RidgewayGirl's Book-o-Rama

Hi, everyone. I'm Kay, I live in Bloomington, Illinois, a small city with a large university, surrounded by fields of corn and soy beans. I moved here a few years ago with my husband and ended up in Adlai Stevenson II's childhood home, which means the house is old and the neighbors have stories.

I mostly read literary fiction, and enjoy finding books by small presses and books in translation. I also like to slip in a fun genre novel in there, but I'm not great at reading non-fiction. I'd say I'm working on that, but what I'm really working on is not reading out of a sense of obligation or completion, not an easy task for someone who is in two local book clubs and is considering a third. I also have to work not to plow through awards shortlists and to just pick out the books that I want to read. So who knows what books I'll end up reading this year.

Currently Reading



Recently Read



Books Acquired

First Quarter Reading

January
1. The Book of George by Kate Greathead
2. Elevator in Sài Gòn by Thuận, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý
3. The Accomplice by Joseph Kanon
4. Rejection: Fiction by Tony Tulathimutte
5. Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson
6. Colored Television by Danzy Senna
7. Sweet Fury by Sash Bischoff
8. We Live in Water by Jess Walter
9. The Favorites by Layne Fargo
10. Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu
11. People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi, translated from the Indonesian by Lara Norgaard

February
1. The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato
2. Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
3. The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain
4. Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister
5. The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger
6. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
7. Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro

March
1. The Book of Love by Kelly Link
2. Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
3. The History of Sound: Stories by Ben Shattuck
4. We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
5. Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter
6. Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky
7. The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
8. The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

The Lists

Books by Author's Nationality

Brazil
Giovana Madalosso (The Tokyo Suite)

Britain
Olivia Manning (The Balkan Trilogy)

Indonesia
Felix Nesi (People from Oetimu)

Kuwait
Bothayna Al-Essa (The Book Censor's Library)

South Korea
Han Kang (We Do Not Part)

United Kingdom
Gillian McAllister (Wrong Place, Wrong Time)

USA
Marie-Helene Bertino (Beautyland)
Sash Bischoff (Sweet Fury)
Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling)
Jennifer Croft (The Extinction of Irena Rey)
Vinson Cunningham (Great Expectations)
Marcy Dermansky (Hot Air)
Layne Fargo (The Favorites)
Kate Greathead (The Book of George)
Joseph Kanon (The Accomplice)
William Kent Krueger (The River We Remember)
Kelly Link (The Book of Love)
Dinaw Mengestu (Someone Like Us)
Marilyn Robinson (Housekeeping)
Danzy Senna (Colored Television)
Dani Shapiro (Signal Fires)
Ben Shattuck (The History of Sound: Stories)
Tony Tulathimutte (Rejection: Fiction)
Anne Tyler (Three Days in June)
Jess Walter (We Live in Water)

Vietnam
Thuận (Elevator in Sài Gòn)

Books by Year of Publication
Note: I count books by the year they are first published, so in the case of translations, this can sometimes be years earlier than the first English language edition.

1960
The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

1966
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter

1980
Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson

2013
Elevator in Sài Gòn by Thuận
We Live in Water by Jess Walter

2019
The Accomplice by Joseph Kanon
The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa
People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi

2020
The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso

2021
We Do Not Part by Han Kang

2022
Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro
Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

2023
The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

2024
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
The Book of George by Kate Greathead
The Book of Love by Kelly Link
Colored Television by Danzy Senna
The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck
Rejection: Fiction by Tony Tulathimutte
Someone Like Us by Dinaw Mengestu

2025
The Favorites by Layne Fargo
Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky
Sweet Fury by Sash Bischoff
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

Welcome in, one and all. Let's talk about books.

Happy New Year! I look forward to following your reading again this year.

Oh I just love those charts. Very clever

I sincerely wish you a happy, healthy and fulfilling new year. May all your wishes come true. Happy reading 2025.

>1 RidgewayGirl: Yay. I love the comic, and how tidy and organised your thread is. Looking forward to hearing all about your reading, especially Elevator in Saigon which looks very interesting.

I come here for the shiny new fiction. So I’m happy if that’s still your trend. Enticing four titles you have going. Do you think, per the comic, we might retain something of those audiobooks in our sleep?

Love the comic!

>7 karspeak: Thanks, Karen. May it be a good reading year for all of us.

>8 Nickelini: Joyce, Tom Gauld always nails it.

>9 Ameise1: Happy reading to you too!

>10 rasdhar: Rasdhar, Elevator in Sài Gòn is marvelous so far. I wasn't sure what to expect since I picked it up at random (which honestly does not often work well for me) and I'm enjoying it a lot.

>11 dchaikin: Daniel, I will never be able to resist shiny, new fiction. That's where the conversations are going on, after all. It's lovely to think that our brain remembers the stuff we aren't consciously listening to, but given how I can lose my place in an audiobook while making a left turn, it's at least not true for me.

>12 rhian_of_oz: I'm amazed at how often Tom Gauld enters my mind to find ideas for his work.

>13 RidgewayGirl: I’m certain counting on you not resisting. And, left turns are ok, but passing slow drivers does dim the attention a lot.

>13 RidgewayGirl:, >14 dchaikin: Another one counting on you not to resist here ;-) Wishing you a happy reading year.

>15 rachbxl: I appreciate every single person who is enabling me here.

Looking forward to following your thread again this year. I always find lots of interesting books in it. I think that's also one of my favourite Tom Gauld comics.

>11 dchaikin: I once was trying to listen to a novel as an audiobook but kept falling asleep and would have to go back 30 minutes the next night to try and find something I definitely remembered. I eventually gave up since I wasn't following the surreal story at all. I got the print book and read through the first few chapters and it was an almost entirely different book. Things that I remembered didn't happen at all. My brain had just taken events off in its own direction as I drifted off. So for me at least, I definitely retain nothing!

>17 valkyrdeath: that’s a great test! But i was coming to a different conclusion. I was thinking, wow, you get a completely new book that way!

Stopping by with my star, Kay. Look forward to your reading in 2025.

>13 RidgewayGirl: He's in all our brains, lurking.

I'll be around to see what you get up to this year. Starred and commented so that I find my way back. :)

>17 valkyrdeath: Thanks, Gary. I'm looking forward to following everyone's reading again this year, but oh, the threads are active right now.

>19 AlisonY: Thanks, Alison, likewise.

>20 rasdhar: But not in a creepy way, hopefully.

>21 ursula: I'm looking forward to your reading, too!

Finished my first book of the year and it was a good one. The Book of George by Kate Greathead was so well done. Greathead is married to another author I like, Teddy Wayne, and it's fun to see small connections in the writing.

I haven't seen that Tom Gauld cartoon before but it is perfect!

Happy new year! I've just wishlisted Elevator in Sài Gòn (in the French translation): I hadn't heard of this author before and she sounds very promising.

I’m here at last, Kay. Your thread’s hopping. Did your son get out today? I see on the news that O’Hare’s a mess.

>23 wandering_star: The only thing I disagree about is the returning of borrowed books. If a borrowed book is never returned, it's just a paper object that can be replaced. I prefer to think of myself as a book pusher than a protector of my books. That said, there are two books I regret having not gotten back, but oh well.

>24 Dilara86: I'm finding the book very interesting and well written. There's a lot about the differences between people from Hanoi and people from Saigon, which is fascinating. Vietnam is a long country.

>25 labfs39: He flys out in a few hours. We are lucky to be on the outer edge of the storm and his connection is in Atlanta, which is south of the storm, so hopefully there will not be delays. One thing about Bloomington's airport is that it only handles a handful of flights each day, so there's nothing that can get backed up and the flight he's on just goes back and forth between Atlanta and Bloomington. So fingers are crossed that all will be fine. I'll miss having him around, though.

>1 RidgewayGirl: I can certainly relate to the statistics about non-fiction in your cartoon. Happy New Year!

>26 RidgewayGirl: I don't lend a book unless I'm prepared not to get it back. A funny story from when Morgan and I first met and were dating - I recommended The Wind Up Bird Chronicle to him and lent him my copy. He called me and said "um, my dog chewed up the back cover of your book." I said, "you mean, the back cover of your book." I didn't need a chewed up copy returned to me, haha!

>26 RidgewayGirl: "If a borrowed book is never returned, it's just a paper object that can be replaced." This is true - but I still remember some books that weren't returned to me many years later!

>28 ursula: I once messed up a borrowed book so badly that I just bought a new copy and gave that "back" to the colleague I'd borrowed the book from!

>27 FlorenceArt: Happy New Year, Florence!

>28 ursula: That's my view, too. And there's a pleasure in introducing a book you really enjoyed to someone else.

>29 wandering_star: I don't remember every book that left and didn't come back, but there are two I do remember.

"That's my car," Jenny said, remembering what she was doing here. She explained the situation.

"I'm in a pickle," she added.

George's expression conveyed sympathy, but he did not offer to help. Not George. It wouldn't even occur to him.

The Book of George by Kate Greathead follows George from his childhood into his thirties. George is affable and bright. He's also lazy and undecided and prefers to have other people take care of him. We've all known a guy like this, who somehow never lives up to his promise, who isn't great at keeping promises or of showing up when he's said he would. This is a hard book to describe, since it's just the life of a guy, and while George isn't the kind of guy who is usually the subject of novels, it all makes for a great reading experience, strangely enough.

George is a frustrating character to follow, from the inertia, to the way he is given endless second chances from everyone around him, but especially his cynicism and self-pity. He receives an expensive private education, his college is paid for, his relatives are willing to give him the kinds of jobs only available to the well-connected, and yet he feels hard done by. His mom endlessly lets him move back in, his girlfriend, a kind and intelligent woman, gets back together with him far more often than is understandable, and all of that makes for surprisingly good reading. Greathead does a fantastic job rejuvenating the WMFuN*, something I didn't think was possible.

* White Male F***-up Novel

Another terrific and timely review. I’ve seen and wondered about this title. And was happy you were reading it. I think it’s a ToB titles(??). But, should i read it. I think it will need to win an award to get me to read it. ☺️

>32 dchaikin: Yes, it's a ToB book. I would not otherwise have read it, but I'm very glad I did. The author, Kate Greathead, is married to Teddy Wayne, another author I really like.

