Mabith's 2024 Reads

Read in 2024:

State of Exile – Cristina Peri Rossi
The Club – Leo Damrosch
Saving Sunshine – Saadia Faruqi
The Bass Rock – Evie Wyld
You Use a Gun, I Use a Bow – Hu Sheng You Meng

Kingdom of Characters – Jing Tsu
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Seasons in the Sun – Dominic Sandbrook
Angelica – Sharon Shinn

Don't Call it a Cult – Sarah Berman
Cluny Brown – Margery Sharp
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Volume 6 – Ryan North
For Real – Alexis Hall
Rogues' Gallery – Philip Hook

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth – Zoe Thorogood
Girls and Their Monsters – Audrey Clare Farley
The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy – James Anderson
The Picts and the Martyrs – Arthur Ransome
Havana Nocturne – TJ English

Heart in a Box – Kelly Thompson
The Birth of Classical Europe – Simon Price
Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You – Lucinda Williams
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter – Alexis Hall
The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death – Daniel Pinkwater

Empire State – Jason Shiga
What's Cooking in the Kremlin – Witold Szablowski
Sheets – Brenna Thummler
The Fraud – Zadie Smith
Beauty is a Verb – Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, Michael Northen

Adventures of a Dwergish Girl – Daniel Pinkwater
The Wager – David Grann
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law – Mary Roach
Hidden Valley Road – Robert Kolker
After I Died I Became Popular Again – Zuo Chuanchuan

Felix Holt, the Radical – George Eliot
The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror – Daniel Pinkwater
The Dictionary People – Sarah Ogilvie
Boy in a China Shop – Keith Brymer Jones
Bunbury – Tom Jacobson

Mr. Fashionable – Yu Xiao Lanshan
Rebirth of a Movie Star – J112233
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
How to Say I Love You – Feng Liu Shu Dai
The Buried Book – David Damrosch

After Marrying the Villain I Became Popular – Gan Hui
In Farleigh Field – Rhys Bowen
Tattoo – Bu Wen San Jiu
Beyond the Wall – Katja Hoyer
Later He Became a Royal Healer – Yan Guikang

Epitaph – Mary Doria Russell
Study for Obedience – Sarah Bernstein
Ignition! – John Drury Clark
Dark Archives – Megan Rosenbloom
I Can Do It – Jiang Zi Bei

Revolution – Peter Ackroyd
Hands of Time – Rebecca Struthers
Freddy Goes to the North Pole – Walter R. Brooks
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
The Ends of the World – Peter Brannen

Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune – Rory Muir
Fight Night – Miriam Toews

After a three year break from LT due to a variety of factors (pandemic, sudden long-term cat death, father's death etc...) I'm back! Excited to see some familiar names and get back to having more variety on my reading (and to-read) lists.

The photo is my dad with my cousin and myself.

When I was feeling like I was ready to come back to LT he got a diagnosis of Alzheimer's and late stage multiple myeloma at basically the same time and then died six months later in September of 2022. My mom died in 2017, roughly a month after her cancer diagnosis, and being only 38 years old the mental adjustment to Orphan has been very challenging. My grief over my mom only seems to grow in scale each year with the sheer enormity of what was lost (for both of us).

My dad wasn't a great father or friend to his adult children (just didn't have the emotional maturity for it), but he was very fun when I was a kid and so many of my reading interests were informed by his interests (which he very successfully passed on to me). He was a librarian for all of my childhood, so being stuck in libraries for full work days growing up during the summer or school breaks also informed how much I enjoyed reading and libraries in general.

2023 Favorite Reads:

Fiction:
1632 by Eric Flint
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman
10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall
Babel by RF Kuang
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

Non-Fiction:
Kissinger's Shadow by Greg Grandin
Unmask Alice by Rick Emerson
Unruly by David Mitchell
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman
Madame Restell by Jennifer Wright
State of Emergency by Dominic Sandbrook
Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse by William Neuman
The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman
Ambition and Desire by Kate Williams
Delicacy by Katy Wix
Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton
River of the Gods by Candice Millard
The Reason for the Darkness of the Night by John Tresch
Born to be Hanged by Keith Thomson

I did so much re-reading this year that it was certainly easier to pick favorites out of the new-to-me books!

I was thinking about you. I’m so sorry for your loss of your father. Hope seeing you here means you’re doing better emotionally. It’s really nice to see you back. Welcome.

It's nice to see you again! I'm very sorry for the onslaught of loss you are coping with.

Welcome back, Meredith. I love the photo of you, your dad, and your cousin and the image of you going to work with him in the library. I hope that you can find some solace, or at least distraction, in talking about books and reading here.

Speaking of books, At Night All Blood is Black was the last book I read in 2024 and my favorite fiction work of the year. Incredible writing. I have River of Gods on order from the library. I look forward to seeing what you read in nonfiction this year. I too like history and want to read more this year. My favorites last year were Hiroshima Diary and Fallout : the Hiroshima cover-up and the reporter who revealed it to the world.

It's so good to see you back! I've missed you! I'm really sorry to hear about your losses. I realized over the holidays that this April will be 10 years since my dad passed away suddenly from cancer (17 days after his diagnosis). He was only 63 and I was only 36. I'm lucky to have my mom, who lives nearby and is healthy, but I miss my dad every day.

Glad you are back and looking forward to your reading.

Nice to see you back on club read

Great to see you back, Meredith. Sounds like you've had a very tough few years. I hope you'll enjoy being back amongst friends.

Thank you all! It was so nice to see many familiar names in the group. I look forward to adding far too many titles to my to-read list!

>6 labfs39: Yes, Diop's writing was incredible! I hope it's getting the acclaim it deserves. I'm putting those two Hiroshima books on my list already, definitely a blank spot in my reading.

>7 japaul22: When the loss is that quick it can be so difficult to make sense of, particularly since we don't think of cancer being like that. Then you also think "Well, what's lurking in my own body?"

State of Exile by Cristina Peri Rossi

A quite small read to get myself going for the year. Rossi was exiled from Uruguay in 1972 (after her work was banned), after which she moved to Spain. These poems were written during her journey and the first period of her exile. They are largely quite brief and mostly speak to the day to day feelings. I feel like it's less a collection to become a favorite and more stands as an interesting window to that specific experience and the disconnects it imposes.

I'd marked a couple to copy out, but I can't retrieve the book as now my cat is sleeping on my lap, and well, I am a sucker. Let's pretend it's just because she had a difficult time over the holidays when there were a lot of guests around a few times so I have to make it up to her.

Cat placeholder for eventual poem:

Please don’t disturb her! Cute!

Lovely cat! I look forward to getting to know you!

Cute cat, but am I the only one squinting trying to make out the titles on the bookshelf?

>14 labfs39: i was just looking at the kitty.

>15 dchaikin: The kitty is adorable!

Welcome back Meredith! I'm sorry for the sudden losses you're coping with.

>12 dchaikin: She would spent the entire day on my lap other than feeding time if she had her druthers in the winter.

>13 WelshBookworm: Likewise!

>14 labfs39: Ha, I do that too. I've taken actual magnifying glasses to family photos for that purpose.

>16 markon: Thank you!

Adding the Cristina Peri Rossi here

Proximities

I don't need to go very far
to dream
A train to the suburbs is enough for me
Some rusted tracks that run
along the seashore
and I feel I'm already in another world
My ignorance of the nomenclature
allows me to baptize with other names
My foreignness
--I am the foreigner, the passing strange--
is the universal citizenship of dream.

Cercanias

No necesito ir muy lejos
para soñar
Un tren de cercanias me basta
Unas vias herrumbrosas que corren
al borde del mar
y ya me siento en otro mundo
Mi ignorancia de le nomenclatura
me permite bautizar con otros nombres
Mi ajenidad
--soy la extranjera, la de paso--
es la ciudadania universal de los sueños.

What a way to learn I still remember the alt code for an N with a tilde! Thank you high school Meredith for memorizing so many of those.

Welcome back to CR. I look forward to following along with your reading this year.

>18 mabith: nice. Interesting that the Spanish title echoes suburbs, but the English title doesn’t. Have you found the poetry thread?

I'm glad you're back, Meredith! I'm sorry for your loss. Glad you have a faithful cat near you, regardless of her personal motivations.

Welcome back, Meredith!

Welcome back to Club Read!

Welcome back! I’m sorry to hear you’ve had such a lot to cope with, but you do have a very cute cat. One of these days I’ll learn how to post one of mine. I was thinking about you the other day, actually, as my almost-10-year-old daughter is totally engrossed in Anne of Green Gables at the moment, and it reminded me of discussing “Anne with an E” with you a couple of years ago.

>20 dchaikin: I hadn't, but I've got it starred now. Immediately won over by it starting with a Carl Sandburg quote (my favorite poet).

Thanks, ladies!

>22 avaland: I've got everyone's threads in Needlearts starred, so will be making my way over eventually (maybe when I figure out what color I was using on my much neglected cross stitch project...)

>24 rachbxl: Ha, no one can resist Anne of Green Gables! I think my sister is struggling over the fact that my niece is much more into Anne with an E over either the book or the 1980s miniseries.

The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch

This book suffers a bit from containing very interesting information but scattered across a range of people who spent most of their lives apart. Damrosch gives potted biographies of each but the length of time he's covering and the variety of figures makes the book feel disconnected in a way I wasn't prepared for.

In the end, some of the most interesting sections were about the women in and around this group (the most well known of whom is Fanny Burney). Approached as a collection of interlinked essays, I think it would be a more satisfying read. I didn't dislike it, it's a great start to approaching any of the figures it covers, or this period of history, but it is limited. Damrosch is not as skilled at building the full picture as, say, Candice Millard or Caroline Alexander.

After reading this I've also cursed myself by looking up Damrosch and discovering a much earlier book that I'm desperate to read but cannot find at an affordable price, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. Most of my high school years I attended a very small Quaker boarding school, and I bet this was in the library when I was there (or in the library at the meeting house). So tempted to call and ask about it.

Saving Sunshine by Saadia Faruqi

This is a middle-grade aimed graphic novel about a set of twins (a brother and sister) on vacation with their family. They've been bickering so badly that their phones are confiscated and they're forced to amuse themselves together at the beach.

I found this through the illustrator (Shazleen Khan), who writes and draws a webcomic I really like. A friend of mine has a sort of mini-book club with her daughter, and as the friend's birthday is coming up I snapped this up for her. Of course, what kind of person would I be if I didn't read it before mailing it off.

Needless to say, I really liked the art. The story is largely focused on the siblings attempts to understand each other but brings up wider issues as well (the sister has started to wear a hijab and the brother has trouble sticking up for her when kids make ignorant comments). It's well balanced, and feels like the right length for the story, which has become quite a problem after publishers realized graphic novels were popular but felt every title should be 100 pages long. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone looking for middle-grade graphic novels.

>26 mabith: too bad, because the title appeals. As do the potted biographies if handled well. I listened to a book by Millard. She was writing about a young Churchill in the Boer war, and took him at his word. I didn’t believe him and felt uncomfortable with the book.

Hi Meredith—just catching up now. I'm sorry to hear you had so much loss to contend with at once, and I know (unfortunately) how that it really does take a while to gather yourself again. Good to see you, and looking forward to finding out what you're reading.

Welcome back :)

>25 mabith: I feel your sister’s pain because it was my pain too! Sure, there are much worse things my daughter could watch on TV than Anne with an E, but I had given up hope of her ever showing any interest in the books. And then all of a sudden last week she picked Anne of Green Gables up all by herself.

>28 dchaikin: The Club was still interesting and not badly written. I don't think there was any really elegant way to cover that many people spanning that many years who were mostly not in the same place at the same time, but one has to be expecting it. I don't know what Millard was thinking with that Churchill book, unfortunately. It's definitely one my brain tries to forget.

>29 lisapeet: >30 JeffreyDaviss: Thanks!

>31 rachbxl: It's a hard road! I mostly only give the kids (and their parents) books as gifts and then I don't ask follow up questions because of course you're mostly going to be disappointed. I try to just keep in mind that I'm putting good books into the house and maybe one day they'll pick them up. The whims of childhood reading are inscrutable.

The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld

Wyld is a writer I particularly like, but I put this title off for a few years. It's her third novel since 2009 (she's very much not a full time writer), and her second (All the Birds, Singing) was so impressive, so innovative in form, so soul-shattering, that I couldn't stand to pick up The Bass Rock. This one does not quite reach those previous heights, but it was still incredibly immersive.

The book opens with a little girl finding a dead body in a suitcase on a local beach and cycles us through three time periods and groups, largely in Scotland. We go from the target of a literal witch hunt, to a woman embarking on a new marriage as the second wife and adapting to a new community after WWII, to one whose life is falling apart in the wake of her father's death. There are ghosts, secrets, and strangeness galore, along with so much grief in varying forms. Everyone is struggling and haunted and facing personal demons, and the atmosphere is delivered extremely effectively.

Since I knew I'd read this book no matter what, I didn't actually read the publisher's summary at any point. I can only thank myself for this grace, as I don't think it represents the book all that well (makes it sound more 'book clubby' than it is, in the negative sense, and speaking as someone in book clubs). On the other hand, I probably could have used the heads up for parent deaths in the book. Six of one, half dozen of the other I guess.

Wyld is one of those novelists particularly skilled is creating living characters, and I'll continue to seek out her work. This year I might try to carve time and energy for a re-read of All the Birds, Singing.

