Cecrow - 2024 TBR Challenge

Primary List:
1. The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie (2024/01)
2. ISOLT #7: Time Regained - Marcel Proust (2024/02)
3. The Origins of the Second World War - A.J.P. Taylor (2024/02)
4. Possession - A.S. Byatt (2024/02)
5. Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens (2024/03)
6. Charles Dickens: A Life - Claire Tomalin (2024/04)
7. The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (2024/05)
8. The World According to Garp - John Irving (2024/06)
9. The Portable Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon (2024/06)
10. The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing (2024/09)
11. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernières (2024/10)
12. The Fatal Shore - Robert Hughes (2024/08)

COMPLETED 2024/10

Alternate List:
1. The White Hotel - D.M. Thomas (2024/01)
2. Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (2024/01)
3. Waverley - Sir Walter Scott (2024/04)
4. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford (2024/03)
5. Neuromancer - William Gibson (2024/07)
6. Speak, Memory - Vladimir Nabokov (2024/03)
7. Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories - Mansfield (2024/07)
8. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer - Patrick Süskind (2024/08)
9. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - Douglass (2024/02)
10. Deadlock - Sara Paretsky (2024/09)
11. The State of the Art (Culture #4) - Iain M. Banks (2024/09)
12. Amiel's Journal - Henri-Frédéric Amiel (2024/04)

COMPLETED 2024/09

In 2023 I turned fifty and made a big deal out of it, but this is also a significant reading year. In 2024 I'm concluding my journey through all of Dickens' completed novels, Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", and my tour through Ancient Rome (with Gibbon). To complement that (and in the true spirit of the challenge), I've scanned the TBR shelves for unread books with the most dust. Some of these have waited to be read for more than a decade - including A.S. Byatt, who I'd already planned to have in my 2024 challenge since many months ago, so her recent death announcement is a crazy coincidence.

wow, your list is up!! i love new TBR lists, they're so exciting! ^_^

i read satanic verses when i was too young to properly digest and appreciate it. neuromancer is one of those books that seems right up my alley but that i'm afraid might end up disappointing me, for some reason. iris murdoch and doris lessing have been in my radar forever!

also, perfume and possession are two of my all time favorites!

i look forward to your reading year! ^_^

I agree - the new TBR lists are so exciting! All that potential. I've read a couple of the books on your list but not too many. Looking forward to seeing how you get on with them. I'll probably be joining you on Our Mutual Friend since I seriously doubt I'm going to get to it this year.

How exciting that you'll be wrapping up several challenges in 2024. Very impressive.

You've got some great titles in your TBR 2024 lists. Some very chunky tomes as well. I look forward to reading your reviews. You've inspired me to think about what books I'll include on my own 2024 TBR lists.

I loved Possession . I'm also reading/re-reading The Culture. I got most of the way through the series except for the last 3 or so. So starting over.

Your 2024 list is impressive and a tad intimidating. I'm looking forward to following along next year. Happy reading!

#1 The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

That's it? All the political fallout, the protests, the murders, the firebombing, the author's living in hiding, over that? Really? It's a good story about the immigration experience - the dissociation, the crisis of self-identity, the calling into question of who one is, and the varieties this crisis can take. The resulting hooplah mostly centered on its episodes from the life of the angel Gabriel that inform but aren't very integral to the main narrative, just sort of sewn in. Rushdie could have cut them entirely, and given how things played out maybe there's been days he wished he had. They were too on the nose for the most strict Islamic sensibilities (sensibilities which he incidentally mentions the importance of not dallying with, right in this book!). I'd say more about this and the impression it makes on me, but it feels unsafe. Dialogue on this topic is not encouraged. Isn't that sad? Midnight's Children wasn't a hit with me but this is the second novel by Rushdie that I've read and really enjoyed (after Quichotte), looking forward to reading some more.

