books per week: 1.4 (finished)
Average pages per week: 510 (total)
Average pages per book: 359 (finished)

I ended the year with four reviews in arrears, despite my best intentions; I'll wrap them up shortly here. I finished the last one a bit past midnight, but I still counted it in December. The day ends when I turn out the light.

Thank you for staying with me through 2015 or just dropping by now and then. I enjoy your remarks and value your company. And I like knowing about you and your reading as well. A happy and fulfilling 2016 to all.

Authors new to me in 2015: 30
(Not counting ER authors)

Judyth Vary Baker
Max Barry
Louis de Bernières
NoViolet Bulawayo
Jim Butcher
Deborah Crombie
Pamela Erens
Richard Flanagan
Kent Haruf
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
Suki Kim
Lily King
E. L. Konigsburg
Craig Lancaster
Erik Larson
John le Carré
Hyeonseo Lee
Taigen Dan Leighton
Sasha Martin
Peter Matthiessen
Iris Murdoch
Naomi Novik
Rosamunde Pilcher
Phyllis Rose
Casey Sherman & Dave Wedge
Nevil Shute
Robin Sloan
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki
Michael Taylor
Benjamin Wood

Some of those were one-shot authors (e.g., Baker, Lee), and some were definitely one shot for me; I won't read them again (e.g., Crombie, Sherman & Wedge). But most I'd want to see again, and some I'm already actively following (e.g., Butcher, Shute).

Thanks to @pgmcc for suggesting this aspect of the year's review.

A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (1973), by E. L. Konigsburg (4 stars)

Six-word review: Medieval royalty brought to vivid life.

Extended review:

It's hard for me to know how to rate this book. I almost never read young adult literature, and so I have little or no basis of comparison. On the one hand, it hardly seems fair to place it alongside major, large-scale works of serious adult fiction; on the other, it seems to me that within the YA genre I would be likely to find far more works that rank below it than above it.

So I'm giving it four stars, meaning, in this case, that I'm guessing it to be something very good within its class.

Told in a fictional style, and structured within a self-evidently fictitious frame, A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver is the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine, one-time queen of France and later of England through her marriage to Henry II in 1152. Eleanor is depicted as a strong-willed, intelligent, politically savvy woman who knows her own mind and understands her worth. Her title to the great lands of Aquitaine in France give her great power in twelfth-century Europe. It is she who has the proud taste for luxuries, among them cloth of scarlet and the white fur called miniver, which, surprisingly, is never defined or described in the book.

Author Konigsburg, of whose other work I know nothing at all, has a knack for vivid characterizations of historical figures. She knows the art of depicting complex situations and relationships in simple terms. She deals with well-known, major episodes in history--the start of the Second Crusade, the murder of Thomas Becket, the rivalry between King Richard the Lion Heart and his brother Prince John, the turning of Henry's sons against him, the imprisonment of Eleanor for treason--in engaging, straightforward language without trivializing them. The style of delivery is entertaining and readily accessible without feeling condescending.

Although the history of this period and these royal figures is not unfamiliar to me, I learned some new things from reading this book--a quick, easy read of 200 short pages. A dry recital of facts it is not. It seems likely to me that the book might succeed in furthering and even awakening a young person's interest in the time, the places, and the people who populate this charming book.

Just seeing the title brought back vivid memories of reading A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. I was, in fact, right smack in the target age range at the time. I borrowed it from the library, and I think I only read it once, but it made a huge impression. I can still remember the parts about her imprisionment, and her complicated relationship with her son and his nickname "John Lackland". To this day, every time I come across Eleanor, Henry II, or King John in my reading, I remember to that book, and think, "Oh yes, I know them!". So yes, you are absolutely right about it awakening a young person's interest in history.

The Worst of 2015

My lowest ratings of 2015 went to three works of fiction:

Lie Down with the Devil (Carlotta Carlyle), by Linda Barnes (review)
A Share in Death (Kincaid/James 1), by Deborah Crombie (review)
Crimson Shore (Pendergast 15), by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (not reviewed yet)

and two nonfiction:

The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, by Lance Dodes & Zachary Dodes (review)
Boston Strong: A City's Triumph over Tragedy, by Casey Sherman & Dave Wedge (review)

I note that one of those novels is the last of a series, one the first, and one the latest in a series of fifteen so far. (I’d read both the Carlyle and the Pendergast series from the beginning, and so I felt especially let down.) And both of the nonfiction were the work of coauthors. I’m not interpreting those facts, just noting them.

Special mention goes to those that I couldn’t stand to finish, not because I wasn’t in the right mood but just because of their sheer awfulness:

WordPlay, by Glenn Bassett (review)
Places of the Heart, by Colin Ellard (review)
There Was an Old Woman, by Hallie Ephron (review)

Two of those were nonfiction Early Review selections.

The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading (2014), by Phyllis Rose (4 stars)

Six-word review: A reader's book, a writer's book.

Extended review:

The Shelf has the distinction of being one of the very small number of books that I have purchased as a keeper after reading the library copy. Not only did I want to be able to refer back to it--and maybe look up some of the selections myself--but I wanted to be able to write in it. I regard most reading matter as a dialogue, and this one by its nature invites notations. Even if I can't give it five stars, I do recommend it to a certain kind of reader.

This book is the record of an experiment, as author Phyllis Rose tells us in the first line. Throughout our reading lives, we find our choice of reading matter constrained through various filters: teachers' reading lists, reviewers' recommendations, award-giving bodies, best-seller lists. Rose set out to make the most independent selection possible, given that any collection (although no longer any publication) must pass a gatekeeper of some kind. "Arbitrary choice," she says, "is the most radical response to conventional judgment" (page 4). So by her own arbitrary criteria she arrived at a particular shelf in a particular library.

