QUESTIONS FOR THE AVID READER - 2022, PART 6

A new thread....



QUESTION 27: LIST: BOOK CHARACTERS YOU HAVE KNOWN (from books YOU have read*)

Please name a character you have met in a book you read, who fits the category listed. Also, tell us the book it is from. I expect you all will approach this in your clever ways… aim for getting at least 20. It might be easier to pick a book up from a pile or shelf, think of the character/s, and place the character in an appropriate category than to try to go down the categories and run your read books through your head....

*You may, however, do a nonfiction list around real living/dead people you have read books about, BUT it can be done as a separate list (don’t mix fiction and nonfiction, thx).

1. Unforgettable:
2. Very nasty or dastardly:
3. Terribly young:
4. Courageous:
5. Was/is Too Curious:
6. A favorite Male:
7. A favorite Female:
8. Sleuth / Investigator:
9. Honorable or noble:
10. Adventurous:
11. Political or Civic-minded:
12. Romantic in some way:
13. Royal:
14. Not human:
15. Adolescent:
16. Senior or elderly:
17. A favorite of yours:
18. Action hero of any kind:
19. Read about in high school:
20. Lives in the future:
21. Comes with a whole family:
22. Lives in the past:
23. Old-fashioned:
24. Someone’s sidekick:
25. One you love to hate:
26. One you would like to meet:
27. Allegedly beautiful:
28. A victim:
29: Funny in some way:
30: On a trip in the story:

Ok, to get you thinking, I just spent a couple hours revisiting my library(LOL) starting with the 5 star reads and looking back. I only did 29 of 30.

1. Unforgettable: Offred in the Handmaid’s Tale
2. Very nasty or dastardly: Mrs. Danvers in DuMaurier’s Rebecca
3. Terribly young: Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure
4. Courageous: Offred in the Handmaid’s Tale
x5. Was/is Too Curious: ???
6. A favorite Male: Rebus in the Ian Rankin mysteries
7. A favorite Female: Dorothea in Middlemarch
8. Sleuth / Investigator: Adam Dalgleish in P.D. James mysteries.
x9. Honorable or noble: Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility
10. Adventurous: One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead by Clare Dudman
11. Political or Civic-minded: Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge
12. Romantic in some way: Lara in Doctor Zhivago
13. Royal: Christian VII of Denmark in The Royal Physician's Visit
14. Not human: Slake moths in Perdido Street Station
15. Adolescent: Fifteen-year old Ejii in Shadow Speaker
16. Senior or elderly: George Washington Crosby of Tinkers
17. A favorite of yours: Dorothea in Middlemarch
18. Action hero of any kind: Douglas Cheeseman in The Idea of Perfection
19. Read about in high school: Darryl Van Horne, the demon in Updike’s Witches of Eastwick
20. Lives in the future: Hari Seldon from Foundation
21. Comes with a whole family: Anyone of of the Zinn sisters in A Bloodsmoor Romance
22. Lives in the past: Daphne Manners of The Jewel in the Crown 1942 or thereabouts
23. Old-fashioned: Madame Verona in Madam Verona Comes Down the Hill
24. Someone’s sidekick: Annie Cabbot sidekick of DCI Alan Banks in Peter Robinson’s series.
25. One you love to hate: Rev. Causoban in Middlemarch
26. One you would like to meet: Dorothea Brooke of Middlemarch
27. Allegedly beautiful: Meg, Little Women (allegedly)
28. A victim: Tess of Tess of the d’Urbervilles
29: Funny in some way: Omon Ra by Russian author Viktor Pelevin (satire)
30: On a trip in the story: Eduardo Halfon (he is also the author) aka narrator in Monastery

This will take some research. 🙂

I had it all set up and somehow lost it all. Ah well, will do it over tomorrow. Think I can remember the answers I had!

>4 dchaikin: ...and your answers will be so interesting....

>5 cindydavid4: I nearly always work things out somewhere else on my laptop and then paste it here for that very reason.

I think I'll probably take a run at a nonfiction version, but that's going to take a bit more time. The problem isn't going to be finding characters -- about 1/3 of my reading is nonfiction. The problem is going to be narrowing them down for the categories!

Anyway, here's the fiction version. Some real oldies in here, some classics, and as always with me, some pretty obscure ones.

1. Unforgettable: Katherine Mary Flannigan Mrs. Mike
2. Very nasty or dastardly: Cathy Ames East of Eden
3. Terribly young: Ruth May Price The Poisonwood Bible
4. Courageous: Ma Joad The Grapes of Wrath
5. Was/is Too Curious: Hermione Granger Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
6. A favorite Male: Gus McCrae Lonesome Dove
7. A favorite Female: Keeley Murdock Hissy Fit
8. Sleuth / Investigator: Temperance Brennan Déjá Dead
9. Honorable or noble: Davy Land Peace Like a River
10. Adventurous: Charlotte Bridger Drummond Wild Life
11. Political or Civic-minded: Paul Atreides Dune
12. Romantic in some way: Claire Abshire The Time Traveler’s Wife
13. Royal: King Arthur The Once and Future King
14. Not human: Death The Book Thief
15. Adolescent: Jenna Metcalf Leaving Time
16. Senior or elderly: Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’ Two Old Women
17. A favorite of yours: Char Nyuk Tsin (Wu Chow’s Auntie) Hawaii
18. Action hero of any kind: Spock Time for Yesterday
19. Read about in high school: Jim Lord Jim
20. Lives in the future: Mark Watney The Martian
21. Comes with a whole family: David Hayden Montana 1949
22. Lives in the past: Supaya Shaman’s Daughter
23. Old-fashioned: Creek Mary Creek Mary’s Blood
24. Someone’s sidekick: Lula Two for the Show
25. One you love to hate: Cora Bemis One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow
26. One you would like to meet: Donald Sullivan Nobody’s Fool
27. Allegedly beautiful: Anne Boleyn The Other Boleyn Girl
28. A victim: Briseis The Silence of the Girls
29: Funny in some way: Ove A Man Called Ove
30: On a trip in the story: Sacagawea Stone Heart

A note on "Stone Heart" -- this could slot into either list ... or neither. Glancy has juxtaposed actual entries from the Lewis & Clark journals with imagined thoughts from Sacagawea.

Do we need a thread where we can debate / discuss "why I chose this one and not that one"?

>6 avaland: I know, but the laptop i have now does not have a word processor. I just need to remember to copy before I venture anywhere!

Decided to try fav characters off the top of my head from sci fi/ historical fiction/fantasy

1. Unforgettable: Thomas Cromwell wolf hall
2. Very nasty or dastardly: wicked witch of the west land of oz
3. Terribly young:Tommen games of thrones
4. Courageous:Wm Marshall greatest knight
5. Was/is Too Curious:Alice through the looking glass
6. A favorite Male: Theon games of thrones
7. A favorite Female:Eleanor of Aquitane Time and Chance
8. Sleuth / Investigator:Cadfeal Brother Cadfael
9. Honorable or noble: Richard II LionHeart
10. Adventurous: Ayra games of thrones
11. Political or Civic-minded:Lord Ventari disc world
12. Romantic in some way: Ashok and Lejali far pavillions
13. Royal: King Pippin the IV the short reign of pippin the IV
14. Not human:Valerion games of thrones
15. Adolescent: David Copperfield david copperfield
16. Senior or elderly: Father William (alice in wonderland
17. A favorite of yours:Griffith the queen of hearts
18. Action hero of any kind: wonder woman
19. Read about in high school: Wang Lung
the good earth
20. Lives in the future: weena time machine
21. Comes with a whole family: tom joads grapes of wrath
22. Lives in the past: King Arthur The Crystal Cave
23. Old-fashioned:Miss Haversham Great Expectations
24. Someone’s sidekick: Sancho Pancha Don Quiote
25. One you lovr to hate: King John devil's brood
26. One you would like to meet: Jo little women
27. Allegedly beautiful: Marie Antointete tale of two cities
28. A victim: Catheron of Aragon The Kings Pleasure
29: Funny in some way: cut me own throat dibbler disc world
30: On a trip in the story: Berna to calais in ordinary time

>7 LyndaInOregon: >8 cindydavid4: good stuff guys. I stalled on several. I’ll refresh my brain and try again later on.

>7 LyndaInOregon: Do we need a thread where we can debate / discuss "why I chose this one and not that one"?

Lois, should we set up a separate thread for that, or can we do it here?

>7 LyndaInOregon: re #25 oh yes! Had trouble finishing that book because of her' sometimes those type of characters are just way to much, but good pick

>10 labfs39: personally Id prefer off shoot conversations stay here because I don't want to juggle bewteen two threads.

What caught me here was how evocative a name is. What should of been a light list becomes serious of memory detonations. I guess titles are evocative too. Somehow having to name characters was different. It just seemed to take me a step deeper into thinking about the book.

1. Unforgettable: Puck - Midsummer Night's Dream
2. Very nasty or dastardly: Richard III - Shakespeare's
3. Terribly young: Romeo - Romeo and Juliet (I think Juliet is younger, but she's far more mature)
4. Courageous: Sula
5. Was/is Too Curious: Herbert Stencil - V. by Pynchon
6. A favorite Male: Jamie -Empire of the Sun
7. A favorite Female: S.H. - Memories of the Future by Siri Hudstvedt
8. Sleuth / Investigator: ...
9. Honorable or noble: Captain Frederick Wentworth - Persuasion
10. Adventurous: fictional Bruce Chatwin - Songlines
11. Political or Civic-minded: Jack Burden - narrator of All the King's Men
12. Romantic in some way: Cressida - Troilus and Cressida
13. Royal: Henry V - Shakespeare's
14. Not human: Om - turtle god in Small Gods
15. Adolescent: Lolita
16. Senior or elderly: Charmian Colston - Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
17. A favorite of yours: fictional Norman Maclean - A River Runs Through It
18. Action hero of any kind: ...
19. Read about in high school: Winston Smith - 1984
20. Lives in the future: Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash
21. Comes with a whole family: Anne Elliot - Persuasion
22. Lives in the past: Pnin by Nabokov - because he lives in his own past
23. Old-fashioned: Claudia Hampton - Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
24. Someone’s sidekick: Tommy Traddles - David Copperfield
25. One you love to hate: ... (oddly difficult today)
26. One you would like to meet: ...stumped here because I want to meet James Baldwin, but that would be my first truly nonfictional person. And no one else matches up.
27. Allegedly beautiful: Helen - Illiad
28. A victim: Francesca - Inferno
29: Funny in some way: Orm Tostesson - The Long Ships
30: On a trip in the story: Augustus "Gus" McCrae - Lonesome Dove

Today is a holiday here, and my birthday, so I have some time to play. This was challenging, but re-using my two favourite characters from all of literature helped 😉

1. Unforgettable: Mr. Firzwilliam Darcy, Pride and Prejudice
2. Very nasty or dastardly: Madame Defarge, Tale of Two Cities
3. Terribly young: Baby, Lullabies For Little Criminals
4. Courageous: Griet, The Girl With A Pearl Earring
5. Was/is Too Curious: Coraline, Coraline
6. A favorite Male: Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice
7. A favorite Female: Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice
8. Sleuth / Investigator: Miss Jane Marple (I haven’t read Agatha Christie in 40 years and don’t remember which ones I read, but the Miss Marples were my favourites)
9. Honorable or noble: Mr Darcy, Pride and Prejudice
10. Adventurous: Orlando, Orlando
11. Political or Civic-minded: Mary Queen of Scots, Rizzio
12. Romantic in some way: Mr. Darcy Pride and Prejudice (“I love you truly. I love you deeply. I love you enough to pay a guy to marry your younger sister” internet meme)
13. Royal: Henry VIII The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes By His Fool, Will Somers
14. Not human: Flush, Flush: A Biography
15. Adolescent: Nomi Nickel, A Complicated Kindness
16. Senior or elderly: Mrs Palfrey, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
17. A favorite of yours: Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice
18. Action hero of any kind: Lyra Belaqua, The Golden Compass
19. Read about in high school: Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit
20. Lives in the future: Aunt Lydia, Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments
21. Comes with a whole family: Elizabeth Bennet Pride and Prejudice
22. Lives in the past: Sophie Zawistowska, Sophie’s Choice
23. Old-fashioned: Charlotte Bartlett, A Room With A View
24. Someone’s sidekick: Charles Bingley, Pride and Prejudice
25. One you love to hate: Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights
26. One you would like to meet: Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice
27. Allegedly beautiful: Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice (“I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how amazed we all were to find that she was a reputed beauty” Caroline Bingley)
28. A victim: Lily Bart, House of Mirth
29: Funny in some way: Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice
30: On a trip in the story: Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice

>10 labfs39: Just do it here. It might lose some magic if done elsewhere :-)

>12 dchaikin: I had the same experience about the names....

>14 avaland: Maybe we should have put a limit on the Darcys...LOL...btw, happy birthday!

I thought I might try doing a nonfiction list with women, but most of my nonfiction reading is around groups of people, not individuals.

>14 avaland: thanks! Hah, you can’t make me limit my Darcys and Elizabeths

>13 Nickelini: happy birthday!

I like the Darcys and Bennets!

Okay, here's the nonfiction list, along with commentaries on a couple of the choices.

1. Unforgettable: Louis Zamperini Unbroken
2. Very nasty or dastardly: Donald Trump Too Much and Never Enough
3. Terribly young: Jacqueline Winspear This Time Next Year, We’ll Be Laughing
4. Courageous: Chuck Yeager The Right Stuff; Yeager
5. Was/is Too Curious: Dani Shapiro Inheritance
6. A favorite Male: John Steinbeck Journal of a Novel; Steinbeck; a Life in Letters
7. A favorite Female: Alice B. Sheldon James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
8. Sleuth / Investigator: Jack the Ripper Portrait of a Killer
9. Honorable or noble: Crazy Horse Crazy Horse
10. Adventurous: Meriwether Lewis & William Clark Undaunted Courage
11. Political or Civic-minded: Victoria Claflin Woodhull The Nympho and Other Maniacs
12. Romantic in some way: Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton Furious Love
13. Royal: Catherine the Great A Treasury of Royal Scandals
14. Not human: Seabiscuit Seabiscuit
15. Adolescent: Ivan Doig This House of Sky
16. Senior or elderly: Cudjo Lewis Barracoon
17. A favorite of yours: Henrietta Lacks The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
18. Action hero of any kind: Marina Raskova The Night Witches
19. Read about in high school: Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl
20. Lives in the future: Nikola Tesla Tesla: Inventor of the Modern – Will be interested in seeing how others answer this one and #22. Okay, Tesla was born in 1856 and died in 1943. But his inventions were so far ahead of his time that I think it’s fair to consider that in many ways he “lived” in the future.
21. Comes with a whole family: Rick Bragg All Over But the Shoutin’; Ava’s Man; The Prince of Frogtown
22. Lives in the past: Joseph Campbell Transformations of Myth Through Time Another one whose physical life was of course “in the now”, but whose life’s work was spent largely elsewhere. Campbell’s heart was so deep in the past, that I think it’s fair to say that his intellectual life was largely spent there.
23. Old-fashioned: Margaret Mitchell The Road to Tara
24. Someone’s sidekick: Michael Collins Carrying the Fire – It may be a stretch to call Collins a “sidekick”, but it’s certainly true that his contributions to the Apollo 11 mission got much less attention than those of Neal Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin.
25. One you love to hate: Cheryl Strayed Wild – Strayed was such a ditz and was so utterly unprepared for her (ultimately aborted) hike along the Pacific Crest trail that she endangered herself and other, better prepared hikers – and then made a celebrity of herself (not to mention a bucket of money) telling the tale of her irresponsible actions. What’s not to hate?
26. One you would like to meet: Leonard Nimoy I Am Not Spock; I Am Spock
27. Allegedly beautiful: Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnly - Okay, this one may or may not link
28. A victim: Carolyn Jessop Escape
29: Funny in some way: Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Free-Range Knitter
30: On a trip in the story: Rinker Buck The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

>18 LyndaInOregon: I'm impressed.

QUESTION 27: LIST: BOOK CHARACTERS YOU HAVE KNOWN (from books YOU have read*)

This would be a "published in the 19th century" version. There are a couple of books duplicated here, but then that's the mark of a good book.

1. Unforgettable: Anna Karenina from the book of the same name

2. Very nasty or dastardly: Lydia Gwilt from Armadale - one of the best villains ever

3. Terribly young: Oliver Twist from Oliver Twist

4. Courageous: David Balfour from Kidnapped

5. Was/is Too Curious: Alice from Alice in Wonderland

6. A favourite Male: Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights

7. A favourite Female: Jeanie Deans from The Heart of Midlothian

8. Sleuth / Investigator: who else could it be but Sherlock Holmes?

9. Honourable or noble: Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities - "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

10. Adventurous: Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo

11. Political or Civic-minded: Eugène Rougon in His Excellency Eugène Rougon - not civic minded, but definitely political

12. Romantic in some way: Natasha Rostova in War and Peace

13. Royal: Marguerite de Valois (Margot) in La Reine Margot

14. Not human: Black Beauty in Black Beauty

15. Adolescent: Lorna Doone in Lorna Doone

16. Senior or elderly: The Aged P in Great Expectations

17. A favourite of yours: Dicky Perrott in A Child of the Jago

18. Action hero of any kind: D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers

19. Read about in high school: Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment

20. Lives in the future: Pierre in War and Peace - his future is the better world he works for

21. Comes with a whole family: Jo in Little Women

22. Lives in the past: Anna Petrovna in The Family Golovlyov

23. Old-fashioned: Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights

24. Someone’s sidekick: if you have Sherlock Holmes, you have to have Dr Watson

25. One you love to hate: Adam Weir, Lord Hermiston from Weir of Hermiston

26. One you would like to meet: Alan Breck Stewart from Kidnapped

27. Allegedly beautiful: Estella Havisham from Great Expectations

28. A victim: Jude in Jude the Obscure

29: Funny in some way: Rudolf Fassendyll in The Prisoner of Zenda

30: On a trip in the story: Pierre Aronnax from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea

Challenging!

