Meredy's 2016 Reading Journal: Part II

Welcome to my ongoing reading record, and thank you for your interest. This thread covers the second half of the year.

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.

Current fast-track read:

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July

• Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein (2006), 7/8/2016; 208 pages plus index (★★★★); review: post 10.
• Adam Bede, by George Eliot (1859), 7/10/2016; 608 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 27.
• White Sands, by Geoff Dyer (2016), 7/16/2016; 227 pages + index (★★★☆); review: post 35.
• The Rainbow and the Rose, by Nevil Shute (1958), 7/22/2016; 310 pages (★★★); review: post 21.
• Arcadia, by Iain Pears (2015), 7/30/2016; 510 pages (★★★★); review: post 27.

July total: 5 books read (1863 pages).

August

• The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, by David Adam (2014), 8/6/2016; 324 pages (★★★☆); review: post 26.
• Last Bus to Wisdom, by Ivan Doig (2015), 8/13/2016; 450 pages + index (★★★★); review: post 27.
• Some Buried Caesar (Nero Wolfe 6), by Rex Stout (1938), 8/19/2016; 274 pages (★★★☆); review: forthcoming.
• Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer (2014), 8/23/2016; 195 pages (★★★★); review: post 44.
• Time and Again, by Jack Finney (1970), 8/29/2016; 404 pages (★★★☆); review: post 60.
• The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters (2009), abandoned 8/29/2016 at 70 out of 463 pages (15.1%) for failure to engage; no review.

August total: 5 books read (1647 pages) + 1 abandoned (70 pages).

September

• Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II , by John W. Dower (1999), 9/8/2016; 564 pages plus backmatter, 676 total (★★★★☆); review: forthcoming.
• Stiletto, by Daniel O'Malley (2016), 9/11/2016; 584 pages (★★★☆); review: post 93.
• A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness (2011), 9/22/2016; 205 pages (not rated); review: forthcoming.
• An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears (1998), 9/25/2016; 693 pages (★★★★☆); review: forthcoming.

September total: 4 books read (2158 pages).
YTD: 39 books finished (12,700 pages); average: 1 book a week at 325.6 pages each.

October

• From Time to Time, by Jack Finney (1995), 10/2/2016; 303 pages (★★★); review: forthcoming.
• Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer (2014), 10/5/2016; 195 pages (★★★☆), reread; comments: post 90.
• The Murderer's Daughter, by Jonathan Kellerman (2015), 10/12/2016; 364 pages (★★★); review: post 96.
• Days Between Stations, by Steve Erickson (1985), 10/19/2016; 253 pages (★★★★☆); review: post 99.
• The Heart Sutra, by Red Pine (2004), 10/27/2016; 201 pages (★★★★); review: forthcoming.

November

• The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, père; Lord Sudley, trans. (1844/1952), 11/13/2016; 720 pages (★★★); review: forthcoming.
• My Extraordinary Ordinary Life, by Sissy Spacek, with Maryanne Vollers (2012), 11/22/2016; 271 pages (★★★); review: forthcoming.

December

• Prey, by Michael Crichton (2002), 12/2/2016; 364 pages (★★★☆); review: forthcoming.
• The Only Woman in the Room, by Beate Sirota Gordon (1997), 12/6/2016; 171 pages (★★★); review: post 119.
• Free to Fall, by Lauren Miller (2014), 12/17/2016; 485 pages (★★★☆); review: forthcoming.
• Hunters in the Dark, by Lawrence Osborne (2015), 12/27/2016; 311 pages (★★★★); review: forthcoming.

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[Reviews owed: 18+ (& 2 from 2015).]

This is a six-word placeholder.

Hi, @Meredy.

I would not want to miss your thread so here I am marking the spot.

Happy reading for the latter half of 2016.

I'm marking the spot as well.

Good luck with your reading!

>2 Meredy: Do hyphenated words always count as two words?

>5 SylviaC: No. Permanent compounds (e.g., "cross-country") count as one; temporary combinations hyphenated for grammatical reasons (hyphenating a compound adjective when it occurs before a noun) do not. But hyphenations are also my gray area when I'm having a hard struggle to bring the count out to six, so if you try to catch me at fudging it sometimes, you'll succeed.

I won't, of course, hyphenate something that just mustn't be hyphenated (such as -ly adverbs before a noun). My fudging is in the count and not in the use of a hyphen.

>2 Meredy: Is the six word placeholder intended as saved space for a review? Just curious.

>6 Meredy: Thank you. I thought there must be a technical, editorial-type answer to that.

>7 jillmwo: You're funny, Jill. It's because of your comment here that it isn't just one word.

When I fill in message 1 with a linked list, it gets long, and having a linked placeholder makes it easy to skip to the bottom of the message. That's why I do that.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes (2006), by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein (4 stars)

Six-word review: Wisdom is a fool in motley.

Extended review:

Do you think this is funny?

Two cows are standing in a field. One says to the other, "What do you think about this mad cow disease?"

"What do I care?" says the other. "I'm a helicopter."

There's humor in much of what I read, but it's usually of the cerebral variety, mild irony or absurdity, witty turns of phrase, that sort of thing; even Harry Dresden's wisecracks aren't usually laugh-out-loud funny. But this silly two-liner on page 120 just struck me as hilarious. If you're giggling too, then you and I have something in common.

If you just think it's dumb, well, never mind. People's senses of humor are pretty idiosyncratic, after all. There's a lot of supposed comedy that I just don't care for at all. But I loved this little book.

What that cow story has to do with existentialism may not be immediately apparent, but the authors will make it clear. It's their gift to be able to encapsulate the chief ideas of several branches of philosophy--metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, and so on--and convey their essential qualities through jokes. Their approach is unabashedly entertaining, and I wish I'd had this light-hearted treatment on hand when I was a philosophy student; but it also rests on a very sound premise for which I've always had immense respect, namely, the efficacy of humor as a vehicle for truth: something cartoonists and satirists know very well.

Watch out, though: there are pop quizzes along the way and a three-point exam at the end. Resisting my native compulsions, I went on past it without completing the assignment. Instead I read the timeline of the history of philosophy, which set me off all over again.

I picked up this small orange-covered volume on a whim during last Thursday's bookstore meetup with two fellow Dragoneers, and it proved a nice break from far heavier stuff. My daytime sofa read is currently a very serious history of postwar Japan, and my bedtime novel is George Eliot's 1859 Adam Bede, full of Eliot's gently but deftly ironic observations on human nature, but nonetheless with a plot revolving around some deep and earnest characters who don't seem to see much humor in things. It was good for a change just to go ahead and laugh. By the time I got to the end and tried to read one of the stories aloud to my husband, I could hardly get the words out between gasps and tears. And it wasn't even that funny.

My father taught philosophy for 35 years. I know he would have loved this. I'm thinking maybe I'll order several copies and send them to my siblings in his honor. He was fond of my all-time favorite quotation about philosophy (attributed to Feigl): "Philosophy is the disease for which it ought to be the cure." This book is a cure.

>10 Meredy: You have hit me with a book bullet. That two cow joke is one of my favourite jokes. In the version I heard the cow said it was a sheep.

A friend of mine studied Philosophyand did his dissertation on humour. He told me most jokes have a victim and he seeks out jokes that do not have a victim. His favourite piece of humour was some grafitti that stated: "Roget's thesaurus rules, reigns, domains,..."

>11 pgmcc: Bang. Wheee! Another notch.

And I did just order copies for my siblings. So I guess that bullet rebounded three times.

Meredy, if you did this already, I must have missed it. Did you do any book-buying the day you met up with @MrsLee and @reconditereader? If you did, did you post what you bought? Somewhere? Anywhere? Inquiring minds want to know.

Edited to add: Never mind. I'm an idiot and just found the information in the thread that talked about what you all did during the get-together. Where one might logically expect to find it....

>13 jillmwo: I sure did. Here's the thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/204488

I wish we could have had the whole Pub gang there! Maybe someday.

>10 Meredy: Glad you enjoyed that book! I love the joke, even though I don't love philosophy. ;) Still, I agree with you that I find it much more palatable through humor.

..and I have indeed bought three more copies, which will soon be winging their way to Massachusetts, Maryland, and Florida. I wish I could send one to my dad.

I haven't laughed like that in a long while, and I sure needed it.

>10 Meredy: you can carve another notch for this one.

>16 Meredy: glad you're getting some laughs!

>10 Meredy: Somehow I made it through my formal education without ever taking a philosophy course. Would this book be a good introduction?

>18 SylviaC: I can't say, but maybe not. I wouldn't call it a reliable guide to philosophy; those big ideas can't be done justice in a couple of lines. But if you're already at least somewhat acquainted with Kant and Kierkegaard and Sartre and the rest, the way the authors extract essential concepts from jokes and use them to spotlight bigger themes is both hilarious and illuminating. I think so, anyway.

