Q3 FAVOURITE READS

Hard to believe we've reached this point in the year already. There's still a fortnight left in the quarter, but it's time to start thinking about what reading stood out for you in Q3, and maybe even what might have disappointed you.

Let your fellow readers know.

I'm happy to post early. These days, I no longer finish books that are substandard or not doing anything for me, so all my reading rates high. Although, I'll give poetry the extra effort and a re-read, if needed. I'm selective enough with nonfiction so those reads are usually successful.

Best Fiction:

Dottie by Abulrazak Gurnah (1990, recently re-published). An earlier work from the Nobel Prize winner. An intimate coming of age story of a African-Jamaican young woman in the UK. ETA set in the 60s.

Q Road by Bonnie Jo Campbell (2002, novel/Michigan) A short novel set in the rural Michigan-- often humorous, with quirky characters, but still has depth, empathy and thoughtfulness.

Favorite Volume of Poetry:

Sue Sinclair's Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems (2002, Newfoundland, CANADA)

Nonfiction: I only read the one but it was very good and not terribly dense: The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native by Douglas W. Tallamy

>2 avaland: I have a copy of Dottie. I found it last year, used.

It’s been a weird year for me. Nothing stands out, which is partially just my mood at the moment. For the quarter, I enjoyed these (in the order I read them)

- Persuasion
- The File on H. by Ismail Kadare
- The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
- By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

Happily for me, I read quite a few great books this quarter. My top five (can't shave it down any finer than that) of the quarter (presented in chronogical order of my reading rather than via any qualitative ranking) would be:

The Family Moskat by Isaac Singer
Song Solomon by Toni Morrison
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn

I hope I don't jinx myself by answering this question with ten days to go, but so far I have had no five star reads, but three 4.5 star reads.

FICTION:
-Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

MEMOIR:
-Born a crime: stories from a South African childhood by Trevor Noah
-Moon in Full: A Modern-Day Coming-of-Age Story by Marpheen Chann (in part because it is set in my home state and I enjoyed reading about the area I grew up in).

>5 labfs39: Born a Crime is one of my favourite books I've read in the past 5 years. I finally found a copy for my husband to read recently. (I didn't want to pay full price again as I had already given away my copy)

>5 labfs39: If you haven't had a five star read so far, maybe "jinxing" yourself might be a good thing with enough time left to read one!

>6 Nickelini: I was unfamiliar with Trevor Noah prior to reading the book, but had read so many rave reviews on LT that I decided to try it. Exceptional memoir, and I learned not only about his story (and his mother's), but about South African apartheid. I'm glad you were able to find another copy.

>7 SassyLassy: That's true! But now the pressure is on to choose my next book wisely. Or maybe I've just gotten too stingy with my stars. I have only given one book five stars all year, I Will Never See the World Again, back in January.

Quite a few translated works:

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura
Death Sentences by Chiaki Kawamata
I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

Even a translated Memior/Diary:

Hiroshima Diary by Michihiko Hachiya

Not a terrible quarter but not everything was exceptional, not bad either. Lots of Average books this year.

>3 dchaikin: I'm debating with myself as to whether I think you would like it. We can't decide.

>10 avaland: i’ll have to read and resolve this internal conflict. 🙂

The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

In both of these books the characters make the best out of a bad situation.

Has anyone else read them?

>13 CJWild: I read and enjoyed A Gentleman in Moscow a few years ago. I've heard mixed things about his later works and haven't tried any of them. Welcome to LibraryThing, by the way! I'm glad you happened upon Club Read right away. Feel free to introduce yourself on the Introductions thread and to hang out a shingle in a personal thread too.

Okay, I guess I'm ready to submit my favorite Q3 reads. The one I'm reading at the moment is definitely not going to make the cut, and since I'm expecting house guests tonight for a weeklong stay, I probably won't be reading much until they depart.

Top honors are shared by one serious book and one silly one --
Montana 1948, by Larry Watson, is a gem of a coming-of age story in which a 12-year-old boy comes to understand that the world is not made up of black and white, that not all adults are infallible, and that sometimes the choice between what is loved and what is right is the most difficult thing in the universe.

The Kennedy Enterprise, by David Gerrold (he of "The Trouble with Tribbles") is a wickedly funny alternate history short story in which Joseph P. Kennedy decides to go into the movie business rather than politics, and JFK ends up starring in a little TV series called "Star Track".

Also outstanding:
The Vanishing Sky, L. Annette Binder
Dear Fahrenheit 451, Annie Spence
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
The Chili Queen, Sandra Dallas

That's six. Sometimes you have a good quarter, sometimes not so much. This was a good one.

Subdivision - This whole book is like a dream
The Colony - colonize us for a price
Companion Piece - nobody stays home anymore
Anthem - dystopian teens

My reading continues to be slow and distracted, so I only managed to read 7 books this quarter. My favourites were the last 2:

Fresh Water For Flowers, Valerie Perrin
The Prank of the Good Little Virgin of Via Ormea, Amara Lakhous

Both from Europe Editions, I've just noticed

Last day of the quarter, which was a good one for me in reading. There were no terrible books, and there was some real diversity.