I'm quite tempted by The Book of George, though also fear George might be a little too much like my dad (although he was more helpful). I remember so distinctly realizing as a kid that his sudden decision to start going to church after he and my mom divorced was likely related to needing a certain amount of praise and attention from women (anyone really but especially women).

>34 mabith: I think that most people will recognize someone in George. I saw my son in his early teen years (he has since improved) and a little bit of myself. Both George and I majored in philosophy and I felt his reasoning in my soul.

I once listened to a favorite book on audio - I had, at that point, probably read it at least half a dozen times. But it wasn't until I was trying to follow it on audio that I realized that the book is about 90% flashbacks. It starts with a scene, goes back to explain how she's there, goes back within that flashback to explain how she got to there... I kept noticing a change of scene/timeline and thinking ah, now we're getting back to the story! but no, it was mostly another flashback. I have read the book since then, and enjoyed it - it makes more sense to me as printed words. (the book is The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley - fantasy, more or less YA (teen protagonist, though she's in very adult situations throughout)).

>36 jjmcgaffey: Audiobooks do much better for me when there's a chronological timeline or the flashbacks are clearly indicated.

Elevator in Sài Gòn by Thuận and translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý begins with the death of the narrator's mother. She'd come to Saigon to see her son's new house, a fancy place that includes an elevator, one where she will fall down the elevator shaft in the middle of the night. The narrator travels back to Vietnam from Paris, where she works in a shop and teaches a class in Vietnamese on Monday evenings. The funeral awakens in her a need to investigate her mother's past, a search that will take her back to Paris, looking for an elusive man she believes to be her father.

The summary does a disservice to this book. It's a short book, but filled with different lives and countries and histories. There's the narrator's own life, the interpersonal relationships of her students, her mother's life as a faithful party member, and the lives of both the man she's searching for and assorted others, from a refugee from Vietnam who lives the shadow life of a person without connections or documents to the aging Parisienne living is squalor along with the feral cats she tricks into entering her apartment. It's an odd and fascinating journey, full of history and human nature.

Sounds fantastic - Elevator in Sài Gòn

>38 RidgewayGirl: Ooh. This was already on my maybe wishlist as it's published in the UK by Tilted Axis Press, who I often buy from. Definitely on the wishlist now!

>39 dchaikin: I really enjoyed it, Dan. The writing is lovely, and it gives a picture of Vietnam I had not encountered before.

>40 wandering_star: I didn't know that. I have a few books from them and keep an eye on their catalog. I picked this up because it was in the "new books" section of the library and it looked intriguing. I'm happy with the range of books available at my small library system in central Illinois -- there are always a few translated books there.

The Accomplice by Joseph Kanon is a thriller involving a reluctant Nazi hunter whose link to the man he's hunting, an associate of Mengele's who ran his own inhumane experiments at Auschwitz, is the man's beautiful daughter. It's 1962 and Aaron is visiting his uncle in Germany, whose work finding Nazis has landed him on the covers of magazines, when the elderly man spots Otto Schramm walking down a busy street. Since he is not able to, he asks Aaron, who works for the CIA, albeit as an analyst, to take on the job. Schramm was reported dead in Argentina years ago, but the key lies with his daughter, who lives in Buenos Aires. So Aaron goes to Argentina, and gets to know Schramm's daughter very well and very quickly. He doesn't have any experience at this, but he has the help of a German journalist and a few Mossad agents, as well as his own connections at the Buenos Aires field office of the CIA. But the guys helping him each have goals of their own and his own motivations are being influenced by the woman he's become involved with.

There's a lot going on in this thriller, with a look at the politics around the high-profile Nazis who fled accountability after the war and a lengthy set up to explain why Aaron, whose mother died in the camps, is canoodling with the daughter of a notorious Nazi, and to put the representatives of the various groups (Mossad, the CIA, etc...) interested in Schramm in position, which means that the real action doesn't start until the final third of the book. Of the books by this author that I've read, this is the least interesting, although it was still a fine diversion.

>42 RidgewayGirl: I was looking up that author name over the weekend (he wrote an introduction in a book I was reading and I had never heard his name before). And now here is a review of one of his books. Some days you cannot make that up :)

>43 AnnieMod: He's very good writing about the immediate post-war period in Germany.

>44 RidgewayGirl: Not a surprise really considering that the introduction was for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - there was a reason to pick him up. :) I plan to check him out at some point this year - not sure how he flew under my radar considering that this is one of the genres I like.

Let me start by saying that I can't think of anyone I'd recommend this book to, not even anyone in my generally game book club. The most adventurous reader I know texted me to say she was setting it aside. I think it's both pretty good and also so entirely located within a subculture -- young people who exist primarily on social media -- that it's not a book written with longevity in mind. Just like Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This, there's a specificity to this book that means it might well feel like it's written in a foreign language a decade from now.

Rejections: Fiction is a collection of short stories written by Tony Tulathimutte in which the characters from other stories all exist in the same world and interact in various ways. The title here is important; each story follows someone who is rejected and for very good reasons. There's the nice guy who is always respectful of everyone, who somehow can't find a woman willing to date him, the woman who is unable to get over anything, the guy who has honed his own taste in pornography until he's unable to form a functional relationship, each character ending up in situations that will make even the most detached of readers cringe inside. All the stories lead to an ending in which the author's own motivations are examined and found wanting. Tulathimutte writes well and he certainly doesn't treat any of his characters kindly. In the stories in which they are not the main character, they appear fine and reasonably normal, but when the spotlight focuses on them, their personal failings are taken to the most extreme point possible. And if all that has not put you off this book, you may well find it both as off-putting and strangely compelling as I did. Just be aware that the author is willing to be explicit in bizarre and stomach-churning ways.

I think I’m not taking that as a recommendation. Although, intriguing. Great review

Hi! I'm here again to be astounded and confounded. >46 RidgewayGirl: like so!

>47 dchaikin: I think the author is talented and that you would not enjoy this book.

>48 LolaWalser: I don't think I'd recommend this book to you, exactly, but you might find it interesting, depending on your tolerance for the way a certain subset of young people talk on social media. I appreciated how well he got the cadences, so to speak, but at the risk of sounding like an old, I longed for clearer communication. Everyone was so deep in how they felt they were expected to respond, that they eventually lost the ability to speak honestly.

>46 RidgewayGirl: That sounds intriguing actually... :)

>46 RidgewayGirl: You've actually made me curious about this one. Making a note of it.

>46 RidgewayGirl: This sounds like an interesting book, Kay although I will pass on it. I think I enjoyed your comments more than I would the book!

Annie, Gary and Beth, I should have thought a minute more before writing my review and realized that there are a few people here who would be curious about this book!

In other threads, there was a discussion about Archipelago Books, which publishes translated works in pleasing square volumes with French flaps and high quality paper. I decided to go ahead and subscribe, which gets me a new book each month. I am hoping to read more from small presses this year and more novels in translation and I'm hoping that I will read each book as it arrives. The first book arrived today and it looks interesting -- it's centered on unrest on the island of Timor.

>53 RidgewayGirl: Actually you may get more than one book per month - unlike other subscriptions, you get every book they publish, a few days before they publish it. :)

Enjoy the books! :)

>54 AnnieMod: Even better! It was with extraordinary self-control that I did not use my 25% discount to immediately load up on their earlier books.

Ooh, I'm jealous. And tempted. I already have 7 unread Archipelago Books on my shelves. Surely I must read those before I subscribe, right?

>56 labfs39: I have a couple of unread Archipelago books on my shelf, too, but I'm hoping that a new one (or more!) arrives every month will get me to read them immediately. That's the plan, anyway. I did just start Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy though.

>56 labfs39: But they will publish so many good books before you get to it and then you will get them with the discount in bulk and that will be worse than them just coming in slowly, no? :)

>57 RidgewayGirl: Are you reading The Balkan Trilogy along with Mark over in 75 Books? Several folks are doing a group read of it this month. I read it in 2013, but didn't write a review and now remember nothing. I went back and scanned my thread at the time I was reading it and seemed to enjoy it a lot, especially book two. It's fun rereading my exchanges with Rebeccanyc, and Tad, who has just rejoined CR.

>58 AnnieMod: Sigh. I just need to read faster, there's no alternative!

>59 labfs39: No, I'm just reading it on my own. It doesn't seem to be the kind of book that needs a guided read. (and the 75 books group scares me a little)

Hi Kay, I see a few ToB on your reading list, yay! I just got Colored Television in Libby and will be back to see your thoughts. Rejection also intrigued me, and I remember liking that Patricia Lockwood book. I haven’t got a hold of the George book but I’d like to.

>61 raidergirl3: I think you've read more of the tournament books than I have so far. I'm a little wary of the Kelly Link book, but hope to get to it soon.

>38 RidgewayGirl: I just stopped by to say hi and wish you a wonderful 2025, and of course I took a bullet on my first visit!

>63 Jim53: It will certainly fit your search for literary mysteries.

>46 RidgewayGirl: "I think it's both pretty good and also so entirely located within a subculture -- young people who exist primarily on social media ..." I immediately knew that this book was not for me, but I enjoyed your review.

>53 RidgewayGirl: Yay! I'm glad that you've also become a subscriber to Archipelago Books, Kay. As I mentioned on my thread I'm nearly finished with People from Oetimu, which continues to be a good read, and I look forward to discussing it with you soon.

>65 rasdhar: Yes, the cutting edge slang means it will look quaint in a few years and off-putting to many, but I don't think that Tulathimutte cares about that. He's doing his own thing here.

>66 kidzdoc: I read the first two chapters of People from Oetimu yesterday and enjoyed the beginning quite a bit.

>67 RidgewayGirl: Great. I finished People from Oetimu early this afternoon, so I await your thoughts about it.

I was book-shamed into reading this book. In a thriller I read, a character needs a made-up backstory and simply steals it from this book. Because the person she's lying to is a writer of literary novels, she feels contemptuous of this supposedly well-read man not noticing she stole her life story from one of the most well-known literary novels in the US. Since I read literary fiction and consider myself reasonable well-read, I felt personally attacked.



Ruth and Lucille are children when their mother drops them off at their grandmother's house, in a small town in the wilds of Idaho, and drives off. They will never see her again. They live with their grandmother and are each other's only friend, living in a ramshackle house where the family stories are always present in the lake next to the town and the surrounding mountains. Eventually, the grandmother dies and everything changes between the sisters.