1. Unforgettable: Judge Holden Blood Meridian
2. Very nasty or dastardly: Henry Drax The North Water
3. Terribly young: The little prince The Little Prince
4. Courageous: Saint Joan Saint Joan
5. Was/is Too Curious: Erik Lönnrot in "La muerte y la brújula" Fictions
6. A favorite Male: Lucas Beauchamp in “The Fire and the Hearth” Go Down, Moses
7. A favorite Female: Elizabeth Bennet Pride and Prejudice
8. Sleuth/Investigator: Travis McGee The Turquoise Lament (One of a series of McGee novels)
9. Honorable or noble: Jean Valjean Les Miserables
10. Adventurous: Odysseus The Odyssey
11. Political or Civic-minded: Joe Hill Joe Hill
12. Romantic in some way: Viola Twelfth Night
13. Royal: Prince Hal Henry IV, Part I mainly because he hangs out with Falstaff
14. Not human: Rikki-Tikk-Tavi The Jungle Books
15. Adolescent: Juliet Romeo and Juliet.
16. Senior or elderly: Santiago The Old Man and the Sea. Don't remember if Santiago is elderly, or just old for a fisherman.
17. A favorite of yours: Doc Cannery Row. For the beer milkshake. Reminded me of when I tried combining chocolate ice cream and tequila. That proved exactly as stupid as it sounds.
18. Action hero of any kind: George Hayduke The Monkey Wrench Gang
19. Read about in high school: Fagin Oliver Twist
20. Lives in the future: Billy Pilgrim Slaughterhouse-Five. Just part of the time.
21. Comes with a whole family: any Karamazov The Brothers Karamazov
22. Lives in the past: Billy Pilgrim Slaughterhouse-Five. Just part of the time.
23. Old-fashioned: Miss Havisham Great Expectations
24. Someone’s sidekick: Sancho Panza Don Quixote
25. One you love to hate: Richard III The Tragedy of Richard III
26. One you would like to meet: Sam Weller The Pickwick Papers
27. Allegedly beautiful: Clytemnestra The Oresteia. I'm guessing about her looks, but she was Helen of Troy's sister. And rather murderous.
28. A victim: Sophie Zawistowska Sophie’s Choice
29: Funny in some way: Chet Pomeroy Panama
30: On a trip in the story: Lemuel Gulliver Gulliver’s Travels

>21 dypaloh: “Unforgettable: Judge Holden Blood Meridian” - oh, definitely, yes!

>20 SassyLassy: That was fun to read :-)

>21 dypaloh: 28. A victim: Sophie Zawistowska Sophie’s Choice Indeed.

>21 dypaloh: #11 touchstone edited: It’s Wallace Stegner’s Joe Hill

>22 dchaikin: . . . “that sooty-souled rascal”! (as the ex-priest Tobin puts it)

>23 avaland: I’d not liked two of Styron’s books before Sophie's Choice. Giving a lauded author three strikes before giving up can pay off!

>24 dypaloh: I liked Styron's memoir Darkness Visible, did you read that one?

>25 labfs39: Darkness Visible: thanks for the reminder! I had forgotten Styron wrote about his struggle with depression, even though I’d seen him interviewed (on PBS?) when it was released.

The ones I didn't much like were Set This House on Fire and the Nat Turner book. The latter I quit about half-way through.

QUESTION 27: LIST: BOOK CHARACTERS YOU HAVE KNOWN (from books YOU have read*)

1. Unforgettable: Priscilla Daughter of Rome
2. Very nasty or dastardly: Bill Sikes Oliver Twist
3. Terribly young: Little Nell The Old Curiosity Shop
4. Courageous: Aquila Daughter of Rome
5. Was/is Too Curious: Leslie Bridge to Terabithia
6. A favourite Male: Scout (a dog) Portside Peril
7. A favourite Female: Elnora Comstock Girl of the Limberlost
8. Sleuth / Investigator: Miss Pym Miss Pym Disposes
9. Honourable or noble: Bob Cratchit A Christmas Carol
10. Adventurous: Nancy Drew The Ghost of Blackwood Hall
11. Political or Civic-minded: Lady Bird Johnson Hiding in Plain Sight
12. Romantic in some way: Juliet Romeo and Juliet
13. Royal: Lady Georgie Rannoch Naughty in Nice
14. Not human: Bill the Bulldog Bill at Rainbow Bridge
15. Adolescent: Anne Anne of Green Gables
16. Senior or elderly: Gladdy Gold Getting Old is a Disaster
17. A favourite of yours: Hercule Poirot Murder on the Orient Express
18. Action hero of any kind: Harry Potter The Sorcerer’s Stone
19. Read about in high school: Huckleberry Finn Huckleberry Finn
20. Lives in the future: Jonas The Giver
21. Comes with a whole family: Elizabeth Bennet Pride and Prejudice
22. Lives in the past: The Beast Beauty and the Beast
23. Old-fashioned: Pollyanna Pollyanna
24. Someone’s sidekick: Dr. Watson Sherlock Holmes
25. One you love to hate: Peter Manchester The Brighter the Light
26. One you would like to meet: Ebenezer Scrooge A Christmas Carol
27. Allegedly beautiful: Sleeping Beauty Sleeping Beauty
28. A victim: Roger Ackroyd The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
29: Funny in some way: Beans Curry Full of Beans
30: On a trip in the story: Millie Sanders Starboard Secrets Cruise Ship Mysteries

#26 intrigues me. Why, may I ask?

>28 cindydavid4: Do you mean Ebenezer? I would like to ask him about his transformation and what it was like to experience the supernatural world first hand. I would also like to ask him about his experiences in reconnecting with his past and how that helped him to get beyond past mistakes. He seems like an intriguing character to me.

>29 LadyoftheLodge: Actually, I never thought of wanting to meet Ebenezer, but you are absolutely correct. Most readers remember only the "Bah! Humbug!" Scrooge -- in fact his name has become synonomous with grasping cupidity. We entirely forget the true miracle of the story -- his conversion.

Okay, you've convinced me!

QUESTION 28: Of all the books you can think of... name the one (or two or three) you LEAST want to read and why.

(Thx to dukedom_enough for this question).

#28 Easy. Moby Dick. I've read the first page a few times and just cannot bear his writing. Now it's become this huge block that I have no desire to overcome.

>31 avaland: QUESTION 31

Well the book that came to mind immediately is Infinite Jest.

Why? - As usual, hype turns me off, so that was the first deterrent. Then Wallace's persona as it was developed in the media, also made me shy away - probably not fair to Wallace himself, but that was its effect.

Other books that come to mind would be anything by Karl Ove Knausgard.

I do read a lot of dark books, but these just don't appeal.
_____________

I think for a question like this, if a book or books don't come to mind right away, then it isn't an answer.

>32 labfs39: if a book or books don't come to mind right away, then it isn't an answer Exactly. It is a visceral reaction, at least in my case!

The first book that comes to mind (hubby is responsible for this question, btw) was Jonathan Franzen's 2001 novel, The Corrections. I was working at the bookstore back then and the hype over this book was just so, so over the top... and that he was another young, white guy just pissed me off.

I think I tend to think in terms of authors, rather than single books. You know, authors I will not read, or more likely deliberately 'not read anymore' . But I digress....

Atlas Shrugged - because trumpy people love it and see justification of their terrible ideas within, and then send out deranged memes with deranged points. And because my dad is one of them, and has subjected me to these lectures.

Finnegan’s Wake
For pretty much the same reason I don’t wish to learn Adnyamathanha (yura ngarwala) just to translate it into Wymysorys: Too much to do to do too little.

A Confederacy of Dunces It sounds awful to me. A book about a slovenly white guy in New Orleans? Pass.

>36 dchaikin: Sorry to hear that, Dan. That's tough.

>40 labfs39: I don't think I could stomach it, but I'm glad you read it and that I have your take.

>36 dchaikin: heh I was just about to post same, for the same reasons

crying on lot 49 came out about the time I joined an online book group (table talk at the salon magazine) I tried to read and and didn't get anywhere, joined the discussion which made me more confused. Tried a few of his others and decided that I just will not read his books

>35 avaland: oh I had the same reaction. the beginning of the book felt like he was writing about my family I related to it but as it went on it just got stranger and stranger. Havent tried to read him again

Ulysses. Tried many many times. Loved Mollys soliloque, but other wise no. Same reading group we used say 'this summer I will not be reading Ulysses' still works well for me

>38 dianeham: I think the popularity is more about the young authors death; I know fellow readers who call it their fav book. I tried and I bailed

>42 cindydavid4: I read a some Pynchon, but gave up eventually. Too much work for what i was getting out of it. (I did like V. a lot. And Gravity’s Rainbow was worth the effort for me - I read it with a guidebook)

Q31

All of the above?

The first that came to mind were Finnigan's Wake and Ulysses. But also any 1000+ tome written by a white male is going to most likely get a hard pass for me. Although if I have 1000 years to live, I might try Moby Dick

>31 avaland: Gullivers Travels I generally don't get on with satire, especially English satire from a couple of centuries ago. It is a book I think I *should* read, and at one point accidentally owned four copies of, but I have mostly given up on the idea that I will read it.

>46 ELiz_M: We all have our bugbears, I suppose (I enjoy satire more often than not)
My pick was because of the super-hype...not the book itself.

You know what they say: don't 'should' all over yourself...:-)

I love this group and its members, but I wish we could leave off the political commentary. I left another group because there was too much of that kind of thing and I did not feel welcome. There is enough of politics in the news media. I am here to discuss books, without the sniping. Thanks.

My apologies

>46 ELiz_M: Ignore the satire, there is still a good story under it. I had to read it when I was in my very early teens - and I loved it (and the whole satire went way over my head). I still like it as a children/adventure story - I know there is more to it, I can see some of it as I am rereading but I don’t care. :) although you may have outgrown the moment when that could work :(

Yeah, I like Gulliver's Travels overall, though there's lots of annoying parts. But that was the style - Robinson Crusoe is similarly annoying. And I've never found an abridgement of either that skipped the parts that annoy me without messing up the story - a Good Parts version. I ran into one of Crusoe that skipped all the good bits (for me), while retaining huge swaths of the bits I dislike...apparently that abridger liked very different things!

My noes include Ulysses, and everything I'm aware of by James Joyce. A lot of classic literary novels, in general - Tess of the D'Urbervilles turned me off the whole genre (had to read it for school).

*plopping down next to Sassy on the anti-Knausgard bench*

His stuff is gonna age like milk, mark my words, maaaark them...

Also, since when is politics out of bounds here? Please let's not be childish. I can't think of a WORSE time to ignore politics. Anyone who doesn't want to read about political stuff can easily avoid that by blocking "the politicals".

As for books I wouldn't read... well, obviously, Rand and her like, but honestly that sort of thing isn't even on the radar.

I guess poor old Henry James will have to do for an answer. I feel some vague obligation to read him (beyond The Turn of the screw, but no urge to do so already.

>53 LolaWalser: Lola there are many groups here that greatly discourage political commentary. Don't think club read is one, i know greeen dragons does. I do understand wanting a place with out it. Makes conversation focused and keeps blood pressure down as well. Doesn't mean ignoring it; we get news from many other places. That being said, its very hard to talk about some books without talking politics

I can't answer this question without getting political, because the one category of book I won't read is anything by Trump, members of his former administration, or Fox News–type toadies like Sean Hannity. It's been loathsome enough to live through four years of them in power and then the sticky and awful aftermath... maybe I'll have more of an appetite for reading what they have to say someday, but not for a long, long time.

Okay, I get it, I did not think it was a childish request. Thanks everyone. It has been a fun ride. Over and out. Blessings and peace.

>56 LadyoftheLodge: um don't think it was a childish request; I get it totally and am willing to cease any politics here, but like lisa that would be my answer to this question. tho to be fair I am steering away from all political books just coz I get enoug of it elsewhere. You are a valued person here. Pls don't go

OK, I don't think I read far back or carefully enough in the comments here before I made mine, and I apologize if I was in effect piling on. Not my intention to make anyone uncomfortable, especially a valued member of this community (as we all are, but it's not like the sound of my own voice is such a joyful thing over anyone else's). My intentions were not mean ones, but I'm sorry if I was a jerk nonetheless.

>56 LadyoftheLodge:

Wow, you see no problem about imposing such a request on 100+ people posting/reading here? And that despite there existing mechanisms to tailor your experience to your preference? This group has never imposed restrictions on topics, and quite a few of us have for years routinely discussed politics, or made remarks that are politics-related. If people want to self-censor, they can. If you wish to avoid politics in your personal thread, you can make that clear. But to DEMAND that everyone shut up in general threads about what you decide to dislike is... yeah, "childish" is actually the kindest epithet.

>54 cindydavid4:

Yes, Cindy, I've been on LT since January 2007, I'm quite aware the Green Dragon restricts topics, just as I'm aware that this group does not.

>55 lisapeet:

How would one even tell whether such people are being sincere? I'm just quietly astounded that after all the circus dogging Trumpo for years, he's still outside prison.

>58 lisapeet:

From what I gather, several people were posting stuff that another person, not involved in the conversation, found unpalatable because "political". Then some went and deleted their posts. Posts that were not aimed at her or anything she wrote and that she had no business censoring.

>48 dukedom_enough: 's comment was deleted before I saw it, so I have no idea what started this brouhaha. Personally, I'm all for political comments in relation to the books we read. It's all part of what makes up our actual lives.

In my little corner of Canada, our big political decisions are on things like one party proposing to replace a 4-lane tunnel with a 10-lane bridge, and the other side saying "that's too expensive! we love the 4-lane tunnel". Neighbours can have difference of opinion about that and still be friends. But a lot of politics today is more serious than that, and when it comes to "I believe xyz group should have rights" and the other side saying "not only should xyz not have rights, but maybe they shouldn't even be in society, and also, let's legislate against them" well then, don't ask me to be your friendly neighbour.

But the person who needs to read the threads after she huffed off at >56 LadyoftheLodge: isn't here to face the music

OK.then. Interesting discussion. Here are my thoughts. I believe in free speech. We are all here to talk about books in one way or another. Politicians and political commentators write books, thus they can and might be talked about here. This now deceased conservative political commentator, who was VERY outspoken, wrote many, many books, published mostly by Simon & Schuster, and being an author makes him eligible as an answer for this question. Answering the simple question, doesn't really constitute "talking politics".

Some may be sensitive, yes. IMO, ignoring the post* would have let it go by with no more attention than previous posts, but here we are. I likely would have winced if someone said they would NEVER read a book by Hillary Clinton because she is awful person, but I would respect their right to post it.

Shall we move on? Will post something new before or on the weekend....

*I note the later posts also.

>62 avaland: well said. I think, and hope, we can move on. This is a fun a series of conversations I think we all enjoy a great deal.

>61 Nickelini: Yes, I read all the posts. My comment was not meant to offend or censor. It was never intended to start all this mess. Let's just move on.

Re Confederacy of Dunces: I was living in New Orleans when it was published and I can tell you that it is a dead on satire of New Orleans culture, especially of that era (1980s). I understand that it's a polarizing book. People either love it or they hate it. Personally, I love it and consider it one of the three or four funniest books I've ever read. To each his/her/their own, certainly. I would suggest that anyone who's been avoiding giving it a try because of what they've heard about the book's subject matter might perhaps give it a go if satire is within their wheelhouse. On the other hand, of course I get the fact that we each have our own criteria for how/why we select the books we try.

I could supply a list of books I wish I'd avoided. But as to the actual question: I have absolutely no wish to read any of the Tom Robbins novels I haven't read yet. I've only read three, so that leaves me a pretty good stack to kick over.

For some reason I don't have any sort of desire to read Tom Jones, although it often turns out that I end up enjoying the classics that I decide to push onto my reading list.

>66 rocketjk: well, I just downloaded the sample and started reading it and so far I love it. Thank you.

>67 dianeham: You're welcome. I'm glad you're having a good experience with it. I hope that continues throughout. I'll be very interested to learn how it goes for you.

>66 rocketjk: Speaking of Tom Jones (which I read as a teen), we happen to be watching our old DVD of the 1998 adaptation over this past week (5 hours worth). A bit madcap/over the top, but amusing still.

>68 rocketjk: I’m waffling now. It seems very keystone copish. I’m starting to think I don’t like comedic fiction.

>70 dianeham: C'est la vie!

QUESTION 29: HUMOR IN FICTION



There are many kinds of humor in fiction: satirical, ironic, black/dark comedy, comedy of manners, romantic comedy, parody, farce… to name a few.. And while we could discuss all these modes in detail, it would be much more fun to just talk about the funny stuff we have read, whether whole books, short stories or individual scenes. Or perhaps you might wish to discuss a specific author's use of humor.

So…tell us how humor fits into your reading and about some of the amusing books or authors you’ve read and why you like them.

NOTE: thanks to Rocket & Diane for the segue into this topic; it’s been on my list for quite a while

Just some samples we all might recognize of aforementioned kinds of humor for those who might be unfamiliar with the terms. Not meant to restrict conversation, of course.

Comedy of Manners: Lady Windermere's Fan
Satire: Catch-22
Ironic: Animal Farm
Parody: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Black Comedy: American Psycho
Romantic Comedy: Northanger Abbey
Farce: Don Quixote or Good Omens

ah! I have several books that I reread when I need some humour in my life.
Batchelor Brothers Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book by Bill Richardson
Our Hearts were Young and Gay( gay meaning happy in the 1930's) by Cornelia Otis Skinner and the new addition.
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

Oddly I struggle with humor for humor’s sake in reading. I need an author to disarm me before I can let go and enjoy that aspect. But, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are the first thing to come to mind.

Personally I struggle especially with satire. I find it often is tiring instead of funny, and that I’ve programmed myself that way a little. If I’m enjoying a novel and find myself noting it’s satire, my impression becomes a little less rosy. Weird.

Sorry for the not funny post on humor. 😁

Question 29:

Some of the funniest scenes I've read are:
The parking lot scene in Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
The jumble sale in To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

Go to humor for me:
The Diary of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain
Stuart McLean's Vinyl Cafe stories

Gentle humor I read for comfort:
Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Yes1 Stuart McLean! Every once and a while CBC Radio rebroadcasts some of the Vinyl Cafe series. The "Christmas Turkey " one is great!

Oh my, so many. These are my favs but I could add so many more *include all author books

ROTFLMHO books

neither here nor there I remember reading this i the tube, trying to be quiet like everyone else but could not stop laughing. Most of his early booiks are the same*

hitchikers guide to the galaxy *

The short history of Pipin the IV by Steinbeck

small gods My first Pratchett *

phantom toll booth fav childrens book

Good Omens

Lamb *

let nothing you dismay One of my fav holiday reads, funny yet poignant as well

any place I hang my hat

cartoon history of the universe

princess bride still does

confederates in the attic*

band box thomas mallon

books that made me smile

queen of hearts

man in the wooden hat *

major pettigrews last stand also one of my top covers ever

England,England

My German Garden*

the bullfighter checks her make up all of her books

I could include others like Mark Twain, O'henry, others but then we'd be here all day

Here is my list of funniest books that I can recall reading. Or, to perhaps put it a better way, books that have made a lasting impression on me particularly (though certainly not entirely) because of their humor. Some have already been offered above.