There were a few things that bothered me about the book, and they're the sorts of things that usually do bother me. I didn't like to see "Ding an sich" spelled with lowercase d, which is incorrect German. I noticed comma problems throughout. I'd have liked to see a tidier edit overall. But those were minor flaws, so I omitted mention of them in my review.

Maybe the sample pages on Amazon would give you enough of a taste to judge whether it appeals to you. For me, a glance was enough.

>19 Meredy: I checked the sample pages, and I think it would be worth checking out. Even if I don't pick up a lot of philosophy, the jokes look pretty good. And my local library actually has a copy!

The Rainbow and the Rose (1958), by Nevil Shute (3 stars)

Six-word review: Pilot's life passes before friend's eyes.

Extended review:

Oddly titled novel of aviation and doomed romance, with more than a touch of what we'd now call "magic realism," something I've seen in other Shute novels: one consciousness sliding into another to reveal a hidden narrative. Here it occurs through the medium of dreams and the effect of environmental proximity. The author achieves a nice balance between the plausible and the impossible.

Shute's fascination with the mechanical, and especially with aircraft and piloting, takes central focus as every event somehow wraps itself around that core. Even though I have no particular knowledge of this field, other than the lore that comes through culture and fiction, I could feel the way the subject gripped him and dominated his story. Some of his fervor was contagious enough to hold my attention even after it began to wear on me.

The story itself is one of personal drama, love and loss, and eventual reconciliation with life as it is. The predictable ending is nonetheless moving and in its own way satisfying.

I chose this novel because it is one of the few Shutes that are available at my library and just about the last one that I hadn't already read. I still fail to see the significance of the title, a line from a poem by Rupert Brooke, which by the marketing practices of today would signal an entirely different type of reading matter. If it weren't for the author's name, I would never have touched a book with a sentimental-sounding title like this.

I'm giving it only three stars because the technical content does overwhelm the story, but it's still a good Shute treatment of unknown private lives that run deep.

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(Edited to insert a missing word.)

>21 Meredy: That's one that I have on my shelf, but haven't read yet.

I've begun Arcadia, by Iain Pears. I don't know about this one. I have no prior experience of this author, but he comes well recommended. I'm put off by a number of things, right from the start, so we'll see if my patience is too far strained.

Meanwhile, I should be working on my dozen and a half overdue reviews, but I'm still mostly in input mode. Reading is a good escape, whereas writing the sort of review that I strive for requires concentration and self-awareness. The former can sometimes be prohibitively difficult, and the latter comfortless.

>23 Meredy: In my opinion Pears's best novel is Instance of the Fingerpost. I also enjoyed Stone's Fall very much. If Arcadia puts you off I would suggest you give one of those two novels a try, perhaps as a library loan.

I have Arcadia but have not started it yet. I read a couple of earlier ones that were not nearly as good, so he can be inconsistent. I would hate for you to miss the good stuff.

By page 160 (of 510), I'm willing to grant the author some slack because of his audacity. The faults that are bugging me persist, but I'm seeing some compensation. There are some whose authorial traits I can't abide and others (v. Jim Butcher) whose quirks are offset by their virtues. It's a little soon to tell, but that may be what I'm seeing in Pears.

The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought (2014), by David Adam (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Imagine that you can never stop.

Extended review:

Everyone has odd notions and intrusive, unwelcome thoughts from time to time. What if your life were dominated by them, indeed governed by them, and you could never, ever shut them off? What if they were so far from socially acceptable that you couldn't discuss them with anyone, and yet you were powerless to halt the behaviors they provoked? What if their very nature posed a virtually insurmountable obstacle to seeking help?

Then you might be in a position to identify with the author of this book, a recognized science writer who for more than twenty years has kept his painful condition a secret, even from his family.

The author describes with unsparing candor the reality of obsessive-compulsive disorder as others have reported it, both practitioners and sufferers, and as he himself experiences it. He gives an account of public perceptions of OCD, relating it to other mental health conditions and to inner states, and discusses the history of its treatment up to the present, from barbaric surgeries to behavior modification.

Something like OCD in a mild form seems to run in my family, though nothing--as far as I know--that resembles Adam's experience. Nonetheless, I found his research and especially his personal narrative both compelling and illuminating. It's a quick medium-weight read that both heightens awareness and leaves much to ponder.

I've finished and enjoyed Ivan Doig's Last Bus to Wisdom, which puts me behind by a record seventeen reviews. If I'm ever going to catch up instead of giving up, I'll have to take a shortcut or two.

Maybe I'll even go so far as to expose one of my unfinished commentaries, which are apt to start off grand and then set me a challenge of some sort that I feel I have to meet before I can post. Yes, my reach nearly always exceeds my grasp. And then the whole thing languishes undone. I have to steel myself to accept the principle that works so well in many other matters: some review is better than no review.

So here, to start, are a few hexaverbic summations and slight expansions:

Adam Bede (1859), by George Eliot (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Love and passion rule humble hearts.

Extended review:

     Intersecting and overlapping romantic triangles generate drama in a rural English village, where Adam Bede, a carpenter, carries a torch for pretty, vain Hetty Sorrel.
     In her first novel as well as those that came later, George Eliot treats her characters--ordinary people, for the most part, in a rustic setting--with respect and compassion. Even mean and despicable characters benefit by her redemptive insight; she never shies away from folly or ill deeds, but she shows the humanity in them. She writes: "The way in which I have come to the conclusion that human nature is lovable--the way I have learnt something of its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries--has been by living a great deal among people more or less commonplace and vulgar." Strong emotions and complex inner states are by no means the province of the privileged classes.
     I want to tell her, though, the same thing I want to tell countless other authors, not least of them being Stephen King: your rendition of babytalk is revolting. For heaven's sake quit trying to write children's dialogue. It's even more obnoxious than overdoing dialect and regional accents. Once you've estabished what precious little brats they are, just leave them to their mothers and go on. All right? Thank you.

Arcadia (2015), by Iain Pears (4 stars)

Six-word review: Exploring how the imagined becomes "real."

Extended review:

      Several storylines develop in parallel across time and perhaps space in this inventive yarn in which the clichéd adolescent steps through the clichéd portal into another dimension--but things just don't work they way they do in the Ozzified Narnian Wonderlands of so many other tales.
      Themes of time, past, future, memory, invention, illusion, choices, alternatives, and cause and effect thread through intersecting narratives that ultimately break through the familiar paradigms without becoming parody.
      At the outset I found several of the author's habits and stylistic tics very grating, almost enough to cause me to abandon the book. In particular I am irritated by an author who doesn't pay attention to what he's doing and says things that make no sense to someone who is. (As usual, I ask: where was the editor?) But by about the one-third mark I had become interested enough in the story to forgive authorial lapses for the sake of the author's audacity. In the end I enjoyed it and gave it good marks.
      Pears doesn't manage what's-going-on-here revelations as well as Emily St. John Mandel or juggle a host of characters and situations as well as Ian McDonald, but he does a nice job of showing us how he sees the interplay of fiction and reality, or, better, "reality" as we think we know it. I would read other work by him.

Last Bus to Wisdom (2015), by Ivan Doig (4 stars)

Six-word review: Coming of age on the road.

Slightly extended review:

     Traveling by Greyhound from Montana to Wisconsin and back, an eleven-year-old boy has adventures and meets characters who change his life.
     It's a road story, a buddy story, a growing-up story, and we've read and seen it all before, but Doig in his last novel does it very, very well. It's one of those novels that have left me feeling as if I'd grown a whole new little world inside me.

Sometimes a person has to settle for what seems less than perfect, or else become paralyzed by a sense of mounting obligations. But even your short reviews convey more useful information than some reviewers' screeds.

Based on @Bookmarque's review, and confirmed by yours, I plan to borrow Arcadia from the library sometime soon. I feel like there is a huge snowball of unread books chasing me downhill.

>28 SylviaC: Yep to that. I love reading Meredy's insights into the books she has read.

>27 Meredy: I had not heard of that Ivan Doig novel. Will have to keep my eyes open and find it. His books are not ones I have to read immediately, but I think you and I both have authors we keep on the shelf for those days we need a good read with no chances. He is one of those authors for me.

Meredy, would you prefer it if dialogue by a child in a book were to be rendered as normal speech (that is, without lisps caused by a missing front tooth or "w"s used to indicate mispronounced "R"s?) I too can get irritated by the use of "fwactious" rather than "fractious" emerging from a six year-old's mouth. Back in Louisa Alcott's day, children had better vocabulary. Maud in An Old Fashioned Girl announced she need to be "amoosed" and it really stuck with me.

Put another way, should the nature of the child's question be conveyed more by the basic nature/intent behind an immature mind or by the way it might be rendered (as with local dialects)? I am not taking issue here with your note to Eliot in #27. I really want to know what you'd see as the most effective means for an author of communicating the age and/or lack of maturity in the context of a conversation between two characters.