The thing about Housekeeping is that it is beautifully written and Marilynn Robinson knows how to tell a quiet story in ways that don't feel quiet. The novel looks at people who don't fit in and how they figure out how to live in the world. The book feels timeless, it could have taken place a few years ago or a hundred, yet the entire book is rooted in a very specific place, an isolated town in the mountains, at the edge of a lake that rises in the Spring to overtake their cellars and ground floors, a place with a high school and officials who are willing to give a lot of leeway to the odd pair living on the edge of town, until they aren't. And even with her first novel, Robinson looks into people's hearts and motivations in a deep and caring way.

>69 RidgewayGirl: I read Housekeeping a couple of months ago and was really impressed by the writing. There are some scenes that are definitely sticking with me. It's the only thing I've read by Robinson so far.

>69 RidgewayGirl: Huh, you may shame me into reading this one as well. :-) I have read nothing by her.

Btw, when I first glimpsed the cover, I thought it was going to be a book about the Holocaust. I don't know how many covers I've seen with railroad tracks going nowhere as not so subtle hints that the book is about Auschwitz.

>69 RidgewayGirl: Housekeeping is such a beautiful, quiet book. I remember when everyone was talking about Gilead but having read both I much preferred Housekeeping.

>71 labfs39: I think that imagery is also very common in books set in small town America, so you might have to recalibrate!

>71 labfs39: Lisa, if you're ever in the mood for perfect, gorgeous, simple writing and a quiet story, pick up Housekeeping or Gilead.

>72 mabith: Yes, I agree that while Gilead is very good, I liked Housekeeping a little more. That may be the main characters -- I related much more to awkward Ruth than I did to John Ames.

She'd never understood so profoundly how much being a novelist was at odds with domestic life, with sanity. But now she saw it clearly. To be a novelist was to be a dreadful parent. To be a novelist was to be a monstrous marriage partner. That kind of writing had no beginning and no end. It just crept around the house, infecting every element of family life. You couldn't live with it, you couldn't live without it.

Jane married for love, but an assistant writing professor whose chances at tenure and security rely on her completing her second novel, a book she's been working on for close to a decade and now, on sabbatical and living in a friend's fancy house, this is her last opportunity. Her husband is supportive of her writing but as he is an artist, she's the one who is supporting their family. Their kids need stability and she dreams of a craftsman house in a multicultural neighborhood, while he dreams of moving the family to Japan. They still love each other, but the strain is showing. When Jane's novel, an enormous, sweeping book about mulattos throughout American history, a mix of history and fiction, is rejected, she's sent into a tailspin, which leads her to trying to get a gig writing for television, an attempt that will strain her marriage yet further, but maybe save her dreams of home-ownership and financial security.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna is both sharp-edged and easy to read, a combination that sometimes softens the very points Senna is making. There's a complexity behind the Hollywood show runner excitement, about belonging and identity and how to raise kids in the world as it is. Jane is a great protagonist, she's confident and sure of her talent, but also prone to worry and to feeling like she's failing. No one gets off lightly, and no one is short-changed. Senna makes even the tertiary characters feel real. There are neither easy solutions nor easy targets in this book I will be thinking about for awhile.

Great review of Colored Television, Kay. Yours is the first that would make me consider reading it, although I'm in no hurry to do so.

thats on my list to read

>75 kidzdoc: Darryl, there's a lot in it, but I don't think any of it would be surprising to you. Senna is married to Percival Everett, but her writing is nothing like his.

>76 cindydavid4: Cindy, I would love to hear what you think about it.

>74 RidgewayGirl: Definitely sounds like an interesting one, going on the list!

>77 RidgewayGirl: I knew that she was married to Percival Everett. I looked at my LT library and I was surprised to see that I have a copy of Caucasia, her debut novel, on my Kindle. I'll read that before I get to Colored Television.

>74 RidgewayGirl: I've seen this mentioned a lot over on Litsy (because ToB), but your review is the first that compelled me to add it to my library wishlist. Thank you!

>69 RidgewayGirl: >72 mabith: I loved Housekeeping when I read it years ago, but I didn't care for Gilead, and didn't go on to read the other books in the series, although I know lots of people on LT loved them.

>69 RidgewayGirl: great review of Housekeeping, which - speaking of shame - I’ve had on my TBR shelves for rather a long time…

>78 mabith: There were some interesting ideas presented in ways I hadn't thought about.

>79 kidzdoc: I'm now interested in her previous books although it will realistically be awhile before I pick one up.

>81 arubabookwoman: That's interesting. I did really like Gilead, but it leans strongly into religious ideas.

>82 rachbxl: My notes say that my copy entered my possession in 2010, so it was well-aged by the time I picked it up.

Lovely post on shamefully reading Homecoming. Shamefully, I have yet to read it

I've had mixed experiences with Marilyn Robinson. I loved Home & Lila, but couldn't finish Gilead or Jack.

Wednesday afternoon I came down with a stomach bug that has left me wiped out ever since. For the first two day, I couldn't even read! Slowly returning to life with the help of jello, saltines and a truly terrible book a friend wanted me to read with her.

>84 dchaikin: Is anyone able to have read all the books they expect themselves to? I'm glad to have been pushed into discovering this brilliant, quiet book, but I don't think anyone else should be forced into it.

>85 markon: That's interesting, Ardene. I loved Gilead when I read it and have it set aside for a reread, but I can see, given the main character in Gilead, why that would be the case. I am excited about Home, though.

I hope to return to reading soon, although today may well be more about napping.

>69 RidgewayGirl: Book shamed What a great expression.

Housekeeping and Marilynne Robinson kind of remind me of Margaret Laurence, another author who dealt so well with families, isolation, and how the world reacts.

>71 labfs39: Agreeing with >72 mabith: about railroad covers and small towns, although I do see how the Auschwitz idea came to mind. Oddly I thought my cover for this book was completely different, but on checking I see it is not. I thought I had the one with the rocking chair on the front porch.

Colored Television is on the library list now. Sounds very good.

I absolutely loved Gilead - one of my favorite books ever. Read it in 2022 and 2023 and as I want to read Home this year it seems to me that I should read Gilead again.

>86 RidgewayGirl: whoa. Tough. Glad you’re feeling better. And there are many books to read yet.

>86 RidgewayGirl: Hope you're fully recovered very soon!

>69 RidgewayGirl: I've read Housekeeping and Home and still can't quite make up my mind about what I think of Marilynne Robinson's writing, so have almost concluded from that indecisiveness that she's not entirely for me. I did enjoy Housekeeping more than Home, though, even though the Gilead books are her most revered work. I gave Housekeeping 3.5 stars, but looking back at my review I did give kudos to the fact that although it's a book where the plot is mostly character development than actual plot, I did think about it quite a bit afterwards. She is definitely a very skilled writer at unpeeling the layers of character, but there's a bleakness to her writing which drags me down a little.

>87 SassyLassy: Margaret Laurence is someone I have always meant to have read and haven't yet. I do have The Stone Angel, if someone wants to book shame me on this one.

>88 Fourpawz2: I'm still thinking about Colored Television, which makes me more curious about Senna's other books. And I have Home set aside as my next Robinson.

>89 dchaikin: A life's reading, I guess. Although I'll need a few extra lifespans to read all the books I want to read.

>90 Jim53: Thanks, Jim. Hopefully, this is the only thing I, or anyone, will catch this winter.

>91 AlisonY: Yes, there is a bleakness to her writing, that's a good way to put it. I really like that.

>89 dchaikin: many of which are yet to be published 🙂

>92 RidgewayGirl: I'll book shame you about The Stone Angel. I haven't loved all the books I've read by Margaret Laurence (well, the 3 books I've read by her), but this was a wonderful depiction of aging.

Sweet Fury is the story of the filming of a cinematic reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night with a feminist twist. Lily Crayne is an up and coming actress slated to star in the movie and she's married to the older and more established Kurt Royall, who will direct. They have the backing and the expectation that it will be a blockbuster. As she prepares for her starring role, Lily begins work with a therapist, who encourages her to reexamine her relationships and her memories. Perhaps something dark lurks behind the glamour.

Novels about wealthy and privileged people begin at a disadvantage with me. Sure, they have some of the same conflicts and sorrows as the rest of us, but there are so many things they never have to worry about. So a book about them is going to have to be better than a book about ordinary people. But while I never managed to care much about any of the characters, Sash Bischoff knows how to tell a story and I was happy enough reading the increasingly dramatic events depicted in this novel. The ways in which Bischoff plays with the Fitzgerald novel are clever and interesting, while the book itself doesn't require the reader to have read the source material.

>93 dchaikin: Yes, that's a real problem. There's no way to keep up with the sheer deluge of interesting books being published, let alone catch up on the older books.

>94 arubabookwoman: Thank you! I'll take that as motivation to pull my copy off of the shelf.

...Wade went alone, took a seat at the bar. He had a scotch and water, his first drink in sixteen months. He closed his eyes as he drank it. His counselor at Geiger had once asked him if booze wasn't perhaps "the first knot in your life." How to answer something like that? It was knots all the way down.

We Live in Water is a collection of short stories by Jess Walter, who has, in recent years, become one of my favorite authors. While he's most well-known for his novels, his short stories are where he is at his best and that's apparent even in this early collection. The stories here are all set in Spokane, Washington, a small and somewhat isolated city in the eastern part of that state. In these stories, men are struggling to get by, to get their next fix, or they're holding on and trying to be better men. There's a melancholy tone to most of these stories, with an awareness that life will continue to require effort and luck, and that some won't make it.

In The Brakes, a divorced dad takes his son with him to work, where he finds the garage once again performing work that doesn't need to be done for an elderly racist lady. In The Wolf and the Wild, a guy works off his community service hours helping elementary school kids with their reading. And in the story that gives its name to this collection, a man tries to find out what happened to his father, a man he hasn't seen since he was six.

Each story in this collection is perfectly formed, whether it's a page long, or twenty. Walter never lets the reader forget what life is like for many people, and that their lives are as real and important as anyone else's.

Nice review - I like Jess Walter and I like short stories. I’ve got a few more novels of his to read as well.

>95 RidgewayGirl: have you read Tender is the Night? I have an unread copy here. Interesting about your take on privilege in fiction.

>97 RidgewayGirl: you make that sound really good.

>98 raidergirl3: Thanks.