Catch 22
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Don Quixote
A Confederacy of Dunces
Emma
Portnoy's Complaint
The Great American Novel: This is Philip Roth's comedic novel about baseball, an underrated great of baseball fiction, in my opinion.
Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series
The few Carl Hiasson books I've read have included memorable dark humor.
The Mapp and Lucia books by E.F. Benson
eta: The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek

In making this list, it’s clear that I am drawn to satire and dark humor, with a few exceptions. This is just a sampling....

Jane Austen’s (b 1775, UK) playful comedy of manners Pride and Prejudice and Emma are two good examples. But also a little known US author Tabitha Gilman Tenney, (b.1762) published a novel called Female Quixotism: Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, pub. 1801 was amusing social satire (but she’s not Austen!)

*Jonathan Lethem has published some amusing stuff…As She Climbed Across the Table or Motherless Brooklyn as examples.
*Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt was amusing but I haven’t stayed up with either. *Adam Roberts, a SF writer, can write some funny stuff, The best of the recent deadpan humor is a Golden Age SF meets classic murder mystery in Jack Glass.
.
Some of my favorite writers or works of dark satire:
*Ornela Vorpsi, The Country Where No One Ever Dies, Albania
*Victor Pelevin, The Life of Insects, Russia (dark/political satire)
*Amelie Nothomb’s first book, Hygiene and the Assassin, Belgium
*Peter Hoeg,s The Woman and the Ape, Denmark
*James Morrow, Only Begotten Daughter, City of Truth…etc, USA
*Lydia Millet, Love in Infant Monkeys, USA
*Nicola Barker’s H(a)ppy, UK
And Lisa has previously mentioned the Connie Willis book....

Then there is my holy trinity:
*Margaret Atwood, Madadam, but a satirical favorite of mine is The Robber Bride Three female friends and their nemesis….
*Joyce Carol Oates, A Bloodsmoor Romance A bit of a riff on Little Women, me thinks. As one LTer said to me many years ago…watch out for the dress dummy scene!
*Angela Carter, Darkly funny, some parody, much satire. Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, for example.

Only Begotten Daughter was wonderful! havent read his other books, should try them

>75 dchaikin: That was interesting, Dan. I was just thinking, wondering what it is that I am drawn to in dark satire. I don't have an answer yet.

>82 avaland: I learned satire from MAD magazing, a gateway to Doonesbury and Far Side. I also like dark. I like my satire biting,revealing a truth we hadn't seen. Jonathan Swift a modest proposal I think would be considered that?

>78 cindydavid4: Oh, my. Confederates in the Attic as humor? Hmmmmmmm. I had to go back and re-read my own review (and then read several others) to make sure we're talking about the same book. I guess that, for me, this was one of those cases when reading about ... eccentric folks ... was less humor and more downright scary.

As for the books I reach for when I need to laugh, Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is right up at the top of the list. Though I never really warmed to the "Guards" series, I always knew better than to take a new Pratchett Discworld book to read anywhere in public. Some people get very uncomfortable when the plump grey-haired lady in the second row begins giggling uncontrollably.

I thought Joseph Heller's God Knows was brilliant and hysterical -- a funnier book, really, than the darkly humorous Catch-22.

Abbi Waxman is emerging as a sharp and funny novelist, winning me over instantly in The Bookish Life of Nina Hill with her speculation on why some men seem to think sending photos of their junk to random women is a courtship gesture.

Janet Evanovich, with her Stephanie Plum series, and Jennifer Crusie with her screwball rom-coms, are always fun to read.

And Mary Roach can make anything -- up to and including how we deal with death -- funny while still imparting solid information on the topic.

Apparently, my tastes in humor are not particularly highbrow -- but I'm happy with them!

>84 LyndaInOregon: I second your Mary Roach mention. I can't believe I forgot to include her in my list. Well done.

>84 LyndaInOregon: God Knows is a great example for me. I knew he was being funny, and it was clever, and i loved the tacos request. But I struggled with it. I like your Discworld story. 🙂

>85 rocketjk: Ditto. I laughed out loud reading Grunt despite the rather gruesome topics (at times). I have Stiff on the shelf waiting for me.

>72 avaland:

I pulled a blank on this question ... I could remember humorous non-fiction, but not fiction. But I've tagged lots of books "humour" and these novels stand out, :

Lullabies For Little Criminals, Heather O'Neill (however, it's also extremely heartbreaking)
Cooking With Fernet Branca, James Hamilton-Paterson
What A Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe
Anxious People, Fredrik Backman
The Book of Lies, Mary Horlock
Portofino, Frank Schaeffer
Eleanor Rigby and The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland (although Eleanor Rigby is also quite depressing)
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Helen Simonson
Fruit, Brian Francis
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

and how could I have forgotten:

Bridget Jones's Diary and its sequels, by Helen Fielding

>84 LyndaInOregon: re confederates: I do get your point, I haven't read it in decades but I remember him making me laugh while at the same time talking about serious history and current events. Perhaps its more of an ironic or satire? I suspect if I were to reread it, Id not be laughing much.

BTW a biography of Sir Terry is coming out in September terry pratchett: a life with footnotes Cant wait!

I'm with >75 dchaikin: on this one. I rarely "get" satire-type humor in writing (or in life frequently).

So, the only book that I know of that makes me laugh out loud (on one memorable occasion resulting in pig-snorting noises when I tried to suppress my laughter on the subway) is Motherless Brooklyn. I think it works because the character is in on the joke -- Lionel knows his behavior appears ridiculous.

Reading through the responses above, reminded me I also laughed while reading Stiff.

Of those mentioned above, I've read and realized they are supposed to be funny: hitchikers guide to the galaxy, Catch 22, Don Quixote, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Good Soldier Svejk, What A Carve Up!

I didn't realize these were supposed to be satirical/funny: phantom toll booth, Emma, The Life of Insects, H(a)ppy, Madadam

It's lists like these that remind me how old I am and how many books I may have read.

>88 Nickelini: Frank Schaeffer a.k.a "Franky" son of Francis the Christian theologian? I did note when Franky started publishing; I read a bit his father's writings in the 70s. I think. Oh, wait, I did read Franky's first book Addicted to Mediocrity: 20th Century Christians and the Arts in the early 80s (I don't remember it being funny). Kris, I think we've both been on LT sooooo long that we've probably noted all this before.

I used to be willing to try everything, and I did ...and I see a lot of books on others' lists that I have also read, but not enough to read more than one or two (i.e.Douglas Adams, Helen Fielding) and during the bookstore years I would read almost anything from Jennifer Weiner to Mary Roach (all the better to be able to handsell to the public, you see). But, being of an age, I read what I want these days (no rules, no lists...etc. completely free-range:-)
--------------------------

Satire: Since a large purpose of satire in literature is to convey social commentary and/or criticism, this allows a writer to create awareness of issues and disparities in society. Satirical literature calls attention to these issues and can make readers aware of something they had not previously considered or understood. ---https://literarydevices.net/satire/

Dark satire is a form of satire that includes themes and ideas that are considered dark or morbid, and which often uses these ideas to explore complicated or morally ambiguous issues ---https://www.languagehumanities.org › what-is-dark-satire

I suppose I like satire best because it's a more 'intelligent' humor....? Perhaps aims to enlighten the reader than just amuse them. And the dark satire has some fairly heavy content. sometimes I feel, when I'm chuckling, I am also standing a witness to, or witness of someone's pain (the Vorpsi book, for example)

>91 ELiz_M: phantom tollbooth is a take on our language. Maybe not satire? But his examples help Milo figure out the direction to go. Give it to my child relatives once they reach a certain age (usually 9, 10) when I think they will get it.

.>92 avaland: like those definitions "Satire: Since a large purpose of satire in literature is to convey social commentary and/or criticism, this allows a writer to create awareness of issues and disparities in society. Satirical literature calls attention to these issues and can make readers aware of something they had not previously considered or understood. ---

https://literarydevices.net/satire/

If thats the case then I think PT is satire, at least for kids!

>92 avaland: Frank Schaeffer a.k.a "Franky" son of Francis the Christian theologian? I did note when Franky started publishing; I read a bit his father's writings in the 70s. I think. Oh, wait, I did read Franky's first book Addicted to Mediocrity: 20th Century Christians and the Arts in the early 80s (I don't remember it being funny).

Indeed! I follow him on Twitter, and he has a lot of "old man yelling at cloud" energy and isn't funny at all, but his 20 year old novel was delightfully funny. There are two sequels, but I haven't read them.

Q#29

Segueing on a few mentions above... I wanted to like A Confederacy of dunces more than I did but a lot of its humour felt forced. Tony Horwitz I remember being effortlessly hilarious in everything I read by him. His description of smoking some drug in common use in Yemen had me in stitches.

At a younger and probably more ticklish age I've LOLed a lot reading Ephraim Kishon, Three men in a boat..., William Saroyan, Mark Twain, Ilf & Petrov... Asterix, Sue Townsend... Later on, Fran Lebowitz, David Sedaris, Woody Allen (his short stories). Wodehouse, Adams, Pratchett bear repeating. I know Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley made me laugh... as did Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker once (Intelligent Design)

Alexander Woollcott is still often funny. Lewis Carroll used to crack me up unexpectedly. Pirandello seems to me wildly funny. It seems to me humour is a necessary component of verbal intelligence even if it doesn't figure in the foreground... I can't think of so-called "serious" writers (or books) that don't have humour--e.g. Mann, Melville, Montaigne, Musil...

edit: link

Q29

I also grew up with P G Wodehouse — whom I’ve yet to grow out of— Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc, G K Chesterton, Jerome K Jerome, Wilhelm Busch, Erich Kästner and all sorts of other people who had been making my parents’ and grandparents’ generation laugh. One very fond memory is of a teacher whose party piece was a wonderfully funny reading of the cricket-match chapter from England, their England, a book that’s almost unreadable when you look at it in the clear light of a century later…

I didn’t get much exposure to contemporary comic writing, though. Asterix, certainly (mostly in German, from my cousins’ stash), but I missed out on Roald Dahl who was only just starting to be well-known after I passed the ideal age for reading his books. Most of them I only encountered later, by reading them to other people’s children.

Having started out with the healthy idea that books were meant to be funny, I long had a preference for satire and dark comedy, e.g. the pre-Brideshead Evelyn Waugh, or The good soldier Švejk.

I think I have got more serious in my reading tastes as I’ve become older, but I still appreciate really good comic writing when I come across it, for instance Alexander McCall Smith.

Q29

There are so few books I've found funny.

Catch-22
Hitchhiker's Guide series
The Martian

Pretty much everything else I can think of that other people talk about/recommend as being funny, I've hated.

>95 LolaWalser: oh yes, esp twain, allen (esp The Kugelmass Episode), dorothy parker. Rudnick and other writers from the NYer make reading the rather sombre and troubling articles less daunting by their humor. Lewis Carroll still makes me laugh! And then there is always Chekov, Molier, the bard....

OH,Ben Elton this other eden, not so much a book about ecological destruction,as much as about how one man who controls the media to manipultae to buy his prodect at the expense of the world. Believe me it is hilarious satire, Came out in 1994 and unfortunately relevant today.

Another brit writer Eliz Eden semi detached house and semi-attached couple

sorry one more Dawn Powell who wrote in the 40s and 50s. Her books about NYC are funny, and moving at the same time. "Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone." meaning right up my alley Capote famously championed her and she more well known now. Start with time to be born

One more for me, too:

In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd. This is the short story collection on which the classic movie, A Christmas Story, was based, the movie about young Ralphie and his quest for a Red Ryder B.B. Gun. Each of the incidents in the movie--the tongue stuck to the light pole, the yearning for the gun, the beating up of the town bully, etc.--has its own short story in the collection. Shepherd, known as "Shep" to his fans, for years had a radio show in New York during which he told stories like those in the collection, about growing up in Depression-Era Indiana, about his time in the Army, and many other topics, along with a strong sprinkling of political and cultural commentary. It's Shep's voice you hear narrating the movie. Anyway, the book was one of our touchstones when my friends and I were in our teens and it is very funny.

"You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"

>101 rocketjk: I loved that movie, didn't realized it was adapted from a book. Will have to look for that

>102 cindydavid4: I hope you do! The framing of the book is that Ralph, years later, is just back from World War 2 and returns for a visit to his home town. He goes into the tavern owned by his boyhood friend, Flick, and the two of them begin reminiscing. It's been years since I read the collection, but as I remember it, there's a short conversation between the two now adult friends between each story.

As I mentioned above, Shepherd was hugely popular in the NYC/NJ area due to his radio show, which he hosted from 1955, throughout the 60s and into the early 70s. He even did live standup performances from time to time. I got to see him a couple of times. It became the custom for his fans to scrawl "Flick lives!" as graffiti on bathroom walls. I still do it, once in a while, just for fun, although, living in Northern California as I do, and Shepherd being dead for 23 years, I'm aware that I might as well be drawing ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on those walls. There's about an equal chance of someone else comprehending my meaning.

From his wikipedia page, here's a reference to a stunt he pulled off in the mid-50s:
On an overnight slot in 1956, he delighted his fans by telling stories, reading poetry (especially the works of Robert W. Service), and organizing comedic listener stunts. . . . The most famous stunt was a hoax he created about a nonexistent book, I, Libertine, by a fake author, "Frederick R. Ewing", in 1956. During a discussion on how easy it was to manipulate the best-seller lists based on demand, as well as sales, Shepherd suggested that his listeners visit bookstores and ask for a copy of I, Libertine, which led to booksellers attempting to order the book from their distributors. Fans of the show planted references to the book and author so widely that demand for the book led to claims of it being on The New York Times Best Seller list. Shepherd, Theodore Sturgeon, and Betty Ballantine later wrote the demanded book, with a cover painted by illustrator Frank Kelly Freas, published by Ballantine Books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Shepherd

>72 avaland: QUESTION 29: HUMOR IN FICTION

I have a weird relationship with humor in my reading (and watching). Most of the things that are called funny either leave me cold or make me scratch my head on "and how is that funny?". I like finding funny moments (or even chapters) in my regular reading but I rarely look for humor as a separate category (except when I do - and then I default to known authors usually). Absurdist fiction can work for me occasionally; parodies and similar can also work better than straight humor. I need to think of some examples for this so I may be back with a second part of this answer. As for proper humor literature:

I seem to be doing better with British humor than with American one: P. G. Wodehouse, Terry Pratchett , Douglas Adams and Jerome K. Jerome are known quantities and can always make me smile (if not laugh outright). The only American who immediately comes to mind is Mark Twain. And I can appreciate humor from other cultures occasionally but it takes a lot more effort.

I still like (and find funny) some books I read as I was growing up: The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek and Branislav Nušić's Autobiografija (Autobiography) for example. Both are hilarious but Nušić's humor does not appear to translate well outside of the area it seems (or so I had been told).

Then there were the children's humor books: from the Bulgarian ones (Ran Bosilek's Патиланско царство may be dated, cringe-worthy in places and oh so non-PC but I do not care - it still makes me laugh) through Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz and most of Astrid Lindgren's oeuvre (Pippi Longstocking for example). These may account a bit for my issues with humor literature - they were funny in ways adult books can rarely be and my brain seems to expect the same level of funny.

And then there are the adult Bulgarian humorists: the classics (Bai Ganyo by Aleko Konstantinov (an otherwise serious writer who wrote the probably most popular humor book in the country), the Hitar Petar tales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitar_Petar if you never heard of him) and the modern ones: Михаил Вешим (Mikhail Veshim) and lately Орлин Чочов (Orlin Chochov) for example.

I am not sure how much the Bulgarian ones work in translation - I know Bai Ganyo is translated but... the humor relies on a lot of cultural and local knowledge and plays on how the Bulgarians see the world. The same applies for the modern ones of course - and part of why I enjoy them so much is exactly that - they feel like those stories I grew up with and like something that belongs to my life...

I seem to be doing much better watching comedies - especially dark comedies and parodies... "Black Books", "The Thick of It", "Keeping Up Appearances", "Mind Your Language", "'allo 'allo!", "Episodes" (for a newer example) (to name a few), a lot of the older British shows (both radio and TV ones) make me laugh a lot more than most American comedies and a lot of current comedic shows on both sides of the ocean...

Which brings it back to cultural influences in a lot of ways...

>104 AnnieMod: All hail Pippi Longstocking! (One of my very favorite early reads).

>105 avaland: I reading Pippi to my niece currently. :-)

>104 AnnieMod:

Oh, that's great that you read Nusic... I too remember his autobiography as ROTFL funny. He was actually read quite a bit in Austro-Hungary (I don't remember now if he wrote in German too).

I forgot to mention Saki, what an omission! "The Schartz-Metterklume Method" and the one where a teenage girl pretends to a visitor that everybody has died and her aunt insane with grief etc. made me sick with laughter the first time I read them.

>103 rocketjk: thanks jerry for the rec, and for the extra info as well! love that prank! would not have worked now when its so easy to find info.Ill put the title on my list!

>107 LolaWalser: Nušić's autobiography was in the mandatory school program somewhere in middle school, 6th grade I think (so 12-13 years olds). The chapter that was in the textbook was the one where the teacher demonstrates the solar system - I don't even need to read that one anymore, just thinking about it makes me smile. Despite having needed to analyze it and what's not, it is still funny.

I read the whole book in the summer before the school year (as was usually expected technically) and I had been rereading parts of it ever since. Most Bulgarians of my generation have the same fond memories of that specific book :)

PS: I just looked up the current Lit program back home: Nušić is still in the 6th grade (with the same chapter) in the third module of the year (3 overall in that year) alongside Vazov's Under the Yoke (the school chapters - other chapters are covered in different modules),, Twain's The Prince and the Pauper (chapter 1 and 3), a Bulgarian poem about street kids (https://bulgarianpoetryinenglish.wordpress.com/2015/12/19/gavroches-little-brothers/ is a translation of it which I do not like much but cannot find another), a classic Bulgarian short story about poverty and humanity and Le Petit Prince (chapter 21 -- the meeting with the fox). That whole setup sound very familiar - I don't think we read Le Petit Prince at that time but the rest had been a standard configuration for decades. And I am off topic again :) Sorry - just got curious on what they are doing now. :)

>104 AnnieMod: I suspect that humor and idioms would be among the hardet for translators to work with. True?