The Complete Colored Pencil Book (1992), by Bernard Poulin (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Materials, techniques, and some amazing samples.

Extended review:

When my art teacher pushed me to venture into color after a year and a half of doing portraits in graphite, I decided to try colored pencils. I reasoned that a dry medium would be more manageable than paint of any variety, and I knew that I liked a far finer line and more delicate touch than I could achieve with pastels. From early childhood through college, I'd done a lot of drawing and painting for pleasure; but that was long decades in the past, and I'd never had any instruction anyway, so I felt like a novice. Kids use colored pencils. How hard can they be?

My art teacher handed me this book, saying, "You can bring it back next week."

I read the whole thing, except the part about how to lay out and build a fabulous studio in your home, and studied the illustrations. Much daunted, I nonetheless ordered a set of Prismacolors online, gave them a little tryout, and took them along to my next class.

Man, there's a lot to learn. Touch. Layering. Blending. Burnishing. Highlights--which you can't add later, or pull out with an eraser; you have to anticipate them as with watercolor and leave them showing through as white. Never mind all the usual components of line, form, value, texture, proportion, and the challenges of translating a three-dimensional subject into a two-dimensional image.

This book was my starting point, early in June. Since then, I've read two other books on the subject and skimmed a third. Predictably, individual authors have their own tips and secrets to share, and all of them recommend drawing from photographs and transferring your sketch to a clean sheet so you don't spoil the paper with erasures while you work out your form, neither of which I do. But Poulin was my foundation, and I'd call it a good one. I'm learning and making progress.

I've now completed two portraits from live models in class, concentrating mostly on technique and use of color. Here's the second one: Kate.

Colored pencils have the virtue of not splashing or spilling, but on the other hand they are slow. Serious use is not kid stuff. It took me the better part of three hours just to build the hat in this picture--the hat alone, without any of the decoration. One of the illustrations in one of the books, a composition as complex as a Persian carpet, took the artist 500 hours to accomplish.

Maybe here at last is the challenge that teaches me patience.

Greenmantle (1916), by John Buchan (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Another improbable pulp adventure with charm.

Extended review:

Escapism has its own appeal, and an author who knows exactly what he's doing makes for a safe escape. Buchan does not pretend to be writing literature, although his own literary background shows. He's writing entertainment. So plots that feature wild schemes and dark missions, plots that rely on amazing coincidences bolstered by daring heroics, aren't measured on a scale of realism. Rather, the question is how much fun they are.

Published in 1916, Greenmantle is an adventure of international espionage and intrigue whose first-person narrator, Richard Hannay (of The Thirty-Nine Steps), is a man of action. "Under the black canopy of night," he says, "perils are either forgotten or terribly alive. Mine were forgotten."

An assignment in Islamic country pits Hannay against savage Turks and menacing Germans as the tides of World War I sweep forward and back. At that time the outcome of the war, not to mention the fact that it was only Roman numeral one, was unknown. The novel, with its overt patriotism and its celebration of macho courage, spotlights the power of a small team of trained and committed operatives to turn events toward victory, regardless of personal risk.

Greenmantle in its time was popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, a hundred years later, of course it's dated, and I doubt that it ever did invite deep thought. I read it for a glimpse of another era and other cultures and for an absorbing diversion. It delivered both, and it was fun.

>31 Meredy: That's wonderful that you're moving in that direction -- creating art, using a particular medium. That's got to be helpful in centering yourself.

Ok, here's a genuine unfinished review draft.

Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace (2015), by Fabian Drixler et al. (4 stars)

Six-word review: Japan's cultural history revealed through art.

Extended review:

I happened onto this book just in passing a library display when I was about 70 pages into Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II and thought it would give me some special insight into Japanese culture. It did more than that.

The book is the catalog of an exhibition that ran for eight months of 2015 at Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History. Beautifully printed in color on heavy coated stock, it consists of photographs of the art and artifacts in the exhibit, with informative captions and accompanying text. I would love to have seen the exhibit. But the book, described as "a history in objects," can stand alone as a survey of artistry and craftsmanship representing 250 years of Japanese history, a conflict-free period of shogun rule from 1650 to 1863, known as "the Great Peace." The explanatory text sets context, describes and analyzes the objects, and extracts larger themes that shed light on an ancient culture before it became accessible to the West.

The authors make it a point to dispel the lore and mythmaking surrounding the samurai, who were originally the poor relations of aristocratic families, pressed into service as weapon-bearing servants. Over time, fiction supplanted fact in the popular and artistic conception of the warrior class:

During the Great Peace, most real-life samurai died on their futons after long years of guard duty or bookkeeping, with few opportunities for flamboyant displays of martial valor or loyalty to their lords. But in ballads, plays, fictional narratives, and woodblock prints, they were men of mettle and action, swinging their swords and laying down their lives in the service of higher ideals.

The reimagining of the samurai still reverberates in the present. (page 55)

I've seen a lot of Japanese movies that perpetuate the samurai mystique. In my opinion they lose nothing by being based in imagination rather than history; such is the case with a large proportion of stories in other traditions as well. But the rich and complex culture that gave rise to them is expressed [Draft ends there; I have no idea what I was going to say next.]

White Sands (2016), by Geoff Dyer (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Essays rooted in awareness of place.

Slightly extended review:

Real-world locations provide a springboard for Dyer's idiosyncratic ruminations on far-ranging subject matter from jazz to hitchhikers, from Egyptian royal statuary to the Watts Towers impressively built by one man's labors with salvaged materials.

I enjoyed following the author's trains of thought as he provided vividly evocative descriptions of arresting sights and environments and then mirrored them with a tour of his inner landscape.

Argh, I just counted the reviews I have left to write and found that my running count was off by 5. I still have 15 to go. That means that when I thought I was behind by 17, it was really 22. More shortcuts needed.

>30 jillmwo: I will answer your question. It's a good one. There's a little checking I want to do first.

Amberwell (1955), by D.E. Stevenson (3 stars)

Six-word review: Warm, easygoing story, but not saccharine.

Extended review:

Author Stevenson has a character in Amberwell say that she is "sick to death of books about piggies and pussies and darling little mousies." Sentimental treacle is not for her, and it's not for me either. That's why I'm instinctively wary of novels that just sound too damned pleasant.

Having read the earlier Miss Buncle's Book, however, I knew that Stevenson could manage a balance between the savory and the sweet. That's why, when I did need something light (in both senses) for a change, I followed recommendations and downloaded this one in a Kindle edition.

The note I wrote immediately upon completing it (and why in the world don't I do this all the time? it would make reviewing so much easier) says: "Definitely a comfort read. Not too ambitious, not especially literary, but quite lovely for what it is."

There's nothing I need to add.

>37 Meredy: Perfect summation of Amberwell.

>32 Meredy: I am glad to see you have not totally abandoned John Buchan. I must read the remaining four Richard Hannay novels. I have only read The Thirty-nine Steps so far.

Sputnik Sweetheart (2001), by Haruki Murakami (4 stars)

Six-word review: Typically puzzling yet rewarding Murakami story.

Extended review:

There's something about the novels of Haruki Murakami: I read them, I enjoy them (or don't: that would be Norwegian Wood), I'm moderately mystified by them--and then, a little while later, I find that I can't remember what happened. I remember that there was something about cats, or moons, or train stations, or wells--a lot of wells--but the story and the characters have diffused into a kind of dreamlike otherworldly vapor.

They seem to want to be classed as existentialist novels, and yet when I think of them in comparison with Camus, I find them far more elusive and less concrete.

I know I liked Sputnik Sweetheart. I even wrote this in my notebook as soon as I finished it: "I found this more coherent than any of the other five Murakami novels I've read." I also harvested a lot of good quotations, from which the following selection comes:

•   "[I]f I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it loses even its imperfection." (page 4)

•   "I felt like I was a meaningless bug clinging for no special reason to a high stone wall on a windy night, with no plans, no beliefs." (page 77)

•   Sumire: "On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely have pegged lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings." (page 134; bold in original)

•   Sumire: "Only a handful of writers--and I'm talking the most talented--are able to pull off the kind of irrational synthesis you find in dreams." (page 137-138; this is followed in the narrative by a dream sequence)

•   In my notebook I labeled this "statement of theme": "So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence."

I guess I'll take my word for it.

Recently abandoned:

Ashley Bell, by Dean Koontz
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
Willful Blindness, by Margaret Heffernan
The Mechanical, by Ian Tregillis

>41 Meredy: Is August the month for abandoning books? I've abandoned more this month than I read, and I did so well in July. :/

>42 MrsLee: Let's look at this another way: maybe it was an off month for the books.

