Q2 FAVOURITE READS

Here it is almost halfway through the year. What were your favourite and not so favourite books for the second quarter?

Pnin was probably my favorite for Q2, although I read some better books.

The ones to mention, in the order read, are below. There are six.

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
Richard III by William Shakespeare
The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga
Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude jr.,

ETA Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, which I finished last night.

I read 22 books in this quarter. I'm just finishing the Godmother by Hannelore Cayre, which will either be a 4 or 4.5 star read, depending how it ends.

Otherwise:

5 stars:

Food Floor: My Woodwards Days - a personal read, as it's a short illustrated memoir by someone who worked at the same local grocery chain that I worked at as a teenager. A 5 star read for Vancouver historians, otherwise, never mind
One More Croissant For the Road, Felicity Clarke. Again, another somewhat personal favourite, as it's about a somewhat hapless long distance cycler, crossing France in search of the best of French cuisine. Ticks off a lot of boxes for me.

4.5 stars:

Tales From the Inner City, an illustrated book by Shaun Tan
A Fairy Tale, Jonas T Bengtsson
Anxious People, Frdrik Backman
A Girl Returned, Donatella Di Pietrantonio

4 stars (still very good!)

Beyond the Pale, Emily Urquhart - a memoir about parenting a child with visible disabilities, folklore, and persecution
The Likeness, Tana French
Dreaming of Italy, TA Williams (a frothy romp through Italy)

My favorites from this second quarter are:

Admiring Silence by Abdulrazak Gurnah (novel, 1996, UK/Zanzibar). Another great read from Gurnah.

Purge by Sofi Oksanen (novel, 2010, Estonia). Story about 'generational trauma', cleverly told. I had started this before but didn't finish, but began again. It has to be the right time for some books, don't you think?

The Language of Secrets by Ausma Zehanat Khan (2016, crime novel, Canada) I started this book in 2016 after loving the first book in the series, but didn't finish this and it got lost in the pile. Shame on me. After finishing this intelligent police procedural I immediately bought the rest of the series.

Migrations: A Novel by Charlotte McConaghy (2020) First time author. Praised by everyone, so what can I add? Begins quietly and eventually becomes a thriller, not sure I bought the ending; it was a bit over the top...but it was a great trip.

(I thought I'd finish more, but daughter & grandkids needed a cool place to hang out for a few days....)

I read 26 books this quarter, 9 were audiobooks

Favorites in order read..

Deacon King Kong by James McBride Full of humor, sadness, and great characters
Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben Macintyre As always, Macintyre’s non-fiction reads like a novel.
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis I loved the book and the Netflix mini series
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman Humorous, at times laugh-out-loud, mystery, with a group of seniors trying to solve cold cases. When someone they know is murdered, the book really takes off.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. Excellent historical fiction
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi I loved this one
Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel This re-read was well worth the time.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett Identity, secrets, and lies

Audiobooks..

The Distant Echo by Val McDermid, narrated by Gerard Doyle First in a series by a new author for me. I’ll be back for more.
The Lewis Man by Peter May, narrated by Peter Forbes This and the next are second and third in the Lewis trilogy. Really good.
The Chessmen by Peter May, narrated by Peter Forbes

I added Hot Milk to my post above.

I read 36 books this quarter. A few were kid's books.

My favorites for Apr-June -

Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor. suspense
Fountains of Silence, Ruta Spetys. hist fic
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi. hist fic
Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells. sic fi
Apple Tree Lean Down, Mary Pearce. family saga
Midnight Library, Matt Haig. fantasy

Two YA books get honorable mention -
Moon at Nine and No Safe Place, both by Deborah Ellis

A few of the books I enjoyed the most (yes, I know, it's a polyamorous situation) or found most remarkable in the past three months, in the order I read them:

Crystallography by Christian Bök -- something very Greeky about poetry with a scientific view of things

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- absolutely the most important piece of writing ever as long as injustice and exploitation continue to rule our lives. And I don't care how many times you burn it--its truth is unkillable.

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud by Kuniko Tsurita -- graphic stories and/or almost-poems like no other

Kommunismus: kleine Geschichte, wie es endlich anders wird by Bini Adamczak -- marvellous exposition of what capitalism and communism are and where is hope to be found. For my part, I'm revelling in the young generation of leftists all over the world who write books like these. They are the only hope.

I did some pretty good reading this quarter, I think!

Books that I rated 4.5 or 5 stars:

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner
There There by Tommy Orange
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. Nicely weaves a true crime drama into an explanation of the tactics used by various factions involved in The Troubles in Northern Ireland. There's also some history for context. Sad, maddening, and engrossing.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Read four or five Dickens novels that I had avoided for over 40 years. This was the best one. Avoid "Nicholas Nickleby."

The Last Expedition the diaries of Robert F. Scott, Antarctic expedition. Wealth of info about how to properly load a ship that is going to encounter rough weather, deal with a constantly changing ice terrain, snow blindness and frostbite, why it is a bad idea to take ponies to a polar region, how to build shelters, what penguins, seals, and whales can tell you about your environment, etc etc. The endng is very very sad.

>10 nohrt4me2: I loved Nicholas Nickleby! I've read 7 Dickens novels, and this was my 2nd favourite. I found it fun, if perhaps forgettable

Q2 seems to have been characterised for me by a few long German books that were interesting but ultimately a little disappointing: Die Verteidigung der Kindheit, Pause für Wanzka and Landgericht in particular.