I agree about Brit humor; with the possible exception of Benny Hill, I love it (tho I will admit laughing at some of his bits). Rowan Atkinson in Black Adder and Mr Bean was pure genius (used to not like that character, too slap stick for me, until I watched his solo drum skit. ) douglas adams and of course sir Terry are hilarious. Loved Keeping up apperances, Butterflies, as time goes by, Faulty towers.....and on and on

America does have its share of great comics; grew up watching Carol Burnett, I love Lucy, , Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin , the muppets, Red Skelton, and Laugh In, so many of the cast ended up being very sucessful. you mention Mark Twain, every year a comedian is chosen for the Mark Twain award for american comedy. All of them gems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain_Prize_for_American_Humor#Recipients

>107 LolaWalser: My 6th grade teacher read us a short storu every day, from Twain, Poe, O'Henty, and Saki. Hilarous stuff

>110 cindydavid4: I never got the appeal of Laurel and Hardy (or Benny Hill on the UK side). They feel more like clown performances in a circus than anything else. Which some people like and I can laugh at occasionally but... And Chaplin... I appreciate his movies in a way I appreciate Golden Age comics - they are artifacts of their time and I can see why they are funny. But most of them just don't connect for me, not on the level they do for most people who likes them. And "Faulty Towers" should have been on my list ;)

Part of my problem with a lot of the American comedians and comic routines and sketches (and books) is that I simply do not have the background for them to land properly without me needing to analyze them or think about them. I am not talking about the cheap laughs - those are usually universal and I am either in the mood for them or not. But the proper ones, the ones that make you laugh as soon as it is done because it lands (the way the Bulgarian authors land for me)? Not really. Not sure if that makes it clearer what I meant above - it is not really that there are no US comedians and humor writers and whatsnot - I know there are and I am sure some of them are much better than some of the ones I like. That's why comedic moments in serious books work better for me than humorous books sometimes - my brain has time to actually process and analyze at that point and the style usually makes things click better.

I am better at it now but 20 years ago halfway across the world? No chance. The British ones were always more universal in my mind (being taught European history and British English and being Europe-centered is a big part of it I suspect). I had been picking up some of the old TV and radio serials from the US side (and some of them are hilarious). I also like some of the newer US stuff ("Veep" for example - but then it is an adaptation of "The Thick of It" by the same game who did the original after all so that was a given). :)

>112 AnnieMod: That's why comedic moments in serious books work better for me than humorous books sometimes - my brain has time to actually process and analyze at that point and the style usually makes things click better.

That makes so much sense. I suspect many immigants have that issue. Btw I noticed you mention the little prince in the curricula in Bulgaria - I never saw that as a humours book, or am I misreading?

>109 AnnieMod:

Yeah, he was assigned in elementary school to us too (I haven't checked but I'm 100% sure that's not the case now--all Serbian authors were "purged" from Croatian programmes when the fascists came to power in the 1990s). Plus later on, in high school, we read a play of his, "The suspect" (Sumnjivo lice) whose plot I don't remember but that too was hilarious. That's cool that Bulgarians get acquainted with him, goes to show his humour wears well in space and time.

>111 cindydavid4:

Yeah, I feel I'm forgetting tons of authors who made me laugh myself silly, especially as a young 'un...

>113 cindydavid4: No, you are not misreading - none of the others are humorous for the most part. It is not a module on humor (which is why I said I am off topic). The three modules in the year revolve around human heroes/characters and their relationship with other things: "Human and Nature", "Human and Art" and that last one is "Human and the others" - covering school relationships, poverty, wish fulfillment, being someone else, greed (and other ugly things), helping others, friendship - that kind of things. It just happens that the humor book falls under it (as a contrast to the school scenes in "Under the Yoke") and as an exploration of personal relationships. The Little Prince is there to cover friendship and wishes and things like that (thus the meeting of the fox being the chosen chapter).

115 oh ok, I understand now.Still love that book

"The three modules in the year revolve around human heroes/characters and their relationship with other things: "Human and Nature", "Human and Art" and that last one is "Human and the others" - covering school relationships, poverty, wish fulfillment, being someone else, greed (and other ugly things), helping others, friendship -"

wonder what our worlld would be like if all schools taught that way...

funny papers " chronicles cartoon icon Derby Dugan's beginnings in the rough-and-tumble world of yellow journalism in turn-of-the-century New York, when Hearst and Pulitzer owned tabloid America. The aptly named Georgie Wreckage, a sketch artist for Pulitzer's daily World, rockets to fame as the creator of what becomes a hugely successful cartoon franchise in this, the first book in Tom De Haven's epic trilogy of twentieth-century pop-culture America."

really really loved this book! Not only lots of humor but lots of history as well. Did not realize it was the first of a series, looks like I have some catching up to do!

>90 cindydavid4: a biography of Sir Terry is coming out in September

Yay!

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page):

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library:

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted:

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library):

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library:

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library:

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library:

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW:

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one.

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library:

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed):

—Tags: Your most overused tag:

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand:

**Kindle users may adapt as necessary
***If it helps for clarity, you can edit the questions down to a few words , in your response.

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): 12/14/18

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 32

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? Imported Good Reads Library when I joined LT

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Oldest posting is 12/14/18 (see question above); no way, really, to tell which of those was actually first read. My private journal, which predates both LT and Goodreads, goes back to 6/16/2000

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): The First Book of Calamity Leek

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Nurse, Come You Here!

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: The Murder Gene, by Karen Spears Zacharias, which I can't get to link. It’s not on my LT list yet but it’s my most recent purchase; I don’t enter them into LT until I’ve read them.

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. The Obituary Society, 3.5 stars, date is my LT joining date so I probably reviewed it on Goodreads & no longer have the actual review date.

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: The First Book of Calamity Leek, pg 32 – I try to write something about pretty well every book I read, even if it’s just a “TV Guide synopsis”. The Calamity Leek review is the last "real" review (364 words).

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question) I don't use collections

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): tutus (because I reviewed “Chickens Don’t Wear Tutus”)

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Fiction (110)

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: They're all pretty straightforward!

>119 avaland: Always good to mess around in the library

Q30 List

— Date joined LT - Feb 8, 2011

— Number pages in your LT library: 156

— Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?

- Initially I went row by row from the bookshelves, which skewed my automatic recommendations for awhile, as chunks of one category were added, then another
- most entries where done by ISBN
- now I mostly enter as I read them, although I should do it as they come into the house, to avoid duplicates
- if the question is how do I enter them by heading, it would be: Cover, Title, Author (last, first), Tags (alphabetically), publication date, original publication date, entry date

- What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted:
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Feb 8, 2011

—Most RECENT book entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Fat City

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: this page (p78) is Fiction Germany, transitioning to Fiction Hungary and the book (today) would be City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr Freud

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: not quite sure of this as it took a long time to restore my defaults after selecting first fiction, but it would be a Garden book, possibly The Pursuit of Paradise: A Social History of Gardens and Gardening (February 2011)
- actually, now that I reread this, it would be The Year of Magical Thinking

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Joan Didion: The Last Interview

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. Blue Nights by Joan Didion reviewed Feb 11, 2012, or one year after joining LT (it took me that long to screw up my courage)
- Joan Didion seems to running through these answers)

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: The Floating Brothel tagged Ahoy, Social History, p 10 in my library

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)
Collections: Garden, China (the country), and Music (very small so far as I am only on Bach, entering alphabetically by composer)

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): possibly Half the Sky from Chairman Mao - books on feminism

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Fiction American - not sure at all how this happened

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: Footnotes and Families a small group of books on quirky people or families who don't necessarily fit elsewhere, like The Sassoons

I'm adding a category here from the Vous et nul autre in LT's Odds and Ends: 31 books

________________

edited to correct Joan Didion title

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page):
March 31, 2013

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.
Well, I've changed my style A so it does not include entry date.

—Number pages in your LT library
19

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?
Bulk imported books from my goodreads account, initially. Now I add or update books when I mark them read or buy them.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted
n/a, about 2500 books were added on the same day...

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library)
Either/Or

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library
Weirdos from another planet!

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library
n/a

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library
The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW
from an nyrb flash sale: The Rider on the White Horse, Little Reunions, Woman Running in the Mountains, São Bernardo, The Bad Side of Books: Selected Essays

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one.
n/a

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library
n/a

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)
I mostly use collections for read status, so I've only added a few besides the default collections: unverified (books with uncorrected data from the initial import), Read, and Failed-to-Read

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed)
might-not-read. I have a lot of tags that are lists. I want to include the complete list of books that are in the New Lifetime Reading Plan, but I don't want them all to be considered to-be-read, so the books on lists I am not interested in are tagged as might-not-read.

—Tags: Your most overused tag
I don't consider any of my tags overused.

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand
abooo = A Bookshelf of Our Own
botb-50 = Beowulf on the Beach (Hi Dan!)
novel100 = The Novel 100
nypl-botc = The New York Public Library's Books of the Century
wem = The Well Educated Mind

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Mar 24, 2008

—Number pages in your LT library: 181 pages

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? I have always entered them one by one by ISBN. AT first I went shelf by shelf, now I enter them as they enter the house.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: The spiral staircase : my climb out of darkness by Karen Armstrong, 3/24/08

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Hiroshima diary : the journal of a Japanese physician, August 6-September 30, 1945 by Michihiko Hachiya, 8/20/22

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Barefoot in Baghdad: A Story of Identity-My Own and What It Means to Be a Woman in Chaos by Manal M. Omar, all the rest are children's books. I must have been at that point of entering my library.

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: My first book was nonfiction. My first fiction was Antrax by Terry Brooks.

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: My most recent book was also nonfiction. My most recent fiction is The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: The Twin by Kevin St. Jarre.

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. Victoria and Vancouver Island by Kathleen Thompson Hill, May 6, 2008, 2.5*

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura, p. 174

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question): Homeschool library, Katie's library, Previously owned, Replace

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): Belletrista. I first became friends with Lois when she asked me to review books for her online journal dedicated to women's literature in translation, Belletrista. I was very honored, and carefully tagged the books that I reviewed there.

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Fiction (1587), I wouldn't say it's overused, as I find it helpful.

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: I think they are self-explanatory, even less common ones like "bookmark stuck". The exception might be those with an acronym: UW (University of Washington), IU (Indiana University), BMGF (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation). They are places I've worked that had book clubs or where I also took classes.

Vous et nul autre in Charts and Graphs/Odds and Ends: 16 books

I have a profile but its too much trouble for me to list my books on it.. So I'll bow out of this one

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Jun 25, 2006

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 62

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?: Initially I used an excel sheet I had and dumped into the LT rapid input. Now I enter each one manually one at a time.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: March by Geraldine Brooks (what I was reading at the time)

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): The No. 1 Ladies' Detection Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (it was a 2017 acquisition, but I hadn't entered it)

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Desert by J. M. G. Le Clézio

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Roadside Geology of Colorado (Third Edition) by Felicie Williams & Halka Chronic

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen, Sep 6, 2006, 5-stars

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith (latest entry, so last page)

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)

All Non-Children's Books (3137)
All Children's Books (1847)
My Books (1314)
The Kids Books (285)
Unowned (2623)
Discarded (1629)
Library Books (894)
ebooks (120)
Audio Books (198)
Read (1189)
To read (666)
Currently reading (6)

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): nothing is jumping out at me.

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Fiction (1,329)

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: again, nothing is jumping out at me.

**Kindle users may adapt as necessary
***If it helps for clarity, you can edit the questions down to a few words , in your response.

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Aug 16, 2015

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: depands on how many titles per page. Using 50/page, it is 41 pages

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? - I used a barcode reader and scanned the isbns. I took down a pile from a shelf over and over. Now I do them as I acquire them.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Invisible Cities 8/16/2015

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Brother Mambo: Finding Africa in the Amazon

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East (Vintage Departures)

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: see most recent book entered

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. The Way Around: Finding My Mother and Myself Among the Yanomami don’t see a date. 3 stars

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: Companion Piece 4.5 stars. Page 41

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question) dojo, bookgroup

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): invisibility Ninja : Secrets of Invisibility

—Tags: Your most overused tag:Poetry

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand:

**Kindle users may adapt as necessary
***If it helps for clarity, you can edit the questions down to a few words , in your response.

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

This one is going to be a bit messy for me, since I’m still travelling and trying to do it on my phone. I’ll see how far I get…

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page):
17 April, 2007

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library:
24 — but I have it set to 200 books per page.

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?

I entered my existing library shelf by shelf over the course of about six weeks, on my desktop computer using the CueCat for books with barcodes (the minority) and searching titles and authors in the usual way for the pre-ISBN stuff. Nowadays I mostly add books using the App.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Peter Hopkirk’s Quest for Kim, a book about the historical sources for Kipling’s “Great game”, entered on the day I joined.

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Jenny Erpenbeck’s essay collection Kein Roman.

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library:
That seems to be about the point where the first flurry of entries ends, so there are a lot of bits and pieces on page 12: my residue of children’s books, the theology section, oversized books, a few Folio Society editions, out of date travel guides, etc. Difficult to say what’s most interesting, but a couple that catch the eye are Lectures, tutorials and the like by Alan Walton, a very good friend from my university days, and Sequins for a ragged hem by the poet Avril Johnson, who taught me on an Open University summer school a long time ago.
—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: see above

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: see above

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: De grenzeloze rivier verhalen uit het rijk van de Rijn by Mathijs Deen. I don’t know anything more about it yet, but it caught my eye in a bookshop a few weeks ago. I did read Deen’s earlier book about the Dutch islands.

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. A wild and lonely place by Marcia Muller, reviewed 28 April 2007. No rating.

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: the Erpenbeck essays, see above.

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)

For disposal (0)
Deaccessioned books (147)
In 1970s catalogue (178)
Read but unowned (839)
On order (0)
Ebooks (213)
To read (79)
Your library (3496)
Currently reading (0)
Lent out (9)
Wishlist (13)

Mostly self-explanatory. For Disposal is a temporary holding point for books I decide I don’t want to keep, so it’s usually empty. “70s catalogue” is a paper listing of my then library I found in an old exercise book.

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): I have a lot of flippant one-off tags, things like “unwisely self-published”. But I wonder why I would have one book tagged “pubic hair”. It’s probably better not to know.

—Tags: Your most overused tag:

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand:

Wow, you all are great sports! Apologies to the goodreads people, I'd forgotten that.

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT: Oct 3, 2006

—Number pages in your LT library: 190

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? look at those first pages and I wonder what my thinking was! I was in a different house and it was soon long again, but it would have been an organized process

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Night Watch by Sarah Waters, posted 2006, same day I joined

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library):
The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece by Jonathan Harr

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: The Dawn of Innovation: the First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW:
The Sewing Girl's Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America by John Wood Sweet (2002)

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one.
The White Earth by Andrew McGahan. c. 2005 Reviewed Nov 1, 2006, 5 stars

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees, reviewed, 5 stars. Book is on page 189 of 190.

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections”
Poetry (275)
Read but No Longer Own (954)
New England history (90)
Margaret Atwood (51)
Quilting, Sewing & Other Needlework (95)
Joyce Carol Oates (86)

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…:
“GGA” Stands for “Gone or Given Away”. I used this for a number of years but then decided to use “Read But No Longer Own”. I’m good at putting the books in my LT, not great tracking their exits!

—Tags: Your most overused tag: “fiction”

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: “GGA” Stands for “Gone or Given Away" I used this for a number of years, until I replaced it with the collection “Read but No Longer Own”

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): June 9, 2006

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 31

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?

I entered the books I had on hand from the Titles and have slowly kept that going ever sense. It has been a slow process that doesn't always reflect my complete "Library" especially since I became primarily a digital reader.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Rise to Rebellion -- June 9, 2006

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Against Interpretation

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library:
In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Annals of the Former World

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Against Interpretation

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW:
Giant Killing Vol. 1

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one.
Earth by DK Publishing -- Five Stars

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library:
Death Sentences -- page 2

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)

It's mostly boring that I use collections as bins for if I have or if I want the book.

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed):

Toothpicks

—Tags: Your most overused tag:

Horror

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand:

Sequential stratigraphy

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT: March 15, 2012

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 153 (20 books per page)

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?
When I joined LT, I was a member of a similar German website called “Lovelybooks” that I had started to dislike. I imported all my books from there by hand. Then I added all the books as soon as I bought them until 2017. Since then I have become much more sloppy, although my goal is to get the library up to date again.

—FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library: Rabbit-proof fence by Doris Pilkington (March 15, 2012)

—Most RECENT book you entered: The Maid by Nita Prose

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: I added the books on pages 77 and 78 in 2014 when I had just finished teacher training, so it has lots of teacher manuals and other stuff like that… The most interesting might be Franz Kafka – Literaturwissen by Carsten Schlingmann, though I have never ever opened it because I wasn’t required to teach Kafka so far.

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Meine Reise durch das Outback by Andrew Stevenson

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Inselstolz – Zwischen Strandkorb und Sturmflut by Gerhard Waldherr

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: The Dark by Emma Houghton

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed: Fräulein Smillas Gespür für Schnee by Peter Høeg, reviewed Feb 18, 2021, 4 stars (I only started writing reviews in 2021!)

—MOST RECENT review: The Dark by Emma Houghton, p. 152

—Tell us the names of a few of your “collections”: I have too many! A few are favourite authors (Austen, Brontë sisters, Goethe), most are genres or topics (fantasy, crime, religion, history,…), then there are geographical ones plus three for my job (pedagogy/didactics, Teaching German, Teaching English)

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag: don’t think I have one

—Tags: Your most overused tag: “not to read”, which I use to tag those books that are not on the tbr and that you usually not read through (such as cookbooks or certain kinds of coffee table books, or books I inherited and keep for sentimental reasons, but don’t wish to read)

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: (*) – I used to tag all the books that I had properly catalogued (title, author, correct cover pic, format, common knowledge) with a *, but there was a time when I started over, so put all the * of books I had catalogued before into parentheses, and there are still some of those left

>127 thorold: oh wow, Quest for Kim looks really good; loved reading and rereading kim.. . Did you review this one?

Q30–
Fun! I’ll do this when I can get on a computer. Too difficult on my phone. I’m enjoying the contributions from everyone in the meantime

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Oct 23, 2012

—Number pages in your LT library: 36

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? I started by importing my Goodreads list, and for a while was good at entering that backlog on LT—including copying over reading dates and reviews, which didn't port—but I fell off that enterprise at some point, which is why if you look at my profile it has me "currently reading" more than 70 books from the early aughts. One of these days I'll go back and finish. Besides those imported books, I haven't changed my book logging habits, which is to enter only books I'm reading or have finished. The idea of cataloging my collection just feels like work, and I already have plenty of that...