Three out of four of those were failed read-alouds for us. Not every book works well when read aloud, although in general I think they should, if they're not textbooks, scholarly works, or references. It's hard enough to find something that appeals to both my husband and me and that also holds up to being spread out over weeks and months. But ditching three in a row is really unusual for us. You'd be surprised at some of the things we've got through that way, in an hour and a half per week.

Annihilation (2014), by Jeff VanderMeer (4 stars)

Six-word review: Psychological thriller explores strange new territory.

Extended review:

As soon as I finished this novel, I went online and ordered the other two books in the trilogy.

It's so short--just 195 pages--that I suspect the publisher did a "Hobbit" movie thing and spread over three titles what could easily have been published under a single cover. How many "trilogies" are really trilogies these days and not just one novel published in three parts?

But that's just a quibble. I was entranced by this story as by a hallucination that's almost too real to be real. My note upon completion says: "Sense of the uncanny marvelously evoked, as if H.P. Lovecraft entered the House of Leaves and found C.G. Jung in a room lined with Yellow Wallpaper."

Like The House of Leaves, this story takes us deep into a subterranean realm where the mysterious unconscious becomes concrete, if not rational. Unlike The House of Leaves, it is constructed of grammatically complete, comfortingly linear sentences, without typographic or compositional special effects. The author's style is lucid while paradoxically the vision is fugitive like that of a dream.

The narrative is a first-person journal by a member of an exploratory team sent into an isolated region known as Area X, where something strange and unknown has occurred to previous expeditions as well as to the original inhabitants. As her investigation proceeds, she begins to experience terrifying and irresistible effects herself.

There were a few oddities about this tale that I couldn't be sure were intentional, such as a reference to ocean tides that implicitly ebbed and flowed at the same time every day; is there anyplace on earth where that is the case? But I'll reserve judgment on such things until I see whether they develop in the subsequent installments, and if so, how.

Because it's not what I would call literary fiction (or any other genre, quite) and it's very short, I might have given it just 3½ stars; but I awarded an extra half for ingenuity, inventiveness, and atmospheric weirdness.

>44 Meredy: That's a great review of Annihilation; I especially appreciate the contrast you make between the flighty unreliable vision and the solid, conventional prose.

>44 Meredy: Thank you for this review. These books just moved up on my TBR pile!

44> "Atmospheric weirdness" is a great description of Annihilation. I loved the sense of creeping horror.

Have you heard that it's being turned into a movie?

>47 pwaites: No, but I would expect that to spoil it by turning it into something completely different. The novel is so subjective and introspective, and movies are about action. This would inevitably rely heavily on CGI, too, and to me that would have the opposite effect to something seen with hypersensitive perception and deeply internalized. Animated graphics are ok in something like Avatar, but this story has psychological depths that--in my opinion--work best within the walls (and tunnels) of the reader's own mind.

>44 Meredy: VanderMeer's Southern Reach books are definitely on my get to at some point list and your review of the first book does nothing to dissuade me from that.

>32 Meredy: I have the complete Richard Hanney as one volume, and found them somewhat slow and dated but the commentary on what was the normal life of people at that time makes them still interesting.

>37 Meredy: I have Amberwell on my Kindle. I think @SylviaC had hit me initially with that one, but I'm sure she appreciates your stealthy follow-up with a second book bullet.

>50 reading_fox: & >32 Meredy:

I have an omnibus edition containing the first four Richard Hanney stories. The edition was first printed in 1930, six years before The Island of Sheep was published. However, the copy I have is from the fifteenth impression that was printed in 1963. On the plus side, my copy still has its dust cover. The original price is marked as thirty shillings; 30/- for those interested in how thirty shillings would have been marked up on the book.



(No, I can't get the image the correct way up.)

I also like these stories because of the glimpse into the impression the well-to-do had of life at the time.

>Sorry to hear you abandoned Willful Blindness. It obviously struck a chord with me that it missed with you. If you have thoughts on why you abandoned it I would be interested to hear them.

48> Having read the entire trilogy, I really don't know how it'd work in a movie format. You're probably right about it being turned into something entirely different.

>53 pgmcc: It did strike a chord, but by the halfway point I was starting to get impatient, saying, "I get it." It seemed to become just too repetitive. Maybe I'll return to it after a bit; but as a read-aloud selection it did become a slog. We've read some pretty heavy stuff that way, but this just didn't hold up to our Wednesday-night treatment.

We lasted longer on that one, though, than we did on the Dean Koontz, whom we used to love, and the small and initially appealing McGuire title. I'm reminded of a line in The Celestine Prophecy that made me laugh so hard that I almost injured myself: "After a long period of waiting during which I had no concept of time, I suddenly became aware that nothing had happened!" (p. 96). It was the exclamation point that killed me. I was literally howling with laughter, holding my sides and half crying, and couldn't stop until I ran out of breath.

If I want to read a protracted exposition while waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen, give me a rich brew of expository prose like George Eliot's and not a core dump of character biographies from some writing workshop. Koontz's reads as so amateurish and so weakly edited that I suspected it was a bottom-drawer ms. dredged up to meet a publisher's demands and taken pretty much as is.

Right now, improbable as I'd have thought it, we're reading Annihilation, which I've just finished on my own. Hearing it is a different experience from silent reading, and it's new to my husband. Twice now he's read aloud to me from lengthy tomes that he'd just finished--two Stephen Kings, in fact--and so I'm returning the favor, though on a smaller scale.

>55 Meredy:

I can understand where you are coming from in relation to Wilful Blindness. It did give many examples.

I think I'm about to abandon The Little Stranger, which after 58 pages has failed to grab me at all, even though I'd have predicted that it would be just my sort of thing. Instead I've continued with Time and Again, which I happened to turn to on my Kindle while awaiting test results in a doctor's office last week. A time-travel theme always catches my attention.

If I can put a book down after a couple of bedtime readings and not miss it or wonder what's going to happen next, I'm pretty likely to leave it and move on. In contrast, if I bring a bedtime book out to the living room and read it during the day, it's got my attention. That's what I'm doing with the Finney novel.

>44 Meredy: you nicked me with Annihilation.

Last night I finished Time and Again (which I liked a lot) before my reading hour was up, so I went on with The Little Stranger, and it still doesn't grab me.

"Grab" isn't even the right word. I don't expect a book to hook me the way a 30-second TV commercial is designed to do, and I relish the slow but engaging start characteristic of many older novels. In fact, I prefer some orientation over the modern writer's-workshop style of leaping straight into action. If a book opens with quotation marks--if the first thing that happens is dialogue--I'm apt to put it right down. I know the author is going to indulge himself in what's-going-on-here games, and I don't like them.

But as for The Little Stranger, there's too little purpose so far: no sense of why the author is telling this story. I just can't seem to work up any interest in the ambivalent doctor or the crumbling estate and its quartet of out-of-focus occupants. So I'm letting that one go.

Meanwhile, the second and third "Southern Reach" novels (sequels to Annihilation) have just come in, challenging my self-restraint. Do I jump into them or save them to share with my husband as read-alouds when we finish the first one? I'll try, for now, to put them aside.

Time and Again (1970), by Jack Finney (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Imagination takes flight across the decades.

Extended review:

Recruited as a subject for an extremely secret government project, commercial artist Simon Morley bridges the interval from the New York City of 1970 to the same city as it was in 1882. How his life and those of others change as a result is the plot of the novel, which blends mystery and romance with the ever-intriguing theme of time travel. There's a nice twist at the end.

The author isn't shy about revealing his fascination with the everyday sights and events of New York in the late nineteenth century; in fact, at times it seems as if his whole purpose were to show off the extent of his research. He has an ability to bring the period and place to life, as if he himself had seen it first hand, making us feel as though we were seeing it too. Finney's use of contemporary illustrative art, photographs, and newspaper stories lends authenticity to his very evocative rendition of time and place. If at times it does seem to grow long, I think perhaps that's only a matter of my own twenty-first-century impatience, cultivated by an environment in which a five-second computer response time is referred to as "forever."

One of the most interesting aspects of this story, however, is almost certainly outside the author's design: namely, his depiction of a major U.S. city in the late middle of the twentieth century. In 1970, Richard Nixon was president; the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy assassination were events in recent memory; the Civil Rights movement was in progress, although (to judge from the author's use of language: young women are all "girls") women's liberation had a long way to go in raising public consciousness; pollution was already a major issue, but computers were still a novelty, and small electronic devices were science fiction. In contrasting 1882 with 1970, Finney shows us a period 46 years ago that seems calmer and safer than 2016, even though in so many ways it already felt dark and dangerous at the time.

This is not a heavy or especially serious book, although it has its moments (and there are a few little questions of logic and continuity). It's mostly just an entertaining fantasy, with an extra dose of verisimilitude to make us feel as if we'd been there. And that we might want to go again.