>8 Cecrow: i read this when my own religious beliefs were still...'less liberal'. i remember empathizing a little about how the book would sound on more devout ears. but looking back, yeah, i dont think it was as shocking as i expected...i remember feeling uncomfortable reading it though. im quite curious how a re-read would feel.

It's certainly no worse than what I've seen done to Christianity many times in other novels; The Master and Margarita being the latest example I've read.

>10 Cecrow: ooh, another book that i fear i did not properly appreciate. i mean i liked it well enough, but a lot of it also went over my head. another one for my To Be Re-Read pile.

#2 The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas

I knew fairly little about this one: rival of Midnight's Children for the Booker Prize, and that it features Sigmund Freud and the Holocaust. Which is an immediate head-scratcher because Freud died in September 1939, so how ...? It starts with about eighty pages of hallucinatory madness before the psychoanalysis part begins, so it's not an easy one to get into. The woman at the centre of the story is an interesting character even when it's difficult to get her backstory straight with all the revisions and rehashing going on. I'm wondering why nobody points out that D.M. Thomas was not Jewish; isn't that supposed to be a problem? I guess I don't understand the "rules". And that's on top of his oddly free pass for cribbing the most intense portion from Kuznetsov's Babi Yar. Actually a good novel despite all my complaining, finished it in under a week which is very, very fast for me.

>12 Cecrow: sounds like a touchy book, but very intriguing premise (and cover!). have to watch out for this on my book shopping ^_^

Noting it rates extremely high on both the sex and violence scales, but neither one is used gratuitously.

Looks like you've had some heavy reading to kick off your challenge. Glad that you've enjoyed both of them.

#3 Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

The science-fiction movie "Arrival" was based on the central story in this collection, "Story of Your Life". The written version of the story is less political, exploring the semantics of the aliens' language in greater depth along with the consequences of studying it. I love both versions though, story and film. The rest of this collection was well worth my time as well. Chiang does an excellent job of balancing character development with thought experiments, lots to appreciate and think about.

>16 Cecrow: oooh, i loved the movie! i didnt know it was based off a written work. gotta check this one out.

>16 Cecrow: - You faired better with it than I did. I tried to read a couple of stories and gave up. Then again, I struggle with science fiction in books usually. Somehow sci-fi movies work much better for me, so I should probably give Arrival a try.

Chiang sometimes gets very deep into the science weeds with his fiction (especially in the story "Seventy-Two Letters" - whew). The movie is friendlier for all audiences and smooths over those parts.

#4 Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time, v.7) by Marcel Proust

Done! Only took me three and a half years, but I've completed "In Search of Lost Time". Two volumes per year was the right speed for me, each time I returned to it I was feeling ready again. Somewhere down the road I think I'll tackle "Dream of the Red Chamber" with a similar approach. This being the concluding volume of seven, I'll not say a whole lot about what it covers other than it brings things full circle in a very satisfying way, there's a lot to think about here, and I still think the narrator is a jerk. I left a more detailed review on the book page if you're not afraid of spoilers, along with my thoughts on ISOLT as a whole. The second and last volumes hit me hardest, but all of it was good. Hard to believe it's over.

#5 The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor

Taylor wrote and published this history at almost the same time as Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I read many years ago - too long ago to do a compare/contrast exercise. Taylor is called a revisionist historian for his reassessment of recorded facts. While he still lands in the same place at others (Hitler bad, Chamberlain foolish, etc.), the path that goes there uses different byways. In Taylor's assessment, Hitler was a brazen opportunist rather than a grand strategist. His pre-war successes were not part of any master plan, only a tactical pouncing on what was on offer. Chamberlain's appeasement approach was not just the story of a man trying to make nice in the face of a tyrant; he was genuinely sympathetic with Germany's treatment at Versailles in 1919 and thought it deserved to be compensated. The most startling fact Taylor highlights, in my opinion, was the British ambassador's unsolicited message to Hitler that should Germany strive to unite the German peoples in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Danzig, Britain would look the other way. Naturally this is one of the opportunities Hitler was waiting for. At the very least, it allowed him to 'read the room' and correctly conquer two democratic countries without a shot being fired. After those successes, it's little wonder he took a step too far in Poland.

>20 Cecrow: WOW! just...WOW! in terms of reading goals, Proust is like Everest ^_^ how satisfyingly fitting that the last volume is titled Time Regained ^_^

Part of reading it was the challenge, but turns out it was really great reading once I got used to his style and what he was doing.

>22 riida: I echo this sentiment.

Congrats on finishing Proust!

#6 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass

I regretted I'd never read any of the slave narratives, so for Black History Month this year I chose to read the best-known and I'm pledging to follow up with more at some point. I can even read more by Douglass, since he wrote two more memoirs later in life. He doesn't dwell on all of the gritty detail like the Hollywood movies I've seen (although there is some of that), but his plain telling of what he witnessed and experienced rings with solid truth to a degree that no movie can equal. He was in the right time and place to be transferred from the Maryland plantation where he was born to a life of kinder service (but still slavery) in Baltimore, and from there eventually escaped north where he met abolitionists who encouraged him to share his story. Doing so made him famous, and earned him a significant place in American history.

#7 Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt

I'm astonished to say, this is now among my favourite novels. A perfect romance for those who can't stand romance, a contender for the best I've read in the genre. My astonishment is because I had grave reservations about reading it at all, and romance wasn't the problem. I knew poetry figures in it extensively, and I've a deaf ear for that (e.g. I preferred to read E. V. Rieu's prose version of Homer). Happily, this did not get in the way. It's an archive mystery-slash-romance story with a slight echo of other reading I've enjoyed in the recent past (The Foulest Things) and - most surprising - I found it really compelling and it had me turning the pages. Along with the researchers, I wanted to get deeper into the mystery and peel away the next layer of the onion they discovered. I'm interested in why I found this so interesting. They mystery contained in Tey's The Daughter of Time left me feeling disappointed for its complete lack of stakes, and this is the same scenario except that this time I think this book is fantastic. Perhaps it's the parallels between what the researchers discover and what's going on in their own lives that made it work for me. Anyway, it's brilliant and an easy five stars.

I've made the serendipitous discovery that A.S. Byatt considered Iris Murdoch to be a friend and mentor, and wrote critical analyses of her work. I have The Sea, The Sea coming up on this same list.

>26 Cecrow: omg, this is one of my favorite "romance" books, and may be the first one i really liked! i'm glad you liked it too ^_^ i think your description of it as "romance for those who can't stand romance" is just perfect ^_^

>26 Cecrow: I loved it too, and I'm not a romance fan either.

#8 Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov

A good but not captivating memoir by the author of Lolita. Nabokov presents his early life story in a series of essays and philosophical reflections, most of which were first published as articles at various times. I wouldn't promote this disjointed model for other memoirs to emulate, but he makes it flow and it has some fun highlights, augmented by his gift for description. Nabokov led a privileged life as a child of the aristocracy, raised on a million dollar estate. With the world his oyster, it's kind of funny that his greatest passion was chasing butterflies. It ends at around 1940 before his highly successful writing career began. He intended a sequel "Speak On, Memory", but never got around to it.

Did he say how he went from chasing butterflies to writing novels? Now I'm trying to figure out what I would do with unlimited funds - probably not chase butterflies, though they are lovely.

Lifelong butterfly chaser. Expert enough that he caught one nobody had identified, and it's been named after him.

How cool!

#9 Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

It's the last novel Dickens' completed, and consequently the last I've read after going through them all in sequence since reading The Pickwick Papers in 2012 (I'd only read Nicholas Nickleby earlier). This one goes a bit dark, sometimes comparable to Hard Times. Its central theme is money, which allows Dickens to revisit just about every prior social theme he's ever tackled since it touches on pretty much all of them. There's more villains than heroes on this outing, and several chapters were a bit of a struggle for me as they were time spent with unpleasant people. Fortunately there's a nice tying together at the end, as he can always be trusted to do.