This book delivers Rose's thoughts on the works she committed herself to reading in the interests of "sampl[ing], more democratically, the actual ground of literature" (page 3). One of the major themes that permeate her commentary on individual works and authors is that of relationship--and especially the relationship of reader to writer, usually, though not always, through the medium of the book. In two instances she actually made contact with living authors and established a bond with them. In others, it was necessarily more remote and even tenuous, but it was felt nonetheless. She in turn offers her readers a sense of who she is and an invitation to engage with her (virtually, if not actually) over a particular experience of reading.

Rose's intelligent, insightful discussion of the reading matter in her experiment extends both deeply and broadly into aspects of the reading life. This perception touched me: "[R]eading is private; that's the most seductive thing about it" (page 120). And again: "[O]f all the parts of our reading life, what we read for escape is most personal" (page 209).

I like her challenge to one of the most outworn clichés of aspiring authorship: write what you know. Says Rose: "'Write what you want to know' is more like it (page 156).

Setting the context for her adventure, she explains how literature used to be taught in universities, founded upon a critical approach that saw literature as "imbued...with depth and urgency," qualities that made it not only relevant but essential to an examined life. Having been an English major myself in the same era as she, the mid-1960s, I was grieved nearly to tears by this paragraph:

We English majors, despite our military epithet, never understood that we had to fight for the literature we so much enjoyed. Its study seemed so well-entrenched, we took it for granted. When the Trojan horse arrived, in the form of clever, infinitely sophisticated professors of literature from France, we accepted their delicious gifts of irony, novelty, and nihilism and did not see the danger. Now, a generation later, the edifice that took a hundred years to put in place, and that spread a kind of enlightenment over America, is gone. We have to do all over again the work of proving that there is any point to reading a novel besides making time pass more quickly. This book is my way of making amends for not fighting when I should have. I thought the problem would go away if I waited, and eventually it did. But, as with a tsunami engulfing a city, when the waters receded, the city was gone. (page 6)

I've been out of touch with academia for more than forty years, and I didn't know. But I feel as though I should have. The signs were there, somewhere within my wider field of vision, and especially noticeable whenever I happened to hear about high school reading lists--no longer Shakespeare and Hawthorne and Dickens and Melville but "relevant" reflections of teen angst and societal distress in emotive, shaky prose that lacks the capacity to exalt or even to expand the vocabulary.

That last part I just made up out of my own prejudice, dismay, and sense of collective loss. If it isn't true, I hope someone will set me straight.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'd just like to wallow in righteous indignation because I know the tradition we were born to has been allowed to die, and what I've done to save it has amounted to nothing. Or next to nothing.

I have, however, been a lifelong practitioner and advocate of reading as a worthwhile activity and have always esteemed "real" books as items of value. I have continued to influence my library's retention algorithms by borrowing old books such as editions of Scott and Eliot novels from the thirties, forties, and fifties, and, of course, reading them. And during my career as an editor I've brought what I absorbed in that tradition to bear on the better-than-workmanlike documents that have come across my desk.

With respect to those that were only workmanlike, or less than, such as competent but uninspired technical documents and academic papers, there's no use in trying to apply a literary standard. I had to learn the hard way that it does no one any good; but in time I came to see that simply not making the author hate editors may have been an oblique and unheralded service in itself.

"Every goal," says Rose, "no matter how arbitrary, is an opportunity for satisfaction" (page 210).

Maybe that's not nothing after all.

217> For what it's worth, I graduated high school in 2015, and we did read Shakespeare. The unspoken rule seemed to be that there was one Shakespeare play each year - Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Hamlet. Most of the books we read were part of the canon of classics, such as The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, Their Eyes Are Watching God, As I Lay Dying, Pride and Prejudice, ect. I didn't read any Dickens and Melville, but I know the other freshman English teacher taught Great Expectations. The only books I can recall reading for high school published in the last ten years were Salvage the Bones and Atonement.

Granted, I don't know much about the curriculum of other high schools. I do remember that we were warned to try and think of other books besides The Great Gatsby or The Scarlet Letter for the essays on our AP exams, since they said everyone in high school (or at least an AP Literature or Language course) would have read them.

The only times I was ever assigned a book considered YA for school reading were both in middle school, The Outsiders and The Book Thief.

I know at one point the district got the idea that we should be reading more nonfiction in preparation for the workforce, but I don't think much came of it at our school at least. I think my younger sister's class was given a "Non-Fiction Reading Project" where they had to read one nonfiction book and write an essay on it.

I would guess that most high school students still end up getting assigned to read Shakespeare or To Kill a Mockingbird.

However, the books assigned are not always equal to the books students actually read. A lot (possibly a majority?) end up reading Sparknotes or similar instead of the book itself. The teachers tried to circumvent this by requiring us to show them that we had a copy of the book ("book checks"), but one copy would end up serving several students.

>218 pwaites: That's very comforting to know. Did you go to a private or public school, and in what area? Can you remember if anyone told you why you were expected to read Shakespeare and Hawthorne? And...do you have a sense of how old your English teachers were?

219> I went to Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston, Texas. It's a public school, but it may be a bit different in that it's all academic honors and we were all expected to go to college. I'm sure that any program that's aiming the students towards college also has them read classic literature, and I'd bet that most in general do.

I'd say all the English teachers there were probably in their thirties or forties. At least two of them took maternity leave while I was there. I think all of them were English majors, but the Latin teacher also took on one or two overflow English classes.

I can't remember ever being told why exactly we were reading Shakespeare and Hawthorne, but senior year we did read some literary theory about the nature of canon.

Most English teachers were English majors. Not all the ones I had liked teaching, but they did all like literature.

Edit - I completely forgot about standardized testing! At Carnegie it wasn't a big deal since they figured we'd pass, but I know it was a lot bigger focus at other schools.