>44 Meredy: I will be curious to see what you think of the rest of the Southern Reach books. I think Annihilation was the best of the three; I found the second book to be irritating, and the third just...fizzled.

And yes, they may try to make a movie, but I'm not sure I can see it will bear much relation to the words on the pages.

>61 Marissa_Doyle: Aww...fizzled? Damn. Well, thanks for the warning. I appreciate it very much.

So what do you as an author think of my speculation that it was conceived as one book but published as three?--all within the same year, I note. Was that better for reviews? a tricky way of fulfilling a two-book contract? a safer investment for the publisher? Just curious about your opinion or guess.

>62 Meredy: I'm not sure about that. It's a plausible speculation--I could see someone having made the decision to publish it in three parts to heighten tension and anticipation, which are after all elements of the story--the wondering what has happened, what will happen. So cutting it up almost makes the delay between releases part of the story--publishing as performance art, in a way.

But it also annoyed me--it also felt kind of pretentious and precious to release it in three short parts. Can you tell I'm more than a little conflicted about these books?

>63 Marissa_Doyle: Sure can, and that's why I asked you. Thanks. It feels a little like cheating somehow, doesn't it?--like pulling the scant remaining merchandise out to the edges of the shelves in a faltering operation to conceal how thinly it's stocked.

I intend to read on, but I'll bear your comments in mind and share my take when I've finished.

Maggie Smith: A Biography (2015), by Michael Coveney (4 stars)

Six-word review: Complex star shaped by fraught history.

Extended review:

If any one thing comes through clearly in this 2015 biography of one of the most accomplished, admired, and enduring of contemporary British actors, it's that being Maggie Smith is difficult and complicated.

From her early stage days in Oxford in the 1950s to her recently concluded role as the dowager countess Lady Grantham in Downton Abbey, Dame Maggie has practiced the fine art of turning personal experience into drama or comedy or, more often, a riveting blend of both. The book tracks the development of her career from her first appearance at the age of 17 in a leading Shakespeare role to an anchoring role in the wildly popular television series, still running at the time of publication. The actress comes across as perfectionistic, tormented, driven, and brilliant.

I wish it had delved more into her longtime friendship with the perennially popular Judi Dench, who seems in so many ways to be an opposite personality: easygoing, light-hearted, and a little bit scattered, prone to giggling ("corpsing") in performance, and always radiating an endearing warmth, even, somehow, when playing Lady Macbeth. One thing I love about them, both of them, is that neither has apparently feared to age in public; another is that their well-seasoned talent and skill seem never to falter or fade.

The book is pretty hardcore, aimed at followers of theatre, especially British. Unlike some stars' bios (of which I've read maybe half a dozen all told), it's not pitched at an audience that reads celebrity profiles in popular magazines. Rather, it assumes more than a little knowledge of the personalities, the professional alliances and rivalries, and the milieu of theatre and film of the past six decades. Some of this I knew, and more I had to guess at; but the substance came across all the same.

Descriptions of Dame Maggie in her various roles are often stunningly evocative, quoted from many sources and particularly from reviews; she seems to inspire in others a rendition in language that strives to be as apt as what she achieves in performance. Here's one quote that's especially vivid. Unfortunately my notes don't credit a source, though of course the book does: "Maggie's Susan [in Bed Among the Lentils] was suspended between seething resentment and a sort of bursting sexual anger. She glared and vibrated like a terribly cross stick insect." (page 216)

I read this biography not so much to learn what makes Maggie tick--I don't think that's for any of us to know--but simply to glimpse the process by which she came to the top of her profession and remains there still, so many years later.

Given the author's apparent thoroughness and care as a researcher, compiler, and presenter of historical data, I find two errors toward the end very surprising. Both pertain to Downton Abbey, a topic on which I warrant there are far more qualified amateur fact-checkers than there are when it comes to, say, revues of the 1950s or stage dramas of the 1970s. One is a reference to the Earl of Carnavon, who owns Highclere, the property where most of the series was filmed. The name is actually Carnarvon. It's not a typo. One instance is a typo; twice on one page (290), it's a misspelling.

The second is a mention of Lady Sybil as the Earl of Grantham's second daughter (page 291) and Lady Edith as the third (page 292). I don't honestly see how anyone who watched the series could make that mistake. Sybil is the third and youngest, and Edith ("poor Edith") the perennially hapless middle child.

>65 Meredy: That sounds like a beautiful biography. Both Maggie Smith and Judy Dench are firm favourites of mine.

>64 Meredy: Yes, exactly! I felt in a lot of ways that the emperor had no clothes, as far as this series went. Will be interested to see what you think about parts two and three.

Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers: The History You Weren't Taught in School (2015), by Dominic Selwood (3½ stars)

(a dreadfully late Early Reviewer review)

Six-word review: Divesting history of long-established misrepresentations.

Extended review:

This book promised to show me things I wasn't taught in school. It surely did that: not only was I not taught the accurate version of most of these pieces of history, I wasn't even taught the incorrect one.

But the book also showed me something that I doubt that the author intended at all.

I'm not a British subject by citizenship, nor by adoption or Anglophile pose. I'm an American, born and raised in New England. But my history didn't begin with Jamestown in 1607 or the Mayflower in 1620, much less in 1775 with the firing of muskets on Lexington Green. Before the arrival of the first North American colonists, mine is as much the history of English-speaking and European peoples as any current resident of London or Paris or Amsterdam.

The history of the U.S. is not the history of the American people, or at least not much of it. Our country is young, but our antecedents necessarily predate the colonies. Except for Native Americans of unmixed blood, our ancestry is predominantly European. And for Americans whose ethnicity is of European origin, European history is as much ours as Americans of, say, Chinese or Egyptian ethnicity can claim the history of their ancestors on other continents.

Self-evident, perhaps, but I have to admit that I never quite considered it in this light before.

So in reading Spies, Sadists and Sorcerers: The History You Weren't Taught in School, I finally came to realize that the myths and truths of Britain's past aren't their story--some other "they." They're our story. Mine too. And that understanding gave a special edge to my experience of this book.

In fact, however, the book isn't addressed to an American audience. I wasn't taught much of this in school, either as fact or as fiction here debunked. Sure, we were granted passing acquaintance with major players on the European stage, but I encountered far more of their names in studying the arts and sciences than in history classes, apart from the kings and statesmen who figured prominently during our colonial period and subsequent revolution.

I'm speaking here of required history classes taken throughout my school years: not special topics chosen from a catalogue of college-level course offerings but the things that all students were expected to learn.

I've also absorbed a great deal of English history through my reading, both fiction and nonfiction, and through television dramas, which may evoke period flavor and custom even while taking major liberties with the players.

So I knew some of the less popular and palatable narratives here exposed, such as a bit of the complex and demythologized history of Richard I, but others were surprising. For instance, the lore and romance surrounding Magna Carta (the author doesn't say "the Magna Carta") are one casualty; having the story demystifed is nearly as disappointing as it was when I learned that Christopher Columbus was not a good guy. I'm always in favor of knowing the truth and defeating self-delusion, but I also think that being stripped of all our mythology impoverishes us and even, here with a nod to Joseph Campbell, impairs our ability to live wisely and well. I came away wanting to un-know some things, or at least to arrive at a truce that permits us to sustain a double narrative, as we may do with, say, Christmas and Robin Hood. We need our heroes and our cultural icons, after all.

I must note that the book, which is a collection of previously published essays on specific topics, doesn't confine itself to the history of Britain; there are several chapters pertaining to the ancient world and to other European countries. But the principal focus is British and the target audience is undoubtedly British.

The book is engagingly written, full of the author's insights and cross-connections among facts, relating observations that illuminate the past to perceptions current in today's understanding. For example, "Although the Vikings are at times increasingly presented as slightly comical figures, no one was laughing in late 700s England" (page 28). I took in another view of Henry VIII, of the Elgin Marbles, of witchcraft. Despite raising an eyebrow a time or two--in the early 1600s, there was no USA (page 63)--I enjoyed the book and learned a great deal more from it than a compilation of unpopular facts.

My thanks to the publisher, Cruz Publishing, of the U.K., for the first hard copy to be shipped to North America, and my apologies for gross tardiness in posting my review.

>68 Meredy: Great review. I sense a bullet whizzing towards the back of my head.

ETA: "Thumbs-up" applied.

>69 pgmcc:

Reading the reviews in this thread can be dangerous!

>70 suitable1: Fatal, even!

And guess what? It just happens to be on sale for Kindle, at least in Canada.

Thanks, guys. I read that ER book promptly in early March and then lagged in completing my review, which lay half written for six months. I had to persuade myself that my response to it was legitimate even though I was not a member of the presumed target audience; it's no reflection on the author or the work if I didn't read it as a product of the British educational system. It's my responsibility as an American reader to adapt my expectations accordingly, but I couldn't necessarily furnish the full context based on a better grasp of the history.