You Use a Gun, and I Use a Bow by Hu Sheng You Meng RE-READ

Re-read of a Chinese webnovel. I started casually learning Chinese some years ago, which led to watching a lot of Chinese TV and then reading heaps of webnovels (sometimes the basis for those shows). Even though I'm reading translations there are always a lot of interesting notes of word usage and idioms and cultural points.

This is one of the pro-gaming focused novels, and just a pure comfort reread after I had to heal myself from Wyld's too-real characters. This one is a particularly amusing queer romance. Given that most of these writers are doing this as a side gig, I'm often pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work and the different culture around webnovels, where authors frequently say things like 'hey don't worry about X happening because it won't.' It's also fascinating that SO many Chinese dramas are based on webnovels, and they're often adapted extremely well.

>33 mabith: I’m not familiar with Evie Wyld. Sounds like good stuff

>33 mabith: Chinese webnovels? I’m so intrigued! What is this? How did you get into it?

>33 mabith: I liked All the Birds, Singing and hadn't realized she had a new book out. I'll keep an eye out for it.

>35 dchaikin: There are a number of big sites that exist for writers to post their books on, often updating with a chapter a day and able to set chapters to 'pay' after a certain number, get 'tips' from readers, etc... I was casually learning Chinese and got into them for various reasons (there are a lot of people translating them into English, sometimes with permission of the author, sometimes with passwords so you have to provide proof that you purchased the book on the Chinese sites). I'm so curious how much the authors are paid for the books that are then adapted into TV shows or movies (a 2019 Chinese drama adapted from a webnovel was one of the biggest shows of that year and became a huge worldwide sensation).

There's also a fascinating subgenre where characters transmigrate into novels, often because they've left a rude comment for the author or they stayed up too late reading the novel, and I think about this constantly.

>36 RidgewayGirl: There was a seven year gap between All the Birds, Singing and The Bass Rock, so she's a slightly troublesome author to keep up with!

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

This is about the various hurdles that written Chinese faced over the late 19th through the late 20th centuries, with how to use it for telegraphs, how to develop a typewriter for it, how to standardize a phonetic form, how to develop computer fonts and allow input, etc... For those who don't know, when you're typing Chinese on a computer or smartphone you use the phonetic form which brings up a list of characters with that syllable (or with phones especially there are usually handwriting inputs as well).

This was interesting, particularly the section on typewriters, I don't know how on earth anyone felt confident about developing that. A lot of the book is also just about the place that the written language has in the culture and the push back against the idea that it had to be scrapped in order to become a modern country. It's an absolutely ludicrous idea that you could change the written form given the number of homophones (and I don't even mean the same syllable with different tones, though there are loads, I mean same syllable AND same tone). Even the simplification of common characters experienced a lot of outrage, due to changing the radical in a character.

Probably only a more interesting read if you're already into the language and somewhat familiar with it (which I am).

I'm afraid I couldn't follow that one, but it does sound fascinating.

>38 mabith: I find this subject fascinating. It’s interesting that although Mandarin and Cantonese are both distinct languages (not just different dialects) they both share the same written language.

For those who don't know, when you're typing Chinese on a computer or smartphone you use the phonetic form which brings up a list of characters with that syllable.

Do you mean a list pops up as with say French, where you hold down a letter and get the accent list to choose from?

>38 mabith: Another question re computer input - if the key pressed represents a phonetic form - does that imply there are different keyboards for Cantonese and Mandarin?

>40 kjuliff: You use the romanized form, pinyin, to type the sound of the character (this is all standardized now, not guesswork). You're just looking at the latin alphabet and doing individual letters vs keys for longer sounds). Typing shi will then display a list of shi characters, starting with the more common words (to be, stone, to make, work, thing, etc...). You have to be able to recognize the character you need from the list, it's useless if you don't know the character already.

There is a pinyin for Cantonese, as well as other systems, but those transcriptions seem slightly less standardized than pinyin for Mandarin. I wonder if there's a regional difference in percentage of users going with handwriting input for characters. There are also several other systems for it as well. The Cantonese systems still just use the latin alphabet for input, as far as I know.

History would certainly look different if the majority of Chinese languages and topolects didn't all use the same character set. Though I believe some characters can have different connotations depending on region, but given that a single character can have a variety of meanings anyway that's not surprising. 光 for instance, can mean light, ray, bright, only, merely or to use up. Everything is always about context.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

It's always a bit strange finally reading a book that you've known the title and author association for so long without knowing anything about the plot. This was picked for my book club, otherwise I probably wouldn't have gotten around to reading it.

I can see why the novel became such a touch point of 20th century novels, the atmosphere is very strong and quite compelling. However, I felt the narrator was too contradictory. She is obsessed with her new husband's first wife, who she knows tragically drowned. She is constantly in her own head about what the first wife was like, the fact everyone seemed to love her, her own place in her new husband's thoughts, and of course the oppressive house where every corner was touched by the woman who came before her. Only then, despite the obsessive thoughts and low self-esteem and insecurity, she'll be talking to people about swimming at the beach where the other woman drowned and not understand why the atmosphere shifted for minutes at a time. I don't think du Maurier remotely understood how that kind of anxiety manifested.

Where the plot went also felt fairly predictable, but the contradictions in our narrator (and the husband to a lesser extent) is what constantly got in the way for me. I could see so many ways to accomplish what du Maurier seemed to want with her in other less contradictory ways. The husband had quite a few of those moments as well, but they are less prominent because he is largely less prominent.

>42 mabith: interesting. Thank you.

>43 mabith: Like you, I know the title (and praise), but not the plot. So I found your review helpful. Sorry you didn’t take to it.

>42 mabith: Yes I do understand that the key brings up a list of characters and is not an alphabetic letter as in English etc. My question regarding the list of characters and the list of accents for French etc,, was asking for clarification of the operation of the physical keyboard.

Re Cantonese. I understand this is a different language from Mandarin and is not a dialect of it. In that case I. am supposing the same keyboard can be used. Or is Cantonese pinyin different from Mandarin pinyin?

From a quick google I see there is a standardized version used in mainland China.

>45 dchaikin: I have seen the movie, and Rebecca is really a made-for-Hollywood-movie book.

The plot is a version of the trite love story where there is a misunderstanding between two lovers which is resolved with a happy ending and an accompanying loss of innocence.

Given such a trite plot, the book seems to make many lists, probably because it is better written and the plot is made more complex than in most modern versions of “penny-dreadfulls”

>37 mabith: South Korea has a similar culture of web novels, many of which become dramas. I started listening to kpop when my daughter was interested in it, then I began watching a lot of k-dramas, as well as some Chinese and Japanese ones, which led me to studying Korean (half-heartedly for the last couple of years).Web novels are an interesting phenomenon. I haven't yet taken to reading them, but I find the dramas a fascinating glimpse at Korean culture.

My favorite Chinese dramas are (not in any order)

Love Scenery
Put Your Head on My Shoulder
You Are My Hero
Somewhere Only We Knew
Road Home

I don't think any of them are based on web novels though. It seems like many of the web novels are historical/costume dramas, which are my least favorite.

>46 kjuliff: I took a screenshot of how it is on my phone for you, the first picture is what initially comes up and the second is what happens if you click the down arrow on the right side to see more characters (if you click the image it will open a larger version):

You need different pinyin systems because a lot of the syllables are quite different, just like how Japanese and Korean have different romanization systems.

I must say I think it's a strange decision that they ever did movies of Rebecca, from reading the book I wouldn't say it's remotely suitable for that kind of adaptation, because it is such an internal novel (a radio drama I can certainly see). A few people in my book club watched the movies and the Hitchcock one especially changes a lot of key details.

>48 labfs39: Yes, I've read some Korean, Thai, and Japanese novels as well, and watched various of their dramas. I do find the Chinese shows are often more to my taste, usually with less sexism than the Korean and Japanese shows particularly. Somewhere Only We Know is a favorite of mine as well!! I felt like so much of it was really realistic to being that age as well (the last four episodes or so went rather haywire but that's often the way). That one is based on a novel actually! A lot of the non-historical/non-fantasy novels they don't big up that angle or the cross-over of watchers and readers is less strong.

I'm not big on historical (or fantasy) themes either typically, though there are some exceptions (the Korean show Rookie Historian Goo Hae-Ryung is a standout, and the Chinese show Winter Begonia which is set in the 1930s). While it wasn't a favorite drama, the main leads were so bland, Love O2O was a really impressive adaptation from the novel (by the novelist). She added all the right things in just the right measure to make it a more vibrant and worthwhile. Although I loved the second leads so much I sat through some fairly dreadful later shows just for them.

>49 mabith: Thanks. That’s really interesting about the keyboards. Now I can see exactly how it’s done.

Re Rebeca - Hitchcock was such a good director. I saw the movie before I read the book. Had it been the other way around I would have noticed more discrepancies. Typical Hollywood though - taking what they want from a plot and altering it to fit what they think the audience wants.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

I've been meaning to read this for over a decade and finally got to it. Despite the years of hype for this novel and Smith in general, it exceeded my expectations. I'm blown away that this was her debut novel. I imagine it must have been difficult to have to come out SO strong when it came to the immediate followup. The writing was just fantastic. and enjoyable the whole way through.

Other than knowing that race would be a theme of the novel, I didn't remind myself of the specific premise of the book, and as usual I feel like going in ignorant of specifics works in my favor. The loosest summary of this one is simply the dynamics of two close family groups in the second half of the 20th century (well two and half families really). If it's on your list to read already, don't keep putting it off.

maybe it's time I read White Teeth... (or listened)

>52 mabith: I tried years ago to get into White Teeth but it wasn't doing it for me. I'm not even sure I still have my copy. I wonder would I like it better now as an older reader.

>52 mabith: Its on my bookshelf, but not on my list yet.....................

I completely agree with your assessment of White Teeth, Meredith. It was an excellent début novel, and I haven't enjoyed any of Zadie Smith's anywhere near as much.

Yes, I remember loving White Teeth.

I'm another one with White Teeth sitting on my shelf for years. Maybe this'll be the year... I love Zadie Smith and would be really interested to see how her debut stacks up against the later works of hers I've read.

Also a fan of Evie Wyld. I haven't read The Bass Rock yet, but I thought All the Birds, Singing was terrific.

I picked up and started White Teeth as an audiobook on my drive home

>59 dchaikin: "I picked up and started White Teeth as an audiobook on my drive home"

Two hands on the wheel, there, buddy.

>60 rocketjk: come now, it’s Houston. We have a large degree of driving variance/tolerance. (Well, don’t have a choice)

>54 AlisonY: Some books definitely require the right timing (well, and our tastes for fiction can change over the years). I've decided actually I'm glad I didn't read it sooner, as I've done so much more non-fiction reading about the 70s and 80s in the last few years and it's nice to have that extra knowledge.

>56 kidzdoc: Her newest one, The Fraud got on my list after being featured on a podcast but I definitely wanted to get to White Teeth first. They're such different books that I hope the new one won't suffer too much from the comparison.

>59 dchaikin: Hope you're enjoying it as much as I did, Dan! I'm so glad I don't have to drive in Houston though...

>52 mabith: I just put it on my list after reading your review. I used to avoid debut novels but have recently read quite a few. There’s a freshness to them. Thank you for this review.

>62 mabith: White Teeth is continuously fun. I’m six hours in, on the Temptation of Samhad, and constantly entertained. Appreciate the nudge here.

>63 kjuliff: I had to doublecheck that White Teeth was her debut novel because it seemed so unbelievable.

>64 dchaikin: Glad you're enjoying it! I could just live in her descriptive style.

Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979 by Dominic Sandbrook

Last year I read the book before this one, covering 1970-74 and really enjoyed the deep dive into a short period. Sandbrook is very good at tying in the threads of popular culture and events with the political situation. He also seems reasonably good at being fair to the public figures involved, or at least looking well past common knowledge/assumptions and pointing out where they're inaccurate. I don't always agree with his conclusions but that hasn't impacted my enjoyment of the books.

They are quite long (in paperback this is 840 pages), and this one felt like a particularly hard slog. I found so many of the key figures incredibly stressful, partly I'm sure because this period is so responsible for building much of our current world and the events of my childhood. It's hard to look at it in isolation and 'watch' the politicians make the stupidest, most short-sighted decisions. He does try bring the humor where he can, but it's a dark period.

Of course, part of me still wants to immediately read the next in the series so take from that what you will (keeping in mind that history of almost any sort is my favorite reading subject, so your mileage might vary).

In the last few weeks I've also reread seven or eight of my Chinese webnovels, but none of them really need posting about in isolation.

For months I've had various disability benefits review appointments going on and the stress has made me reach for all the rereads. Everything *should* be fine, certainly nothing in my health situation has changed, but when your ability to live a semi-independent life is on the line it's hard to be calm about it (especially after losing both my parents).

Angelica by Sharon Shinn REREAD

A night-time audio reread for lying awake in bed but knowing the 'rest' is needed... This was the last book Shinn did in her Samaria setting, a far future world where the population was whisked away from their home planet after devastating war and started over with minimal technology and protections in place from their god to keep the peace. But all is not what it seems.

I enjoyed the Samaria trilogy (starts with Archangel), it has an interesting arc and she generally writes compelling characters. After those three books, she did two stand-alone works in the world, of which this is the weakest one. The pacing and personal development just seem a bit off. It feels like maybe she just needed a guaranteed payment and the publisher was more open to another set in this world vs a new series. The two main characters are also just less interesting and compelling than her leads usually are.

Don't Call it a Cult by Sarah Berman

This is a about the group NXIVM, led by Keith Raniere who was found guilty of various charges in 2019. There's a two season documentary series mostly focusing on one aspect of it called The Vow.