>99 dchaikin: So, when I was in high school, I worked part-time in a bookstore where many of the other employees were English majors at the local university. One went off at length to me about how someone could either like Fitzgerald's novels or Hemingway's, but not both and since I'd already read and loved A Farewell to Arms and A Moveable Feast, I never picked up anything by Fitzgerald. Of course I now know that's nonsense, but somehow I've never read anything by Fitzgerald anyway. I did read a synopsis of Tender is the Night before starting Sweet Fury. It would be interesting to see how the novel lands for someone who has read the source material. And that's a longer answer than you wanted.

And as for privilege in fiction -- novels are about character development and seeing how someone handles problems and conflict, and removing much of the potential conflicts and barriers seems like the author has to work much harder to make an interesting novel, in my opinion.

>97 RidgewayGirl: Your review makes me want to run out and read this collection, and I'm not a big short story fan.

>101 markon: Anything by Jess Walter is going to be good! In this collection, each story is just as long as it needs to be and the one I'm thinking about most was barely over a page in length. Amazing how much can be fit into so little.

>100 RidgewayGirl: terrific answers. Thanks. Very curious English major, and I wonder what exactly his/her perspective was. I see your point on privilege. A lot of books try to strip away real world everyday concerns of characters, to focus on other aspects. Flushing them with money is a method to do that. Although that’s not always the reason for (non-criticized and/or satirized) privilege.

>103 dchaikin: Oh you know English majors, they like a bit of drama.

This one was billed as Wuthering Heights meets The Cutting Edge and I don't know how anyone can resist that, certainly not me. In reality, while The Favorites by Layne Fargo does use the characters from Wuthering Heights as a kind of beginning point, and it is set in the world of athletes competing in ice dancing competitions and hoping to make it to the Olympics, the similarities to either the book or the movie end there.

Heath is an orphan who joins Katarina in learning figure skating. She has the goal of making it to the Olympics and becoming a star like her hero, an ice dancing legend. Their relationship is very close, even closer once Katarina's father adopts Heath. As they move to LA to train at an exclusive figure skating school, their relationship grows ever more tempestuous as Katarina's drive and Heath's stubbornness clash. As the years go by, they work with other partners, but they keep returning to each other.

So it wasn't good, by any stretch, but there was plenty of drama and angst and emotion, which made it a quick and fun read. I will note that the cover was created with the help of AI, and I would not have read this book if I had known that before reading the book, this is published by Random House, which is able to pay for human work.

>105 RidgewayGirl: Interesting!

I'm going to be in Tucson in mid-March for the book festival. If anyone else is going, let me know!

Me! I'm going! ;)

I'm interested to see what you thought of Someone Like Us. I listened to the audiobook and I really think my experience of the book suffered for that.

>105 RidgewayGirl: An AI Cover on a Book published by Random House? Ugh.

>107 RidgewayGirl: im planning to go, where are coming from?

>108 sophroniaborgia: Someone Like Us is one of the best books I've read for this year's tournament, but with the way it twists around time and moves back and forth, I don't think I'd have been able to follow it on audio. I'm listening to The History of Sound and that's working well in audio although I did pick up a library copy to see if it works better on paper. I am a very poor audiobook reader.

See you in six weeks!

>109 ursula: Yeah, I don't like it when self-published authors sell out their fellow artists but a giant corporation like RH has no excuse at all. I am going to be looking at the dust jackets of the books I'm interested in closely to avoid AI covers, but I suspect that eventually they will simply not tell us.

>110 cindydavid4: Fantastic! I'm in central Illinois, but we are in the season of greige and am going to copy all the neighbors in taking a break from the weather by going south for a few days. My BFF is in Phoenix, so we'll meet in Tucson and soak ourselves in books for a weekend. Let's meet up!

"Yes. Let's say he returns home to Ethiopia. It's been forty years since he was last in the country. What do you thing happens to him next?"

"I don't know."

"Let me tell you. When he gets off the plane, he realizes he has no idea where he is. He's afraid to leave the airport. When he left, Addis was like a village....He's at home nowhere in the world. It's better not to know that. It's better to imagine that someday you will return home and that when you do, everything will be better than it was when you left."

Mamush returns to the US to see his mother, but he gets lost on the way. He's been living in Paris with his wife and son, but somehow he's always had one foot out the door and his once promising journalism career has faded. He returns to see his mother's friend, Samuel, a man he realizes is his father, a cab driver living in the DC suburbs and part of the Ethiopian community there. As he travels toward, or fails to travel toward, his father's funeral, he returns to the places in Chicago that marked him, and searches for the man he never really knew.

Someone Like Us is a bittersweet story that moves through time in a non-linear way, with Mamush's memories frequently taking him from the present moment. It should be confusing, but Dinaw Mengestu controls the narrative in such an assured way, that each digression makes sense and serves to build the story he is telling. As Mamush and Samuel navigate their lives, there is the constant presence of the absent country, a country they can't return to, or in Mamush's case, have never seen, but which is ever present, often more than the country in which they have lived most of their lives. And as Mamush looks at his father's life, he is also looking at his own, and in doing so may find what he needs to move forward.

>111 RidgewayGirl: yes!!!!!!! Il be driving down on to Tucson the day before to visit friends (if they are in town)that will be so fun.where you all staying I have a friend who I think is coming and she might have room for me. or do you want to do the motel route

>112 RidgewayGirl: Great review of Someone Like Us, Kay. I'll probably read it this summer.

>112 RidgewayGirl: I am fascinated by your review and have put it on my list. I’m enjoying your thread as usual Kay. You certainly have a knack of finding interesting books that I’d otherwise not come across.

>69 RidgewayGirl: I haven't read Marilynne Robinson, but you really are making a great case for Housekeeping

I hope you've recovered from the stomach bug!

>112 RidgewayGirl: Oh, a new book by Dinaw Mengestu! I've read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears when it got translated in French and really enjoyed it. I own All our names but haven't read it. Your nice review is a great reminder I should go back to this author.

>113 cindydavid4: I've sent you a message. I'm looking forward to meeting you in person!

>114 kidzdoc: Darryl, Mengestu is a gifted writer. I'm looking forward to discovering his backlist.

>115 kjuliff: Kate, I can't take credit for Someone Like Us, it's one of the books in this year's Tournament of Books. One think I like about that event is that I end up reading a few books I would have otherwise not heard of and a few books that don't really peak my interest and then I end up reading something remarkable.

>116 rasdhar: Thanks, Rasdhar, I am entirely recovered and my husband bought so many things to help me get through it that we are all set for the next four stomach bugs.

>117 raton-liseur: He's so good, isn't he? I'm excited to read more.

I gave myself a subscription to Archipelago Books a few weeks ago under the strict guideline that I must read each book right when it arrives. So far this is working out for me.



People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi is set on the island of Timor, moving back and forth through time from when the Japanese occupied the island during WWII to the unrest during East Timor's fight for independence from Indonesia. The story begins with the men of the town gathering in Oetimu's tiny police station in 1998 to watch a soccer match between France and Brazil. It's an evening that will end in tragedy, but first the story will move back and forth through time to tell the stories of some of the people living in the small town located on the border between the east and west halves of the island. There's the young police sergeant who is raised by a foster father after the death of his mother and who falls in love with the beautiful Silvy, a brilliant young woman who studied at an exclusive boarding school and who has some secrets of her own. There's the young Portuguese daughter of an official whose family fails to make it out before the Portuguese are overthrown. There's a priest whose life is connected to that of a girl he knew years ago, before she married and he took orders. And as the story moves around in time and between characters, a picture of how life is lived in a small town, on a small colonized island, and how people make lives for themselves despite the violence and uncertainty that surrounds them.

I really enjoyed this book. I was pleased at the thought of learning about a place I know very little about, but what surprised me is how much fun this book was to read, despite the ever-present violence. Nesi is a storyteller and he knows how to make a story compelling and how to circle round to stories told earlier, and how to tie them together into a narrative.

>119 RidgewayGirl: Nice review, Kay. I'm glad that you enjoyed it as much as I did.

>120 kidzdoc: It was an excellent start to my subscription. Now to wait until they send us another book.

>112 RidgewayGirl: Someone Like Us sounds fantastic. Noting

>119 RidgewayGirl: nice to see two reviews of this book this month. I like your Archipelago Books idea.

>122 dchaikin: Someone Like Us is excellent and reminds me why I read a dozen books I'm not that eager to read for the Tournament of Books. It always pushes something I would not otherwise have read at me.

And given the state of our nation currently and feeling very sorry for what we are doing to our friends in Mexico and Canada, I would very much like to hide under the covers for the next few years.

Me too. I’m with the cat. But what will we find in four years when Musk controls American finance? I might need a longer hibernation

I feel the same way about the Tournament of Books. Some books make me feel kinda stupid, for not 'getting' them, but then there is a great book I wasn't expecting that I really like and makes it all worthwhile.

The Canada tariffs thing is just crazy. My FB is full of posts showing Canadian products we should look for as alternates to US products. But it gets so crazy as everything is so entwined. US produce but it's manufactured in Canada, or made in Canada, but US owned company. A couple of provinces are removing US liquor from the shelves of liquor stores, which are provincially managed/regulated. How much damage one guy can do, sigh.

>123 RidgewayGirl: And given the state of our nation currently and feeling very sorry for what we are doing to our friends in Mexico and Canada, I would very much like to hide under the covers for the next few years.

With all due respect that is what Trump and Musk want us to do. If so we run the grave risk of becoming a neo-fascist state, with the death or submission of the Democratic Party as the major opposition. Although I don't wish to see anyone suffer, even MAGAts, Trump's short sighted tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico may lead to significant inflation and a sharp rise in costs of everyday items, which may be enough to turn the tide if Democrats can get their act together by the time of the midterm elections. Unfortunately the damage he will likely inflict may well be permanent or not easily reversible.

>124 dchaikin: Don’t remind me of that man. Please. I was having a moment of not thinking about him.

>124 dchaikin: It's a coup. There's no other way to see it. An unelected unAmerican guy walking in and taking all our information and blocking federal payments to people on disability or minorities? We will not have the same country again and the repair work will take generations.

>125 raidergirl3: This is so unfair to you! Trudeau's speech was excellent and true and I'm glad he's spitting mad. Our economies are so intertwined that this is going to harm all three countries. My husband works for a company making EVs (not Tesla, thank goodness) and they will be hit very hard as a lot of their parts are made in Canada and Mexico. This is madness and stupidity and so many people are going to be laid off.