Another coincidence has occurred: about fifty pages in, one of the characters begins reading Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and then it's referred to frequently, for which I have an abridged version coming up in this challenge.

My subjective ranking of Dickens' novels. I gave all of them four stars or more after reading, so while it's a fun exercise it's also a bit pointless.

#14: The Old Curiosity Shop - Dickens' most sentimental, too much so. But even Dickens at his worst is no bad thing.
#13: Martin Chuzzlewit - an unlikely plot, and the trip to America is almost a digression. But one of the best villains.
#12: Barnaby Rudge - interesting historical fiction element. The secondary plots overshadows the primary.
#11: Hard Times - Dickens comes down hard on industry toil. Doesn't benefit from being shorter than most.
#10: Nicholas Nickleby - ranking this based only on vague memories, I read it much earlier.
#9: Little Dorritt - rags to riches story that gets better in its second half.
#8: A Tale of Two Cities - French Revolution story, also better in its second half.
#7: David Copperfield - the biographical element is interesting, best start but weak in the middle when it loses focus on David.
#6: Our Mutual Friend - complex design, and an all-encompassing theme that works like a tour of all Dickens' work.
#5: Great Expectations - Dickens' cleanest plot, describing the downfalls of sudden wealth.
#4: Oliver Twist - Oliver is an unlikely heroic urchin, but he's surrounded with some great characters.
#3: The Pickwick Papers - the best comedy, and what committed me to reading the rest of Dickens.
#2: Dombey and Son - perfect balance between Dickens' light approach to his early work and his later more serious efforts.
#1: Bleak House - the epitome of 'Dickensian', with one of his most complex plots.

I'd be most likely to re-read Pickwick or Dombey, if I want to come back someday. Bleak House was the most impressive but it's also more work. I've also read A Christmas Carol but left it out of this ranking, it belongs in a category all its own (like Christmas music).

Dickens' most cited strength is his characters, and yet they are also only caricatures - not quite real people, bearing exaggerated traits, habits and impulses that simplify them almost into cartoon beings. They are really unlike the characters of any other novelist and make reading Dickens a unique experience. London acquires a character of its own as well, with multiple facets that evolve/devolve over the course of each additional novel. It centrally features in almost all of them, "Two Cities" being the only real exception as it is set largely in Paris. It's a younger, much smaller London than the one that exists today. Arguably smoggier and more grimy, but really no different than any city that has its darker corners where the downtrodden - Dickens' most frequently featured people - struggle to get by. In a sense, the city of London is Dickens' most complex and realistic character of all.

Congrats on finishing the Dickens project! I'm just about to start this one. I'll try to get through it quick-ish, though I'm not sure that's possible with Dickens. Love your final list and will be sure to post mine once I'm done. I know that your #13 will be by #14 since it's the only one I couldn't finish. I should give it a try again someday but I just remember finding it tedious.

Your overall comments on his works and the character really captures his stories so well.

>34 LittleTaiko:, it'll be fun to compare! I'm sure I've rated Dombey higher than most people would, something about it just really worked for me. And I expect you'll rate Two Cities quite a bit higher. :)

>35 Cecrow: - You are quite right. Unless Our Mutual Friends blows me away, then Two Cities will be my number one. However, I loved Dombey and can see it as my number two. Why doesn’t that one get more love?

#10 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

An early example of 'literary impressionism', where the narrator gets things all out of order through flashbacks and the full picture only comes together gradually. The title is misleading; there's a fellow in the British military but zero war scenes, and the theme has nothing to do with battle. Rather, it's a story about marriage and adultery, and about the clash between being guided by one's passions and adhering to the mores of society. Ford surfaces a lot of things that prior authors only skirted around, leading to some controversy upon its publication in 1915. It's all tame by today's standards, but the unanswered questions he poses are lasting.

>32 LittleTaiko: that is, indeed, very cool!