It's really hard to understand how so many people just missed all the red flags about this group and its teachings, particularly all these young women. There was a lot along the lines of 'if you feel upset by something that's probably your own fault so you need to examine your own behavior.' Even as a seven year old child my older sister saying she couldn't *make* me feel bad, she couldn't *make* me feel any particular emotion, *I* was in control of that, smacked of bullshit.

The book went into the fuller story whereas the documentary is heavily focused on a supposed women's empowerment group Raniere had set up which involved a lot of sexual coercion and being branded with his initials among other things. It was an interesting, if disturbing and confusing read. I know we'd all like easy answers to our problems, but I'm constantly surprised how many people fall into believing those actually exist and are held by one random guy.

Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

I'm a big fan of Sharp's Rescuers books (which the Disney movies were inspired by, one can't really say based on). They're smart, very funny, and a great time, so I've been meaning to read a few of her more adult works. The Rescuers at least was actually not exactly written for children either, which is fairly clear as you're reading it though I think she tailored them more for kids after that.

Cluny Brown is a young woman who doesn't know her place, so people keep telling her. She does shocking things like use her own money to take herself to tea at the Ritz (quite abover her station) and speaks plainly to people around her. Her uncle decides the solution is to send her into service and she becomes a parlor maid. We bump merrily along with her, her employers, their son, a Polish house guest, and the local pharmacist. Unusually for a book of this vintage (originally published in 1944), you never feel quite sure of what's going to happen, which was an enjoyable aspect. The ending somehow felt neither utterly predictable or particularly unusual, but did feel right. Though I think Sharp could have made any of the possible outcomes feel right.

While it's not an absolutely fantastic read I'll be pushing at everyone I encounter, it was a fun little snapshot of the era and I really enjoyed Cluny as a character. I'm certainly still thinking about it and how it might have fit into contemporary novels of the time. I don't know enough about this kind of 1940s novel and I wish I did to have more context for it (most of my reading from the 30s-40s are mystery novels or children's novels).

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Volume 6: Who Run the World? Squirrels by Ryan North and Erica Henderson

I'm not a big mainstream comics reader, but Squirrel Girl is such a fun series. It's such a silly character that all of the nonsense that accompanies Marvel anything doesn't feel jarring in the way it does with other characters. I'm still happiest with the more alternative side of comics (or with old Carl Barks and Walt Kelly) but these always make for a nice break.

>67 mabith: I hope everything works out with your review. When will you hear a result?

>69 mabith: It is astonishing to me how a successful, secure woman can be made to feel like even her own abuse is her fault. I've seen it up close, and it's so clear in the rear view mirror, yet so many are blind to it as it is happening.

>67 mabith: Good luck with the review, and with your anxiety in the meantime. With this type of anxiety, distractions are a great coping mechanism, if that helps at all.

>66 mabith: Interesting. That's the same font the tabloid newspaper The Sun uses. Is thee a connection between the paper and author?

Wish you well! Sorry you have this stress to deal with. I enjoyed all these reviews, especially your response to Seasons in the Sun.

>72 labfs39: Probably a couple more weeks before I get a response about the review, but it's extremely hard to predict. Sometimes I really want someone to study sibling demographics in those cults, because I feel so strongly that there must be an overwhelming number of only and oldest siblings and far fewer youngest siblings just based on the amount of nonsense most of us get from older siblings building some defense mechanisms.

>73 Julie_in_the_Library: Thanks, Julie! Distraction is definitely key.

>74 AlisonY: No connection, that font possibly chosen because of course how various papers covered the events included comes up. Also, if I recall correctly, in this period the Sun was still ostensibly a Labour paper but had started shifting their political leanings.

>75 dchaikin: Thank you! They've stretched out the forms and appointments over six or seven months for some reason, unlike a previous review, which has made it all much more stressful.

>70 mabith: I didn't have much hope my library system would have a copy, but it is available on hoopla, so I've added it to my list.

Kay, I got it through Hoopla as well. It's interesting that they have a good number of her adult novels but not her Rescuers books. Hope you like it if you read it!

For Real by Alexis Hall REREAD

Starting in 2023, Hall has become one of my favorite authors. This is perhaps, unexpected, as hewrites romantic novels (with LGBTQ characters). I've never been a big one for romance, in fiction or real life, and I'm one of those asexuals who assumed for years that sexual attraction (as opposed to aesthetic attraction) was made up for fiction. Five or so years ago I fell into a romance drama TV pit after years of cutting off my own emotional life and it hasn't let me go since.

So here we are with a romance novel also centered around BDSM and I liked it enough to reread it. A scrawny young man, a would-be dom, meets an older man still struggling with the end of his previous relationship, and they form an unlikely duo, fraught with problems due largely to insecurity.

What Hall does so well are the emotions involved, realistic dialogue, and humour. His books have made me laugh more than almost anything else (equal amounts of laughter to reading Terry Pratchett or Donald E. Westlake). He also clearly loves literature, most of his books are packed with literary references, some obscure, some mainstream (the metaphysical poets get quite the nod in this book).

This is not my favorite of his books, and not the first one I'd recommend to others, but it is one of his most deeply emotional, I find. Many of his others take a well-known romantic trope (fake dating, enemies to lovers, etc...) and breathe a terrific amount of complexity and real emotional life into them. It probably helps if you're familiar with UK pop culture though. My favorites by him are Something Fabulous, 10 Things That Never Happened, and Boyfriend Material.

Rogues' Gallery: A History of Art and its Dealers by Philip Hook

An interesting little jaunt into the art world, and how dealers have shaped trends in collecting and, at times, artists themselves. Not the most fascinating book I've ever read, but full of interesting tidbits.

It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood

This is a graphic memoir largely covering a short period of the author's life when she seems to have particularly struggled with her place in the world, as an artist and as a person. She draws many versions of herself, who have slightly different views of the situation. Her depression and suicidal ideation is a central part of the work, so be forewarned.

The art is wonderful and captivating, but it was a hard read. This is partly due to age, I think. Thorogood is only 25, but somewhat comes across like one of those very young people who consider themselves old or haven't realized that even when they're 50 they will largely still feel 25 (until faced with actual 25 year olds, of course).

Girls and Their Monsters: The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America by Audrey Clare Farley

As the subtitle makes clear, this is about a set of identical quadruplets. Born in 1930, all four developed mental health problems, at varying rates in childhood and teen years, diagnosed as schizophrenia. Because they were identical, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), did a study on them to try to investigate a genetic origin for schizophrenia.

What was often ignored in the study are the actual factors of their home lives, with extremely controlling and often abusive parents who both treated them as a single person and but also heavily favored two of the girls. The girls' problems were often taken entirely out of the context of their lives. The book attempts a fuller picture, and also a mini-history of studies into nature vs nurture around mental illness.

The author does a pretty good job with looking at the wider picture and trying to be fair to those involved. Bringing in the mini-biographies of a couple of the main scientists involved in the research was also done well. The book felt balanced, and like it brought enough general information to make the importance of the this study (and the flaws) clear.

>82 mabith: The Genain quadruplets were mentioned in Hidden Valley Road too. HVR mentioned that the Genain's had a pretty horrible home life as well as losing out genetically.

Yeah, I found out about one book from the other in a way, but I forget what the order was (on Overdrive before the description of Girls and their Monsters says 'for readers of Hidden Valley Road).

>67 mabith: I'd love to know more about which webnovels you're reading. A colleague of mine recommended Mó Dào Zǔ Shī to me, and I've been slowly making my way through it (the novel: I haven't yet reached the webseries or watched The Untamed). Very entertaining so far.

Enjoying your reviews as well, especially the one of Margery Sharp, which I will be reading.

I'm sorry to hear about the disability review; I hope things work out. I certainly understand the comfort of re-reading in times of stress.

>79 mabith: to >82 mabith: you’ve been busy.

>85 rasdhar: Ah, I'm not a big one for MDZS or that author, but it's a relatively fun read. Still quite surprising how big the live action show got in the US and UK, given that Xianxia can be a challenging genre to dive into with no knowledge of the conventions (I would say the live action isn't worth the time investment but millions disagree). My absolutely favorite for sheer quality and attachment to the characters has been Female General and Eldest Princess (I'd say half the novels I've read have extremely basic titles). A fantastic read, really well translated (with permission given by the author), I've been trying to get everyone I know to read it.New Times New Hell, is a great contemporary fantasy novel, incredibly funny (I generally lean towards the amusing side of things). Your Memes Are Better Looking Than You is another very funny one, a simpler contemporary romance. FOG for a very emotional pro gaming novel (does necessitate skimming through gameplay but gave me all the feelings)... If you want links to where to read anything, or at looking for a specific type of book let me know, I can leave you a message. I've read a lot of nonsense in the last few years, but it's generally been very fun.

>86 dchaikin: Dan, I started cross-stitching again, the perfect vehicle for audiobook listening! Well, that and going through my too-numerous possessions, picking things to cull in preparation for a move, another good audiobook activity.

>79 mabith: I'm one of those asexuals who assumed for years that sexual attraction (as opposed to aesthetic attraction) was made up for fiction. Me, too! Or, at least, I assumed it was exaggerated and largely non-physical/embodied. It's funny how many of us thought something like that.

Julie, exactly! It's so hard to conceptualize when you don't feel anything like it.

>79 mabith: >88 Julie_in_the_Library: Heh, I assumed that sexual desire was only for men, that all the women were somehow faking it ☺️

ETA: Also, noting the names of Sharon Shinn and Alexis Hall.

Ha, definitely another common idea, Florence! I do think a sizeable part of the population is demisexual but just unfamiliar with the idea (though perhaps that's still just me, unable to believe that most people are actually experiencing sexual attraction to strangers or acquaintances).

Whereas I don't get why it would be unbelievable that most people are capable of experiencing sexual attraction to strangers and acquaintances--it's not like anyone assumes it's going to be all or any strangers and acquaintances. Nor does it necessarily translate to jumping them on the spot and ripping their clothes off. Sexual attraction, like any other, can be just the beginning of an interest in the other person, it can remain latent, it can be overcome by other factors, it can be consciously resisted and modified, and so on...

As for women vs. men, women are still socialised punishingly restrictively ("slut"-shaming just won't die), that I take with a large helping of salt any claims about women's sexuality that flatter the misogynistic, the essentialist, and/or the religious propaganda. In short, it has never been and still isn't in a woman's interest to be absolutely sincere about her sexuality ETA: especially her wants, needs, her desires. Naturally, in this I'm led by my own experiences.

It's unbelievable for us because we don't experience anything remotely similar (for purely asexual people, there is a spectrum so it differs for demisexual folks who only feel sexual attraction after an emotional connection has been formed), and most people take their own reactions as the norm. Almost like someone with a mild allergy to bananas who refers them as 'spicy' because they're actually causing irritation in the mouth, and it may take years to discover that's not the case for most people because how often are you discussing the finer points of what bananas taste like. That's why I mention aesthetic attraction, because a lot of us think that's what people must mean and so actually being asexual doesn't come up. It's such a relief when you have the language to express it and your experiences click into place.

Cultural teachings about women's sexual desire is always a problem, but just leads to two different places for asexuals and allosexuals (neither good, of course). Particularly in decades past that explanation would make sense to many asexual women, since that was literally our experience. Society also often wants it both ways - if you don't feel sexual attraction you're broken and absolutely need to be fixed, if you're open about feeling it strongly or having sex for pleasure you're a slut.

I’m unfamiliar with all of these terms but trying to follow…

>93 mabith:

Yes, I get the angle that the asexuals' personal experience (or lack of that specific experience of attraction) puts on things, but sex is so important in all cultures, I'd think it would be hard to picture that interest as, somehow, exaggerated. Like, I'm more strongly attracted by women than by men, and this puts a certain bias on how I view the world, but I know I'm in a minority.

if you don't feel sexual attraction you're broken and absolutely need to be fixed

This is where we need better education on asexuality (or sex ed in general). How would one even go about "fixing" a lack of sexual appetite, it makes no sense conceptually or practically.

>94 dianeham:

I'm always learning too. At least that's the hope. :)

>93 mabith: I believe most people - well maybe most women - have had asexual periods in their lives.

>96 kjuliff:

As I understand it (and I invite corrections if I'm wrong), asexuality is a sexual identity (which is why asexuals count under the "rainbow" flag), so what you say is like saying that most people or most women have gay or bisexual "periods" in their lives.

Some asexual people have partners and some even have sex. So, "asexual" does not even equal "going without sex", necessarily.

As for "most" people, the level of sexual desire varies among individuals and over one's lifetime and likely anyone who reaches certain levels of high age ends life technically "asexual". But it seems necessary to distinguish such "situational" asexuality from what Meredith and others are talking about. Otherwise we get people "fixing" what needs no fixing etc.

>97 LolaWalser: I don’t think it follows that if we accept that women can have periods (and I’m talking about years) of total disinterest in sex, then “we get people fixing what needs no fixing”.

Why try to invalidate another person’s perception of their own sexuality? I’ve had no interest in sex for the last seven years. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate beauty in people, just that there’s nothing sexual about it. Or are you saying sexual preference or lack thereof, must of necessity, be permanent?

In any case, just because a sexual preference is given a colour in a flag, it doesn’t follow that it’s describing a lifelong identity of a part of the human race.