>126 kidzdoc: Yes, you're absolutely correct. I'm calling my reps and even my old (Republican) reps in SC as I still have an SC area code. I'm also volunteering in a few places, because I don't know what else to do, honestly. There's no way out but through at this point and I think that community is going to be vital for that -- knowing our neighbors and being ready to help each other.

>128 RidgewayGirl: We will not have the same country again and the repair work will take generations.

Absolutely. These are things not easily undone. I find the whole thing unbelievably scary.

>129 kjuliff: I think they will be slowed down soon by infighting and incompetence. The Project 25 guys and the tech-oligarchs and the Christian Nationalists are already at cross purposes.

Anyway, back to our refuge of books.

Great comments, Kay. Both the Nesi and the Mengestu books sound like ones I would like. I am trying not to go to the Archipelago site and get a subscription...

>128 RidgewayGirl: Charles M. Blow, one of the NYT's opinion columnists, wrote an article in Thursday's edition which perfectly captures my current mindset:

Liberals, It's Time to Fight Back

My attention, as a physician, is focused mainly on the RFK, Jr nomination, and Trump's decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO). I've contacted my two senators about RFK, Jr—unfortunately Pennsylvania elected a MAGAt to replace our former Democratic senior senator—and I'll do the same when Congress votes on whether to withdraw from the WHO or not. The best thing I can do is to stay informed by reading, watching and listening to my trustworthy media outlets, and contacting my representatives to express my opinions as a concerned citizen who votes.

>123 RidgewayGirl: >128 RidgewayGirl: Thanks, and thanks for watching the Prime Minister's speech. More Americans should know more about Canada.

As for the fentanyl notion the President appears to be fixated on, statistics from his own US departments indicate only 0.08% of the substance goes into the US from Canada.

>132 kidzdoc: Good article, but it's not just liberals, but everyone who should be fighting back.
The best thing I can do is to stay informed by reading, watching and listening to my trustworthy media outlets, and contacting my representatives to express my opinions as a concerned citizen who votes.
Keep it up.

However, as >130 RidgewayGirl: says, back to our refuge of books

>131 BLBera: I justified it to myself as supporting a small publishing house. Basically an unselfish act on my part.

>132 kidzdoc: I'll admit I'm far happier contacting my reps here in Illinois than I am contacting my former Senators, Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham. And my middle-of-the-road Congressman has been surprisingly good at not voting for things I do not want him to vote for.

>133 SassyLassy: Oh, the fentanyl excuse is laughable.

In The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso and translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, two women in Sao Paolo follow very different, but intertwined paths. Fernanda is given a promotion, but one that will require her to work and travel more than before. Since she's the sole breadwinner and her husband doesn't work, she feels compelled to take the job, but in order to do so, she has to get her nanny to agree to reduce her free time to one day a month. As a sweetener, she turns the maid's room into what she calls "the Tokyo Suite," painting it and adding a small refrigerator. Maju, the nanny, is trying to start a family with her husband. Every weekend, they reunite and enjoy being together, but the additional money offered and the threat of losing her job if she says no means that she agrees to the new schedule, one that will cost her not only the chance of having children herself, but also her marriage. Maju puts all of herself into raising the young girl she cares for, while Fernanda spends most of her time away from home, where she meets an alluring co-worker. Eventually, Maju takes the step of running away with her young charge.

The beauty of this book is that Madalosso has the reader sympathizing with both a wealthy woman coercing a woman into working 24 hours a day, everyday, and with a woman who abducts a toddler. It's also a look at the pressures put on women to do everything. Fernanda may be working all the time, but she's still the one in charge of making sure the household runs smoothly and is the one who is responsible for organizing everything her daughter needs while her husband can control his own schedule. That she eventually looks for a relationship not based on obligation isn't surprising. And Maju has spent her life doing what is expected of her and being a conscientious employee, none of which makes her continued employment more secure when she can be homeless whenever her employer decides she no longer wants to employ her. The power differential is enormous and unjust. But does that justify her walking out with another woman's child? There's a lot to think about in this novel and it's one that will stick with me for some time.

Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy is comprised of the first three books in Olivia Manning's six book series about a newly married English couple living through the war. I have an omnibus edition, but thought it would make more sense to review each book separately.

The Great Fortune begins with Guy and Harriet Pringle on the train journey to Bucharest, Romania, where Guy teaches English. He had met and married Harriet after a short courtship in England and she is eager for this new stage of her life, throwing herself into finding an apartment and adjusting to life as an expat. But she and Guy are very different. Guy loves people and is constantly finding new people to befriend, bringing a host of colorful characters into their life, while Harriet likes constraint and not mixing too much with people she has little understanding of.

As they passed among the peasants, Guy and Harriet smiled to reassure them, but their smiles grew strained as they breathed-in the peasant stench. Harriet thought: "The trouble with prejudice is, there's usually a reason for it," but she now knew better than to say this to Guy.

They arrive in Bucharest in the summer of 1939, a time of both upheaval and of tense waiting. Polish refugees, mostly Jewish, are seeking shelter in Bucharest, but other than that, and tense arguments over who might invade Romania first, the Germans or the Soviets, life proceeds much as usual. During that first year, Harriet grapples with how Guy's expansive personality leaves her alone more than she likes, but finds a friend of sorts in his colleague, Clarence. Guy brings Yakimov into their lives and eventually into living in their apartment. Yakimov is an odd man, he was married to a wealthy English woman but now he is alone and reliant on the largesse of the people around him. He's able to "borrow" ample sums to live, but he spends it all immediately in expensive restaurants.

This book ends as the news of Paris being occupied by the Nazis reaches Bucharest. I'm eager to find out what happens next to the Pringles and their friends.

She remembered her arrival in Rumania, and her first long days of sunlight. That had been a difficult time, yet she thought of it nostalgically because the war had barely begun. She saw herself as she had been, nervous, suspicious and isolated among strangers; jealous of Guy's friends and of his belief that he owed his chief allegiance to the outside world. Unmarried, she had been a personality in her own right. Married, she saw herself coming in, if at all, somewhere in Guy's wake.

>136 RidgewayGirl: Great review, Kay.

>136 RidgewayGirl: - Makes me want to rush over to the basket where it’s been resting for the last few months and start reading the 3rd book.

>136 RidgewayGirl: Oh thank you so much for this review. It’s brought back old memories. I read and loved the trilogy. I might benefit from a re-read

>136 RidgewayGirl: I'm planning to read this this year as well. Probably starting in March or April.

>137 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl.

>138 Fourpawz2: It's a race! Let's see who reads it first. You have a head start since I still have the second book to read.

>139 kjuliff: I'm glad I reminded you of it! I do like reading people's reviews of books I've read.

>140 japaul22: I'm enjoying it enormously! I am, however, not allowing myself to buy a copy of The Levant Trilogy until I finish the second book.

>119 RidgewayGirl: >121 RidgewayGirl: Reading both your reviews has really convinced me to take up People from Oetimu.

>135 RidgewayGirl: Interesting, to balance out both characters as sympathetic takes a lot of skill.

>136 RidgewayGirl: Great review.

>142 rasdhar: Oh, I'd love to find out what you think of People from Oetimu.

Anne Tyler has made a career writing about socially awkward and shy people living in Baltimore, Maryland, whose lives are, for the most part, quiet and constrained. Three Days in June is a perfect example of her writing and was, for me, an excellent and relaxing read.

Gail is 61 and an assistant to the headmistress of a private school, when she's called into the headmistress's office to be told that the headmistress would be retiring, but that Gail would not be considered for the job. She's told she should consider a career change as "social interactions have never been her strong point." So Gail walks out, away from her career, but not from stewing about the encounter. It's an important weekend, with her only daughter's wedding to take place the next day, the rehearsal dinner that evening. Coming home, she finds that her daughter has dropped off her ex-husband to stay with her as he has brought the cat he's fostering with him and her fiancé is allergic.

What follows is three days in which Gail is pressed from every direction, even as she continues to think over how her boss sees her. She spends a lot of time thinking things and then keeping those thoughts to herself, kind of if Olive Kitteridge were sensitive to the feelings of those around her. As the weekend goes on, between the usual drama of a wedding and the presence of the man she divorced over twenty years ago, Gail comes to terms with how she wants her life to look like going forward.

Gail is a wonderful and opinionated character and this is a novel about character development and how, even at 61, a not particularly flexible person might find it in themselves to bend in a new direction. I like how Tyler writes and how fully realized her characters are and this small book was exactly what I was in the mood for. I'm glad she's still writing, and with the same compassion and humor.

>144 RidgewayGirl: I've never read Ann Tyler and do not really plan to. She could be right up my alley, but who knows why, I was not drawn to her.
I really enjoyed your review though, and think this might be the book that would make me change my mind and get acquainted to her work. I would wait for it to be translated in French and in paperback though, which might take a while.
Would you recommend it as a first Ann Tyler?

>143 RidgewayGirl: and >144 RidgewayGirl: I just realised I got confused between Ann Tyler and Ann Patchett. How embarassing!
I've never read Ann Patchett although sometimes feel I should, and I think I had never heard (and noticed) about Ann Tyler! And it seems pretty difficult to find books by Ann Tyler this side of the ocean!

>144 RidgewayGirl: Lovely review! I'm a big fan of Anne Tyler so would have read Three Days in June soon anyway, but you've made me want to read it right away. I love your kind of if Olive Kitteridge were sensitive to the feelings of those around her. I find I have to space out my reading of Anne Tyler because she tends to re-hash things, and I don't mean that as a criticism - I see it more as her wondering what would happen if she took this middle-aged socially awkward male Baltimore resident, gave him a different name and sent him in a slightly different direction, and I always enjoy seeing where she goes.

>145 raton-liseur: I’m not into Ann Tyler either though I did enjoy Kay’s review. I read The Accidental Tourist in the 1990s when Tyler was very popular. Since then I’ve tried other books of hers, but don’t find them special. They seem to be similar; I can’t remember the content of any of the books after The Accidental Tourist, and didn’t intend to read any more.

But the Kay’s review has lead me to second thoughts.

>145 raton-liseur: & >146 raton-liseur: I also have never read any Ann Patchett (I have nothing against her, just in the never-ending deluge of books, she's hasn't written one that has made me pick it up) and have never really wanted to, but I first encountered Anne Tyler as a teenager and really loved her oddball characters. They've been aging alongside me. The best recent Tyler is A Spool of Blue Thread, which she thought might be her last novel, but luckily she could not stop writing. I also loved Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Searching for Caleb and The Accidental Tourist, but I do not know how these have held up over the years.