>33 Cecrow: looks like i need to pick up Bleak House again soon...I've start-stopped this book several times...i keep falling asleep a dozen chapters in :p but i do really want to finish it!

>39 riida:, it's my personal favourite but other LT discussions show that taste varies widely. It's all Dickens' work, but it's not all alike so it depends on the reader.

#11 Amiel's Journal by Henri-Frederic Amiel

Henri-Frederic Amiel was a 19th century French intellectual who became a professor at a German university. All of his friends admired him and encourged him to apply himself to some great work. He never did it, leaving only this journal behind as his legacy. For at least a century it was popular reading. A lot of it is about why he didn't apply himself. He tackles the question head on from a number of angles that I find interesting. Can becoming too critical subsume your creative side? Can investing in a creative act permanently dim your appreciation for its subject, by too close an examination? What subject truly warrants so much effort, at the expense of setting aside so many others? Basically, he didn't want to chain himself to a desk and stress himself out when he could be enjoying life instead. For an intellectual, he was pretty smart.

>41 Cecrow: "For an intellectual, he was pretty smart." -- that's very witty ^_^

#12 Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since by Sir Walter Scott

Scott was a tough read in my twenties when I tackled Ivanhoe, and he's not any less stiff to read now. Still, this book is called the progenitor of today's historical fiction genre which is kind of my thing, sometimes anyway, so I'd an interest in seeing where the concept began. Its setting is the Scottish uprising against the British throne that took place in 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie had an idea he would restore his Stuart lineage to power and turf the Hanovers. As history records, that didn't work out and he fled to France. Scott inserts a fictional British soldier into the fray and we get a good long look at the Scottish side of the equation along with many lines of virtually impenetrable brogue. I don't imagine I'll read anything more by Scott - the reward doesn't feel worth the work - but this novel's strong Scottish atmosphere has some winning ways.

#13 Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

I'm glad I read all of his novels first because Tomalin spoils every one of them. She's harsh in her judgement of all his work prior to David Copperfield, which isn't always deserved, and too entirely praiseworthy thereafter. Those critiques aside, this was a brilliant overview of a man's life who rose to great fame on the basis of his determination and work ethic, an enormous friend and philanthropist, but who was deeply flawed in his treatment of his family. He married a woman who could not be his intellectual equal, had ten children with her (seven or eight more than he actually wanted) and then cast her aside in favour of a young lady less than half his age who doesn't seem to have embraced his advances initially but eventually succumbed and did grow to love him. I knew the broad strokes of this biography already - several novel introductions wanted to tell me all about him - but it was good to fill in the missing pieces. I've previously read Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self and find Tomalin an able and reliable biographer.

>43 Cecrow: - Hmm. I have Ivanhoe on my shelf, but your review is not helping move it any closer to me actually reading it.

>44 Cecrow: - However you have now added a book to my wishlist so maybe it's a fair trade. I'd much rather read about Dickens and it's good to know it's by a reliable biographer.

#14 The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

This one's been on my shelf longer than most, since I anticipated a certain degree of challenge. The challenge is there, in its initial slow pace and rich description, but it also had a remarkable ability to draw me in. It also had an even more remarkable ability to transform itself as it progressed, changing from one kind of story into another multiple times. Is this the classic Man vs Nature, or Man vs Man, or Man vs Himself, or all three of them? Whenever I thought I was pinning it down, it became one of the other ones. The narrator Charles Arrowby is a selfish old man who believes the world revolves around him, and this is too often validated by the world's generally doing so for him to break from the illusion. There's an engaging story throughout about obsessive love and how it is driven first and foremost by one's true first love, the love of self. His assumptions and actions create a series of cringe moments that are impossible to look away from, and unexpected events add spice several times. I wished to see his character from the outside at some point, and it's the lack of that more than anything that leaves my head spinning; so many ways to interpret, so many different messages that might be derived. My take is that it explores the nature of love, arriving at an answer that strips away most of the magic.