>98 kjuliff:

I said nothing whatsoever about your sexuality, nor would I presume to. I was addressing the generalization you made to "most people - well maybe most women". Granted that neither of us knows what the case with "most people - well maybe most women" may be, as a not-straight woman I know the problems non-heterosexuals have in getting their orientations to be taken seriously and respected.

just because a sexual preference is given a colour in a flag, it doesn’t follow that it’s describing a lifelong identity of a part of the human race.

I think you may be confusing sexual identity with sexual activity. Asexuals, gays, lesbians, bisexuals etc. get a colour in the flag as a recognition of identity--their basic sexual orientation--which, as far as I can see, most people DO think of as a permanent characteristic. But whether people have sex or with whom is another question. Celibate people still have a sexual orientation. Homosexual people have been known to have heterosexual relations and vice versa, without this changing their sexual orientation. As I said already, some asexual people are in relationships, and some even have sex. This doesn't change their basic sexual identity, the fact that they don't experience sexual attraction. So, "asexuality" implies different things when we talk about a sexual identity of someone who has never experienced sexual attraction/desire, vs. the loss of sexual appetite in old age or illness etc.

Not sure I'm making this any clearer, but probably Meredith can point us to a good reference.

Yeah, disinterest in sex doesn't equate to asexuality really. There are asexuals who are sex-repulsed, sex neutral, or sex favorable but they still never feel sexual attraction. Sexual attraction to a person is a different thing from feeling sex can be physically pleasurable and enjoying it for that element, or seeing it as bonding with a partner.

If you don't know that's part of your makeup then even if you're sex favorable you end up with partners unhappy you're never initiating sex, even if you enthusiastically participate when they initiate, which is incredibly confusing when you don't understand sexual attraction. This happened to me several times, and if I'd had the language to talk about it maybe those relationships would have worked out or at least we could have cut them short faster.

Ace by Angela Chen and The Invisible Orientation by Sondra Decker are good books on the subject if anyone is interested. It's helpful information to give someone who is struggling with that part of their life.

The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy by James Anderson

This is a book I looked at on the bookshelves at home for years. Age six, I thought the title was the funniest combination of words ever devised. It also had a great cover which I could not find online, and I'd meant to read it for years. I so regret I didn't specifically rescue it when we moved during my teen years.

I had been led to believe, from who knows where, that this was a spoof of a golden age mystery (it was published in 1975), but it really isn't. It does bring in a lot of classic tropes, and it has some funny aspects, but definitely not a spoof or parody.

Classically, it involves a group of people having a weekend at a large country house. There are foreign office types dealing with representatives from a foreign nation who they want to keep on-side ahead of WWII (this is set in 1937 or 1938), an American gun collector there to look at the homeowner's collection, a now-struggling girl from a formerly well off family, hidden identities, etc...

Not a mystery you can figure out from clues by reading but a great time. I'll definitely be reading the others he wrote in this vein.

The Picts and the Martyrs by Arthur Ransome

After see Lisa (labfs39) read Peter Duck on her thread, I remembered I hadn't actually finished this series! I got anxious about 'running out' and was saving the last couple for some unknown point. I am skipping Missee Lee, as it's another fictional story written by the children vs a novel about them and I know it's going to annoy me.

In this one, the Amazons (Peggy and Nancy) are on their own with the cook, but their mother is letting them host the Ds (Dick and Dot) on their own as they arrive to pick up their own small sailboat. However, horror upon horrors, the Great Aunt has learned of their mother's absence and taken it upon herself to take charge. Nancy won't have the GA harassing their mother about her lax parenting, so is determined that they hide Dick and Dot and pretend to be perfect little ladies during the five or six days of her stay.

Banished to a shack in the woods, Dick and Dot become Picts while Peggy and Nancy are Martyrs at home. Dick and Dot, unlike the Swallows, have only recently learned to sail and have not taken care of their own cooking and such before. The book is occupied with this and avoiding the GA, but also pointing out the ways Nancy and the GA are actually quite similar. I really liked that aspect, it's something I see in a lot of people. There's this person they complain about, but cannot recognize their own behavior in. He doesn't moralize on this, or focus on it hugely but it's a classic little Ransome element and part of why I've loved these books.

These books are also, essentially, my ideal childhood, and I'm thankful I'm old enough and grew up in a rural enough place that I did get to run around on my own from a young age (though nowhere near to this extent, unfortunately).

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and then Lost it to the Revolution by T.J. English

Well the subtitle really says it all on this one. It's a quick little popular history book. Not the most amazing read ever, but generally interesting, and maybe a useful addition to wider reading about 20th century Cuban history. The writing and organization of the book worked fine for me, no big complaints.

Heart in a Box by Kelly Thompson, illustrated by Meredith McClaren

This is a seven-issue comic about a woman who agrees to wish away her heart so she can stop feeling heartbroken over a past relationship. I mostly had it on my list because I'm a huge fan of the illustrator (one must support fellow Merediths). It's a nice little meditation on humanity in a way. Nothing super deep, but a fun quick read, and again, fantastic illustrations.

>100 mabith: I had a conversation last night about these very issues. A character was portrayed as asexual but also touch-repulsed, and the story made it seem like the latter was part of the definition of the former. I wish the writer had been a little more nuanced with it.

>102 mabith: I have promised myself that I can read Swallowdale as soon as I finish my current book.

Lisa, it's interesting how the conversation has ebbed and flowed with that. It took so much effort to get beyond "all asexual people are sex repulsed and aromantic" to a more nuanced view. It's frustrating to watch some younger folks, who now sometimes assume that all asexual people are sex favorable and want to be in relationships. They largely mean well, but the death of nuance in online communities especially is so frustrating.

Hope you'll enjoy Swallowdale! I've loved all the books so much.

>87 mabith: Oh, thank you so much for these recommendations! I will be looking them up. Just catching up on your thread and really enjoying your latest few reviews.

>100 mabith: Thanks! I think I will look for The Invisible Orientation. I’m a bit confused myself about this, it had never occurred to me until a few months ago that I might have a “sexual orientation” (well yeah, I know that everybody has one, but you see what I mean, I hope).

Hope you find it useful!

Yes, thanks, both of those >100 mabith: look good.

The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine by Simon Price

A generally interesting read, though it perhaps didn't do enough to justify the title, in terms of cause and effect? Not bad at all, just one of those okay historical reads. I needed something focused on the distant past, and this served well enough.

This review is probably a bit of a disservice to the book, and read at another time I might have found more enjoyment in it.

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams

Williams is a musician I like a fair bit, having seen her live several times on Mountain Stage as I was growing up. Her music is quite personal, inhabiting a sort of folk country rock space, which varies a bit between albums.

She had a rocky childhood in some ways, due to her mother's struggles with her mental health and alcohol, though there were also compensations. Likewise, she had a rocky road to reasonable musical success. She comes across as a very genuine person, trying her best to understand a frequently confusing and difficult world. Her inability to stand up against her mother's family in the wake of her death really broke my heart, though I understand why. She's very honest about her own mistakes.

It's a short book, and there's often a shift in focus to how a particular song was written and the story behind it which can sometimes feel like they should be in a separate inset box of text. It was generally a good read though, if you're interested in Williams already. Some musician memoirs have a wide appeal (Patti Smith's, for instance), but I don't think this one does.

>113 mabith: I like her music and her voice.

Yes, great voice. It definitely got me in the mood to listen to her albums again.

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter by Alexis Hall

This is Hall's venture into a fantasy world Sherlock Holmes pastiche and it's incredibly fun. He really captures the Watson narration tone nicely and it's a well constructed mystery to boot.

The world building is also impressive. I don't read loads of fantasy, and the type I tend to enjoy most are historical fantasy, very character driven, with the fantasy element being less prominent. However, I didn't grow up on the Oz books for nothing, and also love a unique world that feels complete and compelling (Garth Nix being my pick for the worldbuilding successor to Baum). Hall's world and how he brought up the various countries and elements within it strongly reminded me of Jaclyn Moriarty's Colours of Madeleine trilogy, which is a major compliment.

There will be plenty of references in this I've missed, both to known fantasy novels and also to Sherlock Holmes details. I've read the Holmes novels and most of the short stories, but it's not a series or character I'm super into. Even without that, it was a great read. Hall really is the funniest recent writer I've encountered, and it's been a godsend.

The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death by Daniel Pinkwater REREAD

There are few authors I'm as devoted to as I am to Daniel Pinkwater. His books helped me hang onto imagination as a pre-teen/teen and not give into the idea of Growing Up as quickly as possible. His children's novels especially are so funny but also just smart! Also, he's a lovely man.

I've read them all so many times, and picked this up now as my "lay in bed for too long before sleep comes" listen. You can download many of his self-read audiobooks for free from his website, and he is always the best reader for them.

This is one of his rarer forays into what could be termed YA, as the protagonists are teenagers. They live in a version of Chicago, where instead of the Clark Theatre, there's the Snark, which shows a different double feature of old films every night. Our protagonists, Winston Bongo and Walter Galt, make a habit of Snarking Out, sneaking out of the house at night to go see movies. They quickly meet a headstrong young woman, known as Rat, who also snarks out and then get involved in searching for uncle, who frequently goes missing. It's an adventure, it's a meditation on the nonsense of high school, it's a comedy, it has its pastiche and Sherlock and Watson, it's a love letter to avocados and classic films. I watched so many old movies because of the ones mentioned in this book and the sequel.

Trying to adequately summarize any Pinkwater novel is an impossible task. If you have kids and pre-teens in your life, get them some Pinkwater. No one is more fun, no one encourages the creative mind more, no one else works as much art and philosophy into their books.

For anyone already devoted to Pinkwater, there's quite an interesting little book out there about his YA work (written before The Neddiad and its sequels came out), called The Agony and the Eggplant and it was a fascinating read.

Empire State: A Love Story (or Not) by Jason Shiga

This is a medium length graphic novel about a couple of mid-20s friends. One of whom has just moved to New York City (from Oakland, CA), prompting the other to realize he may have been in love with her. He writes her a letter to say he's coming to visit and to meet him at the Empire State building and hops on a greyhound bus. She hasn't received the letter and is already dating someone.

I liked the style of it, but it was a mediocre read for me in most ways. Shiga is an author I always feel I should like more than I do because my favorite of the comic artists who came up in early 2000s (Shaenon K. Garrity) likes him, but here we are.

>117 mabith: I wonder if my nieces would like his books. I'll check some out at the library. Thanks for the tip!

>117 mabith: I may check this out. My cousin's son (at age 6 or so) loved The big orange splot, and then the neighborhood I lived in at the time used the book to promote their tour of funky homes and gardens.

>119 labfs39: >120 markon: He's got something for every age basically, including a lot of early reader type shorter chapter books. At the elementary school age The Hoboken Chicken Emergency was always my favorite, and Blue Moose (and its sequel). Into the grade school ages Borgel is my favorite.

>116 mabith: All right, I think that one is going on my wishlist! It sounds like it combines a lot of things I enjoy.

>117 mabith: Ah, Pinkwater was a particular favorite of my childhood (I read The Hoboken Chicken Emergency multiple times and it never stopped doing fascinating things to my brain), and I find that the ones I've read as an adult tend to hold up really well, too. (Although, interestingly, I don't think I enjoyed the stuff he wrote that was actually aimed at adults nearly as much.) Now I'm wondering if I should add The Agony and the Eggplant to my wishlist, too.

>122 bragan: Hope you'll like it! I've adored everything I've read by Hall. He's so funny and has such a great knack for dialogue.

I do think anyone who has had their brain changed by a Pinkwater book would find The Agony and the Eggplant worth reading. I like some of his adult essays, but I do think his gift for children's literature makes it the best thing he could have focused on.

>118 mabith: So many stories about failed meetings at Empire State. The best was “An Affair to Remember” with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant turns up for the meeting but Kerr appears to have stood him up.

>124 kjuliff: Yes, that's a good one, though Cary Grant is always good of course.

What's Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork by Witold Szablowski

I feel the title and subtitle of this may give a false idea of the tone of the book. In many ways we spend an equal amount of time on experiences during the Ukrainian famine and the siege of Leningrad, and the very personal stories of the cooks. There's an edition with the subtitle A Modern History of Russia Through the Kitchen Door, which doesn't quite answer either.

In any event, it's a good combination of food and history, the personal and political. There's a decent mix of horrible events and interesting little anecdotes, to keep one from feeling too overwhelmed. Szablowski lucked out with the timing of writing and researching this, as if he'd started a year or two later he wouldn't have been able to travel freely where he needed to (and I believe some of the oldest interviewees would have died).

Some sections are essentially monologues by interviewees and I sometimes felt this was jarring, the change in tone from those to the standard narrative writing. I imagine there wasn't really a better way to do it though, and I appreciated having the clear voice and personality of the subjects uninterrupted by other comments.

Sheets by Brenna Thummler

This is a graphic novel aimed at middle grade readers. It's about a girl whose mother has recently died, her father is retreating into alcohol, and she's trying to run their laundry business herself. Meanwhile a local man is trying to sabotage the business so they'll she'll have to sign the property over to him and suddenly she's seeing the ghost of a young boy who doesn't want to face his own death.

I know I'm not the target audience, but I found it difficult to suspend my disbelief with this one. Not over the ghosts, or the shady local man. My issue was the town acting like it was totally fine for a THIRTEEN YEAR OLD to be running the business and being very rude to her when she's a little late opening after getting home from school. It was annoying while reading it when I thought she was actually a few years older and doubly annoying when I double-checked her age and found it SO young. It's a small town, not a large city, they all know her mom died and that she's largely looking after a much younger sibling as well, what the hell is wrong with these people.

I liked the art, but I almost gave up on it fairly early on due to that issue and only kept going because well, graphic novels are very quick reads and I was curious about how the ghost stuff would pan out. Not recommended.

>126 mabith: What's cooking in the Kremlin sounds quite interesting. I'll skip Sheets based on your recommendation though.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

This historical novel covers both the very briefly popular novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, and the Tichborne case, whereby a man originally from Wapping in London saw ads searching for a wealthy young man thought to have died in a shipwreck and claimed to be him, necessitating several court trials and creating a public sensation. I found out about the book via a podcast on the case where Zadie Smith was the guest.

The novel flits around in time, starting more or less in the middle of things, with our main focus being Ainsworth's cousin/housekeeper, Eliza Touchet. Ainsworth's second wife is a keen supporter of the Tichborne claimant (absolutely a fraud), and between this and the public attention on the case, we're brought into that story.

Smith's balance of the two tales is incredibly well done, and I never found myself confused about where we were in time even with the audiobook because the people around the Ainsworths and Touchet change so much in each period. It was well read by the author herself, which was quite unexpected.

The book is touched with what I hope is Smith's trademark humor (having only read this and White Teeth. Touchet is a brilliant character to focus on (and create, to be fair, the real woman having died before the Tichborne case), and her own changes over the years seem absolutely realistic and believable. The use of Touchet might bother some readers, but it worked really well for me. Smith thoroughly recreates this period in a way that makes it seem she mostly writes historical fiction, even though this is actually her first.

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen

This is a brilliant, challenging collection featuring 36 poets with a wide variety of disabilities. I'm disabled myself, and basically have been for my entire adult life after being totally healthy up to age 19.

Each poet has an initial short essay or excerpt from a speech or previously written piece and then a few poems. I marked many places, and many poems.

This is perhaps my favorite poem from it (though I've posted two others in the Poetry thread in Club Read):

The Common Core – Vassar Miller

Each man's sorrow is an absolute
Each man's pain is a norm
No one can prove and no on refute.
Which is the blacker, coal or soot?
Which blows fiercer, gale or storm?
Each man's sorrow is an absolute.

No man's sickness has a synonym,
No man's disease has a double.
You weep for your love, I for my limbs—
Who mourns with reason? Who over whims?
For, self-defined as a pebble,
No man's sickness has synonym.

Gangrene is fire and cancer is burning.
Which one's deadlier? Toss
A coin to decide; past your discerning
Touch the heart's center, still and unturning,
That common core of the Cross;
You die of fire and I of burning.

“I think the way I approach translation is the same way most translators do: crumple the original poem into a tiny wad, chew it for a while, spit it out, unwrap it, try to pat is down as flat and neat as possible.”
John Lee Clark – from Translating and Reading ASL Poetry

“Like the male gaze, the medical gaze doesn’t exist discreetly in the human eye, but as a sort of collective eye. A cultural peeper. The medical gaze, leering ever pointedly since the end of the nineteenth century (see Foucault), works two ways: 1.) it reveals things about you that you yourself did not know, and 2.) if it cannot see your illness, your symptoms don’t exist.”
Danielle Pafunda – from Meat Life

“Nothing I've said in this essay changes the fact that I also perceive my illness as a terrifying constraint: physically limiting, but also psychically limiting when fear of the future takes hold of me. But by thinking of chronic illness as a language, I can become engaged in an observation of what fluency might mean, the fluency to speak in a language entirely different from my body's language of health. I can then try to use words to communication this fluency, recounting my experience of body, of this opening to what is the altered or increased or dispersed perspective that illness provides or simply stimulates. But words are the second order of speaking in my body, through my body, and I have to be sensitive to the histories that each word calls forth, the traditions, which will reflect meaning in a different way than a healthy body would recall them, or understand them. I've discovered that the body is a surprisingly “elastic” medium for appreciating, for translating the languages at its disposal. Perhaps there are more than these two—the body's language of health and of illness—but these two are where I begin.”
Rusty Morrison – from To Saturate the Matter of the Present

Some very interesting reviews, Meredith, especially that last one. I can relate to the poem and the Pafunda quote. It's the second book of poetry to appeal to me today. I might become a poetry reader at this rate!

Just catching up on your thread and these are really interesting reviews. I was particularly taken with What's Cooking in the Kremlin: From Rasputin to Putin, How Russia Built an Empire with a Knife and Fork. There's a podcast on which academics often discuss new books they've written, and one series has focused specifically on this type of history. Nearly all of them agree that it's a struggle to write, while balancing information and detail along with holding the reader's interest.

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability also sounds like a very interesting collection. I think it's wonderful that they've included accompanying text to the poems. On to the TBR it goes, and thanks for the review.

>129 mabith: nice to see a positive review of The Fraud. I’m still thinking about it.

>131 labfs39: I think with poetry it's all just so individual. There are so many styles out there, so it's worth exploring. Carl Sandburg is by far my favorite poet, personally. He is mostly straightforward, you're not guessing at what he means, and he has a great gift for expressive language.

>132 rasdhar: Hope you enjoy both if you get to them! Certainly good reads for me. It is quite difficult to balance those histories where the author is doing some standard writing but then you have sections with just the interviewees words. One of those minor issues that don't impact enjoyment all that much but it's helpful for me to know about ahead of time. 'Domestic' history is always a favorite of mine anyway though.

>133 dchaikin: It certainly worked for me, but it is also precisely the sort of book I really like to begin with.

Adventures of a Dwergish Girl by Daniel Pinkwater

When I was looking up dates on the previous Pinkwater re-read I noticed a couple more recent books I hadn't read yet and obviously had to start catching up.

Dwergs are a dwarfish race secretly living in the Catskills. Some adventurous or bored dwergs go to regular public schools, and Molly O'Malley is one of those. Unwilling to become a typical Dwergish girl with all the weaving and cooking, she decides to move to the human town, where she gets a job in a pizza place and starts seeing a lot of ghosts around. There are trips to New York City, consulting a magical king about the ghosts, and a plot to steal the Dwergish gold to foil.

It's not Pinkwater's best work, but there are some fun little details. For the curious Pinkwater fans, my favorites of his 21st century works are The Artsy Smartsy Club and Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann

I'm partial to a ship voyage book and by extension shipwreck and mutiny stories as well. For one, you really feel grateful to be alive now with no danger of impressment and able to get around the world in a faster, safer, and more pleasant manner.

This one wasn't my favorite of the genre, but it was well done, written clearly and fairly compellingly. Unfortunately, I was greatly looking forward to the court case against the mutineers and that was incredibly anticlimactic and minor.

I was in my local independent bookstore (where I used to be assistant manager so I have a Lot of Opinions about how things are done), and this was book was in the True Crime section... Which, you might as well put most of the history section in there if that's how you're arranging things.

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

I'm a general fan of Roach's non-fiction, where she just explores a lot of little related or semi-related topics to her heart's content. She's really found a great way to do one thing but have an incredibly varied life.

I picked this one for my book club to break up all the murder focused and Sad Times books that got chosen, and I was surprised how much discussion it inspired, though it may have had the side effect of making people more nervous about bears than they need to be (one of the suburbs of my city has had a lot of bear sightings lately).

As usual, Roach skips around topics and continents, and one of the more interesting aspects are the cultural differences in how we deal with 'problem' animals. I do wish she'd had a section on historical animal trials (she mentions a few very briefly), as that's always quite fascinating and usually very funny. It's not my favorite of her books, but an enjoyable read.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

Carrying on from Girls and Their Monsters about the Genain quadruplets, it's another family where the children have a high occurrence of schizophrenia and how their story fits into the larger narrative of schizophrenia research and mental health treatment in the US generally. There are twelve children, and six of the ten boys are eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.

It's very well written, and I think does a good job at refraining from judgement of all parties while presently the difficult realities of their lives and how this fact has impacted both the well and sick siblings. The oldest child, Don (also the first to show symptoms) is twenty years than the youngest, and these wide age gaps also contribute to many difficulties given the sheer number of uncontrollable kids (and the parents not bothering to try to control them all that much either).

After I Died, I Became Popular Again - Zuo Chuanchuan

Mostly I've not posted about the re-reads of Chinese webnovels I've been reading, partly because they've been particularly silly ones lately and of little interest to anyone who isn't me. This is a new-to-me one though, and moderately less silly.

This is a transmigration-into-a-novel one, though unusually it's a couple of ancient people going into a modern dogblood novel (the plot of which involves the baby of a rich family, Qi Linqing, being switched out and growing up very poor in the countryside and the false young master getting everything good in life). More usually you have modern folks going into ancient settings. However, now a famous ancient painter is inhabiting Qi Linqing and he doesn't want any part of the drama. His previous apprentice has also transmigrated, into a classmate, and gradually suspects that the other is his master.

There's much face-slapping of the entitled false young master, and perhaps more detail about traditional Chinese ink painting than I needed in my life. I think the author must do it themselves, or else is just very convincing at bullshitting. It was a fun read, without big conflicts, and the interactions between the master and apprentice were very amusing.

It's interesting that transmigration-into-novel is now such a common trope that some authors don't bother to justify why the transmigration happened, which is a bit of a shame. A fair few involve the author maliciously sending a reader into a book after they've made negative comments or rejected it as a publisher (though the majority are just 'I Stayed Up Too Late Reading and Now I'm in the Book' - it's a lesson to us all).

Unrelated, my favorite novel-setting book has this premise allowing the main villain access to the entire work: “Due to an overabundance of plot holes, this story has been rejected by its readers. Thus, the most popular character among the readers has been selected to personally verify the story’s consistency, and make suitable changes.”

>136 mabith: Interesting. I came across this while looking for a good shipwreck or mutiny book, but I got bored fairly quickly and stopped, intending to get back to it. Now finding that the ending is anticlimactic, I think I’ll leave it alone. Thank you for your review, as it’s probably saved me time :)

>138 mabith: I read Hidden Valley Road last year. I agree with you. It’s a sensibly written account. Have you read The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions?

>140 kjuliff: It's not a mutiny book (and ice bound rather than shipwreck) but Madhouse at the End of the Earth was a GREAT read for me. Really interesting. The Bounty by Caroline Alexander remains my favorite though. I think she really builds it brilliantly and the court part is especially fascinating, partly because our common (aka film) knowledge about the case is a good ways from the truth.

I'll have to put The Best Minds on my list, though I think I'll give the subject a good long break for a while. I wouldn't have read Hidden Valley Road so soon after Girls and their Monsters but my library hold came in and I hate to waste that.

Felix Holt, the Radical by George Eliot

And now for something completely different...

I've been putting off reading this, as it's my last Eliot novel and I adore her work SO much. Her writing style, her humor, and her absolute grip on the psychology of her characters is just joyous. It's everything I love about Victorian novels.

One aspect of many of her books for me is also that I can't quite predict what will happen. There are numerous paths that seem possible (and plenty that seem impossible of course, given the times), and you're not sure until the very end what she'll choose. This is so rare with older novels. It doesn't necessarily make it better for me, I know where Elizabeth Gaskell's books are going, but love them to pieces regardless, but not knowing does make for an interesting reading experience.

This novel was one of her less successful for me. The pacing just doesn't seem right, like perhaps it should have had a whole extra volume inserted towards the end. The reveals that happen (to the characters, the reader can be aware) are so late into the book and it feels like the main one is an afterthought. The writing is still impeccable and deeply enjoyable, but it felt lacking compared to almost all her other novels. Perhaps this is because the previous work, Romola, was not a success at the time and impacted how she wrote this one. Our titular character Felix simply doesn't feel like a main character in the way he ought to, and he's far less developed than either of the other main characters.

It's a bit of a shame I didn't save Middlemarch to be my final Eliot read perhaps. I am thankful that I love to reread books, however, and I will enjoy revisiting some of hers in the future (just not this one or Silas Marner).

>142 mabith: Thanks for the references. I’ve put both those on my list. They both fit just what I was looking for, though I expressed myself badly. Now I don’t know which to read first. Both are available at my libraries.

As usual an incredibly varied reading experience just reading your book reviews. Chinese web novels are completely new to me.

Noting The Bounty. I’m not particularly interested in marine books but this one sounds tempting. I read and loved a novel loosely based on the Bounty mutiny years ago, I think it was L’Ile by Robert Merle.

I still haven’t read any George Eliot but I think I should, though maybe not that one. I’ve had Middlemarch on my wishlist for ages.

Chinese webnovels intrigue, but those transmigrated-into-a-book plots sound very confusing!

Lots of great reading here. You remind me that I want to order a Pinkwater book to try with the girls. The only Mary Roach book I've read is Grunt but loved it. Reading her with the book club would be a lot of fun. I'll have to suggest it the next time it's my turn. I too enjoyed Hidden Valley Road. I understand about wanting to spread out those types of books though.

>143 mabith: Interesting about the Eliot. I have only read Middlemarch and Silas Marner. In fact I reread (or rather, listened to) Middlemarch for the first time in decades last year. Do you not care for Silas Marner?

>139 mabith: Please do post about the webnovels if you have the time and inclination - I can say that I, for one, am interested! I have noticed the transmigration into novel trope is very popular at the moment, especially in fan communities.

Can you recommend any books on the race to the South Pole? Anything about Scott and Amusden? I read Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica's Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night!and will it shortly. Thanks for letting me know about it.

>143 mabith: I had never heard of Felix Holt, the Radical. Interesting read and great review. And cool that you have read all Eliot’s novels.