>147 rachbxl: I see it more as her wondering what would happen if she took this middle-aged socially awkward male Baltimore resident, gave him a different name and sent him in a slightly different direction...

I really like that description. I can see not being able to read her novels close together, but I'm reminding myself to pick up something by her the next time I just need to feel like the world is small and manageable.

>148 kjuliff: I don't know, Kate. Her books seem to be getting quieter over time, and she's happy to observe small moments in small lives. I do think you might like Gail's voice in this book, she's pretty aware of the faults and idiosyncrasies of the people around her and she's frequently annoyed, but you also might dislike her.

>144 RidgewayGirl: This is another one of those authors that I think will work for me and yet I never quite get around to reading one of their books. Nice review!

>149 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for those recs. I'll have to explore, and then I'll decide if I'll give it a try or not...
Your relationship to this author is so nice: a teenage encounter and then the feeling of aging at the same time as the characters...

>150 AnnieMod: Thanks, Annie.

>151 raton-liseur: There are so many authors to read! I had started a stack from my own tbr of books people have mentioned here since the start of the year and that stack is already becoming unstable. There are too many books I very much want to read immediately.

>136 RidgewayGirl: i’m very interested

>144 RidgewayGirl: i feel very similar to Kate in >148 kjuliff: - for me it was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant that i liked a lot. But the premise of this new one appeals a lot.

>153 dchaikin: Dan, these books are so good. I'm reading the second one now and when I'm not reading it, I'm often thinking about Guy and Harriet Pringle.

>154 RidgewayGirl: Guy and Harriet Pringle. Unforgettable.

>155 kjuliff: I'm already unhappy at the idea of finishing the sixth book, and here I am only halfway through the second one.

In The Book Censor's Library, by Kuwati author Bothayna Al-Essa and translated by Sawad Hussain, a man, long unemployed, finds work as a book censor. It's not long before he falls in love with books, a love affair begun while censoring Zorba the Greek. He's desperate for more books to read, sneaking them out of work and reading them at night, until his wife is bitten by the books in the bed. His daughter is an imaginative girl and it's her need for stories that puts them all into danger, most of all herself.

This novel is written with the feel of a fable, so that fantastic things occur and the characters remain undeveloped by intention. Al-Essa has a vivid and dark imagination which she uses to craft an Orwellian nightmare coached in the cheerful tone of a fairy tale. It's both impressive and effective. My only issue with this book is that it might have been better as a short story, but I suspect that most readers will not tire of the deliberately simple tone and structure, with its somewhat heavy-handed lessons as I did.

>123 RidgewayGirl: My emotions are with the cat, but I'm pressing myself to do the right things.
>144 RidgewayGirl: I haven't read a thing about Anne Tyler, hasn't been at all on my radar, but I tend to like interior life unfolding.

>158 qebo: Hi, qebo. If you like quiet novels, Anne Tyler is perfect. A Spool of Blue Thread, which was shortlisted for both the Women's Prize and the Booker, is particularly fine.

>157 RidgewayGirl: I'm actually inclined to agree that this might have worked better as a short story, although in my case it took me a while to warm up to it, rather than tiring of it, so I might have preferred to jump further into things faster. I still found it successful, though.

>160 bragan: I was so excited by the beginning of this book and then as the characters stayed one-note and the tone never changed, my enjoyment slowly faded and I dragged myself through the back half of this book. I'm not a good fit for this kind of book since I'm most interested in seeing fully developed characters and good character development in what I read, so this was never going to be one I loved.

Gillian McAllister is a hugely popular thriller writer and I decided to see what the fuss was about by reading Wrong Place Wrong Time and, friends, I still do not know why this author is popular.

Jen, a very anxious mother, is up waiting for her technically adult, yet still teenage son to get home and so manages to watch him murder a man. The next hours are horrible, as she and her husband wait in the police station for news. The next morning she wakes up and it's not the day after her son killed a man, it's the day before he commits the crime. What follows is Jen waking up a day, or several days earlier, and she tries to find out what happened and why as she travels the wrong way through time.

McAllister writes serviceably well and she certainly knows how to keep a plot moving along and how to dole out clues and twists at a steady interval. That the story makes no sense, even ignoring the time travel aspect, which is well handled by essentially ignoring how it would work and just getting a scientist to say that it's possible at one point to cover that part of the story. The entire premise of the story would be nullified by a conversation between two married people, which left me wondering why I had to work my way through four hundred-some pages to find out that out. I get it, thriller writers have to produce exciting and surprising plots at a breakneck pace, but this one was laughably bad, and made worse by the author's note at the end of the book, explaining where she'd found her ideas.

>157 RidgewayGirl: >162 RidgewayGirl: I enjoyed both these reviews of books I am unlikely to read.

>163 rasdhar: One of my favorite things here is reading reviews of books I will never read. I also like reading reviews of books I've already read a lot, and also adding books to my wishlist based on a review here, so it's pretty much all win.

"If Noah or Kyoko would just tell me the truth, I could help them, I know I could," Charlie said.

"Too afraid, I'm guessing. And with good reason. You know how big the human heart is?" Graff balled his hand into a fist. "About that size. I continue to be amazed at how much hate such a small thing can hold, even in people who think of themselves as decent and Christian. There are a lot of folks in this country with a lot of hate stored up, and those hearts of theirs are just ready to burst from it. You can work miracles with a jury, Charlie. I've seen you do it. But I'm afraid you'd have to be God himself to get a fair hearing for Noah Bluestone. And he knows it."

In The River We Remember, a small town sheriff and WWII veteran faces a tough situation when a disliked, yet prominent landowner and farmer is found drowned. Brody is eager to see the death ruled accidental, but the small midwestern town is eager to blame the one Native American farming near where the death occurred. As the investigation progresses, tensions are high.

William Kent Krueger tells a good story, and this one, set in the late 1950s, in a small midwestern farming community where many of the men bear the scars, both physical and mental, of having fought in the war. He takes the stock character, the stalwart small town sheriff who seems determined to do the right thing in the face of community disapproval, and makes the character complex and less trustworthy than is usual in this kind of mystery novel. Krueger is respecting the norms and demands of this genre, he's just making sure that the motives of everyone are not necessarily what they appear to be. And then he changes directions and focuses the second half of the novel on a more unusual character, a retired lawyer roped in to be the arrested man's public defender. Charlie is a woman who prefers to live alone and yet, because she was born and raised here, is still an insider of sorts. And she's the one able to talk to people and figure out what really happened.

The mystery of what really happened is disclosed slowly, and made sense, which is appreciated. What I most liked is Krueger's exploration of the history driving the story, and how the secondary and even tertiary characters had complex backgrounds and motivations. The writing is solid, if unspectacular and the story was constructed with care.

>136 RidgewayGirl: Great review! Maybe unsurprisingly, I'm very interested in reading books set in Europe leading up to WWII. I'll have to check and see if I have Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy when I get home (I'm in Miami for a too-short work-adjacent trip). If not, I think I'm going to have to library it up.

>165 RidgewayGirl: Thank you for reminding me of Krueger. I read a couple of his several years ago, liked him a lot, and then went on to the next shiny thing and forgot about him. As I recall, his books were light enough for bedtime, so I can grab one when I'm reading something that isn't.

>166 lisapeet: Lisa, I just finished the second book in the trilogy. It's so good. The story begins just after the Germans marched into Poland, but before the war reached Romania, so it's not strictly a pre-war novel, but it's definitely interesting. The way the entire country just hunkers down and waits and how the British couple are not sure there is an England to return to, even if they could get there.

>167 Jim53: Jim, I'm in a book club that tends to choose lighter books than I usually do and they have been great for reading when I'm tired and don't have the concentration for more serious fare. And Krueger is good at setting a novel in a time and place.

Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy is comprised of the first three books in Olivia Manning's six book series about a newly married English couple living through the war. I have an omnibus edition, but thought it would make more sense to review each book separately.

The second book in the trilogy is The Spoilt City, in which things grow ever more precarious for the British living in Romania, as the king abdicates and the Iron Guard, who are pro-German, take over. There are ever more Germans on the street and they take over the places British people gathered. Guy Pringle is still busy teaching, even running a summer school at the university that is mainly attended by Jewish students hoping to find their way to the safety of an English-speaking country. Romania isn't at war, isn't occupied, but Jewish people are not being treated well, and the Pringles end up hiding a young Jewish man in a storage shed on the roof of their apartment building. And Harriet, paying attention to the news, knows they need to be ready to leave, but she's determined to find a way to get Sasha out with them. The news, though, also makes her uncertain that there will be an England to return to. Meanwhile, some of the Brits are oblivious to the dangers. Yakimov has blithely gone to visit an acquaintance who is now a Nazi in charge of a district in Romania, and the others feel that they can probably just ride things out.

". . . One has to respect the existing régime, whatever it may happen to be. And you have to learn to live with it."

Harriet asked: "You think we can learn to live with the Iron Guard?"

"Why not? It's all a matter of personality. If you can adjust yourself, you can live with anyone or anything. It's the people who can't adjust themselves who get into trouble."

Pinkrose nodded vehemently. "I do agree. And, you know, once things have settled down, the world's much the same whoever's running it."

But that sanguine attitude dissipates as British citizens are named as enemies on the German radio station and British citizens are killed. People are leaving, but Guy, uncertain as to finding a new job elsewhere and determined to be there for his ever smaller numbers of students refuses to leave, even after he is named by the Germans as an enemy. And Harriet is determined to stay with him, no matter what, even as she realizes that her marriage isn't a good one.

At one time, she had been indignant when others were critical of him. Now, she realized, she was criticising him herself. Even more surprising, she could feel bored in his company.

And yet, watching him as he sat there, unsuspecting of criticism or boredom, an open-handed man of infinite good nature, her heart was touched. Reflecting on the process of involvement and disenchantment which was marriage, she thought that one entered it unsuspecting and, unsuspecting, found one was trapped in it.

I am thoroughly enjoying these books, with their look at life in Romania for a group of British ex-pats, their view of the war engulfing Europe, and where their sense of security is being steadily eroded, and the examination of a marriage between two very different people. I'm glad to have four more books to go.