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea, entered 10/23/12 but first read in 2001.

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Ali Smith's Companion Piece, which I'm currently reading.

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: They're all interesting! But OK, if we're looking for something that other CR folks maybe haven't come across, The Fly Trap, by Fredrik Sjöberg, an entomologist writing about his study of hoverflies in the most engaging way—my review says it "occupies the Venn diagram intersection of philosophy, poetry, and entomology."

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy by Ron Robin, which I didn't love—only gave it three stars—and didn't review. I don't remember a word of it, either.

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Joanna Scutts's Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism, which I did love.

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Between galleys, the library, and my groaning shelves I don't buy a lot, but that would be an ebook of Mary McCarthy's The Group, if a 59-year-old book counts as new.

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, five stars. It has the review date as 10/20/12, so that must have been an import from Goodreads.

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: I try to write at least a short review of everything I've read these days, so it's the last book I finished, Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism, four stars, reviewed 8/21/22

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” Pretty pedestrian, the most unusual being: Jeff's, Gave away I obviously don't keep up with this tag because I give books away all the time, but never go back to change the tag, Books with my work in them, Signed, Didn't finish.

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): Rock'n'Roll Girls Book Club (which doesn't exist any more, but we were all middle-aged and had great taste) or maybe Countermapping (a deep interest in grad school).

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Fiction

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: Again, they're pretty straightforward. Maybe "literary hype" (which was Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman). Or else "biograpny," nuff said.

Fun! Here's mine.

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): January 21, 2008

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 167

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? I originally went through my shelves, pulling down about 5 or 6 books at a time, and entered the books. It was a delightful process. I did that two or three times a day (I was a freelance writer working from home at the time) until I was al caught up. In those days, as I remember it, it was relatively common to encounter older books that had no cover images uploaded. I spent a lot of time scanning and uploading those when necessary and would even sometimes contact the administrators of legacy pages to let them know I’d uploaded a cover to a book that was listed in their library.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Bystander by Maksim Gorky, uploaded on January 21, 2008

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): The most recent book I’ve entered is actually a periodical: Show - The Magazine of the Arts, July 1962. The next book I’m going to enter is The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde. My wife bought this book recently, so it’s not in my library yet, but since I’m going to read it next, I’ll be adding it to my library later today.

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Halfway for me is page 84, which advances me only to April of 2008, meaning that over half of my current 3330-book LT library was entered in that first 4-month period. I was, at that point, entering the books from my baseball shelf, so this page is all baseball bios and histories. I’ll go with one I haven’t read yet for this category: Doc Ellis in the Country of Baseball. Ellis was a pitcher in the 1970s known as a free spirit. One day he came to the ballpark thinking he wasn’t going to be pitching that day so decided to drop some acid. However, whoever was supposed to pitch couldn’t, and Ellis was given the last-second assignment. So, high on acid, he went out and pitched a no-hitter. I’m looking forward to reading this book about this fellow one of these days.

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: The second book I entered, right after Bystander, was Low Man on a Totem Pole, a collection of humor/essays by H. Allen Smith, published in 1941. The next was another baseball book (it must have been a recent purchase not yet shelves), Black Diamonds: Life in the Negro Leagues From the Men Who Lived It.

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Coincidentally, the most recent non-fiction I added to my library is another collection of humor and essays, Knocking the Neighbors by George Ade, published in 1912.

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. As it happens, I reviewed and rated the first book I entered, Bystander by Gorky. I didn’t enjoy it very much, and gave it only 2 stars, though I did think it was worth having read.

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: My most recent review is of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s on page 167 (the last page) of my library. It was a birthday present from my wife in July.

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): Highbrows and Lowbrows. These are the books I read for a grad school course of the same name and includes novels by Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Novel

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: Released. These are books I’ve read and subsequently donated to the thrift store.

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Apr 23, 2009

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 15 (200 books per page though)

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?: That's complicated. When I started I added all the books around me (most of them are now deleted - they were my old library). These days I add the books I read only and I make plans for adding all the rest (you know those villains from the cartoon shows and their plans? My plans are almost as successful). The current plan is to get through the shelves one by one then start working on the boxes, one by one. We shall see if that ever happens. I did add some of my special publishers' shelves at some point and one night added all the Kindle books I had at the time (hotel rooms are good for tasks like that). But the majority of my books are uncatalogued.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: The oldest survivor (see above) is Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente. Entry date 2009-04-23 (the same day I joined)

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): The one I started last night: Dime a Demon by Devon Monk

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Foundation by Isaac Asimov (it just happened to be on that page today... and that is MY book so... no arguments there). Although there are some runner ups in there

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen (2009-04-24). The oldest surviving - it was not probably the first added - I had a few shelves of Tudor books, the ones surviving were the ones I wrote reviews for from these early books...

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library:Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume One

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Because of how I am entering the books (aka when I read them), the ones at the top are sometimes 10+ years old.

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one: Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente, Jul 13, 2009, 4.5 stars

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: Give Unto Others by Donna Leon, Jul 27, 2022, 4 stars on page 1

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question): My collections are boring: a few publisher names, a few types (Radio Plays, Plays, Books and so on) and some about the reading status of books...

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): My tags are pretty straight-forward so no interesting tags really. I need to clean them up a bit - some of them are covering things that the new Graphs and so on finally took care of...

—Tags: Your most overused tag: "read" (see above)

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: I doubt that any of my tags are cryptic enough to need an explanation.

>135 rocketjk: The second book I entered, right after Bystander, was Low Man on a Totem Pole

Oh, my goodness! I had several of Smith's books back in the 60's. Low Man on a Totem Pole, Lost in the Horse Latitudes, and Life in a Putty Knife Factory, and possibly a couple of others. They probably didn't survive one of the many moves I made in that decade.

Thanks for bringing them to mind again!

>131 MissBrangwen: Your posting of Peter Høeg prompted me to see if he has anything new out since The Susan Effect in 2018. Sadly, no.

>135 rocketjk: I agree that putting books into LT was a 'delightful process"!

>137 LyndaInOregon: Wow! What a cool connection. Thanks for telling me about that. Cheers!

Q#30

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): January 11, 2007

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 829!! buuut, not all are books...

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? Mostly MANUALLY MANUAL. And yes. 'Tis nothing for a MANIAC.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics Including Women's Solo Meditation Texts, entered on the day I joined

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): The Sandman, Season of mists

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Hmm, so circa page 415... well, I haven't read this one but I'll be disappointed if it isn't mighty interesting: The romance of the Newfoundland caribou; an intimate account of the life of the reindeer of North America

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: See First Book Entered, above

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Studio Ghibli: the films of Hayao Miyazaki & Isao Takahata

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Nani e folletti

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. Like Bartleby, "I would prefer not to", it's embarrassing!

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library:

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question) Movies; SFF-LT-read; a bunch of numerical and alphabetical labels...

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): eh, someone else would need to determine this, I'm completely unimaginative when it comes to tagging

—Tags: Your most overused tag: "Essays". It's really being too lazy to say something specific about the topic.

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: I was gonna say, surely none, but then I noticed I'm the only one using "Fingerkraft"... what a mystery. :)

Q30: Messing Around in Your LT Library
Well, this should be fun....

Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Feb. 7, 2006

Number pages in your LT library: 131 (at 30 books per page)

How do you go about entering books in your LT library
When I started out it was mostly as I came to them on the shelves. There have been a couple of bulk imports in there (at least one of which I am still cleaning up after). At this point, I will enter the books more or less as I obtain them, and I typically use either the app to scan the barcode or the Add books page while at my computer. I could probably stand to be more methodical than I am, but it works well enough for me.

Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted:
The Writer's Complete Fantasy Reference was the first book I entered, on the day I joined LT.

Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library):
My Antonia (chosen as a Summer Reading prize from my local library)

Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library:
Hmmm, lots of random fiction at that point, but nothing particularly stand-out. It's hard to determine what qualifies as interesting, honestly.... I guess European Costume : 4000 Years of Fashion is the one that stands out to me the most today.

FIRST non-fiction entered in your library:
This would be the same as the first book I entered, period. So the first fiction book I entered was Elantris.

MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library:
A Faithful Student of Nature: The Life and Art of Samuel L. Gerry - I went to an exhibit on his art last month and had to buy the guide.

Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW:
The Rema Chronicles: Realm of the Blue Mist is the most recent catalogued book that I purchased new. Going Ballistic by Dorothy Grant is the most recent purchased book (ebook), per my book purchases spreadsheet, but I haven't added it to my catalog yet (I tend to fall behind on adding ebooks in a timely fashion).

The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one.
Star ratings are far more prevalent in my catalog than actual reviews. So....
- Earliest rated book: Elantris - 4 stars
- Earliest reviewed book: Enchanted, Inc. - 5 stars, reviewed 11 May 2010 (for my fifth reading)

In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library:
With my catalog sorted from oldest to newest, my most recent review is of So You Think You're a Bookworm?. It is on page 119 of my catalog, and I didn't rate it particularly highly.

Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections”
Here are my collections, excluding all the default ones:

Read (1597)
Manga and Graphic Novels (886)
ebooks (442)
Reference (200)
Gospel Library (45)
Knitting and Craft (61)
Work Library (11)
Childhood Library (44)
Released and Withdrawn (351)

Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed):
I don't know that any of my tags are particularly interesting or original. I'd call the whole lot of them highly prosaic, honestly. They boil down to genres, locations, and miscellaneous subjects. Also a whole slew of series tags that I really could probably do away with.

Tags: Your most overused tag:
My two most used tags are fantasy (1216) and unread (938). Whether that qualifies as overuse I will leave to others to decide.

Tags: One the rest of us might not understand:
I think all my tags are pretty self-explanatory.

>140 LolaWalser: Totoro! My daughter made me watch that lovely anime, otherwise I wouldn’t know Studio Gibli. Love your choice of first book entered.

>140 LolaWalser: Reading your answers this early in the morning, I nearly broke a rib laughing. Caribou? We have a nice DVD set from Studio Gibli, and a few singles.

>141 shadrach_anki: A nice mix of books. And that's three of you now that joined LT before the discussion groups went up.

>142 dchaikin:

They are amazing movies all. You should definitely see Spirited away, and on the heartbreaking end, the anti-war drama Grave of the fireflies.

Ha, the book was literally the first in the first row of the first bookcase when I started entering them on LT. So yeah, the first few pages reflect what the bookcases looked like then.

>143 avaland:

They are majestic animals. :)

It's a huge gorgeously illustrated tome that was being tossed by the library, I had to save it.

>140 LolaWalser: Too funny - what great titles - love the first entry title and the halfway one.

Re tags: eh, someone else would need to determine this, I'm completely unimaginative when it comes to tagging
I did see one tag I'm sure not many people have: "actual shit is myrrh and frankincense in comparison to this verminous traitorous cowardly dissembling little Nazi-ass-licking genocidal creep"

>144 LolaWalser: They are amazing movies all. You should definitely see Spirited away, and on the heartbreaking end, the anti-war drama Grave of the fireflies.

coincidence- you reading yhat book and Im reading sharing a house with the never-ending man15 years at Studio GHibli. Can i just say that this cover is the worst thing ive seen in a while. Title doesnt help either. may need to remove it from the book. regardless, hope its magical given the artist it should be

grave of fireflies was the first of his I had seen and still havent totally recover. if you watch it have lotsi of kleene

Well, this is an interesting one! Let's see...

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page):

Feb 28, 2007

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library:

57

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way?

Well, when I first joined LT, I went through all my books, shelf by shelf, and entered them one at a time until I was caught up. It took quite a while. Now, I enter them as I acquire them. Both then and now, I mostly enter them by ISBN, if they have one, or by searching for the title and trying to find the correct edition, if not. These days, I will very, very occasionally use the scanner on the LT phone app instead.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted:

The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams. At the time, it was the first book (alphabetical by author) on my non-TBR hardback fiction shelves. That was Mar. 1, 2007.

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library):

The Orville Season 2.5: Digressions by David A. Goodman. A graphic novel based one of those TV series I'm obsessed with.

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library:

So, that'd be page 29, I guess. I'm genuinely not sure what to pick here. It depends on your criteria for what's "interesting." Let's go with The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. I'd say that's interesting by almost any standards.

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library:

Mental Floss Presents Condensed Knowledge. A fun book of various random trivia.

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library:

Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW:

That would be the same The Orville comic already mentioned, which I bought on Amazon as soon as I realized there was still one in the series I didn't already have.

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one.

Is Christianity Good for the World? by Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson (oooh, provocative!), which I reviewed for Early Reviewers on Aug 14, 2008. I gave it 3.5 stars.

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library:

The most recent review I've written isn't showing up here, because it was an ebook, which is new for me, and I stuck it in a different collection, not in my library. So, disregarding that, it was On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger, there on page 57. I reviewed it three days ago and gave it 4.5 stars.

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry “Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)

I don't have that many collections. There's Wishlist, Currently Reading, To Read, Random Wishlist Books, Ebooks, and Read but Unowned. Ebooks still only just has that one thing in it so far. "Random Wishlist Books" requires some explanation. Those aren't actually wishlisted books; they're ones I own, that are actually in my library. They're things I've picked up as part of a long-term, ongoing project in which I randomly pick books off my wishlist to buy, whether I remember why I wanted them in the first place or not. I only do one at a time, buying a new one whenever I finish reading the previous one (which it sometimes takes me a while to get around to). The results of that have been interesting.

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed):

I don't know if it's original or interesting, but I have this tag, "society," which is a weird catch-all category for books about social issues and quirky cultural stuff and social sciences and basically anything that's about, I dunno, the weird world of humans in general. I really, really ought to come up with a better word for that, or figure out how to subdivide it or something.

—Tags: Your most overused tag:

Possibly "biography and memoir" which I tend to apply not only to obvious, well-defined biographies and memoirs, but to anything someone writes about a thing they did.

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand:

The "old" tag probably qualifies, because that very specifically means a book that is on my TBR (and in my To Read collection) that was already there when I joined LT and cataloged everything. The number of books that still carry that tag is staggering to me, really.

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Dec 1, 2006

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 125 pages of 100 books

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? When I started I was...no. When I started I just typed in the ISBN (or title, author if it didn't have one). After about 100 books, I ordered a CueCat and used that for the next...3-4000 books. I still use the Cat occasionally, but I'm not doing mass entry much (except for ebooks, and I import those - calibre does a useful export to CSV). So it's easier to type the ISBN than convince the Cat to do the job - not to mention that I have quite a few books without bar codes. I started with cataloging my SF, because that was where every other cataloging system I'd used failed - I'd get partway through and realized I'd gotten rid of books and added new ones. LT worked, so I went on and cataloged everything. Now I (theoretically) catalog as I get them - which means sometimes that I have heaps and boxes of books hovering around my desk. They don't get shelved until they're in LT. Though sometimes I read ebooks before I catalog them - then I have to hurry up and do the import so I can review them.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey, entered March 7, 2007 (took me a while after joining to actually do anything!)

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Fantasy Heartbreaker HQ by Kieron Gillen, an ebook (graphic novel) out of the Hugo packet for this year.

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Heh. Page 65 is books entered in 2013, when I did a mass import of _all_ my ebooks that I'd gotten up to that point. R to S (by title) in the approximately 1000 books I entered in one blow (and then it took me years to clean up the import!). My favorite book on the page is So You Want to Be A Wizard by Diane Duane (international edition). The most interesting may be a short story, Poppa Needs Shorts by Walt Richmond - it was a story in a magazine that my mom read years before, she remembered it and mentioned it to us shortly before this, and I tracked down a website with the story and copied it as text. Cute and interesting story about how kids (the protagonist is about 2) process the information they receive, and integrate it...and how this kid managed to save his father's life more or less accidentally.

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Took me a little while since I started with my SF shelves, but March 16 2007 I entered Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould. Must have been bought then, I hadn't finished entering SF.

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: The Nature of Oaks by Douglas W. Tallamy. Still reading random science stuff...

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Hmmm. So no Hugo stuff, nothing I got free from the publisher, no ER books, nothing from Project Gutenberg...Ah, here we go. Lad of Sunnybank by Albert Payson Terhune - does that count? I bought the ebook from Amazon August 2, 2022. Ah, and here's one that was actually a new book (not an old one turned into an ebook) - No Luck by Mel Todd. Again, ebook from Amazon, June 20, 2022. It's been a long time since I bought a new physical book - years, I'm not going back that far.

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. Actually, I reviewed my first entry, when I read it a year after I put it into LT. One Good Knight, reviewed April 13, 2008, four stars. I don't think that was my first read of the book (I believe I read it as soon as I got it), but I wasn't reviewing back then.

—In the other direction, what is your MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: Newbie Werewolf by Sue Denver, an ER book. It's on the first page of the catalog sorted by newest first. Three stars.

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry “Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” ebooks, Boxed, Reference, Inclusion, Borrowed, Lent, Discarded, Discard, Working on... I mostly use collections for things about the books, rather than about their contents.

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): Hmmm. I have a lot of tags like _Anthology.DDeeds2 - that's Dirty Deeds 2. For a while I was cataloging short stories so I could review them independently, then Tim said he was going to set up a proper system for them so I stopped, and the system never showed up. Well, sort of - there's Included In. But I'd have to go on adding the individual stories as work-level items, and there are a _lot_ of them. So mostly I don't, now, but I still identify anthologies and collections. Most of my tags are either external to the book (@ReadFrom:LibraryAF. ~Talk.s_anki) or about the contents so I can group them (Computers.Programming.Python, Cooking.Baking.Bread). @ means a book I don't own (read from the library or borrowed from someone; ~ is a marker for how I heard about the book (I don't preserve all the book bullets I get, but I do some of them). _ is something about the book, not its contents. Like that.

—Tags: Your most overused tag:...well, I don't know about 'overused' - it's used exactly as many times as I need it to be. But my biggest tag is Fic at 8,528 uses.

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: Oh, a lot of them - most of them are codes to me (as noted above). _ultb - is anyone here (still) doing Unique LibraryThing Book? I haven't checked mine for years to see if any of them have been combined or someone actually added it to LT (they're books where I'm the only owner on LT, according to LT). Most of the ~ ones (if you know that ~ to me means where I heard of the book, if that's not where I got it) - ~Netgalley is pretty obvious if you know of it, but ~MCAH (M.C.A. Hogarth)? ~NTB? I don't even remember what that is, some book newsletter I think.