My favourite new read fiction:

A Guest of Honour by Nadine Gordimer - this seems to be out of print now

My favourite reread fiction:
A Tale of Two Cities by Charle Dickens - I had no idea I would get so wrapped up in it this time around

My favourite nonfiction:
Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn - this is one of those books where you keep saying to anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity - "Did you know" or "Listen to this"

Quirkiest Books:
fiction: An Audience of Chairs by Joan Clark
nonfiction: The First Mrs Meredith and Other Lesser Lives by Diane Johnson - quirky more for the choice of subject, as "lesser" people aren't often subjects of biography

My reading in Q3 has turned out to be pretty diverse, even by my standards, so there are a lot of things that it’s difficult to compare with each other, and any selection has got to be pretty arbitrary. I’ll try, anyway.

Discoveries in fiction:
Vom Aufstehen and Judasfrauen by Helga Schubert. An (East) German writer I never knew I didn’t know about.

Books I expected to like and did:
Trieste by Daša Drndić
Aus großer Zeit by Walter Kempowski
In Ethiopia with a mule by Dervla Murphy

Books I expected to like but were only OK:
The magician by Colm Tóibín

Great books I’ve known about for fifty years and should have read earlier:
Akenfield by Ronald Blythe
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

Great books I should have known about for 49 years:
Prancing Novelist by Brigid Brophy (and the very enjoyable re-read of Ronald Firbank it prompted)

Least necessary book of Q3:
Miss Merkel: Mord in der Uckermark by David Safier. Who knew that the world needed cosy mysteries featuring a retired German Chancellor?

Least concise book of Q3:
(Not counting Don Quixote, which I still haven’t finished)
Mémoires intimes by Georges Simenon

A bit belated, but my best books of the quarter, based, as usual, on which ones I rated at least 4.5 stars:

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai
Conversations with People Who Hate Me: 12 Things I Learned from Talking to Internet Strangers by Dylan Marron
On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

>21 bragan: Always good to hear from more people, no matter when - interesting sounding books

I've had a weird Q3 so apparently managed to finish only 37 books of which 7 were Commissario Brunetti novels, 1 Spenser novel, 2 Maigret novels and another 7 were in fantasy or SF series I am playing catch up in (2 Verus novels, 3 Ordinary Magic books and 2 Foreigner novels). Which leaves 20 books - I tend to exclude long running series from my Favorites lists because they rely on older novels too much and in a way if I am still with the series, chances are they would always make my favorites list (these mostly did).

So from the remaining 20, the highlights are:

Grandville Bete Noire (which maybe I should left with the previous group of titles because the backstory of the first 2 volumes is important but it is still worth mentioning...). Alternate history in graphic novel format. This one is so full of literary allusions that it makes one smile while reading just for the sheer joy of recognizing them. And then there is the story, the world-building and the art.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron - I finally got around to this series and really liked the first book.

On the Edge by Edward St. Aubyn - satire of the New Age movements and their 'gurus' at its best (probably will be really offensive to some people but I loved it)

The Iliad by Homer, translated from Ancient Greek by Robert Fagles - my first reread since high school and either I'd forgotten too much or it just went over my head last time.

My two Q3 favorites were:

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Companion Piece by Ali Smith

Close seconds:

Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism by Joanna Scutts
Difficult People by Catriona Wright
Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon

I had a superb reading quarter, probably the best one I've had in at least five years. The following books earned at least 4½ stars:

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
My Broken Language: A Memoir by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Nothing Personal: An Essay by James Baldwin
Bless the Daughter Raised By a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Listen: How to Find the Words for Tender Conversations by Dr Kathryn Mannix
Alzheimer's Canyon: One Couple's Reflections on Living with Dementia by Jane Dwinell and Sky Yardley
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives by Adolph L. Reed
The Colony by Audrey Magee
Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin

For various reasons, I read a lot of quick and easy novels and several rather mediocre ones in the last quarter. So while I enjoyed some of these very much, nothing really stands out apart from Eine Halligfahrt by Theodor Storm, a novella I listened to towards the end of the quarter.

I have managed to read very little since July, mainly because of buying a house. Surprisingly, I did have some good reads:
The Prague Sonata which I read after my trip to Prague in June. Fun to recognize places mentioned.
The Four Winds for my July book club - Kristin Hannah is moving away from her "romance" roots, and this was pretty solid as historical fiction.
Not as good as The Grapes of Wrath for my Sept. book club. Definitely a 5-star read.
I also gave 5 stars to The Warmth of Other Suns which I liked much better than Caste read earlier this year.

I didn't read a heap of books in Q3 so it was was easy to pick my top 5, in reading order:

Velocity Weapon by Megan O'Keefe

Dune by Frank Herbert

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The Pull Of The Stars by Emma Donoghue

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee