thorold quotes a relevant line of verse in Q2 2026

…or perhaps not. I’ll have to think of one! It seems to be almost spring, anyway, watch this space, and we may see a few green leaves…

Tasks for reading in spring:

- 1. Whittle down the TBR pile (146 books at present, about 115 in Holland and the rest in Cleveland)
- 2. The new Reading Globally theme read on The francophone world
- 3. Continue with the Margaret Atwood readthrough I sort of started with The edible woman
- 4. Finish Don Quijote (I'm about five chapters further on than I was at the start of Q1
- 5. No, really, whittle down that TBR pile before it turns into a neutron star...

Gratuitous daffodils from York last week:

And the first book of Q2 is one I brought back from my little trip to Brussels a few weeks ago. I felt I ought to pick up at least one from the “Belgian Lit” table, and this one appealed because I have fond memories of holidays in the Ardennes. Disturbingly, they turn out to have been from a decade or so before the distant childhood memories so lovingly recalled by Wauters. I must be getting old, or something.

Wauters is a Belgian who writes in French (although Flemish on his father’s side) with several novels and quite a few literary awards to his name.

Le plus court chemin (2023) by Antoine Wauters (Belgium, 1981- )

Back to music. This was a chance find in the Broese sale a few weeks ago, but it’s a book that I would probably have read anyway, sooner or later.

John Potter is a British tenor who has sung in a long line of distinguished avant-garde and early music ensembles (Swingle II, Hilliard Ensemble, Red Byrd, Dowland Project, ECM, etc.). He studied with Peter Pears back in the day, and retired from teaching in the music department at the University of York a while ago.

Song: a history in 12 parts (2023) by John Potter (UK, - )

>2 thorold: I’m imagining a neutron star of TBR

>3 thorold: random, but i was surprised to see the Ardennes named in Orlando Furioso (1516/1532). It’s the location of two springs - one turns love into loathing, the other loathing into love. Causes serious romantic confusion. Sorry, long side note.

Lovely daffodils!

I’m a bit bogged down in another book I started about a week ago, so a quick in-between read of something light from the top of the pile:

The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) by Fay Weldon (UK, 1931-2023)

I missed getting a copy of the 2024 Boekenweek gift in the normal way, and it’s been slow to show up in our local little free libraries or thrift stores. After months of looking out for it, today there were actually two copies in the bargain box at one of our local thrift stores, so maybe people have started throwing it out now that they have the 2026 gift to find space for…?

Gezinsverpakking (2024) by De Chabotten (Netherlands, - )

>2 thorold: Envying this display of daffodils here, where by 1500+ bulbs are only just emerging. I can't imagine how many are on that York fortification.

>7 thorold: I think that lack of reference consistency would be distracting.

>8 thorold: How many Boekenweek books do you have now?

>9 SassyLassy: That was before Easter, three weeks ago. Here in Holland the daffs are just about finished now. But I’ll be in Cleveland later this month, so I may get to see the start of spring all over again… The York daffs are an institution — I think planting them was originally a Boy Scout initiative after the war, now it’s supported by the city council and local businesses, and they are adding wild flowers.

According to LT I have 54. I think the actual number on my Boekenweek shelf is one or two less than that (for instance I know I read Oeroeg in a later collection, not as the Boekenweek gift). There’s a full set from 1984 onwards, a few years before I moved to the Netherlands, plus a scattering of earlier ones, but none of the real rarities from the early years.

Back to the Francophonie. This is a book that has been sitting on my shelf since October 2020, mostly because it is one of those annoying tall and narrow Actes Sud paperbacks that require enormous amounts of wrist-strength to crack open…

Kamel Daoud is an Algerian who writes in French and has frequently been critical of Islam and the Algerian government both in his journalism and his fiction. His latest novel Houris won critical acclaim but is currently mired in legal controversy in France and Algeria. I read Daoud’s debut novel Meursault: contre-enquête in 2016 — that was a postcolonial take on L’étranger from an Arab perspective and also got a lot of critical attention both in the French original and in translation.

Zabor ou les psaumes (2017) by Kamel Daoud (Algeria, 1970- )

>1 thorold: hey im almost at 200 posts when am i supposed to change threads?

>11this does look good

>12 cindydavid4: There’s no rule — I start a new thread every three months, whether I need it or not (like Elizabeth I and baths….). If your thread gets unwieldy, you might as well start a new one.

As you all know by now, I have a weakness for composer bios, and Sibelius has been a favourite of mine among the late-19th-century symphonists for a long time.

Daniel Grimley is a Fellow of Merton and professor in the music department in Oxford — this book came out in paperback fairly recently, and I happened to spot it in the wonderful little Books On The Wall in Chester.

Jean Sibelius: life, music, silence (2021) by Daniel M. Grimley (UK, - )

Random diversion: I found this battered old school text in a local Little Library which I was visiting mainly to get rid of a couple of books I really didn’t need…

Interesting to see that Dutch schoolchildren were still reading Gottfried Keller in their German lessons as late as 1967.

Kleider machen leute (1874; Clothes make the man) by Gottfried Keller (Switzerland, 1819-1890)

>16 thorold: Sounds fun! And I saw on Wikipedia there are several films based on it, which I wasn't expecting.

>16 thorold: Agree with Dilara, it sounds fun! Reminds me a little about this old American movie where a poor man is given a million dollar cheque, in order to prove that he won’t have to cash it to use it to advantage.

>17 Dilara86: Fun! It is the sort of simple story that begs to be filmed, I suppose. There’s a clip from the Heinz Rühmann version here: https://youtu.be/r0CFk_4jmMk?is=pAHe_IHXGoWCrdH6
…obviously they didn’t bother to stick too closely to the book: this is a scene that Keller doesn’t have, but the film must have put it in to bring Nettchen and Wenzel together earlier in the story.

Another short one from the pile. I’m always a bit suspicious of these books with subtitles that include words like “how” and “genius” and — especially — “reinvented”, but this one turned out to be less offensive than most.

From walking around in Florence and visiting the cathedral I had never quite got a proper sense of how big it really is, but that sank in a few years ago when I stayed with a friend who has a farmhouse in the country south of Florence. Seen from her terrace, everything in the city is hidden behind a low ridge of ground, except for the huge bulk of the dome that looms over the surrounding country like a skyscraper. It must have been quite something for people watching it go up in the 1440s…

Brunelleschi's Dome (2000) by Ross King (Canada, 1962- )

>19 thorold: I don't understand German, but I still enjoyed the video: the actors were quite expressive...

>20 thorold: What a coincidence! I read a children's non-fiction book about Brunelleschi a couple of weeks ago: Waiting for Filippo: The Life of Renaissance Architect Filippo Brunelleschi- A Pop-Up Book by Michael Bender. I wouldn't recommend it necessarily (and definitely not the French translation I have), but its pop-up view of Florence was nice. I might see if I can find Ross King's book.

>16 thorold: Fun! :) Too bad it's not translated.

>18 FlorenceArt: That's an interesting parallel. The movie you're referring it might be based on a Mark Twain short story, The Million Pound Bank Note, which takes place in London if I remember well.

>22 raton-liseur: According to Wikipedia there are a couple of (rather old) French versions of the novella under the title L'habit fait le moin and a quite recent complete translation of the whole collection as Les gens de Seldwyla (2020).

>22 raton-liseur: Yes, that’s it! I must have seen the 1954 version with Gregory Peck.

>23 thorold: Thanks for looking this up for me!

Just before I head off on another trip, here’s the last of the books I brought back from Tropismes in Brussels. I’ve read quite a few of Perec’s books, but I hadn’t heard of this one: it turns out that there was a good reason for that…

Le Condottière (1960, 2012; Portrait of a man) by Georges Perec (France, 1936-1982)

I’m back in the US again. A disintegrating Penguin read on the plane yesterday…

Famous Trials (1986) edited by John Mortimer (UK, 1923-2009)

Since I’m in Ohio again, a little random dip into one of the less-obvious things this region is famous for.

The story of the airship (non-rigid) (1943) by Hugh Allen (USA, - )

>28 thorold: I have fond memories of the Goodyear dirigible that roamed the skies above Le Mans for years. It’s been gone for a while unfortunately. Thank you for the reminder, though I’m not feeling nostalgic enough to read this 😊

>29 FlorenceArt: No, I think you can safely forego reading it :-)
We very occasionally see the blimps around, over the sports stadiums here, or on their way between Akron and Cleveland. I just looked them up, and it turns out that the current generation were not made in Akron at all, and are not even technically blimps but semi-rigid airships built for Goodyear by the Zeppelin company in Friedrichshafen.