Heh. And after I'd written this up, by copying the list from the question post, I see that ULTB has been independently recreated for this question... I have 167 books tagged _ultb. Vous et Nul Autre says I have 813 unique books...I bet there's a lot of combining to be done there. But yeah, I have a lot of weird books.

>145 SassyLassy:

Oooahahahahaaa! Forgot about that one... but blush as I may, I must own my hatreds, and he's quite particularly my bête noire because SOOOO adulated.

>146 cindydavid4:

I know! I couldn't believe the end, kept thinking for sure there will be some deus ex machina reversal... but, no.

>147 bragan:

So you're Team Orville, Betty! Have you watched ST Discovery, though? (I'm following on DVD, so up only on first three seasons.) Some people tell me fans of Orville tend not to like Disco and/or vice versa, so I haven't tried Orville yet.

>148 jjmcgaffey:

Vous et Nul Autre says I have 813 unique books

It's been a while, but last I knew this was actually the number of books shared with only ONE other person... has this changed? I check my "ultb"s by sorting by total members and down-down.

>149 LolaWalser: They updated the feature awhile back to allow you to see lists of books you share with no one or with 1 to 6 people (separately for each number). :)

>149 LolaWalser: Oh, I love The Orville! It starts out a bit silly and uneven (although definitely not without entertainment value), and then somehow, while you're not looking, it evolves into a really top-notch mostly-serious SF show. The recently-concluded third season just impressed the heck out of me. I really do recommend it. And not just because whether it gets renewed for another season will supposedly depend on how well it does in whatever metric they use to measure viewership success in streaming shows, either, although I do admit to some self-interest there. :)

(I may have just been going on about this on my own Club Read thread, too, as the ebook I mentioned in my post was also related to the show.)

I can't contribute any data to that particular hypothesis about Discovery, though, because I haven't watched that yet. Not past the first episode, anyway. One of these days I will catch up with it, although I'd have to do it on DVD, too.

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): 9th Jan. 2015

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 25 pages

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? I started with the books I was going to read over the next few weeks and then added what was on my bookshelves manually over time. I used to always enter everything I bought, but now I tend to just add books to LT as I'm reading them.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan on 9th Jan. 2015.

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth. I'm really interested in anything Scandinavian, be it books, interiors, lifestyle.

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: If we're including memoirs under this category then Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit by Richard Coles. Otherwise Confucius on Leadership by John Adair

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Please Don't Come Back From the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. I reviewed the very first book I added - On Chesil Beach - on 9th Jan 2011 and gave it 4.5 stars.

—In the other direction, what is your MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: I Feel Bad About my Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry “Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” ebooks, Boxed, Reference, Inclusion, Borrowed, Lent, Discarded, Discard, Working on... Abandoned, Read, Read But Unowned, To Read, etc.

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): I'm not a massive tag user, but the tag Bowie is interesting to me as a mega fan.

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Don't use tags that often

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: Don't use tags that often

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY
—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): Mar 5, 2007

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.
—Number pages in your LT library: 151 pages, 20 books on each page

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? Almost every book was added separately by ISBN

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: Mansfield Park (Jane Austen), entered on the same day I joined

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Husband, Lover, Spy: a True Story by Janice Pennington, which I read in 1994 and do not own. But I remembered it recently and wanted to list it. Pennington was one of those identical looking models on “the Price is Right” who was married to a German alpinist. He went missing while mountain climbing in Afghanistan in 1975 and it turned out he was working for the CIA, she found out years later. I had no idea there was anything like that going on when I read this because I was young and naïve, but I found it utterly fascinating.

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: none of them are interesting

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: In the Blood: Poems, by Alan Hill

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Hex: Darkland Tales by Jenni Fagan

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosphical, Religious and Institutional, by David Linberg; 19 JUN 2008, 4 stars

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library:
I write comments (reviews) on my LT threads, but rarely post them to the book’s page. The most recent one was: Menno-Nightcaps: Cocktails Inspired by that Odd Ethno-Religious Group You Keep Mistaking for the Amish, Quakers or Mormons by SL Klassen, reviewed 19 MAR 2022, 5 stars

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question) I love Collections. Here are some of my favs:

Sold, Donated, Gave to a Friend (363)
Fairy Tales & Retellings (67)
Special Editions (297)
Europa Editions (31)
Virago Press (75)
Virginia Woolf (80)
Jane Austen (91)
Canadian Lit: the Canon According to Me (87)
Art Books (41)

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed):
1976 UK Heat Wave (4)

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Non-fiction (411) - - I realize this is a silly tag, but I’ve started so I just keep using it

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: Fabrizio – my husband’s name, which you don’t see all that often in English. So when I come across a character with this name, the book gets this tag

>153 Nickelini: Now you have me wondering how many tags I have for authors.... ETA: answer: 6.
BTW: Clever original tag!

>153 Nickelini: Huh. I was there during the heat wave (and found it somewhat amusing - we were running back and forth to feed coins into the gas meter to get some heat! We'd been living in Afghanistan and the heat wave felt cold to us). So I went to check your books with that tag, and there's only two of them? Did you discard a couple? I'll see if I can find those two, though.

>155 jjmcgaffey:
It's all perspective isn't it? And whether the buildings are designed for handling heat or not. Anyway, I have four books with this setting in my library:

The Trouble With Sheep and Goats, Joanna Cannon
Proof of Love, Catherine Hall
Instructions For A Heatwave, Maggie O'Farrell
The Water Children, Anne Berry

and I also know about another:
Year of the Ladybird, Graham Joyce

I live in Alameda, CA, on the San Francisco Bay. On any given day, summer or winter, there will be people walking along the beach in shorts and t-shirts, and people in bubble jackets. It really is in what you're used to...

>157 jjmcgaffey: I live in Alameda, CA, on the San Francisco Bay. On any given day, summer or winter, there will be people walking along the beach in shorts and t-shirts, and people in bubble jackets. It really is in what you're used to...


Oh, I love your climate! Yes, I can picture that. I live in Vancouver, and we get a bit of that too. And conversely, I've been in Italy when the temps were in the mid-20s and I was hot and all the tourists were in sleeveless tops and shorts, and you could spot all the Italians in their jeans, boots, full jackets and jaunty scarves. Likewise New York City in the 90s where the women on the Upper East Side were in beautiful suits, hose and pumps. Why was I wearing half the amount of clothing and I was a melty mess?

I'm finding it interesting how people use collections vs tags.

The major difference is that LT gets wonky if you have too many collections (that may not be true now, but it was when collections started). So relatively large chunks in collections, and tags for smaller details that have more different points. Then different people apply different chunking to their libraries...

QUESTION 31: GENRE: HISTORICAL FICTION

"Historical fiction transports readers to another time and place, either real or imagined. Writing historical fiction requires a balance of research and creativity, and while it often includes real people and events, the genre offers a fiction writer many opportunities to tell a wholly unique story." — MasterClass

"To us, a “historical novel” is a novel which is set fifty or more years in the past, and one in which the author is writing from research rather than personal …"
https://historicalnovelsociety.org/defining-the-genre-what-are-the-rules-for-his...
—-Historical Novel Society

—————————————————-

The recent reading by several of us of Booth has brought this specific sub-genre to mind. Do you read and enjoy historical fiction? If you don’t read it, why not? If you do, do you read only HF from your own country? Do you prefer historical novels about a certain time period? What do you get from an historical novel? What do you look for when looking for an historical novel? Can you share with us some of your favorites and why, but also one or two you thought substandard (your standards, of course) and also why

P.S. To avoid mixing a fiction book set in, say, in 1790 written by a contemporary author of that era, let's add the parameter that we will be discussing historical novels set in the past, written in our contemporary times, say---written in the last few decades...OK?

>161 avaland: understood but how about a book written more than 50 years ago. Thinking Dickenson, Austin etc ? Never been clear on that myself.. BTW you have hit my fav genre, will write more when I get home

>162 cindydavid4: Ok, I can see that it can get messy (I think there is one or two Austen who fit the parameters). Will edit the question....

>162 cindydavid4: Did I make it better?

>161 avaland: yup, thats better :) thx

Q31 - Historical Fiction

Definition of historical fiction for me is a novel written years after the events. So Dickens' 1859 A Tale of Two Cities, set in the 1770s, would count.

I've always been a fan of historical fiction and I learned a lot about European history through the books I read when I was young. I still prefer books set in the British Isles, France or Italy. I like reading about daily life and art, and not so much about wars, battles or treaties. Probably my all time favourite is The Girl With the Pearl Earring because I love what Chevalier did with a historical figure we know little about, Vermeer, and creates an intimate, detailed novel.

Do you read and enjoy historical fiction? YES!
.
if you do, do you read only HF from your own country?

no, in fact its only been within a few years that I have read much Amerucan HF . My husband is big on US history and Ive become more interested in it as we travel, and have shared some HF reads esp about pre revolutionary and civil war times

I remember in HS reading a lot from the british isles works Mary Stewarts Arthur series, Katherien by Anya Seton, Jane Eye, Yet I stretched out as welll, reading the good earth, Kim,Heide Ive been expanding my reading globally which I am enjoying quite a bit

Do you prefer historical novels about a certain time period?

I tend to like stories that take place in the middle ages, but Ive really expanded, and will read from whatever country in whatever time.

What do you get from an historical novel?
I can travel with the author to different times and places without leaving home! Its all so fascinating. I also learn so much from them and ofter after reading one, I will look for a non fiction work along the same time and place

What do you look for when looking for an historical novel? the story needs to be of interest to me. The characters need to look dress and act and to some extent talk from the time period and place. The facts of events and real people need to be either real, or if not the changes are belivable in the time and place. I don't like overly romantic stories, or ones that center closely on war ad battles' It also helps if an author gives information about what they changed and why. and I want to see decent maps.

Can you share with us some of your favorites and why,

most recentlu calais in ordinary time this book touched everything I expected include the language being similar to Chaucher, but relatively easy to read

the court of the lionThis book about the Tang dynastu fit all of my perimeters and interested me so much that I found some historic peices to clarify some of the events and people. Was surprised how much in this novel was true

wolf hall and rest of trilogy Mantels abiliity to take a much hated man and turn him into someone we care about and want to watch. He eventually shows his true colors, but still fascinating all the way to the end.

my fav authors Sharon Kay Penman. Eliz Chadwick, Emma Donogue, Bernard Cornwell, Hilary Mantel,Sara Waters, and Ian Pears

but also one or two you thought substandard (your standards, of course) and also why

Phillipa Gregory She is known for taking an event and completely redoing it changing the story totally. as an example may I present the other bolyen girl

Kenneth Follett. I should have loved pillars of the earth the characters were all wrong, and after I think the third rape, I tossed it in the trade pile

Do you read and enjoy historical fiction? If you don’t read it, why not?
Yes, I read quite a bit. If it's well done, it's a good way to learn about a place and time, without being as dry as far too many histories are. I also enjoy a good fluff novel (historical romance - 99.44% of Regency romances, for instance), where it has historical trappings but isn't a real historical novel.

If you do, do you read only HF from your own country?
Nope. I do read some American historical fiction, but I think I read more from Britain than from America. And all over - China, Southeast Asia, Africa, Rome and the Roman Empire, whatever catches my interest.

Do you prefer historical novels about a certain time period?
Most of what I read is medieval, but the majority is slim. Earlier (as I said above, the Roman Empire), and later - as late as the 1800s or mid 1900s, especially history of science stuff.

What do you get from an historical novel?
Again, _if_ it's well done - a feel for the people and the place that a history, focusing on _what_ happened, seldom conveys. If it's poorly done, it still conveys a feel, but it's not accurate. I usually figure those out in the middle, and sometimes I bother to keep reading (if the story is good) but I stop thinking of it as a historical. Alternate history, more like.

What do you look for when looking for an historical novel?
An interesting subject, first. Biographies, history of science (how and by who and why something was discovered/developed/studied), engineering events (building of the Panama Canal, ditto Transcontinental Railroad, ditto...lots. Brunelleschi's Dome! Or battles, or - whatever strikes my interest.

Can you share with us some of your favorites and why, but also one or two you thought substandard (your standards, of course) and also why?
Favorites - Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. It's a fantastic story of early American ships and trading and navigation - and then I discovered it's a biography of an actual person (the first time I read it, in the afterword). It's a gorgeous story. I've reread it half a dozen times, at least.
The above-mentioned Brunelleschi's Dome was great, too. Spent too much time on the (possible) rivalries involved - I'd have preferred more about the dome itself and how it was developed - but still a good story.
Just read The Bowman of Crecy - the protagonist is fictional, most of the people he interacts with were real, and the afterword explains who really did what he's supposed to have done in the story. Good story and good information.
The entire Brother Cadfael series - I'm a Robin Hood fan from way back, so I knew quite a bit about Richard Lionheart, and a bit about Henry II and Eleanor, his parents. After reading Brother Cadfael, I know just as much - more, really - about Stephen and Maud and how Henry got to be king, and how messed up England was at the time. All (most of?) the protagonists are fictional, but they deal with historical events and persons.
Oh! The Sir Robert Carey series. For feel and atmosphere, and historical accuracy, _and_ a great story, all of those books (that I've read so far - up to A Plague of Angels) are _fantastic_. Made me get Steel Bonnets, which is about the same time and place (though I haven't actually read it yet), and also the historical Sir Robert Carey's memoir - P.F. Chisholm (Patricia Finney) says that reading that was what made her want to write the HF series about him.

Not favorites - Microbe Hunters, and far too many histories of museums. There's a mention of a discovery/development, then instead of going into detail about that and what grew from it the author(s) spend the next chunk of the book talking about the (possible, or documented) rivalries, feuds, battles of various sorts that the discoverer got into. YAWN. I suppose it kind of gives you a view of the place and time...but not a view I'm in the least interested in.
The Door in the Wall - OK, it's a children's story. But...I'm familiar with medieval times (see: Robin Hood fan - though this is a bit later), and I was confused by a lot of the references. My review is, I think, the longest one on LT on this book, and near the end I comment "No, I didn't go point by point - my review would have been longer than the book"! Most of my complaints were that things were explained to the protagonist that he should have been familiar with, and things were skimmed over that he might not have known (and I didn't). The world was decently depicted, but the characters didn't fit - didn't make sense within that world.
Some medieval romance - I have no idea what the book was. When the villain steals the maiden, stuffs her in his coach(?), and races off to his castle while the hero follows him by asking about the seal on the door of the coach(?!)...yeah, no. This is supposed to be medieval, not Regency - there weren't roads that anything that could be called a coach could travel on! The author didn't do their homework, and that left _huge_ plot/logic holes. I didn't read past the coach.

So I need a) a good story (characters with depth, descriptions that make sense, actions that actually advance the plot - same things I look for in every book) that b) works in the time and place it's set in that c) is reasonably accurately depicted. If A fails, or B, it doesn't matter if C is perfect, for me. Though...I'm equally picky - if B or C is flat-out wrong, A would have to be _amazing_ to make me keep reading (as I said above, if I can assign it to alternate history, I can keep reading if I think the story's worth it. I often don't).

Q31

Do you read and enjoy historical fiction? If you don’t read it, why not?
Historical fiction was one of my favourite genres for a long time, but for the last decade or so I haven't read as much of it as I would have liked. The main reason is probably that most of the historical novels that are on my shelf or my wish list are rather long and, being short on time and generally stressed, I preferred shorter novels, so I only read about one or two historical novels a year. However, I would love to read more historical fiction and hope to do so in the future.

If you do, do you read only HF from your own country?
Not at all. Most that I have read take place in the UK.

Do you prefer historical novels about a certain time period?
Most historical novels that I have read take place in the Middle Ages. There were a few others from later centuries until the 18th century.
I have also read novels taking place in the early 20th century or during World War Two, and somehow they have never felt like historical fiction because that time still feels somewhat close, but a few months ago I read the definition of "fifty years ago", so I realized that that is historical fiction, too.

What do you get from an historical novel?
They provide escapism and I love traveling to another time. I enjoy reading about all the details like the lifestyle, the clothing, the food, and the backdrop of real events such as coronations, battles, important meetings etc.

What do you look for when looking for an historical novel?
An interesting story, perhaps with protagonists that were real people, a sense of place and atmosphere, and of course a reasonable amount of accuracy, although sometimes it is not easy to judge that.

Can you share with us some of your favorites and why, but also one or two you thought substandard (your standards, of course) and also why?
My favourite is German author Rebecca Gablé, but unfortunately, only one of her historical novels has been translated to English (as far as I know): Fortune's Wheel. Most of her novels are set in medieval England, but she has also started a new series set in medieval Germany.
Also Sebastian Faulks, although I haven't read all of his historical novels.
One of my favourite novels last year was Warlight by Michael Ondaatje, another novel set during World War Two.
I have only read one novel by Tracy Chevalier so far - The Lady and the Unicorn - but definitely wish to read more of her work.
One that I did not like that much was Tod und Teufel (Death and Devil) by Frank Schätzing - it was entertaining, but the language was so modern, which destroyed the atmosphere for me.

>167 jjmcgaffey: After reading Brother Cadfael, I know just as much - more, really - about Stephen and Maud and how Henry got to be king, and how messed up England was at the time. All (most of?) the protagonists are fictional, but they deal with historical events and persons.

Sharon Kay Penman has a fantastic HF from this time when christ and his saints slept lots of battles but the characters and the scene set ups (when Maud escapes Stephen during a snowstorm by wearing white, crawling down a tower, and walking right by them) were made to be filmed! The history is all based on research and primary sources. There are some slow parts and sometimes I want to slap Maud silly, but I found it astounding story.

Oh and I love brother Caedfeal too

Q31

Do you read and enjoy historical fiction? If you don’t read it, why not? If you do, do you read only HF from your own country? Do you prefer historical novels about a certain time period? What do you get from an historical novel? What do you look for when looking for an historical novel? Can you share with us some of your favorites and why, but also one or two you thought substandard (your standards, of course) and also why

I have a very strained relationship with historical fiction. Partially this is because I do love history but get uncomfortable when bad conclusions are made. In HF, the author creates their own world and conclusions. They’re always patently wrong in some way. I have trouble with that.

I read HF, from any historical time, but on a literary basis. If it disarms my critical discomfort, than success. If not, than I won’t enjoy it. So it’s a small part of my reading relative to its prominence in fiction, but still I find I’m reading it a lot.