#15 The World According to Garp by John Irving

If that's not the worst book I'll read this year, I'm going to start questioning my picks. Irving mixes sex, violence and humour to laugh at the hopelessness of the world's madness. I guess the 1970s were some kind of low point in his view of the world and the only path he could see through it was to endure it with a smile. I didn't smile a whole lot while reading this novel, questioning some of the jokes and feeling generally disgusted with these stupid characters who make stupid and sometimes contrary decisions. I guess the idea is that Garp's heart is in the right place but he's not always smart and often controlled by his lust (and it doesn't help that every woman he encounters either falls in love with him or at least wants sex with him - this element starts becoming very predictable) or his fears, and it keeps getting in the way of his addressing the world's problems in a serious way with any success.

Interesting. I have vague memories of trying to watch the movie and not really enjoying it. Probably for the reasons you describe above.

>46 Cecrow: another book I cant be ceratin if ive read or not...it feels like its stirring things in my memory but i cant recall exactly. maybe memories from one of my past lives :)

#16 The Portable Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

'Portable' in this case being a word that means 'abridged'. Gibbon's full opus is six large volumes. This version largely boils those down to just one by dropping nearly everything that happens after the fall of the western empire, ejecting most of the footnotes and dropping asides about other peoples surrounding the Romans. Even so - though it was a month and a half task for me to surmount it - it feels like I've had only a bird's eye view as the centuries flashed by: Commodus begins the decline, the third century crisis nearly ends all until Aurelian and Diocletian pull things together, Constantine is a high point but introduces bad policy, the legacy continues through Julian and rests on Valentinian, then Val's brother Valens gets himself stupidly killed vs the Goths whereby things shift from 'decline' to 'fall'. Theodosius delays the inevitable by being brilliant in crisis mode, but his son Honorius ... well, that was like making the summer student your CIO. Goodbye, western Roman empire. That pretty much wraps things up for this edition, but a few excerpts get tacked onto the end about the Byzantines (eastern Roman empire): a glimpse of Justinian and Theodora, the rise of Islam, and the defeat of Constantinople that historians regard as the true and final end of the Roman legacy in 1453, a thousand years after the first sack of Rome.

That's the third wrap-up of a major reading project for me this year, by concluding my survey of the Greeks and Romans over several years of this challenge through some key bits of reading with a few dashes of fiction on the side. It's likely I'll return to these eras now and then through other reading, but I don't expect to conduct another survey-through-the-ages.

>50 Cecrow: i love how you summarized the roman empire's decline ^_^

congratulations on completing your reading project! seems like a tough one. i like reading non-fic and history, too, but i cant binge them or read too many at a given time. my brain can't handle too many good things at the same time :p

Nonfiction definitely slows me down, I try to read it on the side rather than concentrate on it. Pairs really well with some bracing fiction. Except, I wound up with Garp, lol. Gibbon was definitely better!

"That was like making the summer student your CIO." That's brilliant!

Congrats on finishing your project!

>53 LittleTaiko:, it was actually a bit worse than that. The last emperor's general Stilicho twice saved the empire from the Goths and became quite popular. Honorius felt unjustly threatened by his popularity and had him executed. Guess what happened the third time the Goths attacked.

#17 Neuromancer by William Gibson

In 1984 when this was published, I was still running around the playground acting out pretend lightsabre battles. Gibson spent that time imagining the actual future we might have in store, something much darker and more akin to the atmosphere of Blade Runner while introducing a new element: a virtual cyberworld that overlays our own. Case (that's his name) is called a cyber cowboy, because in this version of the world only the most technically inclined know how to navigate the online world without getting themselves killed. He gets recruited by a mysterious benefactor? society? rebellion? to do a job, and by the time he knows his actual employer he is already neck deep. It's a fast-paced story but I had to read it slowly so as not to get lost in all the technobabble. It's not nearly so impenetrable as I was led to believe (calling it 'sci-fi's Ulysses' is frankly ridiculous, sorry) and clips right along, even forty years later.