>119 labfs39: >121 mabith: Ha ha me too... I'm using my eight-year-old grandson as a reason to check out The Hoboken Chicken Emergency and "see if he would like it." ;-)

>145 baswood: Variety is definitely always my goal!

>146 FlorenceArt: I'm such an Eliot fan. Her writing is just gorgeous, and there's a lot of humor in it as well. Sometimes I think "transmigration into a novel" is just an author cheat because it's easier when your main character already knows about the novel events and the secrets of the main villains, etc...

>147 labfs39: I think Stiff is still my favorite Mary Roach book, but I've really enjoyed them all. I didn't absolutely hate Silas Marner but it was definitely less engrossing and less fun than her other works.

>148 rasdhar: Ha, noted! It does seem a help to an author (especially writing serially as most of them are) in terms of managing to plot to already have a plot outline they can just alter.

>149 kjuliff: I've not actually read much about Antarctic expeditions, for whatever reason. I think the only one is The Endurance by Caroline Alexander, and it's not her finest work (not bad at all, but fell short of her later feats). I hope you liked Madhouse!

>150 dchaikin: Felix Holt, the Radical does seem to be half-forgotten!

>151 Jim53: I've certainly done a lot of re-reading and re-watching things to see if they're suitable for my nieces and nephews. It's a great excuse.

The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror by Daniel Pinkwater

After rereading the first one I had to complete the set. Like the first, there are SO many fun elements in this book. The teens discover a dark coffee house with terrible poetry and folk music (haven for teens of any era), there's a werewolf loose, Wallace Nussbaum is back, and Pinkwater has predicted the future with his Japanese pizza robots at the Garden of Earthly Bliss Drive-In and Pizzeria.

As ever, a great ride, many literary and historical allusions, and yet another mystery food which is never fully described but makes one deeply hungry (borgelnuskies).

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

A nice little non-fiction read by a former OED editor, looking particularly at the volunteer contributors who are often overlooked (but only going into the main leaders of the project).

Good read for me, if the idea appeals to you I think the book will as well (does what it says on the tin, and all). Ogilvie and her helpers put in an extreme amount of research tracking people down after finding James Murray's address books of contributors.

Boy in a China Shop by Keith Brymer Jones

There are a variety of creative competition shows which sort of spun-off from the popularity of The Great British Bake Off (all of which I basically prefer, because I love a handmade thing that's also usable), including The Great Pottery Throw Down. Jones is a judge on the show (the only one who has stayed for all the seasons of it), and became well known for crying and generally getting incredibly emotional over the work of the potters. He will tear up at least twice every episode. It seemed so ridiculous when I first started watching the show, but now I'm almost 40 and I tear up at the drop of a hat as well so it's become more endearing.

Surprisingly to me, Jones actually picked up pottery and stuck with it from quite a young age. Other than joining and being pretty serious about a punk band, pottery was really his life. He joined a working pottery right out of school and spent three years on apprentice grunt work before being allowed on the production line. When that business decided to move to Scotland, he set up his own studio and proceeded to nearly work himself to death.

It was a good read, and nice to get his full story in pottery. Amusingly, I had heard of the punk band he was in, The Wigs, and their big song was on a compilation of 1980s UK punk. Was very surreal to find out that was him.

Bunbury by Tom Jacobson

"What if... Romeo & Juliet had a happy ending? Or Blanche Dubois didn’t go crazy? Or the Three Sisters actually made it to Moscow? When he discovers he’s only a fictitious, never-seen character in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo’s never-seen obsession from Romeo and Juliet. Together they infiltrate and alter classic literature."

This play had a wonderful premise but couldn't quite live up to it or make full use of it. How any of this play travel works, how they figure out what play they're in, how they get a hold of the scripts, etc... is never gone into. The main point of it is the writing and a lot of in-jokes as long as you recognize the plays. Jacobson's writing in the style of Wilde was particularly fun. If you don't recognize the plays, or don't know them well, you're a bit stuck. I've read Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf but decades ago, and while I knew that's the play we were in I couldn't remember anything about the plot and had to look it up.

It would be a fun live performance to attend, particularly if one took the time to reread all the referenced plays beforehand, but I don't know that I particularly recommend it as a solo read/listen (or if so go into it with low expectations).

Two weeks ago we had a tornado in my area, which is very unusual here in WV. 90 mph winds, and 36 hours without electricity. It's not that long, but when you only have an electric stove and live in a fairly dark house it does FEEL long. The morning of the tornado I also went out and found I had a flat tire out of nowhere, so I couldn't seek electricity at friends' houses either, so I was forced to bury myself in re-read comfort (and now I've had to buy two new tires as the flat couldn't be fixed and that's just not fun on a fixed income.

Now you get the Chinese re-read round up!

Mr. Fashionable by Yu Xiao Lanshan 语笑阑珊

Gluttonous fashion model/actor runs into director of a company he'll be working with when he's in disguise to eat, director falls in love with him, very very silly book, very very silly main character (what the Chinese netizens would call a husky type - which has been decided to be the silliest dog for reasons that are mysterious to me but probably related to amusing meme pictures).

Rebirth of a Movie Star by J112233

This is another classic genre in the Chinese webnovel world - the rebirth novel. The main character dies relatively young and then finds themselves transported ten years or so back to the past with all their knowledge of the later years. This one features an unlucky actor who was used as a bank by his brother, has a very rocky career due to scandals related to that, and then is pushed into a heart attack when his partner, after pushing him to come out as gay, uses the backlash to crush his career and announce his marriage to rich woman. Going back, he decides to accept being the company boss' kept lover to avoid the complications of his brother's debts and the relationship becomes real (the boss was there when he died and was very distraught, so it wasn't out of nowhere). I don't know why this is my go-to comfort reread, but the main character is very appealing and there's an amusing child in it.

How to Say I Love You by Feng Liu Shu Dai 风流书呆

Neglected younger child of a wealthy family comes home, isn't allowed to join the company despite excellent achievement, mother pushes him into acting. Has conflicts with a star actor who judges him harshly, star actor is in car accident that leaves him able to read minds, realizes he's misjudged the other man and is woken up to how little he seems to know the people around him. A more thoughtful, less silly one.

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

This is only my second Waters read (previously read The Night Watch), just one of those hundreds of contemporary authors I kept not getting to.

We're thrust into the late Victorian period and Nan Astley, a working class girl, falls into love with Kitty Butler who is a 'masher' or male impersonator at music halls. Kitty returns her feelings (though with more guilt and anxiety over the illicit nature of their love) and Nan follows her to London to serve as her dresser before joining the act. Her life has many ups and downs and she reels through three distinct phases and modes of life after moving to London.

I had to take several longer breaks in this reading because I was getting a little too upset about what was happening to Nan and some of her choices, but it was a good read with a good balance of humor. If you struggle with unlikable protagonists, you might struggle with Nan. She's frequently doesn't do herself any favors.

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch

An interesting read that I perhaps wasn't in the right headspace for. I think I was particularly stressing out about car repairs when I was reading it, so the epic and world of Victorian archaeology was less diverting than usual.

This book covers the epic, Ashurbanipal, who was one of the last kings of Assyria, and particularly George Smith, a self-taught Assryiologist from a working class background whose many discoveries were often pinned to other more aristocratic or traditionally educated figures. It's another brick of the wall of my dislike for E.A. Wallis Budge (who appears in the Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters, and probably in some other non-fiction I've read).

The territory he wants to cover is a pretty big ask for a relatively short book, so maybe it's not totally my fault I wasn't as into it as I'd expected to be. I did enjoy it though and now feel permanently aggrieved for how Smith was treated.

After Marrying the Villain I Became Popular by Gan Hui 甘洄

More transmigration into a novel as I was continuing to not get my car dealt with at this point, but it's not a re-read this time.

This represents the subgenre of transmigration where the transmigrator is someone who was extremely ill in the real world and had a really narrowed down life, so now they get to be healthy. As someone with disabling chronic pain, this certainly appeals.

Xia Wan is the cannon fodder ex-toy of the novel's protagonist, but of course the new Xia Wan, finding himself at the protagonist's engagement party grabs a new target to protect him, not realizing it's the protagonist's brother who becomes the main villain of the book. It's one of those where the 'villain' has reasonable complaints and is just driven to extreme action, vs actually being a villain so of course love saves him etc... (the actual evildoers still suffer). This is quite a well done one, with a more advanced plot than most, with numerous elements not present into the novel the original Xia Wan read because they only related to him and he was just a side character.

Part of what keeps me in the Chinese webnovel scene is the abundance of funny queer novels without too much drama, and often set in queer-norm worlds (the f/f ones tend to be more heartbreaking, barring a few, so I do end up reading fewer of them, I need to limit the heartbreak).

In Farleigh Field by Rhys Bowen

Not a good read and gets worse the more you dig into it. This was selected for my book club, and had so many flaws. The author has published far too many books for some of these things to still be slipping through.

There are whole side stories that had absolutely zero impact on the book as a whole and could have been cut without anyone noticing and there were numerous little bits you think will lead to something and they're just never mentioned again. The premise is during WWII a parachutist is found dead in a small village and thought to be a spy due to wearing an older variant of a uniform and badge. It's billed as a mystery but written as a social novel, the pacing is very odd, there's little concern for the mystery or spy until the very end. The villain is flagged pretty clearly at the beginning to the extent you think 'oh, probably a red herring' but no, he's the end villain and it ends incredibly anticlimactically.

If it were just a social/character novel set in this period it would be better (though still not for me). You have three childhood friends, one of whom, Jeremy, was in a German prison camp and has escaped and come home. Just before the war he crashed a plane due to recklessness, injuring another friend Ben, so that he can't serve in the military and joins MI5 instead. Then there's Pamela, daughter of a lord who is working at Bletchley, and deeply in love with Jeremy (Ben is in love with her of course). The book goes back and forth sometimes acting as if she and Jeremy are dating and sometimes that it's unrequited, it's quite odd. Ben is there to halfheartedly investigate the spy, Pamela is there to see Jeremy. There are a million side characters.

Not recommended for anyone.

Fantastic reviews of a range of genres. I've been toying with the idea of reading The Dictionary People after reading Dictionary of Lost Words for my book club. I'm going to be reading a kids version of Gilgamesh with my niece next year, so I read your review of The Buried Book with interest. Not sure it's the one for me though.

>161 mabith: Not recommended for anyone. Noted!

>156 mabith: Interesting! It reminds me of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, which have a kind of opposite premise - literary detectives jumping into books to maintain plot integrity.

>157 mabith: Delighted to see the webnovel reviews. The most popular Kdrama in my country right now is a rebirth plotline. Rebirth of a Movie Star sounds fun.

"Part of what keeps me in the Chinese webnovel scene is the abundance of funny queer novels without too much drama, and often set in queer-norm worlds"

I agree entirely.

>163 rasdhar: The most popular Kdrama in my country right now is a rebirth plotline. Which one is that?

>157 mabith: After some fumbling I managed to find Rebirth of a Movie Star in a format that I should be able to read on my phone or iPad. I look forward to discovering this new to me world of Chinese web novels.

>162 labfs39: i think there's a lot to like in The Dictionary People, and it's a good one to dip in and out of.

>163 rasdhar: Ha yes, very much the opposite of the Thursday Next books! Which kdrama is that? I keep meaning to watch Reset, a Chinese one from last year or 2022, which isn't quite rebirth but a time loop thing, and supposed to be done very well.

>165 FlorenceArt: Florence, goodness, that is some trouble. I can actually send you an e-book format file of it if you want. Sometimes what people find online is just machine translation. It's just a silly little book but the main characters are very warm-hearted (though not foolish) and it's comforting.

>166 mabith: Thanks! And your description makes me want to read it next, after I finish my first fanfic read ever ☺️

>166 mabith: I watched Reset when it came out, mainly because it starred Bai Jingting, whom I had enjoyed in You Are My Hero. I'll be curious as to your take when you watch it.

>164 labfs39: >166 mabith: It's called 'Marry My Husband'. The premise is that the female protagonist is married to an awful man and dying of cancer, and discovers that he is cheating on her with her best friend. She's about to die, when the ghost of her father appears and gives her a do-over. He sends her back in time, to before she got married. She realises pretty quickly that all the bad things that are going to happen, are going to happen still - but not necessarily to her. They could happen to someone else. So she decides to get her revenge, by getting her best friend and husband to marry instead, so her fate goes to them instead. It's exactly as over the top and melodramatic as it sounds. But kinda fun.

>168 labfs39: Did you like it? I usually gravitate towards comedies, but I do like a time loop. I've been out of the Chinese drama world for a while, so I only notice newer ones if my favorite singer has done a song for them (he does do loads though).

>169 rasdhar: Ah, I have seen gifs of that pop up on Tumblr. I think it's definitely one I most enjoy hearing about and seeing snippets of (so much TV like that!).

>170 mabith: To be honest, I don't remember it very well, just the basics.

Tattoo by Bu Wen San Jiu REREAD

One of the relatively rarer Chinese webnovels where the main characters are both proper adults (a lot of the less prolific writers are quite young). One is a college professor, Xiao Ke, who happens to share a table in a bar with a tattoo artist, Zhou Zui, while celebrating his birthday alone. Zhou Zui gives him his card, neither thinks much of it, but then Xiao Ke's friend wants to get a tattoo so they call in the nominal favor and the two grow closer. Xiao Ke is the optimistic sunshine type, Zhou Zui is quiet and pessimistic, with a difficult past. He doesn't want to let Xiao Ke in but also can't bear to shut him out. Fairly simple, fairly short, but nice little novel with a minimum of nonsense and good supporting cast.