I must add that when I read books that shed the same sort of light on aspects of American history--for example, a book about Roger Williams that I read in June and that is also mired in review limbo--I'm nearly as free of prior notions. In fact, I probably know more British than American history. When I was in school, I didn't see much point in history classes beyond their relation to literature and art and their accepted explanation of our holidays. The emphasis on social history came along later; then it was mainly names, dates, and wars. Oh, yes, and discoveries and inventions. Man, I'll bet that landscape has changed in the past half century.

>65 Meredy: book bullet hit me! I love Maggie Smith! I marked it in my library TBR list.

>73 Meredy: said, "... for example, a book about Roger Williams that I read in June..."

Would that be the John M. Barry book? If yes, that was a highlight read for me earlier this year. Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty is a book that also really enhanced my enjoyment of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, as it gave me a wealth of background going into that piece of alternate history/historical fiction, which was set in an overlapping time period with Williams' life, (although Williams is not mentioned).

A question for Meredy and/or anyone else hit by the book bullet contained up there in #68. I note (from a quick visit over to Amazon) that Dominic Selwood has written a few other things, including a short story he refers to as being an homage to M.R. James. Has anyone read any of his shorter works? The one Meredy reviewed is listed as being in excess of 700 pages and I just haven't the strength at the moment for something of that length. That said, if he is good, I might venture something easy.

And I agree with you, Meredy, that stripping ourselves of mythology can have unfortunate repercussions at times.

>75 ScoLgo: Yes, indeed, that's the one. I took 9 pages of notes and gave it 4½ stars. What a different view of things that gave me. Just about all I had remembered from schooldays was that Williams had had a falling out with the Massachusetts Puritans and fled in a blizzard to go found Providence, Rhode Island. The depth and complexity of his story--and all the transatlantic traffic it entailed--held me fascinated, and I wished I'd known much more much sooner.

>76 jillmwo: I haven't, but I may look for them. This book isn't any 700 pages, though. The bound copy I received is just 265 pages plus backmatter, and it wasn't a heavy slog by any means. The paperback shown on Amazon says 286 pages. Maybe that includes an index; one thing I miss in most ER copies is that the index isn't there yet.

Amazing: five thumbs are enough to put that last one in the "hot reviews" list. That's cool. Usually I get one or none, so I'm happy with that.

>77 Meredy: Good to know. Maybe I'll try the one that purports to be an homage to M.R. James and report back.

Oh! I lurve the 6-word reviews. They are now my favorite kind of review.

FWIW, I spent much of the first half of The Little Stranger asking myself, What is going on and do I care? Only to discover that I had been slowly drawn in and by the end I was left with an unusual sensation of having been subtly infiltrated. I'm still not sure what she did there.

>65 Meredy: You got me on this one. I picked it up at the library today.

>80 citygirl: Thanks. Your comments about The Little Stranger pique my curiosity, but maybe not quite enough to make me wade on. Perhaps I'll come back to it another time, but it doesn't seem to be passing the missing-it-and-wondering test.

>81 Jim53: Cool.

I'm kind of in a state of overwhelm as I think about trying to review the last big book I read, Embracing Defeat. Maybe avoiding that one will spur me on to catch up with some others, such as Stiletto, just finished.

>68 Meredy: Just wanted to follow up on your review of Selwood's longer book with a quick note on the ghost story I'd mentioned to you in #76. It is marketed as being an homage to M.R. James and I wanted to note that, as such, it largely succeeded. Selwood's prose is not as dense nor his sentence structure quite as convoluted as that of James. But the short story, The Velvot, did capture some of the same atmosphere and used many of the same tropes (the arcane volume of forbidden knowledge, the fearful thing in the corner that isn't *quite* visible when the flame is struck to a candle, etc.) I wasn't actively made uneasy but there was an enjoyable delivery of the Gothic. Hold this one for reading, once they've turned the clocks back and you're itching for a nice dark tale of phantoms...

Selwood, as Meredy points out, is capable of delivering an engaging story.

A Monster Calls (2011), by Patrick Ness

Six-word review: Not reading any more YA novels.

>84 Meredy: Succinctly put.

84> That's usually my sentiment for YA dystopia... and then I'll somehow end up reading more.

I've just updated my totals at the top of this thread. I thought it had been a slow quarter because I hadn't gone through very many titles. And I was too sick for a week in September to pick up any book at all. But I see now that the 14 books I finished average more than 400 pages in length and that 5 of them are over 500. That would convert to an awful lot of YA novels and children's books if those were my thing.

I like to live with a good book for a long time, and 800 pages is too short if I really love it.

The interesting thing about the children's books that I remember best--most of them pretty short, but not all--is that they expanded into entire realms that my mind could live in. I don't just mean fairy tales and fantasies like Pinocchio but even reality-based stories such as the Anne of Green Gables series. The best authors evoked an imaginative experience that, once lodged in memory, partook of many characteristics of real life. It stimulated the same sorts of sensory records as actual experience does (or so I surmise; neuroscientists probably have studies that explore this idea). Maybe that's why some books can shape and influence us as much as the events of our own lives.

>87 Meredy: When I look back on many of the books I read as a child, it isn't so much the stories that I remember, as the worlds they took place in. I can still "see" Avonlea, Oz, or Narnia in my mind, and feel like I'm moving around in that place.

>87 Meredy: & >88 SylviaC: Mom and I were just talking about this yesterday. We love books full of descriptions of place if the author writes well. They don't seem tedious at all, but like a place you can "move into."

I've just finished Annihilation for the second time, this time as a read-aloud with my husband. This is a custom we've followed for 18 years now, an hour and a half every Wednesday night. We have covered some territory in that time, everything from Jean Auel to Daniel Dennett, Harry Potter to Karen Armstrong, at the rate of about 30 pages per week. But this is the first time we've turned around and read together something that I had recently completed on my own.

I don't have much to add to my review (at #44. above), but it was a different experience, hearing the book read aloud instead of taking it in silently. I heard different emphasis, and some of the descriptions seemed more vivid. Other parts were harder to retain, especially for the reader (my husband). Afterward we had a very interesting discussion of what we liked and didn't, what worked and didn't, and what the author was really doing. My husband said "trippy" several times.

We're going to give the sequel a try, bearing in mind Marissa's warning (#61) that books 2 and 3 are a letdown.

I WILL finish and post a review of something today: probably The Murderer's Daughter or Days Between Stations or An Instance of the Fingerpost or Stiletto. I'll be relying heavily on my notes because my memory is not quite as reliable as it used to be. It's also a test of a book, though, to see what remains in memory after it's been overlaid by several other works.

>91 Meredy: I'm always interested in whether I can remember a protagonist's name or salient characteristic after a while; it seems like a pretty good indicator that I was engaged. Although as you mentioned I'm not sure I remember as much of anything as I used to.

Stiletto (2016), by Daniel O'Malley (3½ stars)

Six-word review: Supernatural adversaries struggle to make peace.

Extended review:

As I recall Stiletto a perilous six weeks after finishing it, it's mostly not a story.

It's mostly a showcase of O'Malley's seemingly limitless capacity for seemingly offhand invention--bizarre and formidable special powers just mentioned in passing: for example, one person can summon and command wasps, and another disrupts mathematics (page 489), and one little boy has the humble ability to increase the nutritional value of root vegetables (page 135).

It's also a catalogue of supernatural effects--such as a house whose second floor, if you go there, can ruin your credit rating; or the invasion of someone's dreams, or seeing the entire history of an object, or being able to remote-control someone else's actions. There's a dress that purrs.

One has the impression that the author must tote around a capacious notebook and be constantly scribbling additions to lists. I'll bet it's hard to carry on an ordinary conversation with him.

More: The author delves into medical details as vividly as Cutting for Stone. He lavishes attention on wardrobes and attire. He goes to some lengths to depict the level of discomfort that some people experience with social events.

These may be effective in themselves, but there does not appear to be much of a purpose to all this in terms of either character or plot. Instead it feels a lot like authorial self-indulgence.

Many character interactions are simply disappointing. Myfanwy, whom we followed here from The Rook, stays mostly in the background. The interesting Shantay makes only a cameo appearance. There's plenty about Felicity and Odette, but we don't really see a transforming moment and, such as it is, it not experienced reciprocally--more as a fait accompli.

That author's habit of varying interchangeable names (for example, first and last names, or names and titles) is sometimes confusing. We may not realize at once that he's talking about the same character, especially when it's been a while since the character's last appearance; for instance, I kept forgetting who Marcel was--he was never really distinct to me.

The reader's knowledge of the story's background is taken for granted. We are not given many reminders to help us recall such characters and entities as Gestalt and Bishop Aldrich. I read The Rook in June of 2013, and three years later I don't remember anything about some people being traitors and moles, but that was important in this story.

In fact, I don't remember much plot at all.