Erich Loest’s novel about Leipzig in the last two centuries, Völkerschlachtdenkmal, was equally interesting and time-consuming, but not quite so disappointing. And Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag was short, quirky and fun.

That makes it a bit hard to see the things that stood out. Probably my best reads of Q2 were two re-reads, Beloved and Kästner’s memoir Als ich ein kleiner Junge war.

I also enjoyed Plankton, the third part of JJ Voskuil’s 5000-page Dutch office-epic.

In crime, I was glad to get to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán at last, with Los mares del sur. I’ll certainly read some more of those.

What stood out in non-fiction was The young Rebecca. Amazing writing, and an interesting contemporary insight into the suffrage question.

I also enjoyed Lord Bingham’s little book on The rule of law, which I should have read a decade ago… An honourable mention too to Nicholas Kenyon’s new book about the history of the repertoire of western classical music, The life of music.

>11 Nickelini: I found it interminable, but if you liked it, you go, girl, as they say.

>4 avaland: I agree with Migrations, my absolute favorite of Q2, followed bv the wonderful Everything Inside

>13 nohrt4me2: most Dickens is interminable ;-)

David Copperfield is wonderful and there was an excellent movie about Dickens The personal history of David Copperfield nice companion to reading the book, I think

I did a lot of reading for work in Q2, stuff I wouldn't have necessarily picked up myself, so not a lot of outstanding reads for me. A few really good ones, though only the first one was a knockout:

Matrix by Lauren Groff
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky
The Salt Path: A Memoir by Raynor Winn
The Red and the Green by Iris Murdoch

Of the few things I finished this Quarter:

Woman & Power by Mary Beard
A Luminous Republic by Andres Barba
Speak by Luarie Haise Anderson

Just realized I didn't answer this. My favourites in order read were:

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown

Disappointing (well maybe not disappointing but didn't live up to expectations) were:

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald - no match for Kathleen Jamie

My top five for the quarter in the order read were:

Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling
Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Network Effect by Martha Wells
The Last Human by Zack Jordan
Uprooted by Naomi Novik

>20 rhian_of_oz: I think in the right hands Qualityland would make a hilarious movie. The book was weird & wonderful.

I continue to have an excellent reading year, with no real disappointments (save, perhaps, not having as much time to read as I would like). In Q2 I read 47 books, 17 of which were rereads. Of the 30 new to me reads, these were my favorites (roughly in order of completion date):

The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart
The Reluctant Godfather by Allison Tebo
Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers
Half-Off Ragnarok by Seanan McGuire
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
The Telling Touch by Keira Dominguez
Monster Hunter Guardian by Larry Correia & Sarah Hoyt
A Place at the Table by Saadia Faruqi & Laura Shovan
Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas
The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart
Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana K. White

My top Q2 reads were:

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop (winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize)
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Society of Reluctant Dreamers by José Eduardo Agualusa
The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto

>21 Yells: Who is doing biting satire in movies these days? I'm assuming there's someone more current than Ben Elton :-).

Is he still around? Loved This other eden tho the last time I read it, realized that he really is using a very big hammer to get his point across, which he didn't need to do, and of course Black Adder. Would love to know the answer to your question.

>25 cindydavid4: Ben Elton is indeed still around, I saw him perform a couple of months ago. I thoroughly enjoyed his show - he definitely knows his audience.

>24 rhian_of_oz: Ha! Good question. The main character reminded me of Bernard from the British show Black Books - if that director is still around, we might be talking.

>23 kidzdoc: i almost picked up At Night All Blood is Black last night on audio…but it was too short. Couldn’t justify spending the credit. 🙂 I’ll look out for a paper copy.

>28 dchaikin: I purchased the Kindle edition of All Blood Is Black after it was chosen for the International Booker Prize longlist, as it was considerably cheaper in that format than the hardback copy.

My faves for the quarter:

• A desolation called peace by Arkady Martine' the 2nd novel set in the Texicalaanli universe.


• When all is said by Anne Griffin. Loved the written and the spoken voice on this audiobook. An elderly Irish man celebrates the people in his life in a series of solitary toasts.


• How to survive a plague: The inside story of how citizens and science tamed AIDS by David France.

Honorable mentions to
All the murmuring bones by new-to-me fantasy author A. G. Slatter. A variation on a selkie story

The color of law: a forgotten history of how our government segregated America by Richard Rothstein: A flawed but interesting book about housing segregation between the Civil War through the twentieth century in the US (I haven't finished it yet.)

late to this,

After Sharon Kay Penman passed I reread her work in chronolocial order This quarter I finished

the devils brood 4*

Lionheart4*

The Flying Classroompre war german school 4*

Jack next book in her Gilead series, loved the writing, plot rather unbelievable 3*

medusa uploaded rocket from earth tries to find a place to land, rather fun 4*

Travels with Herodutus History of Persia, Greece and the Congo. 5*

The rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell Had interesting info but kept trying to defend crumb from his critics. disappointing3*

The Childrens Train Children sent to north italy to escape poverty in the south. 4*

Song of Achilles Loved it when I first read it, this was for a book group and realize I didn't like it some much

I've had quite a few 'OK' books this quarter. Is the the books or is it me? Could be me - busy / stressful / distracted quarter for me with work.

I had two standout books - The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. My next favourite was Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

>32 AlisonY: Yes, distracted reading! I did enjoy reading two by Vera Caspary, and Patricia Highsmith never fails to interest. Downloaded The Blunderer this morning.

I read more books in the second quarter, but again only one book rated higher than four stars (5).

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