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany by Katja Hoyer

Does what it says on the tin! This was a great read, and there's a strong focus on counteracting our common misconceptions of the state and the period that is greatly needed (particularly in reference to reunification perhaps).

Hoyer manages to include a huge amount of detail without making it feel too overwhelming or like you're missing the human story. My only complaint really was that I happily would have read an even longer and more detailed work.

Highly recommend this one.

Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell

This has been on my to-read list since it came out in 2015, because I loved her book Doc so much. I do think I preferred that one, but Holliday is just such an interesting character.

This novel covers Josephine Marcus and Wyatt Earp mostly during their time in Tombstone (and their extended circles of course), but it also carries on past where the romantic novel version of their lives would end (aka where the movie Tombstone ends) and through the ends of their lives. I don't feel I know enough about either of them to comment on the historical accuracy, though I imagine it's far more accurate than the aforementioned movie (fun as that one is).

A good read, though perhaps not one that will live in my head for any extended period.

Editing to add this amusing quote from the book:
John Clum was not a callous man. He was a newspaper man, which is similar but not identical.

>173 mabith: My only complaint really was that I happily would have read an even longer and more detailed work.

That says a lot about the book. I don't know much about that period of history. Noting.

>174 mabith: I bought a copy of this recently, but have put off reading it, wondering if I should reread Doc first as it's been many years. What would you recommend?

Lisa, I went back and forth regretting not rereading Doc before starting Epitaph, but I don't think it's particularly necessary at all.

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

This one is going around LT, and it's a bit nice to feel part of a reading pack. Though from descriptions I knew it probably wasn't going to be a book I absolutely loved, the opening quote from it in Dan's review intrigued me, so here we are.

I enjoyed the writing, though struggled with the narrator's contradictions, the time period things were supposed to be happening, sudden mentions of Microsoft Teams, etc...

Still, glad I read it anyway (what's the point if you're only reading fiction you're already sure you'll love), and I'll take more from the other reviews of it on LT now.

.
Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Drury Clark

This was first published in 1977 and was recently republished in 2018. I'm not sure if there were any changes between the two editions, but if so I don't think it would have been much. The original cover is so much fun and I think they missed out by not having a new cover with a similar vibe (also I don't think Clark, who died in 1988, would be happy about an Elon Musk quote on the cover, even 2018 Musk I think Clark would have found a first prize ass).

My scientific interests don't extend hugely to chemistry, but it's been a while since I read some harder science and this guy made me think of my granddaddy. They did live in the same county in New Jersey for a decade between the 1950s-60s, Clark coming up with liquid rocket propellants and my granddaddy at Bell Labs writing technical instruction manuals for missiles and such. Granting, my granddaddy wasn't one for chemistry outside of what you need for developing photos but this book might have convinced him that it wasn't as 'cut and dry' (his own words) as he thought.

The book is absolutely technical, but Clark gets a good bit of humor in it as well. He perhaps overuses the phrase 'scared me to death' but given what he's working with, I suppose that's normal. Will I retain lots of information from this read? No. However, if hypergolic or thixotropic come up in a quiz, I now know what they mean and they were key enough points that my memory should keep track of them, so it's a win.

>172 mabith: This sounds sweet and pleasant. I am thinking of what you said earlier, about enjoying these novels "...without too much drama, and often set in queer-norm worlds".

>179 rasdhar: Tattoo is definitely a little more drama, with the artist's past coming up and absolutely getting in the way of things before and after their relationship starts but certainly not compared to a lot of book. My fragile heart just needs a lot of low-stakes happy romance to balance out the state of the world, I guess.

Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom

I've entered that stage of life where quite a lot of the books I'm reading (of this memoir/popular history ilk especially) are written by people essentially the same age as me and it still feels a bit startling.

The subtitle says most of it. Rosenbloom is a medical librarian, though also has a bachelors in journalism which no doubt helps make the book very readable. She works for a group who test books suspected to be bound in human skin, and some of the chapters revolve around that work and others about the people doing the binding, the reasons for it, misconceptions, etc...

It's a good read if you're interested in the topic. Obviously medical ethics is a strong part of this work, given that the creation of these books is weighted towards doctors in certain periods. Ethics of ownership comes up too, with varying beliefs about what should be done with these books.

I feel like I was expecting a bit 'more' from it, but I'm not sure what that would have looked like. Sometimes I think it's just a current reading mood I'm in lately that the popular history works have lost some of their appeal (compared to more in-depth histories).

I Can Do It - Jiang Zi Bei REREAD

I started this reread on my recent train trip and forgot it was only nearly finished for a bit. The trip was largely for the scenery from the train (Charleston WV to Staunton VA, easily one of the most scene eastern Amtrak sections), so I found I really couldn't read print while on the train, except for periods when the sun was directly coming in the window so the curtain had to be shut. Even then I was mostly looking out the other side's windows. My thought of romantically reading Elizabeth Gaskell while on a train was also thwarted by just being too tired/in too much pain to concentrate on a new-to-me read with lots of antique dialect (fabulous trip though, gorgeous journey and Staunton is a classic fun little college town).

ANYWAY, this is a pro-gaming novel centered around the actual game, League of Legends (which seems a particularly tedious and uninteresting game to me which was created perhaps with pro-gaming in mind). It's an exceptionally funny one, and worth having to skim through game play sections. The characters and their interactions are so amusing and feel quite realistic. I probably annoyed my friend by chucking constantly when I was reading it in the hotel room.

The plot is focused on a teenage boy working as a game streamer known for his trash talk changing over to play professionally partly out of spite for people who say he can't and partly because of his admiration for the team's captain.

Revolution: The History of England from the Battle of the Boyne to the Battle of Waterloo by Peter Ackroyd

Now for something completely different... This is the fourth of Ackroyd's big History of England series (starts with Foundation which is the only other one I've read). They're A Lot in terms of detail and the span of time they can cover, so probably only suitable for those really into their history.

This period is one where I've read or learned about specific events (Trafalgar, war of Jenkin's Ear, the American revolution, various aspects of the French revolution etc...), but not the wider scope from the English perspective. It was good to fill in some details.

Good reading for me, and I'll have to get to the two books in the middle this year. I hadn't really realized they were part of a sort-of series until I was looking up something about this book.

Hands of Time: A Watchmaker's History by Rebecca Struthers

This is another memoir/popular history mixed work where the author is just my age. What have I been doing with my life, I could be a master watchmaker by now!

Struthers does a good job with this one, alternating between her own story, wider clock and watch making history, the history of specific famous watches, etc... She finds a good balance between all that, and did make me interested in finding a book more exclusively focused on horology.

>184 mabith: What have I been doing with my life, I could be a master watchmaker by now! Haha

Freddy Goes to the North Pole by Walter R. Brooks RE-READ

Potentially my least favorite of the Freddy books I've read (and I have read most of them), and for what seems like a silly reason. At this point in the series, Brooks hadn't yet made the animals able to talk to humans. They could speak to each other and understand humans but didn't speak to humans. This didn't change until the fourth book in the series.

My trouble with the North Pole is that Santa is a character and they get stuck at his workshop for a while which pirates have sort of taken over but with sort of good intentions? It's a bit all over the place generally. Now, I think even as a kid (we did not have this one in our library) Santa being involved would have bothered me. I don't remember ever 'believing' in Santa, as much as my older siblings tried to inculcate that in me and people dressed as Santa hugely frightened me due to the fake beards. My parents and our circle were back to the land hippies, there were a lot of long beards, so fake ones were just alarming.

One could say Santa is no less plausible than a talking pig who can dress up and pass as human in certain conditions but to my brain they are in different leagues. This is part of why I've avoid a few of the later books in the series (Freddy and the Men from Mars and Freddy and the Baseball Team from Mars most notably...).

In general, however, the Freddy books are great fun and I highly recommend them. They still make me laugh loads as an adult reader and we absolutely adored them as kids. Brooks has a great way with making believably flawed characters, and pointing out those flaws in a way that says "we're all imperfect and that's okay" rather than "this is a moral failing!"

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

In a general way, I'm a great lover and defender of Victorian novels. It's heartbreaking that people stereotype them as boring or purely moralistic. The Moonstone certainly strengthens my love for the period even more.

This is such a well-balanced work. It's very funny at times, but also the setup is clever and interesting, the mystery does hold your attention, you are trying to work out what's happened along with the characters. Then the characters themselves, even the ones leaning into stereotypes, feel believable. The book also leaves with some minor mysteries, just enough to keep you thinking about it, not enough to be annoyed you never got a firm answer.

I hadn't read anything by Collins before, and now I'm eager to get to his other works (particularly as I've now read all of Eliot's novels and only have one Gaskell novel left).

Highly recommended.

The Ends of the World:Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions by Peter Brannen

As usual, I have veered as far from a classic novel as possible, in part to help create a buffer before starting The House of Mirth.

I slightly regret going into this subject with a science journalist rather than a scientist. This one felt well done but more and more I wonder how much in these popular science books is over-simplified to the point of uselessness (yet my lack of knowledge means I can't spot that). On the other hand, this is what's accessible to the layreader. It's a quandary.

Having just finished a lecture series on geology, it did seem a good time to pick this up, when some extra knowledge was hopefully still in my head. As I say, there were no massive red flags that I could spot in this one with regards to accuracy and I think Brannen does a good job confronting some of the assumptions we make or the many unclear areas. I like to think I'm a reasonably critical reader in popular non-fiction in general, but I find that easier with history.

The writing is well done, the subject is interesting. The relevance to climate issues today felt stretched or shoe-horned in at times, like perhaps Brannen just wanted to focus on the past events but was told to tie them into now more. A good read if you're interested in the subject.

Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen's England by Rory Muir

Certainly does what it says on the tin. If this were covering the 17th century half of them would be off the New World of course, but in the 18th century they're studying law, medicine, going into the church, and joining the army or navy.

It's not badly written at all, and I think Muir chooses his examples really well (one of Austen's brothers is often used), but it was not as engaging as I'd hoped. I think the title and cover make one expect a little more humor, though this is perhaps my own issue due to having read so many humorous history books in the last few years.

I can see this book being a really useful volume for fiction writers. Maybe one to pick up only if you're particularly interested in the period, or trying to understand a veer your ancestors took. Any of mine who were younger sons of better families were definitely already in the Americas, robbing me of the chance to see all my favorite comedians in person now. Quite rude of them.

Fight Night by Miriam Toews (pronoun Taves)

Now here was an engaging work! I'd particularly recommend the audiobook, read by Toews daughter, which really adds to the mood and feeling sucked into this little family.

“You're a small thing,” Grandma writes, “and you must learn to fight.” Swiv's grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partner-less and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send.

This book has a lot of elements of Toews own family and their history in it. Her parents were both part of the Kleine Gemeinde, a Mennonite group formed in 1812 in what was then the Russian empire (present-day Ukraine), from the group that settled in Canada. Toews' father and older sister committed suicide, as do Elvira's husband and daughter in the book (Toews' mother is also named Elvira).

I loved Swiv, her mother, and grandmother so much. They are incredibly alive and real almost immediately. There are many books aimed at adults but narrated by children, not all of them successfully capture the child's voice yet maintain the balance of an adult work. Toews succeeds here, in my opinion.

While at times Swiv feels older than nine you can see why, given how her mother and grandmother are. She is full of love for them, fears for their safety, but of course is also deeply embarrassed by them on a continuous basis and isn't quite old enough yet to be inured to it. The dialogue and each character's vocal quirks were particularly well done. I could see so much my nine-year-old self in Swiv.

This may be a book you'll either love or hate. I can imagine some readers having trouble with Swiv and perhaps the sequence of certain events, but it worked from start to finish for me. This was the only book in my book club's recent picks that I was excited about and I'm so pleased it lived up to expectations. I read it all in two bursts yesterday (it's quite short). We meet to discuss it tonight and finally I don't have to go in full of "here's a very mediocre book that everyone else liked much more than me" feelings.

>187 mabith: I absolutely loved The Woman in White and I really should read The Moonstone soon. I do like a good Victorian novel.

Kay, I'm sure you'll enjoy it! It went so quickly for me too, given it's not a short book.

O Ye Jigs and Juleps by Virginia Cary Hudson RE-READ

I was in a nostalgic mood last night so re-read this before bed. This was a mainstay of my childhood, I adored it so much. My dad would use it for bedtime stories when he was feeling lazy (he was a professional storyteller so mostly we wanted a Proper story from him, not being read to). Also, after my parents divorced he started going to the Episcopal church and maybe thought focusing on these essays would make me less resistant to going (you can't take nine year old who has never regularly been to any religious services and expect them to instantly be happy to start going every other weekend when clearly it wasn't important to you before that).

They are a series of school essays on various topics purportedly written by the ten year old author in 1904. When I was a kid it was common knowledge, in our family at least, that this was just a construct but Wikipedia is certainly treating it as fact...

...here came that Tim Summerfield, acting smart with a new fifty cents for his birthday to buy paint for his bicycle. He is one of those Presbyterians and I thought of something. I said, "I bet you twenty-five cents the Presbyterians believe in procrastination" and he said they didn't and I took him up to Dr. Briggs' house. He is their preacher. And I told him what I wanted to know. And he said the Presbyterians sure did believe in procrastination and the pledge cards proved it. And I asked him if he had change for fifty cents and he said yes, and I got my twenty-five cents... and Tim ran home crying and his mother called my father's office and said if he wasn't careful he would have a gambler on his hands, and he said it looked like he already had one, and she said gambling was terrible, and he said it certainly was when you lost, and he gave me twenty-five cents to take to Tim with a can of paint for his birthday, and he didn't even thank me.