You're getting me very excited to read this! Maybe I'll get to it sooner rather than later . . .

>170 japaul22: It's so good. Immersive and perfect for this moment in time. I'm going to continue right on into The Levant Trilogy. RIP my plans to have all the books read for the Tournament of Books.

>169 RidgewayGirl: I loved these book. Glad you are enjoying them. I’m thinking you might enjoy Lawrence Durrell’s literary tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet.

>172 kjuliff: I'll make note of that. I think when I do finish both trilogies, I'll be ready to concentrate on shorter books for a bit.

>169 RidgewayGirl: After reading your glowing review, I tried to track down my thoughts when I read it back in 2013. Unfortunately I didn't put a review on the work page, but evidently I loved it, the second book even more than the first, but I'm not sure I went beyond the second book.

>174 labfs39: I can't stop reading it. I thought I'd take a week between the second and third book, but that has proved impossible. The Levant Trilogy will be in my hands on Friday.

>165 RidgewayGirl: this is a great review. I’m intrigued

>169 RidgewayGirl: and Manning just sounds wonderful. Loving your reviews

Gosh I remember reading those books and loved them but honestly remember so little that I think a reread is in order

>176 dchaikin: Dan, William Kent Krueger is a mainstream author, but he carefully grounds his novels in time and place and never forgets how complex people are.

>177 cindydavid4: Cindy, I have to sit down and write up a review or the books disappear from my mind. Somehow, the act of writing makes me remember them more clearly over time.

So glad you are enjoying the Balkan Trilogy. I think Manning is the second best writer I've 'discovered' in the past several years. She is so very, very good I can't understand how she has flown under the radar for so many years. (But probably I am wrong about her being not well known and it is just me.)

And The River We Remember sounds really good - very tempting. All I need to figure out is if I should borrow it or buy it. But either way I'm going to get my hands on this puppy sooner rather than later. Great review!

>179 Fourpawz2: Manning might be well known in Britain. I know there's a BBC mini-series for the entire series called Fortunes of War and starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, which I'll watch as soon as I've finished the books. It does seem like excellent casting.

I look forward to finding out what you think of William Kent Krueger!

>178 RidgewayGirl: yeah I should do that, in the meantime, Im getting a copy of the books.

>180 RidgewayGirl: I saw that and it was an outstanding series!

Far be it from me to ignore progress. let's see how this goes.

>183 RidgewayGirl: Looks good - the new format and the review. How did you manage to put the quote in italics using the review box?

I didn’t think there was much control of font style in the Edit Book review field.

>184 kjuliff: You can do italics and bold in the review box just like elsewhere.

>185 RidgewayGirl: Oh thanks. I didn’t know that. I look forward to my next review.

>186 kjuliff: Italic away! I do like the look of the inserted reviews, but I'm still adjusting to writing the review on the book page first. Usually I noodle around with it here first.

>187 RidgewayGirl: I imagine I will do that too. Get it looking good, copy, paste into the box on the book page …

>46 RidgewayGirl: I did read Rejection and understand your review. I appreciated what TT was doing, and was impressed with a lot of it, from a distance. The individual stories were just okay. I like connected short stories, looking to see who shows up in a new chapter. However, that one chapter with the porn guy was .. unreadable. But later chapters were better and I liked the metafiction aspect at the end.

In the stories in which they are not the main character, they appear fine and reasonably normal, but when the spotlight focuses on them, their personal failings are taken to the most extreme point possible.
Exactly, and that's part of what I liked. Like you said, I don't know who I'd suggest this to, but I imagine the analysis at Tournament of Books will increase my appreciation.

>183 RidgewayGirl: I had Beautyland out from the library, but couldn't even get it started. Back it went!

>162 RidgewayGirl: My theory on popular thriller books, like Wrong Place, Wrong Time, is that people who aren't big readers are impressed and so they become popular. Very few 'popular' books and authors in this type of book, excite me. They are okay reads, but I don't rave about them. I can feel the manipulation to keep the suspense going (even if I don't know what the twists are), and I get a bit annoyed. And like you say, a single conversation would make the plot fall apart, or at least solve the issue. Shari Lapena is particularly egregious.

>189 raidergirl3: That will be a fun day in the ToB. I'm really looking forward to this year's competition, although I still have three and a half books to go, and they are the three I am least interested in. We'll see how far I get.

>183 RidgewayGirl: Oh, a nice review (and I agree, the embedding looks good). I was glad to see that clicking 'show more' just expands it right here and doesn't redirect to the book page.

>183 RidgewayGirl: youve got me sold! another BB

I like the new review function. Beautyland sounds like one I would like.

I have enjoyed William Kent Krueger's Cork O'Connor mysteries set in northern Minnesota but haven't read any of his standalone books.

The Manning trilogy is on my shelf; maybe this year...

>191 rasdhar: It's good to see a useful new tool added to this website.

>192 cindydavid4: I look forward to finding out what you think of Adina, Cindy.

>193 BLBera: Beth, I read the first of Krueger's mystery series and while I liked the setting, it didn't grab me. But this one was good and I'll read more of his stand-alone books. I have a copy of Ordinary Grace on my tbr.

And The Balkan Trilogy is so good. I'm enjoying every minute of it.

>168 RidgewayGirl: OK, you've got me sold on The Balkan Trilogy. On to the neverending list it goes.

>187 RidgewayGirl: Yeah, this is my process too. I ramble a bit more, in a more personal vein, on my own thread, then tighten it up a bit for public consumption. And take out any rude rants unless the author is dead. (Though maybe that's opening myself up to an angry-spirit-writer haunting?)

>195 lisapeet: The Balkan Trilogy sat in my row of nyrb books for a solid decade before I pulled it out and read it. May you get to it quicker than I did because it's really something special and in this moment we're living in, it's a book that can hold all my attention.

And speaking of books that can hold all of my attention, Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro will be discussed at my book club next week. I'm really happy to have been introduced to Shapiro's work.

And it looks like block quotes also work on the review page.

>197 RidgewayGirl: I really enjoyed your review Kay. It seems to have some similarities with a Tim Winton book I’ve just reviewed on my thread. Oh, and I used the new feature - thanks to your inspiration.

I’m in the middle of so many books but on checking Signal Fires at my library I saw it was available, so I borrowed it.

I received my ?first Archipelago Books title in the mail this afternoon, The Harmattan Winds by Sylvain Trudel; have you gotten it yet?

>199 kidzdoc: Going outside to check now!

edited to add: No joy. Hopefully tomorrow.

Fewer books read this month than normal despite spending quite a bit of time reading. I'll blame reading three tomes at once.

And the next book in my Archipelago subscription is still not here, despite Darryl (kidzdoc) having received his yesterday. On the other hand, my long awaited copy of The Levant Trilogy just arrived from nyrb, so now I can read the last hundred pages of The Balkan Trilogy without fear of not being able to continue with the series.

In unrelated news, I have covered the main bathroom in swatches of various shades of pale blue paint, so that I can choose one to paint that room. So naturally we are having guests on Wednesday. I guess I can get their feedback on which color they prefer.

>201 RidgewayGirl: So naturally we are having guests on Wednesday. I guess I can get their feedback on which color they prefer.

Lol

I'm reading my way through the books that will be competing in the Tournament of Books and am down to just a few, which is a good thing as the competition kicks off on March 6th. Of course, this also means that the last few books are the ones that I'm not that excited about. Sometimes that means that I discover something great I would otherwise never have read, and sometimes that means I read a book I don't particularly like or am able to appreciate. Let's see how those last few books play out.

https://www.tournamentofbooks.com/the-2025-shortlist

>203 RidgewayGirl: Ha, you made me smile Kay. Yes I can’t accept myslph morphing into anything especially not a bird. Interesting review nevertheless.

One of the reasons I read the Tournament of Books shortlist each year is that there is always a book there that didn't appeal to me and yet, upon reading, it becomes a new favorite. So it is with Great Expectations, a novel structured on a political campaign infused with hope, and who wants to read about that at this moment in time?

>205 RidgewayGirl: Not a novel I want to read (at least not now) but an excellent review.

>205 RidgewayGirl: Sounds interesting Kay. I haven’t heard of Vinson Cunningham. I like that thoughtful novel and don’t always expect a plot. I’ll keep my eye out for this one.

>205 RidgewayGirl: that's exactly what I've found with the Tournament of Books. I'll pick a book to read that would never have been on my radar, and it is very good.

>206 AnnieMod: Yes, understandable. I do think he's a writer worth watching.

>207 kjuliff: I do enjoy a thoughtful, introspective novel, but they are at a disadvantage in the Tournament of Books because they end up being read on a deadline and books like that deserve to be picked up when you're in the mood for them and to be read more slowly than an action-packed thriller.

>208 raidergirl3: And sometimes I discover that the book I wasn't interested in was not for me, but it's fun to read them and then follow the discourse about them. And I do feel a sense of triumph when I can cross an author off my list. There are so many authors I want to read, so eliminating one is almost as good as discovering a new favorite.

From this year's tournament, I discovered The Book of George, Great Expectations and Someone Like Us, books that I would have otherwise missed entirely. And I didn't like All Fours, but since Miranda July gets so much attention every time she publishes a book, it's nice to know that I can let her future books go. I think James is the best book in the competition this year and a favorite to win, but I'd also like it if Martyr! pulled out a surprise win. In any case, the action kicks off today. Here's a link to the play-in match:

https://www.tournamentofbooks.com/2025/play-in-match

Enjoy the ToB. I’m impressed you come in so prepared. And I love your discoveries and all your reviews. Great Expectations appeals. I hope James gets respect.

>210 dchaikin: James is the favorite and I'd be very surprised if it lost in the first round to The Book Censor's Library. I really like how each year, the ToB has me read a book or two that I otherwise wouldn't and I really like them. This year it was Someone Like Us, The Book of George and Great Expectation. It's a really good shortlist.

>211 RidgewayGirl: Too bad Book Censor's Library has to face James in the first round. I think it deserves some love, even if it's not the same caliber as James. I'm also happy to see translated lit.

>212 labfs39: Yes, and especially from a place I don't run across much translated literature. I have plenty of books translated from French and Italian on my shelves, but this was the first book I've read by a Kuwaiti author.

I've got one more book in the Tournament of Books to go, which makes a change from the past couple of years when I've deliberately decided not to read a book from the list. This one was a surprise -- it wasn't on my radar at all and I loved it.