Kudos to you for making through the technobabble. I tried to read it a few years ago and most of it went over my head. I didn't dislike it but just didn't understand most of it.

#18 Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories

Early 1900s New Zealand author, admired by Virginia Woolf, whose stories centered largely on the theme of disruption, often tied to a struggle with identity. Each one of these stories surfaces a truth about the world and human nature, often very sly and subtle. Not many spoke to me in an intimate way, but I think Katherine and I would have seen eye-to-eye on a lot of topics. Her private journal/diary has also been published and is highly praised, I may check that out later to see if I'm right.

#19 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

The title mostly sums it up. In early 18th century Paris, a lowly child is born with an incredible power for scent, and a psychopathic lack of empathy. His amazing talent combines in some awful ways with his inability to love and leads to murder. There's no unfolding mystery to solve here, just the story of his determination to aspire to the heights of his art by any and all means. I learned a lot more about perfume than I really needed to, but the tone stayed remarkably light considering the content and it's a short novel that moves right along. Not the ending I was anticipating, but it serves the theme.

#20 The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding by Robert Hughes

I hadn't guessed the history of Australia would be as challenging to read as the fall of Rome, but worth it. Very engaging writing about the first eighty years of Australia's history as a British colony. In his introduction Hughes explains the veil that was cast over this period until about the 1960s, as Australians sought to live down and tuck away the country's origins that were built largely on the backs of convicts transported from England. Hughes delves into all of the available evidence and comes up with a narrative-like story about how the colony was first settled and the stages of its early growth. A strong theme is how little there is to be ashamed of. All of these settlers, free and convict alike, survived difficult trials to establish the Down Under we know today. I only grew a little frustrated with the way that Hughes jumps around in the timeline, it's not a straightforward chronology like I prefer. I see what it gained him but it does make it difficult to recall names and their personalities or to understand who was a contemporary of whom. He also assumed I had more initial knowledge than I actually did; perhaps he didn't envision his work's becoming an international non-fiction classic.

>58 Cecrow: omg, this is one of my all time faves! i enjoyed the movie adaptation too ^_^

#21 The State of the Art (Culture #4) by Iain M. Banks

It's ostensibly the fourth in the Culture sci-fi series, but this is a collection of short fiction rather than a novel and most of the stories do not even take place in the Culture universe. Of the three that do, the main feature is the title story (novella, really) which occupies half its length. This story makes it explicitly clear that the Culture is an alien-to-us power, since here it encounters Earth as a distinct other. Some of the usual tropes are trotted out (whatever would intelligent aliens make of us? etc.). The other two Culture stories are insignificant and don't expand on the universe in any way. None of the non-Culture stories are standouts. A just-okay read, which makes it the least impressive entry in the series thus far.

In another of those odd coincidences that sometimes happen, in the midst of this short story collection I unexpectedly encountered two characters arguing over the merits of The Satanic Verses.

>61 Cecrow: That's an odd coincidence considering you read the Satanic Verses earlier this year.

>59 Cecrow: - This sounds like something I would really enjoy. I know I have one distant relative who was shipped off to Australia but then somehow ended up in California.

#22 Deadlock by Sara Paretsky

I'm not big on thrillers but this one came highly recommended and also has a major scene in my small hometown. V.I. Warshawski is an early (circa 1980) example of a female private eye in fiction, hard-boiled and tough. She's entirely convincing in the role, following clues to her cousin's death that get her involved in grain shipments and lake freighters. Speaking as someone who never reads this stuff, I still thought it was pretty great. I might even look up other entries in this series and see if something grabs me.