Oscar Sargent bet me my whole bag of gum drops that Miss Nelly McDonnell's cat couldn't scratch himself out if we buried him. I bet he could. But if he could, he didn't. Oscar says to me, he says, "What do people do with dead bodies?" And I said to Oscar, "they tie rocks on them and throw them in the river." And Oscar says, "but we don't have a river." And I said, "Mr. Hamilton has the biggest, deepest cistern in town." And now if Oscar says I told him to put Miss Nelly's tom cat in Mr. Hamilton's cistern, he is just adding up 2 and 2 and getting five.

Etiquette is what you are doing and saying when people are looking and listening. What you are thinking is your business. Thinking is not etiquette.

The book ends with:
PS Mrs. Dixon, if you conscience won't let you give me an A how about a B. If that woman keeps on giving me a zero in deportment, I will simply have to see the bishop.

That's the drift anyway. It was originally published in 1962 and was on bestseller lists for ages. Again, I don't believe these were written by Hudson at age 10. They were published after her death by Hudson's daughter who had made copies not long before a house fire destroyed the originals (quite convenient). The daughter defended the authenticity of the essays strongly, but she would, given the financial interest. In the end, it doesn't particularly matter, it was just strange to see it all taken at face value after growing up 'knowing' that the essays were either written by Hudson at a later date as reminiscences (most likely to me) or written by her daughter based on stories she'd been told.

I still love the stories, they still make me laugh, and they still bring me comfort.

>193 mabith: Gosh, that is a blast from the past. We had a copy of that and I remember reading it way back when.

>194 WelshBookworm: I knew LT would be the place to find other people familiar with it!

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

My first Wharton! Dan gave a great little summary on Wharton's books and where might be good to start on his thread, which was very helpful.

It did feel like such a departure from my 19th century reading, even though the story is set right at the end of it and the book was only published in 1905. I'm sure this is partly cultural, the higher social tiers in the US operating differently than those in the UK where most of my 19th century reads spring from (there was a book covering some of the major high society differences I read last year, The Husband Hunters).

The book focuses on Lily Bart, who was well-born but has become impoverished after her father's financial failure and the death of both her parents. She has been raised to be a social ornament, and to avoid 'dinginess' yet has to rely on friends and acquaintances so that she can stay decently dressed and act largely as the other ladies do.

There is a constant struggle between what she knows she must do for her own interests and versus what she might actually want and her own morals. There is a man of good standing who she could marry but her vision of the future with him and perhaps her own reluctance to inflict this loveless action on an unknowing party causes her to hesitate. Her actions are frequently misunderstood but she has no way to plead her case without harming others.

Throughout the book I was begging for Lily to fully confide in someone, to overcome her own nature, or at times or own scruples, to secure herself an easier life. She is brilliant but she is trapped by her own upbringing and by the way society functions. She's constructed so fully and realistically, with all the flaws and strengths of any average person, and I grew to really care about her as the book went on. Wharton grasped the psychology of her character extremely adeptly.

She broke my heart a bit, but I'm looking forward to reading more Wharton.

Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall

In order to restore my heart after The House of Mirth, I decided to go for this early 19th century set historical fantasy. This is essentially my favorite kind of fantasy - where the mythologies and folklore of a world are just essentially true but how much they impact the 'regular' people's lives is highly variable.

The year is 1814 and Maelys Mitchelmore finds herself under a mysterious curse. First, her dress utterly falls to pieces at a ball, to the extent that she has to flee to the garden and be rescued by the scandalous Lady Georgiana Landrake who is rumored to be a witch and to have murdered her whole family but also knows far more about curses than anyone else Maelys is familiar with.

As usual, Hall's writing is wonderfully funny and his characters are very engaging. He also solves a neat problem of exposition issues in this work by having it narrated by a fairy, Robin, who has fallen on hard times so follows various humans around through interesting times in order to write up a book on it later. This easily allows quick explanations of certain things (and also quite a bit of extra humor), and it slightly simultaneously gives you first and third person narration.

It's a great romp, and I loved it. There's a sequel coming out in August (Confounding Oaths), focusing on one of Mae's friends which I'm sure will be equally good.

I've enjoyed catching up your thread, and I'm looking forward to reading this Alexis Hall book, too!

>197 mabith: Sounds fun!

>186 mabith: I love the Freddy books too, though I don't think I got that far along in the series. It's been a while... I think last time I read any of them was to my kid, so that's got to be 30 years now.

>187 mabith:

I also just read The Moonstone this month and really enjoyed myself. It was a great mystery that kept me guessing and made me feel silly when the final reveal happened. Of course!

The Woman in White is a genius book so definitely get to that one next!

>198 rasdhar: His books are always just the most fun yet also so good at capturing complex emotions.

>199 FlorenceArt: He's quickly become my favorite fun but emotionally hard-hitting modern writer.

>200 lisapeet: They're worth a look back, for various reasons, I think. Freddy the Politician, Freddy and the Bean Home News, and Simon the Dictator are particularly interesting given recent history.

>201 lilisin: Yes, The Moonstone just worked in all senses. I'll definitely be reading The Woman in White this month or in July.

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel

This short work is the story of Stéphane Breitwieser, an extremely prolific art thief who completed more than two hundred thefts over a period of eight years. He likely wouldn't have gotten away with it for quite so long but he did not sell the art. He hoarded it all in his rooms, for his personal display, making sure no one other than his girlfriend (involved in the thefts) and his mother (who he lived with) ever saw the work. His mother only saw the items briefly, if at all, when he carried them in.

Finkel was able to build on others' work for this but also interviewed Breitwieser directly and seems to have been the person he spoke to the most. Finkel wisely does not attempt to write a longer book than he has material for and I think balances it all quite well. A good read.

>203 mabith: Thank you. I’m looking for a good short read right now. It’s available in my library and I’ll be starting it today.

Hope you like it!

Design for Living by Noel Coward

Gary (valkyrdeath here) and I watched the 1930s movie adaptation recently so I thought I'd also get to the play. I've not actually read much Coward before. If you have access to Hoopla through your library, the LA Theatre Works group has a lot of recordings of staged plays (with a live audience) and it's a great resource. They're usually done quite well, though I was not into the main actress for this one.

It's an odd little play about three friends gradually figuring out a polyamorous relationship, essentially (why yes, the film is pre-Hays code). Coward throws you in at the deep end, partway through their story, in a way that felt a bit odd to me. All in all, I rather preferred the movie (and not just because two of the side characters are played by Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn, two loves of my young life).

Gary and I watch movies together most Sundays (via the magic of the internet) and we've been making sure to get to at least one older film per month, as we both love them and grew up watching a lot of them thanks to our dads. This year I've made a bit of a special focus on pre-code works. If I had to pick one decade that I could only watch the movies and hear the music from then, it would be the 1930s without question. Even with books you're doing all right, lots of Wodehouse, golden age mysteries, Faulkner, Steinbeck, TH White, Hurston, Pearl S. Buck, Graham Greene, Djuna Barnes, The Hobbit, and that's just thinking off the top of my head.

Bank Shot by Donald E. Westlake RE-READ

The second of Westlake's Dortmunder series, and the first I read, via audiobook, with my dad on a car trip when I was eleven. It started an absolute craze, and we both just adored the first nine books in the series SO much. The ninth book was the natural end point and I don't know why Westlake returned to it (I'd slightly bet on the needing the money), but they were never the same standard after that.

In this one, Kelp's nephew has come up with an idea to steal an entire bank, temporarily housed in a mobile home. Dortmunder doesn't yet think Kelp is a total jinx, but the nephew (who was let go from the FBI for wanting to introduce a secret handshake), is almost designed to irritate him. However, Dortmunder can see the plan working so well that he goes along with it. Of course, things don't go as planned.

It's an incredibly solid book, and just ridiculously funny. It was originally published in 1972 but I think it's aged well (better than many from the era). Westlake, to me, is always good at building realistic characters with realistic contemporary attitudes and to me it's very clear when that's the attitude of the character vs the author. In the Dortmunder books especially there's really never a huge 'yikes' moment even on that character attitude side.

This is also the first book where we get May, Dortmunder's life partner in this and all the other books, and I love her so much. She's smart, she's funny, she's realistic, and we immediately learn things about her which have nothing to do with Dortmunder or his work. I think it's also the first time we meet driver Stan Murch's mom, who is also a joy. I don't think anyone else writing these kinds of novels in this period built such great women characters.

If you can track down the audio editions read by Michael Kramer, they're perfection (likely only as ex-library audio cassettes). Honestly the most well-read fiction audiobooks I've ever encountered. Kramer is a complete master in this period. All the new readers are dreadful, no one should listen to them. If you're interested in digital files of the Kramer readings of books two through nine, I do have access I can share. They're too brilliant to disappear.

>206 mabith: I thought Noel Coward was an actor, I didn't know he (also?) wrote plays!

Interesting thought about the 1930s. I remember years ago, when I was collecting video discs, I bought one collector’s set with two versions of the same movie (Man Without a Face?). I was shocked at the difference in treatment of the female characters. The female lead is a journalist, and in the 30s version she was ambitious and smart. In the 50s version she… screamed.

>205 mabith: I will. I’ve read a few chapters - audio. The narrator, Edoardo Ballerini, is excellent. I’m hooked already.

>206 mabith:

Very cool mini film club! I love early sound and pre-code film too. Agree that the Lubitsch film of Design for living is unbeatable. I had posted a couple stills here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/320697#7220690

Lola, yes, it's such a great and just interesting era for so many different reasons. Having our film club is mostly what forces me to watch movies and not just documentaries. TV I can happily watch alone but it always feels like movies should be a group activity. I need to go back to more silents. I watched every one I could get my hands on as a teenager, but that was the pre-streaming days, relying on the library, and there's so much more available now (admittedly still mostly relying on the library!).

The Great Pearl Heist: London's Greatest Thief and Scotland Yard's Hunt for the World's Most Valuable Necklace by Molly Caldwell Crosby

I really liked Crosby's other two books, and was a little surprised by the subject of this one (the previous two are both about illnesses). I do love a heist though and vintage detecting. One of the main detectives was also instrumental in the case that inspired the recent Olivia Colman movie, Wicked Little Letters (well worth seeing).

The necklace was worth more than the Hope diamond, consisting of 61 matched pink pearls. Since this is 1913, we're well ahead of the cultured pearl industry (though predictably the Chinese had known the technique since the Song dynasty, 960-1279 CE), and pearls are beyond valuable.

It's an interesting little book. Nothing absolutely incredible, but if you like a heist and subsequent chase, it's a nice diversion.

Mr. Melancholy Wants to Live a Peaceful Life - Cyan Wings RE-READ

Ah, another Chinese webnovel that I can heartily endorse as actually a great book. It's particularly interesting to me because it's sort of a response to another genre of webnovel - quick transmigration. Regular transmigration one or two people get sent to some new world, novel, present day, etc... Quick transmigration you have the same person spending 10-12 chapters in each of usually at least nine worlds (there are some exceptions). The reasons for this or how it ends is not always gone into in much detail or carefully thought out. Often someone is traveling through novels to keep the plot on track, or sent into worlds to be the villain who always suffers so the 'system' controlling them can steal their luck. Often I think it's just an excuse for a writer to do a lot of settings. You've always got a xianxia world, a more realistic ancient world, a modern entertainment industry setting, an apocalyptic world, a western fantasy world, etc...

In this world we meet a former 'clearer', Yu Hua, who survived being sent into more than 1300 worlds by the System, to meet specific goals so the system could steal the worlds' energies. Yu Hua has became so powerful though that he breaks free and goes to retire in an unopened world that the System can't yet touch. He just wants to live an ordinary life, and he has a plan. Marriage is not part of the plan, but his company forces him on a blind date and the other person catches his attention, making him really feel something for the first time in hundreds of years. When the book begins, they've been married for a few years, and Yu Hua has just lost his job due to the system managing to unseal some of his power, causing him to lose control and injure a coworker.

He is currently working on controlling the unlocked power and trying to figure out how to introduce his savings of $100 million dollars without arousing suspicion. His husband is trying to figure out a non-suspicious way to bring up the fact that his income is actually far more than his stated job, since in reality he's one of the world's Protectors, who fight off Destroyers (what clearers are known as), though there haven't been any since Yu Hua first arrived 15 years before.

It's a really funny book, the characters are created with a great realism to them and all feel very individual. However, the plot also really tightly done. The steps, the pacing, it all makes perfect sense for this kind of world, in this genre. The thing with amateur writers, often writing serially (or only five to ten chapters ahead of their posting schedule), plot isn't always the strong point of webnovels. This one has it all though. Great characters, great plot (more and more powerful destroyers keep coming, Yu Hua has to help the protectors fight them, showdown with the System, etc...), super funny.

>213 mabith: Great review, and this sounds like such a fun read.

It really is! If you, or anyone, is curious, it can be read online here (and at the top of the page there are links to download ebook formats as well).

>197 mabith: This sounds like a lot of fun, and it's a type of book that I haven't read for a while. I've put it on hold. Thanks for your review!

>211 mabith:

Libraries are the best! In case you need more silents, there are great free databases (with excellent quality, restored films, and usually English sub availability) linked here https://www.librarything.com/topic/321467#n7395182

>216 Jim53: Hope you enjoy it!

>217 LolaWalser: Thanks, Lola!

>216 Jim53: Oh, wonderful. Thanks for the link!