>214 RidgewayGirl: I was going to skip this ToB shortlister, but since you and many others think highly of it, I’ve added it to my Libro.fm wishlist.

>215 Charon07: I've gotten an audio copy myself. The cast, which includes Nick Offerman, Ed Helms and Jenny Slade, is really outstanding. I've listened to the first story, where Chris Cooper reads it with a slightly melancholy air, which suits that story perfectly.

I'm off tomorrow for Tucson, Arizona for the book festival and general fun times, which pushed me to get my review for We Do Not Part finished before I left. What do you say when a book is both superbly written and almost unreadable?

>217 RidgewayGirl: Oh great review. This one's going straight on my wish list.Have a great time at the festival - who are you planning to hear speak?

>218 AlisonY: I'm hoping to go see panels that include Eowyn Ivey, Julia Phillips, Jamie Quatro, Samantha Harvey and Willy Vlautin. There are a ton of authors I want to see.

I already had The History of Sound on my library wish list, I think from a review in NYT. I'm glad to know you enjoyed it. I don't always love short stories, but these seem like the theme would appeal to me.

And very interested in Kang Han's new book. I had a hard time with Human Acts because of the violence and my lack of background on the student uprisings. But her writing is so excellent, I'd like to try again.

>217 RidgewayGirl: Great review as usual Kay. It’s now on a 12 week hold at NYPL!

>220 japaul22: Jennifer, my internet search history as I read We Do Not Part is pretty grim. I did the same with Human Acts and this one is somehow more emotionally draining, despite having the distance of time. But she is brilliant and I'll read anything she writes. I read part of this while getting a much needed pedicure and the contrast between the ridiculously unnecessary and self-indulgent luxury with what was happening on the page was dislocating.

>221 kjuliff: Thanks, Kate. I picked up a copy of Eurotrash from the library today.

>217 RidgewayGirl:
I hated The Vegetarian but this feels more like a "sequel" to Human Acts which I enjoyed due to its focus on actual Asian history. So I feel like I could pick this one up, despite having avoided picking up her other books.

>222 RidgewayGirl: Good info, thanks. I'll have to choose wisely when to read this book.

>219 RidgewayGirl: Sounds great. I'm hoping that means Eowyn Ivey has a new book out.

>214 RidgewayGirl: oh Ive been wanting to read that, so glad you like it! thats a BB

>217 RidgewayGirl: excellent review. I’m eyeing this, and like Han Khan. I was interested to see it didn’t make the International Booker longlist.

Enjoy your book festival. It sounds like fun.

>217 RidgewayGirl: Fantastic review. I will add it to Human Acts on my wish list.

I hope you have a great time at the festival. I love Eowyn Ivey and just picked up a used copy of The Snow Child to put in my LFL in order to share the love.

>223 lilisin: Yes, and having read Human Acts enhanced my reading of We Do Not Part, although it isn't a sequel in any way.

>224 japaul22: I understand that. It was good for me to just jump in knowing nothing about it because otherwise I would have put it off. It was brilliant and I was always slow to set it down and eager to get time to read it, but starting it, knowing the subject matter would be hard.

>225 AlisonY: Yes, she does and Black Woods Blue Sky sounds amazing and I'm eager to dive into it. She was delightful in person. All the authors at the festival seemed to be enjoying each other's company a great deal, which was fun to watch.

>226 cindydavid4: Cindy, it's such a solid and well-crafted book. I'm looking forward to finding out what you think of it.

>227 dchaikin: I hadn't noticed that, Dan. Interesting. Is it simply that she's been on the list so many times before? There does seem to be an emphasis on authors translated for the first time on the list this year. And having already won once, not to mention her Nobel Prize, means people may not need the longlist to discover her.

>228 BLBera: Beth, it was the best.

>229 labfs39: Eowyn Ivey had a fun story about how she wanted to call her novel "Bear" but Julia Phillips beat her to the title. The two authors were appearing together in the panel I saw, along with Samantha Harvey.

>230 RidgewayGirl: hopefully not. But since the whole longlist are first timers this year, it’s something people think about. She has won once, and was listed another time.

In a discussion about genres, the following was said, "Historical fiction has to include at least one character who you can prove really existed." Has anyone else come across this remarkable requirement? It means a book mentioning Bill Clinton counts as a historical novel, but one set in the Renaissance that doesn't name drop is not and that seems silly to me. So what counts as historical fiction to you?

>232 RidgewayGirl: That sounds weird to me. I kinda can see what they are going for but... does it really need to be a person? Can that "character" be a city or a movement or a war or... something else?

For me as long as it is in historical setting (aka before the author was born or at least before they could have had witnessed the time or to keep it simple - at least 50-70 years in the past), it is historical fiction.

>233 AnnieMod: That's my thought, as well, although I suspect the cut-off of how far in the past a book needs to be to count will vary from reader to reader. Genres tend to be very loosely defined until you get to the sub-genres, or sub-sub-genres.

>232 RidgewayGirl: Historical fiction has to include at least one character who you can prove really existed

I simply wouldn't take that comment seriously.

As for time period, I'll leave that up to the reader. I had a TA at university who was doing a Masters in history and his thesis was on the culture of the Parisian banlieue in the previous decade. So if a university accepts 10 years or less, who am I to argue? But I struggle with a time period being that recent.

>232 RidgewayGirl: I’ve never heard of a real historical character being a requirement for historical fiction. That said, I have trouble figuring out what “historical fiction” means. I would have said that I don’t typically read historical fiction, but LT thinks it’s one of my biggest genres. According to LT, I have 349 historical fiction books in my catalog, but I myself have tagged only 56 books as historical fiction. To my mind, the author has to be writing about a period before they were born, and the historical milieu or some historical event must some be relevant or essential to the story. Just being set in the past doesn’t make it historical to me. And I vaguely and arbitrarily think it has to be set before the 1900s to be historical, or at least before my parents’ lifetimes.

It's so subjective! And everyone is, in my opinion, correct about their own definition of how far in the past it needs to be in order to qualify in one's own imaginary sorting criteria. But it's fun to argue about it! For me, anything in the previous century counts, and probably at some point, I'll arbitrarily move that to 2010.

Charon, I am intrigued by your requirement for an historical event to occur. So neither a book set among peasant farmers in the 18th century, nor one about the first moon landing would be historical fiction?

>237 RidgewayGirl: It doesn’t have to be a particular historical event, just that the book is “about” the historical period in some vague and nebulous way that I’m having trouble articulating. For example, The Dress Lodger counts to me as historical fiction because it’s very much about a particular period in time: a cholera epidemic in London, the state of medicine and public health at the time, etc. If the context of the 18th century peasant farmers was particularly relevant, it would be historical fiction, but if the story could have been transplanted to 19th or 20th century rural America with small tweaks, for instance if it were really “about” a family or a community, then no.

The first moon landing is a historical event, but obviously, since it took place in my lifetime, it can’t be historical fiction!

>238 Charon07: That makes sense. History just gets further and further away!

Fifty years seems too long for me; I also don't think it has to be before the author's lifetime. If I write a novel set in 2000, that might well be historical fiction, assuming it meets whatever other criteria you want to set for the genre (I agree with Charon07 that the 2000-ness of it must be relevant to the story). I'd have to do just as much research into historical details as I would for a novel set in 1827.

I lean to a very inclusive definition: As soon as the world of the book is recognizably different from the time in which it's written, it's historical fiction. Ad as rapidly as technology changes these days, it doesn't take long. I'd also suggest that a novel set in year X might be historical fiction with one background and not be with another. A novel set in 2021, for instance, probably wouldn't be historical fiction; if it's a novel about working at Twitter pre-Musk, it might be, because that's a radically different world than the one in which we live now.

Did you have a favorite author/event at the festival?

I read so much historical fiction that for my personal tagging purposes, the novel has to be set before the early to mid 1900s and has to feature a real historical person or be very informative as to time period or war or major event. I have 84 books in my collection marked as historical fiction, whereas LT says I have 635. I don't presume to press my definition on anyone else, it's simply a way of culling an otherwise meaningless mass of books.

>241 BLBera: The first panel I attended, with Mateo Askaripour, R.O. Kwon and Julia Phillips was memorable. All three were visibly thrilled to meet each other and to be there. And afterwards at the signing, Askaripour complimented me on my sweater (an oversized brown pullover that is the warmest sweater I own). Then, a later panel with Willy Vlautin, Sydney Graves (usually known as Kate Christensen, and Marcela Fuentes was a lot of fun. But all the panels were excellent and I'm excited to dive into the books I brought home.

>242 labfs39: I'm delighted by the variation in how we define historical fiction and by how we all seem to not judge others by their obviously wrong way of categorizing their books.

That sounds like a terrific book festival, Kay! I really like the matchups on those panels. And I didn't know Kate Christensen was writing under a pseudonym! I'm a longtime fan of hers, so I'll probably have to check one of those out.

I'm also following the ToB, even if I don't have time to read all the comments. And it's put some books on my radar too.

We Do Not Part sounds harrowing, but I'll probably read it. I'm reading a memoir of a woman whose family escaped Korea in the 1950s—a very different POV and experience, but there are whiffs of how brutal that time was.

>243 RidgewayGirl: I'm delighted by the variation in how we define historical fiction and by how we all seem to not judge others by their obviously wrong way of categorizing their books.

so true! I tend to be more conservative than most; for me the 50 year rule works tho I recognize as I get older that doesnt make sense anymore. my historic fiction is about a real event or person and I prefer it to be more historic than fiction, and appreciate when an author notes what is real or memorex and describes the reasons for her choses. and the fiction should fit in with the time period with limited anacronisms and with choices that make sense for the time and place. tho I have been known to read some that are more fictional than historic

I'm in a book club and the books are chosen by voting on the suggestions made by those in the group. Which is to say, I suggested Hard Rain Falling and it was chosen, but only a few of us liked the gritty reality of it. That said, the three of us who liked it, really liked it.

>217 RidgewayGirl: Fantastic review, and I'm so looking forward to reading this now.

>238 Charon07: I agree. Consider some of the most well known historical novels. Things Fall Apart is about a fictional tribe set in British Nigeria. Jean Valjean was based on some historical figures, but is himself fictional.

>246 RidgewayGirl: Sounds interesting! I always come away from your threads with more on my TBR.