#23 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

I expected this one might drag a bit, based on others' reviews, but it was great. I guess femisism + communism must really work for me?? Actually it's about the resolution of internal contradiction to arrive at peace with oneself and the world. Anna records her life and memories in four separate diary notebooks, finding this is a logical way to describe its different parts. What she is working towards is a unison, a single 'golden notebook' that unites all these separate parts to bring her clarity. There is also a lot to unpack here about the intersection between sex and love, which I still find bewildering as to message and I don't think works anymore in our day. Still it is an astonishing look into one woman's mind, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

>65 Cecrow: good to hear you liked this book. i've also been interested but haven't picked up her works yet, cause they also struck me as 'dreary'. now im reconsidering :)

Wellllll, I'd understand that sort of take on it, lol. Anna has terrible taste in men, repeatedly. But there's an undercurrent of struggle for survival and forging a path to get there.

#24 Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

Earlier this year when I read Possession, I said it was a romance for people who don't like romance. This might be a war story for people who don't like war stories, but make no mistake, it's a very dark war story. So dark, there were a couple of times I was reluctant to pick it back up. It opens with the zany antics of a small Grecian town during World War II that sounds like fun and games. Later there comes a chapter from the war front, with the most vile scenes of horror and despair any author has ever contrived. Then back to the zany town again. It goes back and forth like that. It can be a bit hard to take, but the lesson being taught emerges in the end. Summing up the novel's mood is entirely beyond me, but I can say this is an extremely far cry from the ho-hum romance that the 2001 movie trailers were advertising. The writing is beautiful and intense in both kinds of scenes and there's several engaging characters.

That wraps things up unexpectedly early for me: I obtained a huge lead in the first three or four months and then held onto that through to the end. Given I've a couple of months left, I'm pulling out The Tale of Genji to see if I can mow through it before New Year's. No terrible regrets among this year's picks, although I'm feeling discouraged from reading any more by Irving (I still recommend A Prayer for Owen Meany). My top highlights were Possession, The Golden Notebook and the conclusion of Proust. Best of all, my TBR shelves are looking relatively young and fresh now.

I'm feeling so confident about my 2025 list that I'll get it posted soon, it just means I have to avoid those titles until January.

Congrats on completing your challenge!

Congratulations on the early completion of your challenge! I'm so envious. What are you going to read in the downtime between challenges?

The Tale of Genji, like I said, lol. I've two months and more to get through it at a snail pace, and don't have to fit it into next year's challenge - what a relief.

>72 Cecrow: - Ha! Yes, if only I had read your post a little more carefully. Happy reading!

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, trans. by Edward Seidensticker

The world's first novel? It took me two months to read a thousand pages written in Japan a thousand years ago. It details the intrigues of 10th century court life centuries before the samurai code became a thing. Life was simple then, and court life revolved around poetry, music and fashion. And lots and lots of sex. Genji gets busy with every female he lays eyes on. As middle age sets in, he takes stock of his life thus far by bringing every woman he's had a dalliance with to live together in his home. And they all get along because the sex part is largely done, I guess. But the intrigues continue. It's a whole lot less like Shogun and a lot more like name-a-soap-opera. There's no overarching plot, just events that carry the story from one episode to the next with no end in sight. Of course the book does eventually have to end, but it only seems to have been the author's death that decided it.

There's no bloody violence or threats. Everyone's extremely polite and minds their manners. And it's not even boring because there's always someone making eyes at somebody, or a festival happening that everyone has to prepare for, or an elderly person dying who wants their family looked after, or a promising young orphan in need of a home, etc. I liked it. The only downer is the womanizing, sometimes amounting to sexual assault. The author has quick excuses for every act of every man - he was young and that's just how they are, or he was so in love and couldn't help himself, blah blah blah - but perhaps she is just trotting out the homilies of her time while not shying away from bald portrayals of the acts. A light reading between the lines is enough to tell you, even women surrounding the throne were powerless to protect themselves short of becoming "nuns" - or whatever that word originally was in Japanese. There's a few translation quirks like that, but this remains the recommended edition thus far.

Congrats on finishing your bonus book - especially with it be 1000+ pages. Sounds intriguing, but not something I'm going to rush to read.