Things I don’t like:
- modern progressive personalities in historical setting
- especially anachronistic feminists. This is fantasy, not HF.
- long drawn out settings (often because in truth the author failed to manage that efficiently, and think that they are creating atmosphere by adding more nouns and people and events, when really they are trying to write themselves out of this problem. - See Booth, arguably)
- for me, most HF drowns itself is too much setting. I get very impatient.
- compressing historical detail in impossible ways to liven the story. (Including lots of now famous names, or adding events that really aren’t relevant)
- rosy overlays
- overly serious takes
- all other things I don’t generally like in fiction. Simplistic villains, etc

Things I do like in HF
- a sense playfulness
- an author openly acknowledging they are really writing about something else and using the historical setting as a way to get there
- a capturing of cultural mythologies or foreign to me cultural elements
- of course, the surprising capture of a time

Examples:

Wolf Hall - (Henry VIII’s England) has most of the things I don’t like, and few the things I suggested I like. Hmm. But I loved the novel. It lives in its era. It’s not too ambitious with plot and is well managed and worked over. She, Mantel, finally had to confront her historical impossibilities in the 3rd book in the series. Her Cromwell is not the secret religious reformer of history, a necessity to understand Cromwell’s fall. Oops. I forgive her, but the 3rd book tries to write its way out of an impossible conflict between these two Cromwells.

Booth - too long, too much setting for me. The first 80% of the book is set up for the assassination. But these early 19th century characters feel like 2020 personalities to me, tossed in a shack with a bunch of time-period nouns. I didn’t buy in.

The File on H. by Ismail Kadare - fiction in 1930’s historical setting (pub 1981, so on the 50 yr fringe). This is a fictional Milman Parry recording Balkan classical (Homeric?) saga singers - except moved from Serbian Yoguslavia to Albania. It’s very playful. And nothing is real except the setting. So he can make all his modern commentary within this fictional setting and still capture what feels possible. It’s also very foreign. So i have no knowledge to apply doubt.

Garden of Evening Mists - so, modern setting looking back to WW2. So a bit HF and a bit not. I liked that it captures the contemporary local cultural melange and puts it in a historical perspective. (The plot is iffy).

>170 dchaikin: That's a terrific response, Dan -- honest and well-said. I think authors use historical fiction for many things.

>170 dchaikin: modern progressive personalities in historical setting

Oh don't get me started. I do understand there were forward looking people, if not, how otherwise would we have progressed? But there are books were the anachronisms fly fast. Sometimes if the story is really good ill suspend believe, other wise, tossed to the trade pile

An auxillary to this: writers find a fascinating person or event to write about but insists adding a modern person in the furture supposedly to hlep us feel connected. Very seldom does this work (thinking of Geraldine Brooks, how she ruined a fascinating look at how this famous haggadah might have been made, but had to make the modern narrators life a mess and the end could be compared to Dan Browns) If the event/ person is that good, stay in that time and place. One time that I think it worked was in all the light we cannot see mainly because the modern character was actually the character in the past, in the future, as an epilogue that worked

>171 avaland: wow, thanks.

>172 cindydavid4: oh, I know. Also I have issues with Geraldine Brooks, including with The People of the Book. She tried a lot of things with that book, and maybe half of them really don’t work, imo. (But many readers love it)

think that really bothered me is that I first read about the book when a segment was published in the NewYorker, it was an article about the people involved in the story and how and when they met. It was so moving. But she didn't include it in the book. Would have been the perfect ending imo

I did love how she wrote the narrator's study of each mark on the hagaddah and intertwined the history of Jewish displacement and prejudice against them for so long. And loved the passover image of the young woman author sitting with the famiy. For me it worked

Interesting, she is a journalist by trade (as was her late husband Tony Horowitz) It shows, in her non fiction work which are so much better than her fiction, it seems. She has a new one out called horse, and I don't honestly think I want to try it.

>169 cindydavid4: I have When Christ and His Saints Slept, haven't read it yet - didn't know it was Stephen and Maud! That moves it up the list, a little.

I generally only read historical fiction by authors in whom I am otherwise critically interested. The period in which the book is set is of little concern, although I did make an exception recently by rereading Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge in the light of of the January 6 riot and similar popular uprisings. Even a period in which I have little or no interest, such as the Middle Ages, can take on appeal in the hands of a writer I admire. On the other hand, after reading Ainsworth’s Old St Paul’s last year, a novel set during the Great Plague of London which I thought would offer interesting comparisons with the current Pandemic, I realised that interesting content could not redeem third-rate form for this former English major. At the moment I am rereading The Leopard as a follow-up to Acton’s The Last Bourbons of Naples and in this case my recently enhanced interest in/knowledge of the historical period has added a lot to my appreciation of the book. I also enjoyed Lampedusa, a fictional account of the author’s writing of The Leopard. But I find that the more recent and hence familiar the period in which a work of historical fiction is set, the more most authors like to linger on the period details, as dchaikin notes in answer 170. Like the camera in, say, Foyle’s War staying just a bit too long on that vintage icebox someone located. As for the mindset of the characters, the Victorians cheerfully imposed their own regardless of the period in which the book is supposed to be set. Cf Romola, or Hereward the Wake. Modern authors are generally okay with creating secondary characters who display the unexamined biases of the time in which a historical novel is set, but have difficulty creating a likeable hero or heroine who is not anachronistically “progressive.” I’m not sure we’d really enjoy it if they tried, any more than the Victorians would have.

>170 dchaikin: She, Mantel,

I saw what you did there!

Some interesting tidbits regarding what HF might offer a reader

https://lithub.com/historical-fiction-is-more-important-than-ever-10-writers-wei...

very interesting essay, which also sent more book titles to my list. There was one thing that stood out tho "Historical fiction also delivers facts in a manner that people find easier to grasp than in a history book, so it can reach a bigger audience and have a greater impact. "

This happens as long as the facts are facts, not changed on the whim of the writer, tho modified to fit the story she is trying to tell. and that the reader understands what changes were made and why.

I read relatively little historical fiction but do try to pay attention to what gets praised, as I agree that good historical fiction can be great history. History itself is far from being an objective discipline and I approach it with just as many misgivings as I would any fiction, when it comes to what's "true".

As to the oft-voiced intolerance of anachronisms... while I agree in general, I think we must remember that we bring other kind of prejudice to reading historical fiction (or history), which is our many preconceived and stubborn notions of what the past was like. Notoriously, our ideas have been shaped for centuries under the influence of white male supremacy. It's incredibly recently that people have been taking second looks at what we thought we knew about the past, our ancestors, what they did.

I'm particularly sensitive to dismissal of "progressive" thinking as inconceivable in this or that past era. When we know that there existed egalitarian religions and practices millennia before ours, that there were atheists in the Middle Ages (including among illiterate peasants) and so on, I'm not sure what general idea gets to be "impossible" in any era.

This is particularly galling because it usually neglects the point of view that is the most relevant--those who are oppressed. Spartacus was a slave and didn't like it, although he wasn't a modern man. We have evidence of women's rebellions against the patriarchy, private and collective, from ancient times. (And I include every religious precept contra women's freedom as such evidence.) When trans-Atlantic slavery started, with its justification in the newfangled doctrine of White supremacy, black people had more than enough intellectual wherewithal to rise against it, time after time. For these groups, there is nothing "anachronistic" about wanting to emancipate themselves.

>180 LolaWalser: great post. For myself, being rebellious against or in any way counter to injustice isn’t time-stamped. But the mindset of that rebellion is. A fictional character’s mindset should come out of the mindset of the novel’s world.

>181 dchaikin: Margaret Mitchell was probably able to create an unselfconsciously pro-slavery heroine in Scarlett O’Hara because her own thinking hadn’t evolved much from that of the period in which the book is set. It’s hard to imagine Gone with the Wind being written today.

Q31 Historical fiction

Do you read and enjoy historical fiction? If you don’t read it, why not? If you do, do you read only HF from your own country? Do you prefer historical novels about a certain time period? What do you get from an historical novel? What do you look for when looking for an historical novel? Can you share with us some of your favorites and why, but also one or two you thought substandard (your standards, of course) and also why

— Yes, I always have, and with a lot of pleasure.
— I’m fairly catholic about place and period, and I like the way HF can give you an easy way in to a period or a place you don’t know much about yet, but obviously I do have a tendency to gravitate towards things that reflect my other areas of interest. I’m not a huge enthusiast for some currently-fashionable topics like the Tudors or 18th century America, for instance, but I don’t actively boycott them.
— When I read an historical novel, I’m looking for something that is reasonably faithful to what is known about the period it’s set in but that also adds something from the perspective of the time the author is living in. The “added value” should be literary as well as historical, although obviously the balance between the two will vary from book to book. Sometimes the advantage a historical novelist has from writing many years after the event is the ability to focus on characters or viewpoints that would have been invisible to a contemporary writer (cf. >180 LolaWalser:); sometimes it is in being able to use new approaches to narrative and style. Sir Walter Scott couldn’t have written a book like Wolf Hall, even though he probably had almost as much documentation about the period available as Mantel did.
I accept that there’s a place for anachronism in historical fiction. Sometimes writers have to “break the rules” to be able to do something interesting and worthwhile. But there’s a difference between breaking the rules deliberately (and visibly) and the kind of anachronism that creeps in as a result of laziness and bad research. If characters are supposed to be speaking 19th-century English, for instance, they shouldn’t say “train station” or “I’ll put that on hold”.

A quick run-through of books I’ve tagged “historical fiction” recently:
— Days of greatness by Walter Kempowski : the author writing about his parents’ childhood in Germany during and before WWI. Very clearly marked by his consciousness of what would happen later in German history, lots about the knee-jerk nationalism of the Wilhelmite period that had a lot to do with plunging Europe into two world wars.
— The magician by Colm Tóibín : I had a hard time seeing how this gained from being written as a novel rather than a straight biography.
— Das Hamlet-Komplott by Robert Löhr : this was really all about the naughty pleasure of seeing serious people like Goethe being given silly things to do. Fun, but not a history lesson.
— Birds without wings by Louis de Bernières : over-long, and a rather one-sided view of things
— Die profanen Stunden des Glücks by Renate Feyl : another novel that might just as easily have been a biography, but I think Feyl did have a good reason for using fiction to make readers aware of the importance of the semi-forgotten woman writer Sophie von La Roche.
— The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk : a superb historical novel set in 18th century Poland and focussing on events that don’t fit well with the nationalistic orthodoxy of the people in power in present-day Poland. Added value both in the history it exposes and the very inventive technique it uses.
— The prisoner of paradise by Romesh Gunesekera : deals with abuses of colonial power in early 19th century Sri Lanka and Mauritius, so it passes the test of highlighting history we probably don’t know about, but it treats the material in a rather routine, predictable way.
— Sea of poppies by Amitav Ghosh : a writer who is even more obsessed with getting the eccentricities of 19th century English right than I am, an interesting subject, but a book that takes an inordinately long time to get anywhere. I still haven’t worked up the courage to tackle the other two parts of the trilogy.

sorry double post

>180 LolaWalser:
I'm particularly sensitive to dismissal of "progressive" thinking as inconceivable in this or that past era. When we know that there existed egalitarian religions and practices millennia before ours, that there were atheists in the Middle Ages (including among illiterate peasants) and so on, I'm not sure what general idea gets to be "impossible" in any era.

I agree with you, after all without those people, we would not have changed one iota. but a few reviews here agree and yet thought the ending not fittiing

>181 dchaikin: For myself, being rebellious against or in any way counter to injustice isn’t time-stamped. But the mindset of that rebellion is. A fictional character’s mindset should come out of the mindset of the novel’s world.

yes, exactly. See the review below

Further, if an author wishes to create a strong female character who is also becoming fashionably liberated from the mores of her own social-historical niche, it ought in all decency to be done in a manner consistent - in thought, in speech, and in behavior - with her own time, and not our own. That is, it ought to follow the pattern (known or carefully imagined) of real women who rebelled in similar circumstances. Glaringly modern phrasing and formulations of thought not only stick out startlingly from the fabric of the prose, but seem to be evidence of an insensitive ear to contemporary speech, carelessness, or worse. (Euydice)

I love historical fiction when it's done well, which basically comes down to the pornography non-definition—I know it when I see it. I'm not a big fan of romance, YA, mysteries, or women's fictiontype stuff, and read more along literary fiction lines in general.

ots of the titles/authors noted here. Also Andrea Barrett, who writes lovely historical fiction about explorers and scientists, and the great Dorothy Dunnett, whose Lymon and House of Niccolò series I haven't finished but just love (though they're dense and want a lot of looking up of words—if I decide to go back and read straight through at some point I may invest in the companion volume, though reading on my iPad allows for easy lookups as well).

Did anyone mention Sylvia Townsend Warner? I really liked The Corner That Held Them, though I know a lot of folks found the plotlessness annoying

Other recent hf I liked that hasn't been mentioned (I think... I'm a lazy scroller) includes Lauren Groff's Matrix (12th-13th century French nuns), Frans G. Bengtsson's The Long Ships (10th-century Vikings), Susan Stinson's Spider in a Tree (18th-century Massachusetts Puritans), Arthur Philips's The King at the Edge of the World (Elizabethan England), Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink (inquisition-era Amsterdam and England), Sean Michaels's Us Conductors (1930s and '40s U.S. and Russia).

I have a particular soft spot for NYC historical fiction, like E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley and World's Fair, Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, and Stacy Carlson's underrated shaggy but wonderful Among the Wonderful. I'm sure there are more, but those are some of my sweet spots.

I love historical fiction, but I don't use the tag a lot because of the problem of definition. When I do, I usually require that the book include a famous historical personage. Therefore, in my library Wolf Hall has the historical fiction tag, but The Long Ships does not. I have used the tag 70 times whereas if I search my collection for historical fiction, 532 books come up. What a mess!

Some favorites (4.5 or 5 stars) from this larger selection, that I don't think have been mentioned, include:

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset (14th c. Norway)
Joan of Arc by Mark Twain (yes a serious novel and a work he considered his best)
Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker (WWI)
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes (Vietnam War)
In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner (Cambodian genocide)
The Gendarme by Mark Mustian (Armenian genocide)
HHhH by Laurent Binet (assassination of Heydrich
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman (Russia in WWII)
Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Japanese occupation of Malaysia)
The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai (Vietnam War)

>181 dchaikin:

I kinda think I know what you mean but I'm not sure what you mean by mindset? In any case, it goes back to our preconceptions: how do we know the mindset of the past, I mean REALLY, scientifically know? Take ancient Egypt for instance (the setting of one novel that prompted by Mark's list I could remember loving as a teen, Sinuhe the Egyptian)--sure we have a certain archaeological knowledge and even some literature and history (already twisted every which way at the time of writing, looking at you, Herodotus), but how do we decide based on that that we have pinned down the period's "mindset"? Which also, by the way, implies a single one...

I'd suggest that any sufficiently general idea is expressible at any time in human history. The form will be different, the context will be different, but the essential will be conceivable, understandable, thinkable to, if not every single one, then SOME Babylonians, Greeks, Sioux etc. Take one of our modern buzzwords, "intersectionality". Now if I were writing a ("realistic") fiction about ancient Sparta, I wouldn't put that word into a character's mouth. But have a character point out that X is particularly harshly burdened because not just a slave but also lamed?--sure, simple enough. And there you have it--you could imagine a discussion about "intersectionality" in ancient Sparta. Would it be exactly the term we talk about, would it have our context--no. But the basic idea is reachable across millennia.

>185 cindydavid4:

That review seems to focus on technical mistakes, such as Mark mentioned too--wrong language, anachronistic knowledge... When it comes to psychological attitudes, I think it's much more difficult to decide what goes and what doesn't in any given period (and really says more about the reader and/or writer).

I'm reminded of wondering, as a kid, if Jane Austen knew them "dirty" words. I was (suppose still am) a very literal-minded sort and needed proof for anything that wasn't demonstrable to eyes or reason. But this question seemed destined to remain unanswered. There were no dirty words in her novels, or any other novels of her time I had access to. But as a kid governed by severe parent-imposed taboos, and yet exposed to occult knowledge by streetwise peers, I knew the appearances may hide a very different reality. So this nagged at me--not out of fascination for the "dirty words" themselves, but for what it implied about the way people behaved AND books are written. In short, that people are always hiding something and that there is no "authentic" representation of reality in fiction.

>188 LolaWalser: dirty words — fascinating thought! I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get a version of P&P in the style of James Kelman…

But I’m sure that kind of insight is one of the benefits of reading old books early in life. As an adult you are happy to accept that kind of convention almost without noticing it, but as a child you really want to know how people in 1813 could live through the whole of a three volume novel without once going to the toilet, or even thinking about needing to.

>186 lisapeet: Did anyone mention Sylvia Townsend Warner? I really liked The Corner That Held Them, though I know a lot of folks found the plotlessness annoying

I didn't care all that much for it ( much prefered Matrix same concept much more intersing story. However I did love lolly willowes which I still reread now and again.

I have a particular soft spot for NYC historical fiction,

did you read City of dreams ? just an outstanding history of NYC, within a HF framework

like you, not a fan of romance or mysteries tho Ive read one or two that were not to bad. For romance thinking the greatest knight and for mysteries Caedfael

Q31. Don't hate me for giving a long response, but this is my favorite genre so I have a lot to say and a lot to recommend!

I read a LOT of historical fiction, probably because it was the first “adult” genre to which I was introduced. I was an early reader, and my mother realized by the time I was 10 or 11 that I had outgrown Dr. Seuss, Nancy Drew, and similar series. She asked the local librarian to recommend some appropriate adult books. The first one I remember reading was Katherine by Anya Seton. (And I remember that it had a few scenes that were definitely surprising to an 11-year old!) Books by Rafael Sabbatini, Daphne du Maurier, Mary Renault, and Thomas B. Costain soon followed. I loved the detailed descriptions of earlier times and places, and that remains, although I am now a lot pickier about the historical novels that I choose.

I do not enjoy books in which the principle storyline is romance (although I tolerated it in the first two Outlander books, mainly because of the thrilling political milieu). You won’t catch me reading Georgette Heyer, for example. I’ve tried; just not for me. In the last few years I have gotten bored with the formulaic novels set in two time periods, modern and contemporary. It seems to me that one of the earliest to use this framework was A. S. Byatt’s Possession, but we’ve since been bombarded with copycat versions of art students finding mysterious portraits, young women finding packets of their great grandmothers’ love letters, and so on. I usually pass as soon as I recognize the cliché in a book’s description. I also demand that a book be well written, and I cannot abide sloppy research. IMO, Goodreads and Amazon need to add another category: Literary Historical Fiction.