What I mostly remember about The Rook is being taken someplace that was active, surprising, and fraught with danger. In contrast, what I mostly remember about Stiletto is special effects. And clumsy infodumps.

As for making peace with historical enemies, I guess that's in there somewhere.

I probably won't be in such a rush to get hold of a third installment, if there is one. Showmanship is great, but there has to be some substance too, or what is there to hold us? Nonetheless, this book ends with an obvious hook for a sequel while leaving no clue where a suitable adversary might come from. I hope it doesn't devolve into an action comic with superheroes saving the world from one megalomaniac villain after another while engaging in petty rivalries among themselves.

As before, there are some good lines, some arresting images, and some grammatical lapses and misuses of words that someone ought to have looked up. One glaring fault with The Rook that does not obtrude quite so much here is the amateurish use and overuse of dialogue tags. On one page of Stiletto (368), people say things thoughtfully, tartly, sniffily, hesitantly, and flatly. Oddly, there appeared to be some pretty clean editing up to page 496, and then suddenly the editing seemed to go light, as if a looming deadline had reduced attention to such constructions as "A call of 'Come!' came..." and "came the whispered reply."

In the end, I didn't dislike the book; I just felt let down by it. Perhaps that's just the price of anticipation.

Meredy, that very neatly summed up my reaction to Stiletto as well...though for me the sheer wild creativity somewhat made up for the lack of a real story. I don't think the depiction of the growing friendship between Felicity and Odette was successful--or at least, it didn't feel organic. I'll definitely read the third book if/when it appears, and hope for more plot next time around. And yes, I was very disappointed not to have seen more of Shantay--her interactions with Myfanwy were priceless in The Rook.

I wonder if part of the difficulty lay in the change of story structure between the two books: in The Rook, info dumps were an integral part of the structure and plot, and I can see that having them to lean on in one book, then losing them in the next, might have been traumatic, authorially speaking.

The clumsy info dumps definitely did not do Stiletto any favors. Hopefully the author gets that worked out for book 3.

The Murderer's Daughter: A Novel (2015), by Jonathan Kellerman (3 stars)

Six-word review: The Psychologist's Protege: An Annoying Spinoff.

Extended review:

I think Jonathan Kellerman has been reading too many Tana French novels. I've enjoyed his Alex Delaware novels in the past; they pretty reliably delivered what they promised. Now, with Alex's former student Grace Blades, he seems to think that leaving us without a clear plot resolution and without answers to some major questions is fair play. Perhaps he imagines that it serves some higher dramatic or literary purpose. Whereas, as far as I'm concerned, all I want from his novel is for it to serve an entertainment purpose. So, being nobody important, just a prospective reader and erstwhile customer, what I say is "Fooey."

I should have stuck by my resolve not to read any more novels with titles of the irritating form "The X's Y."

I liked the premise and was willing to forgive the contrivance necessary to bring some disturbing personal history into a psychologist's consulting room. I was even fairly good at overlooking--well, let's say tolerating--the author's odd stylistic habit of implying impossible concurrencies by the use of present participles:

"Relatching the French doors, she got into bed, crawled under the covers..." (p. 40)
"Working out in the hotel gym, she showered in her room..." (p. 134)

Those "-ing" verbal adjectives denote simultaneous actions (e.g., "Smiling coolly, she waited her turn to speak": those things are happening at the same time). You can't be in the hotel gym while you're also in your room showering. It's a false economy on the author's part. It doesn't speed the narrative. Rather, it causes an attentive reader to stumble. Every time he does it, it yanks me out of the story and into editor mode.

Not that I wasn't repeatedly catapulted into editor mode anyway, or at least into vexed-reader mode. Why does he spend so very much time detailing his focal character's education and early professional life? It doesn't figure in the story. If he wants to examine aspects of the formation of a professional psychologist out of a wounded child, fine, but that would be a different novel. In the present context Grace's academic career is given disproportionate attention. I don't see that it contributes anything but word count; and I find myself using the term "self-indulgent" again.

We are given very close personal details of Grace's private life, whether we want them or not, and how she conducts her therapy sessions and even arranges her home decor; and yet when it comes to big questions in the plot, such as what really happens in the end--where is that? And why don't we get a come-uppance scene with the bad guy? And why isn't the dramatic discovery of the surviving sibling dramatic at all?

Another "why" question: why does Kellerman pretend to know things he doesn't know? On page 275 he speaks of using a Boston phone number for a location in Cambridge. Nonsense. You use a Cambridge phone number for a location in Cambridge. And it's B.U., not Boston U. (page 281). And it's Legal Sea Foods, not Legal Seafood (page 292). And if he thinks jaywalking students create a "unique ethos" (jaywalking? an ethos??) in Berkeley (page 273), he can't be recalling pedestrian traffic in Harvard Square very clearly. Where, he says, there is a "libertine environment" (page 203). Isn't "libertine" ("free of moral, especially sexual, restraint; dissolute; licentious") pretty strong language to use as a generalization about Harvard? And while we're at it, with respect to local geography, when he says "Somerset" (page 333), doesn't he mean "Somerville"? It seems so to me.

Once I started getting annoyed, everything annoyed me. Young prodigy Grace doesn't want to be talked down to and resents having someone think she doesn't know what "adjudicate" means; but in her voice we see such babyish language as "The back wall of the big room was a bunch of glass doors..." (page 196). If she thinks doors are arranged in bunches, vocabulary is not where her brilliance is going to shine.

It also bugs me when an author isn't paying attention to his own stuff. When a character is Elaine on one page (75) and Eileen on another (94), the editor isn't even watching his back.

Twice he speaks of "filth and lucre" when the expression is "filthy lucre." Twice he refers to people as "damaged goods," as if "goods" were a fit label for anyone. Twice he simulates legalese using phrasing that no lawyer or indeed any person with a logical command of English would use. And once a character says "Here, here" (page 263); although since the expression was spoken, the character probably knew enough to say "Hear, hear" and it was just Kellerman who didn't know how to write it.

But all this pales beside the inconclusive, diffuse, and unsatisfying ending. A murder tale that invokes conventions of the mystery genre does not end with "guess what happens next." So I say again, "Fooey." For all the potential interest of the characters, the situations, the history, the revelations, and the unfolding of unusual developments, it didn't add up to anything.

Oh my. It sounds almost as if the manuscript fell into the clutches of a junior and alarmingly inept copy editor who decided to do some "improvements" along the way. Have there been similar issues with earlier books?

>94 Marissa_Doyle: Interesting thought about the structure. Is that also why so many movie sequels don't work?--original problem is solved, and after that the plots seem too contrived?

I've thought about that "sheer wild creativity" you cited, certainly part of the appeal. But by the time I'd coursed through hundreds of pages of it, I started to think it was a little like that game I played and you probably did too as a kid: you read aloud a story with lots of blanks in it where nouns belong, and others take turns picking slips of paper randomly out of a box to fill in the blanks. The result is some hilarious adjective-noun and noun-verb combinations that can make kids laugh themselves silly. Back then, I liked to make up the stories and be the one to read them, and the other neighborhood kids loved being entertained.

After a while, O'Malley's inventions began to sound like a "take one from column A and one from column B" approach to novelty, almost as absurdly arbitrary as the Yellow Pages game: reading the guide words on the pages as if they were a single phrase, such as "Burglar-Bus" or "Garbage-Gardeners" or "Martial-Massage" or "Religious-Rental." (Can't do that with Google search.) Not to take anything away from his imagination and originality, but over time the formula did seem to become more prominent than the values substituted for the variables.

Days Between Stations (1985), by Steve Erickson (4½ stars)

Six-word review: Reflecting the light, windows become mirrors.

Extended review:

When I face writing a review of a book that mystified me, it's less like a challenge and more like a dare. How much of an idiot am I going to look like this time? 40 percent? 80 percent? I guess I'll have to take the chance, consoling myself with the facts that so far my admissions of bewilderment haven't been fatal and that I haven't even always been the only one.

But first I'm going to revisit what happens when you take a paper Möbius strip and cut it right down the center line. Do you get one long Möbius strip? Two strips linked together like a chain? No, you get a double-length strip with two twists in it.

How is that relevant? It isn't.

Recalling Days Between Stations just a few days after finishing it is like recalling a dream, or a hallucination, or a dream of a hallucination. In my notes I called it enigmatic and mesmerizing. It's not that the sentences aren't perfectly clear, well formed, linear, and grammatical or the descriptions aren't vivid and fine. But the images seem to relate to one another like successive frescoes painted on a plaster wall, the shadows of one showing through another so that you aren't sure which is the subject and which is the ghost.

Parts of it, indeed, seem to take place in the halting, haunting imagery of a silent movie of the 1920s. I see the characters, one in particular, rendered in sepia, with shadowed eyes and a desperate, hopeless beauty, ripe for a rescue that never comes.

There's a story, all right--at its barest, a love triangle. But the story seems no more essential to the novel--essential in its literal sense, being of the basic nature or essence of it--than the subject matter is essential to an abstract painting configured to display color, texture, dynamic range, and emotional expression.

Since finishing this novel, I've read a 200-page explication of the Heart Sutra by Red Pine. Unenlightened though I am, I'm better able to tell you what happens there in the heart of Zen than I can give you with assurance an account of the narrative of Days Between Stations. It's not just the sand, the water, the ice, the twins, the identities, the transmogrifying, the flickering silent films, the lost bicycle racers, or the lost children.

It's memory and perception. It's sensory experience and mental constructs. It's being. It's time.

Here's something that happened to me while I was reading the novel:

When I paused one night on about page 176, I forgot to move my bookmark and left it at the arbitrary future spot where I'd parked it while reading. So the next night I picked up at page 208. I didn't realize that I'd skipped 32 pages because I was no more disoriented than usual, no more puzzled over continuity and logic. Finally after about 18 pages I turned back to look for something--and realized that there was a whole chunk I hadn't read at all. So I returned to the beginning of the section I'd skipped and read forward from there. When, presently, I came back through the 18 pages I'd read ahead of sequence, including the passage about the lost bicyclists, there was of course literal déjà vu, so fitting for this of all books.

I would like to call this a fantasy, but the term has become so degraded through the popularity of genre fiction featuring wizards and dragons that it seems discourteously inept to apply it here. Comparisons are wanting, but there is a similarity of feeling to the novels of Haruki Murakami. I was also persistently reminded of Camus's The Fall, maybe especially because of the laugh. And the circling back to view the same moment from different vantage points, as if through different windows in different structures and different moving vehicles. Something like eternity, as explained by Joseph Campbell, being not foreverness but a timeless present.

I never encountered an explanation of the title, but by the end I hazarded a weak theory, having to do with Michel's journey by train from Paris: an idea of years and lives taking place between days, and the suspicion that all the stations he passes through are Wyndeaux.

>99 Meredy: Once again, while I have no particular interest in the book, I admire your review. You've conveyed a strong impression of the mood and flow of a book that appears to be difficult to describe. I still don't know what it's about, but I know what it's like.

Yesterday was my Thingaversary number 5. Hurray! I didn't even know there was a badge for that until I got one.

I'm working on my celebratory list. Here's a start:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman - a BB from our friend @SylviaC. My husband and I have done a lot of books in this category as read-alouds, from fairly heavy neuroscience to the popular quasi-fables grouped around a catchy theme by Malcolm Gladwell. We're on a long novel now, one that will take us months, and we're going to need a nonfiction palate cleanser when we finish.

• Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Speaking of Gladwell. This was a prompt from Amazon. The last Gladwell I read, in 2014, was David and Goliath, and I gave it only three stars, with a review that ended thus:

The eye-opening character of Gladwell's observations commands attention, and the explanatory potency of his theories impresses, as it is designed to do. But I can't escape the feeling that the drive to churn out best-sellers takes precedence over the treatment of the content, which is veering toward the sensationalistic at the expense of coherency.

But if I can't take it seriously, I can look at it as entertainment of a certain sort and enjoy the vignettes.

I need three fiction now to keep in balance. Still thinking about it. How long do I have before I'm in trouble with the Thingaversary cops?

I'd keep my doors locked just in case. The Thingaversary Enforcers are sneaky.

Congrats on your Thingaversary! Don't worry about the enforcers. Offer them tea and biscuits and they might be lenient.

Thinking Fast and Slow was actually recommended by @stellarexplorer in my thread. I'd hate for him to miss out on getting credit. I'm interested in reading that one, too.

Congratulations on your 5th Thingaversary! Cheese is a good distractor for the Enforcers.

Mmmmmm! Cheese! Gruyere...Compte...Gouda...Brie...Mont D'Or...Munster...Merlot

Psst, Meredy, if you pour them a glass of wine to go with the cheese, they completely forget about calculating fines....

What fines?

Happy Thingaversary!

Thank you. I'm still ducking the Enforcers, but I did leave a platter of select cheeses and baguette by the door, including some fine, savory Scottish cheddar that I paid way too much for because the sample was so delicious. I hope that will hold them at bay while I work out my moves.

*nom, nom, nom* ...may need some more merlot...wash down.... *nom*

>110 Meredy:

With bribes like that, you may never get rid of the enforcers. They are not as stern as they were in the good-ole-days.

>113 suitable1: Wait till you see what happens when the cheese runs out.

I'm so far behind in everything that I doubt I'll ever catch up. Book review triage time! I don't like to let them go at one-liners, but that may be all I can manage between now and the end of the year.

At least I was such a slow reader in November (and The Three Musketeers was so long) that I didn't add much to my in-arrears list.

Meanwhile, I added Lauren Miller's Free to Fall to my recent acquisitions on my son's recommendation. Apparently it prompted him to express some interest in Milton's Paradise Lost, which is a challenge that I've never met myself.

>115 Meredy: I have to say that Free to Fall looks very interesting, albeit a tad alarming. The tie to Milton also makes it sound good. I read Paradise Lost while working the circulation desk in college. (During a slow period.)

Free to Fall does look intriguing. And I know someone for whom it might make a good Christmas present. I read parts of Paradise Lost in university, and always meant to get back to it, but never have.

Wow, second-hand book bullets! Now I'm going to have to read it myself.

Looking at the book information here and on Amazon, I don't see any reference to Milton, so I'm not sure now that my son was actually connecting them. I'll have to ask him to clarify. I would have thought he might never have even heard of Paradise Lost. His education has been irregular and uneven and has never, to my knowledge, veered toward English literature.

The Only Woman in the Room (1997), by Beate Sirota Gordon (3 stars)

Six-word review: European woman helps define postwar Japan.

Extended review:

Beate Sirota Gordon tells her story capably enough, but it's nothing brilliant. The most striking thing about it is its brevity. I know I wouldn't be capable of telling a minor fraction of my unremarkable history in 171 pages, much less a life as vivid, varied, and consequential as hers. She has a memoirist's knack of letting representative observations and anecdotes convey a sense of events rather than narrating them in exhaustive detail.

Indisputably, the author (who died in 2012 at age 89) led a noteworthy life spanning three continents, both in the performing arts and in her pivotal role as one of the authors of the Japanese constitution drafted by General MacArthur's team in 1946. But my rating is not of her life or deeds but of her book. And I'm more impressed by the one than by the other.

Thank you, everyone who stops by to see my reading notes and post friendly comments. I value them all. And I do follow a number of writing journals, so I've been in touch in some virtual sense.

This has been a dark and difficult year, and I have fallen hopelessly behind in my reviews. I have notebook entries on all my reading for the year--rather than all those diabolical little scraps of paper I used to keep--but I don't know how I'd ever catch up with posts. This is despite the fact that I've completed fewer books than usual. One does what one can.

However, I do maintain my comprehensive list up in post >1 Meredy:. I managed to finish my current ER selection last night and gave it four stars: Hunters in the Dark.

For Christmas my husband gave me the book I wanted, Look Homeward, Angel, and it will be my first finished book of the new year. This time I thought ahead to the title I wanted to see at the top of my new list and didn't pick something incomparably stupid.

Maybe 2017 will go better, in some respects, at least. Bracing myself for the other respects. Or maybe not bracing, in a rigid way, but instead seeking flexible stillness so I can deal with the ten thousand things as they come.

We always enjoy reading your thread, and when you have the energy to spend on them, it is appreciated, but until then, be gentle with yourself and simply enjoy reading. *hug*

I hope that 2017 is a better year for you in every way. As MrsLee says, "simply enjoy reading". Something we should all do!

I have to turn to Emily Dickinson when trying to say what I hope for you, Meredy:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

Wishing that the New Year will bring a large flock of feathered things to your soul.

I am hoping 2017 brings you hope and better tidings than the year just done. I cannot think of anything better to add than the Dickinson quote that @jillmwo included in >123 jillmwo:.

You're all so very kind. Thank you. I never fail to feel the genuine lift that comes of sympathetic support.

The year that my husband was diagnosed with lung cancer (2005), his chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery were all over before Thanksgiving, and we entered the new year with optimism. This year will have a much darker beginning, with complications I'm still barely grasping. When I come here, I like to leave as much of that behind as I can, but some does seep out. Thank you, my friends, for the comfort and ease you offer. And the feathers.

If I can, I will post a few fast and scattershot reviews later on to redeem my reading year at least a little. I've chosen the right book to read over the transition, rich and complex and compelling: Look Homeward, Angel. I hope it has a good ending.

A glad new year to all. Remember, courage is for those who have fear; the fearless have no need of it.

Link to my 2017 reading journal:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/245090

Thank you for staying with me. Happy 2017.