As to places and time periods, I have a lot of favorites but am always willing to consider new ones. As a retired professor of Early Modern English Literature, of course a main interest is anything set in the British Isles in the medieval through Victorian eras, with special focus on the years between 1485 and about 1800. But I also have particular interest in France, from the court of Louis XIV through the defeat of Napoleon; the American colonial period, including early settlements and the witchcraft trials; the Russian Revolution; the colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania; the American Revolutionary period and the Civil War; Irish historical periods, especially the struggles against British rule and the experience of Irish immigrants in the US; the partition of India and Pakistan—to name more than a few. I’ve read and enjoyed various historical novels set in various periods in Asia and Africa, a few in Mexico, and even in the North Pole. Offhand, I don’t think I’ve read anything set in South America, unless The House of the Spirits counts.

Here are a few of my all-time favorites, 5-star reads from my LibraryThing list:

Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel. I loved all three books in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, friend and chief counselor to Henry VIII, but this one is just brilliant. I count not put it down. I loved the style, it was full of delightful unexpected turns, and I’ve rarely been so moved by a book, both emotionally and intellectually. For me, it is the perfect historical novel. A close second would be Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, for the same reasons.

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru. Another one that totally stunned me the first time I read it. It’s set first in India and later in England. In a way, it’s another rise and fall book in which a rich boy is thrown into the streets when his father dies and struggles and cheats his way back into upper society. But what I loved about it is the way that Kunzru plays with identity, making ethnicity, caste, nationality, personal history and even gender fluid. Supposedly it’s a satire on Kipling’s Kim.

Small Island, Andrea Levy’s wonderful story Jamaicans who fought for England in World War II and immigrated after to have a better life, only to face racism. That may sound a bit grim, but it’s also the exploration of love, two marriages, and perseverance, and the four main characters, especially Hortense, and wonderfully drawn.

A few authors who rarely miss the mark: Rose Tremain, Jeffrey Lent, Madeline Miller, Pat Barker.

And a few really bad ones:

Queen of Subtleties by Suzannah Dunn. Horribly written; for one thing, Katherine Howard and her ladies in waiting use Valley Girl slang.

Anything by Posie Graeme-Evans. Floridly written bodice-rippers.

Hester: The Missing Years of The Scarlet Letter by Paula Reed. Based on impossible premises: Chillingworth has made Hester’s illegitimate daughter his heir; Hester returns to Oliver Cromwell’s England (!) to restore her reputation; she develops the paranormal ability to see sin hovering over people like an aura, which Cromwell believes is a gift from God. Plus really, really bad writing.

Thanks for indulging me! I was SO excited to see this question. And I look forward to reading your recommendations

Q30 LIST: MESSING AROUND IN YOUR LT LIBRARY

—Date you joined LT (on your profile page): June 7, 2007

*NOW*: Sort your library in style "A"and by "Entry Date", with oldest books first.

—Number pages in your LT library: 69

—Assuming you entered your books in your LT library…. HOW did you go about it? And do you still do it the same way? Hmm, I just go to Add Books, search, and click the book I want to add. Initially I went through my shelves and boxes. Since, I’ve tried to remember to add anything new.

—Looking at your first page: What is the FIRST book of any kind you entered in your LT library… and the date posted: The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru, entered 6-17-22 (along with a LOT of other books, so I must have been adding shelves).

—Most RECENT book you entered (on that last/most recent page of your library): Jeoffry by Oliver Soden

—Most INTERESTING book on the page that falls roughly halfway between the first and last pages of your library: Little-Known Museums in and Around London by Rachel Kaplan

—FIRST non-fiction entered in your library: Mary, Queen of Scots, and the murder of Lord Darnley by Alison Weir

—MOST RECENT non-fiction in your library: Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

—Go to your most recent page (newest entries): tell us the most recent book you bought NEW: Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat by Oliver Soden (Kindle)

— The EARLIEST book listed in your library which you reviewed, name of book, date of review, and rating, if you gave it one. The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

—In the other direction, what is you MOST RECENT review and what page is the book on in your library: Jeffry: The Poet’s Cat by Oliver Soden

—Now go to the TAGS page. In the left hand column under “Collections” and excluding the entry 
“Your Library” tell us the names of a few of your “collections” (if you don’t use collections ignore this question)

—Tags: Your most interesting or original tag…(with explanation, as needed): Given Away (books I want to remember that I read. This reminds me not to search for them on shelves or in boxes because they are GONE!)

—Tags: Your most overused tag: Historical Fiction!

—Tags: One the rest of us might not understand: My tags are pretty bland. Maybe Elizabeth of Bohemia or Iconography?

>186 lisapeet: Have you come across My Brother’s Keeper, by Marcia Davenport? Like Homer and Langley, a fictionalised account of the Collyer brothers. A Freudian take, where they are essentially the superego and id of the same person. Davenport’s real interest was opera (she was an announcer on the Met broadcasts) and a romantic interlude with an opera singer on an Italian lake is worked in, not entirely convincingly. But all quite fun, esp if you enjoy stories about hoarders. I like to read them to reassure myself that I am a *collector*.

>180 LolaWalser: Great post...

Damn! all this juicy conversation and I don't have time to read it....yet. We are headed for a lakeside cabin in midcoast, Maine this morning and after we unload perhaps I'll catch up on the conversation via cell phone...(or I'll be in the water)...maybe I'll read it while he drives....

Another thought: what about historical fiction as a way of circumventing censorship? —authors who managed to sneak in “forbidden” subject-matter by setting their stories in the past. It’s probably not so relevant for most of us nowadays, but — at a trivial level — I can certainly remember the joy of discovering that the Toga Section of the school library was awash with positive descriptions of same-sex relationships (Mary Renault!), at a time when no-one would ever have considered including an LGBT section… I’m sure there are other examples.

(Of course that applies to historical subjects in other art-forms as well — e.g. all those nineteenth-century revolutions that are said to have been started by over-excited opera-goers…)

>191 Cariola: In the last few years I have gotten bored with the formulaic novels set in two time periods, modern and contemporary. It seems to me that one of the earliest to use this framework was A. S. Byatt’s Possession, but we’ve since been bombarded with copycat versions of art students finding mysterious portraits, young women finding packets of their great grandmothers’ love letters, and so on. I usually pass as soon as I recognize the cliché in a book’s description. I also demand that a book be well written, and I cannot abide sloppy research. IMO, Goodreads and Amazon need to add another category: Literary Historical Fiction.

oh god yes! I loved Possession, but mentioned above how Geraldine Brooks ruined a book for me by making her modern narrator a mess. I to tire of the mysterious portrair love letters etc. If an event or person is interesting enough there is no need to make a modern 'connection'As I said some authors can pull it off, but few and far betweet. I also demand a book well written and expect it to be well researched (without it becoming a research dump, that is another problem all together) I like the idea of literary historic fiction, but if we cant completely define what HF is, it would be inpossible to define LHF except I know it when I see it.

oh and yes House of Spirits count. Read more by her. Eva Luna has much of the same magical realism, that makes her works so good

Cant tell you how many times Ive reread WH, about every other year it seems. and yes to small island a book that taught me more about a period and place I knew little about.

oh ans this thread is made for long posts! no apologies needed

>191 Cariola: >196 cindydavid4: I agree it would be impossible to define literary historical fiction. It’s the same problem literary fiction has (or why we don’t tend to like “mfa-ish” writing when it all begins to resemble each other.) There is an implied originality and new perspective that only exists until it gets imitated. I think once you define it, it means it basically must have become a genre and no longer really is whatever was meant by literary. But, I think on a personal level, we can keep in our mental pockets some ideas that we feel make a work literary.

Sorry, I blame Robert Musil for this side track, but it suddenly occurs to how inherently contradictory this kind of definition might be.

>195 thorold: authors who managed to sneak in “forbidden” subject-matter by setting their stories in the past.

When I read this I immediately thought of political writers, specifically of Ismail Kadare, a master of the technique, but "toga sections" and other novels, like those about the French courts, were as you say, real eye openers too. I remember trying to work out what courtesans and mignons were without having to ask an adult.

Some of the lives of the saints in the library at my convent school also had lots for a young child to puzzle over. What was it the evil man wanted Saint Maria Goretti to do? The nuns would never explain beyond a "bad thing".

All this leads me to think of omission as a form of censorship.

QUESTION 32 : MEN WRITING WOMEN….AND WOMEN WRITING MEN
IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION*

*Discussion parameters: Contemporary Fiction here shall be defined as fiction written AND set from 1990 - the present. For discussion purposes we will eliminate SF & Fantasy, Historical fiction; but mystery/crime novels and genre romance can be discussed if written and set in the contemporary time period.

Using your personal reading from these last three or so years as reference…do you find yourself reading more books where the author is of a different gender than that of their main character? If not, do you think the lack of this is due to your personal choices in reading, or something else. If so, what? Is any one gender better than the other at writing the opposite sex? Keeping in mind your own gender bias, how would you rate some of these authors’ creations? If negative, what do you think they are doing wrong?

Please share with us some examples from your reading.

Note: I realize that ‘gender’ is more complicated these days but had to start the discussion somewhere….

I've read so many books by women with a male protagonist, or about men, that it rarely registers. It always registers when a man writes a book with a female protagonist, especially if they do it well. This has been true since I was in high school. I clearly remember reading DH Lawrence and being surprised that DH was a man.

It's hard to keep my mind on contemporary literature, since I read little of it, but some that stand out in my mind are

The Blue Notebook and Celestine - two books written by men but from the perspective of a teenage girl. Both very good.

An Unnecessary Woman - spans an elderly woman's life (does that count?), written by a Lebanese male author but strong female protagonist. A great book that I read this year.

And The Swallows of Kabul is a particularly interesting case to me. It is written by a man, an officer in the French military, who wrote under a female pseudonym in order to skirt the censors. So although the protagonist is male, I think it really interesting that the author pretended to be a woman. The opposite is often true, women writing crime, for instance, often use their initials so that men will buy their books. Don't get me started...

this will be difficult; I rarely notice who the author is until close to the end of the book, let alone notice the gender . That being said, I generally find woman have less trouble writing male characters than men have of women, perhaps because they are more observant ? I am often surprised when I finish the book and look for author info, to find how well some male authors are able to pull off women characters. Two examples from recent reading wrong end of the telescope about a trans woman dr from Lebanon, seemlessly written by a male writer, and zorrie about an orphan during the depressing, surviving on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and Drifting west, settling in Indiana and her life there. Its the kind of novel Id expect from Marilynne Robinson, but the pleasant surprise was realizing that Laird Hunt, a male author, wrote this.

I think for me, more than gender, is the age of the author and the age of the character. There are some books about older characters written by 20 year old ish when you wouldnt expect them to have that knowldege, and some much older authors able to recall what it was like to be an adolscent.

ETA lisa, great minds think alike!

>200 labfs39: Are you saying you don't read much fiction that has been written and set in the last 30 years? Translations count :-)

>202 avaland: Even so! I went through the last year (65 books), and only maybe five books that I didn't already mention. So not a robust sample. I guess I need to go through my lists for the last few years to gather more...

>203 labfs39: I just went back through to and including my Club Read 2019 and found less than I thought there would be. Turns out, some of my favorite authors are really good at writing women. Take, for example, Abdulrazak Gurnah's early novel, Dottie which I finished recently and probably was the inspiration for the question. He writes with perception, depth and, I think, great empathy or intimacy (which is why I love reading his work). "Dottie" is a tough story to tell (and read), and the character of Dottie is wonderfully complex.... Other authors I read... Jean Christian Grondahl whose Often I am Happy tells the story of a recent widow named Ellinor who has conversations with a dead female friend about her recently dead husband (that's just one example, but it got me hooked on his work) Olaf Olafsson's The Journey Home is a tale of one woman's return to her home in Iceland after many decades in Europe. His Restoration, is a wonderful, sad, immersive story of women, love, art and war....

Mia Couto's 2015 Woman of the Ashes feature Imani, a fifteen-year-old girl, who is asked to be an interpreter during a war. He tends to mostly write about men

Seffi Atta's latest novel, The Bad Immigrant was an excellent family story with a focus on the father, an intelligent, cranky, skeptical Lit professor. I thought him quite believable.

I was trying to come up with a "bad" example but didn't find one in my last four years of reading....

Conversations here on QUESTIONS tend to go their own way....

Booker lists

Author/main character 2019-2020-2021
Male author/male MC 5-4-4
Male author/female MC 0-0-0
Female author/male MC 1-2-2
Female author/female MC 6-7-3
Female author/ trans MC 1*-0-0
Male author/Mixed MC 0-0-2**
Female author/mixed MC 0-0-1
Male author/non-human MC 0-0-1

*Frankissstein - Dr. Ry is born female and in transition to male
** Light Perpetual follows 3 boys and 1 girl, but kind of focuses on her husband. Maybe male author,male main character

———-

One conclusion is that a male author writing a female main character is missing. (A possible inclusion is Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Klara isn’t actually a person, but has female sympathy since she is girl’s artificial friend. In the audiobook she is read by a woman and I instinctually classified her a woman, but that’s actually interpretation, and probably should be left unsettled.) Possible explanations are that it is either very hard, not done as much, or less appreciated by the Booker judges.

I think I don't read enough fiction, especially contemporary fiction, to answer this fully.

However, one general issue occurs to me, which may relate to the problem men have with writing women (assuming there is such a problem). It's this: there are umpteen books, media channels, blogs, vlogs, TikToks and whatnots, by which men spread vicious misinformation about women, from crassest misogyny to just plain dumb "received wisdom" tales. There are entire movements now, of "incels", PUAs (Pick Up Artists) and other assorted MRAs ("mens rights activists", "meninists"), which command the attention of millions of (often) young men and boys. These men take parts in hounding women online and sometimes offline (doxxing etc.), as in, for example, organizing site-bombings and Twitter attacks on women who play "gender-bent" characters, or just plain any "strong female characters" etc. Moreover, there are men inspired by these misogynist movements, who have actually gone and murdered women en masse (and the occasional male bystander).

Now, I think this much is clear: there is no corresponding phenomenon on women's side. Women may not all have a great grasp on men's characters, but neither do they seem to gather in huge social groups to spread misinformation about men, or to degrade men massively to other women with fantastic commercial success (just look at that pig incel guru Peterson and the money he made off woman-hate). In short, women, for whatever reason seem less prone to believe bollocks about men than men are prone to believe just any old shit about women.

My conclusion: men talking shit about women, propagating that shit and cementing that shit, MIGHT also have an effect, down the line, on what emerges in their fiction.

>206 LolaWalser: I wonder about a corollary to all that. Because of all you note, there is a kind of spotlight is on sexist stuff (in some hard to specify but broad circles, including literary circles). Does that silence male authors?

(The one true exception to the rule in the Booker lists I summed is The Promise by Damon Galgut, with two main characters, brother and sister. The sister is a kind of saint that carries the guilt of history inside her. That’s playing it very safe.)

Well, I don't know if men are silenced. You mean self-censoring and not writing women characters? Honestly, I don't read enough current books to tell. (And I'm not sure about my criteria either. Back when The Corrections came out I thought Franzen was a good overall psychologist, but he seems to top the lists of authors disliked by women.) But your little factoid up there about the Booker is interesting.

I don't choose books for this reason, one way or another, but in looking over my reading of the past few years, all of the examples I could find were of women authors doing good jobs with male protagonists and/or important characters. The examples that I found on my recent reading lists are:

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Interestingly, and I'm not sure I can explain this in any satisfying manner, I find Song of Solomon to be the best book of that quartet overall, although, of the four, Morrison's male characters may be the least effective all in all. I think it's because I found Morrison's overall theme so powerful in Song of Solomon. That's not to slight the other three books I mentioned, all of which I thought were excellent.

The only novel I can think of to the contrary (male author writing good female character{s}) offhand is the job Charles Frazier did with the two main female characters in Cold Mountain, though it's been a long time since I read that book and my recollection might be off.

>206 LolaWalser: I think another part of the problem may be that popular culture has long perpetuated the idea that women are mysterious and unfathomable and men can't possibly understand us. In order for a man to write a believable, well-rendered woman character, he first has to understand that women are people, not some bizarre and unknowable Other.

The idea that men are fully human with contradictions, foibles, inner realities, etc, is well established and understood by women, because so much of the Western Literary Canon that we read all the way through our schooling examines focuses on male characters with genuine depth, and most of it was written by men to boot.

Think of the way children's, middle grade, and even YA fiction tends to be marketed and thought of: books about boys are for everyone, but books about girls are just for girls.

>209 rocketjk: I'd be surprised if anyone choose their books for this reason.

>211 avaland: Sure! Me, too. I was thinking of this part of the question, though. . . .

"do you find yourself reading more books where the author is of a different gender than that of their main character? If not, do you think the lack of this is due to your personal choices in reading, or something else."

>210 Julie_in_the_Library:

Yes indeed, you're quite right to highlight how traditional this asymmetry in thinking about men and women is. (I was sorta including that under "received wisdom tales"). There is a huge cultural investment, not just in literature but in visual arts, and even philosophy, in the idea of the "Eternal Feminine". And it trickles down into everyday life in such questions, among others, as "what do women want", as if all women were the same or totally incomparable to men.

QUESTION 32: MEN WRITING WOMEN….AND WOMEN WRITING MEN IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

This is a question for which I have no answer. I went over my reading list for the past three years and found almost no books which met the criteria. I am definitely stuck in the past!

The gender of an author is not important to me, however, I probably read more male than female authors, only because it was they who were being published in the bad old days.

>212 rocketjk: Yeah, I don't consider this at all when I am finding books to read. Often its a happy surprise but it just doesn't concern me enough to bother checking.

Q32: I also don’t have much in my recent reading that strictly falls within the terms of the question. A few random thoughts anyway:

— We now tend to look askance at men writing women, for the good reasons Lola and others mentioned above. But in the nineteenth century (and before) the prejudice was the other way round: male writers (think of Trollope, for instance) switched between male and female main characters without hesitation, but a woman writing a male main character was laying herself open to being accused of straying outside her area of competence. Or worse, of displaying unladylike knowledge. (George Eliot had the nerve to risk it a couple of times, but most didn’t). Maybe in a decade or two we’ll have decided to let the reader set the pronouns for both author and main character at the time of reading.

— Light fiction, such as comic novels and crime stories, seems to have a much greater tolerance for cross-dressing than serious literary fiction, maybe because we aren’t expecting profound psychological insights. Gender in a crime story typically only seems to affect the way other characters react towards the main character, but not really how the character acts in the investigation. Alexander McCall Smith, for instance, always seems to use female main characters and mostly gets away with it. There are even one or two series of detective stories where we never learn the main character’s gender at all, without that detracting from the way the story works.

never mind.