Another minor diversion. Too late for me to read when I was deep in all that kind of stuff as an undergraduate, and it’s probably lost its sting a bit with the years…

Postmodern Pooh (2001) by Frederick Crews (USA, 1933-2024)

Another small distraction. I’ve read “La Côte Basque” before in an anthology or somewhere, but the other bits were new to me.

Answered Prayers (1987) by Truman Capote (USA, 1924-1984)

“Last week in London I went to a party at Drue Heinz's and got stuck with Princess Margaret. Her mother's a darling, but the rest of that family!— though Prince Charles may amount to something. But basically, royals think there are just three categories: colored folk, white folk, and royals. Well, I was about to doze off, she's such a drone, when suddenly she announced, apropos of nothing, that she had decided she really didn't like ‘poufs’! An extraordinary remark, source considered. Remember the joke about who got the first sailor? But I simply lowered my eyes, très Jane Austen, and said: 'In that event, ma'am, I fear you will spend a very lonely old age’ Her expression!—I thought she might turn me into a pumpkin.”
— from “La Côte Basque”

Another minor diversion from my tottering Cleveland bookpile. Angus Wilson is a writer I’ve always enjoyed when I’ve remembered to pick one of his books up.

Reflections in a writer's eye (1986) by Angus Wilson (UK, 1913-1991)

Clearing up stray books here, I found one of those nasty omnibus editions squashing a bunch of E M Forster novels into an overstrained hardback binding on paper that is already turning brown after thirty years. It will be discarded humanely, but in the meantime, it’s a prompt to re-read novels I haven’t looked at for twenty or thirty years.

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) by E. M. Forster (UK, 1879-1970)

I seem to have missed my stop, and I’m still on the Forster omnibus…

A room with a view (1908) by E. M. Forster (UK, 1879-1970)

>35 thorold: and since this is Forster it can’t be achieved without George first spending a delightful but slightly shocking afternoon frolicking naked in a pond with Lucy’s brother and the closeted clergyman Mr. Beebe.

it’s hard to take Cecil Vyse seriously as a threat to Lucy’s future, he seems so much like a refugee from The Importance of Being Earnest

Ok, that's a hook.

>36 labfs39: Enjoy! I’m sure no-one ever came to any harm through (re-)reading too much E M Forster :-)

This was a blast from the past I happened to see on the secondhand shelves the other day. As a child I was fascinated by this kind of book, thinking that somewhere there was the magic formula to build a bridge between our not-very-British family and all the “normal” people around us. Little did I know at the time that none of them were in the least “normal” either, and certainly nothing like Mikes’s picture of the behaviour of 1940s Londoners…

Of course, being in the middle of that hulking Forster omnibus, I also loved the idea of this being marketed as a “minibus”!

How to be a Brit: a George Mikes minibus (1984) by George Mikes (Hungary, UK, 1912-1987)

The Forster omnibus rumbles into its terminus…

Howards End (1910) by E.M. Forster (UK, 1879-1970)

And a bit of Clevelandiana that caught my eye in a local bookshop. After four years of spending time in the city, I knew how to decode that title…!

It turns out that Winegardner is not actually a Clevelander, but grew up in rural Ohio on the Indiana border. He researched and wrote this book whilst he was teaching at John Carroll. In keeping with the famous Midwestern dictum he keeps quoting, “if you’re so clever, why are you still here?” he now teaches in Tallahassee, Florida.

Crooked River Burning (2001) by Mark Winegardner (USA, 1961- )

>35 thorold: Just read this one about a month ago for my first Forster. Delightful language and exquisite mockery! Not a fan of the ending though. Lucy still needs to be told what to do, this time by the elder Emerson. How was this any better than the sermons she heard before?

>40 VladysKovsky: Yes, there’s a lot in Forster’s novels that doesn’t improve with mature acquaintance. I really enjoyed re-reading these three for the language and the little barbed observations of manners, as you say, but the plots do have some weak spots.

Sometimes the TBR pile turns up trumps: I was able to go from a river named (apparently) for its crookedness, to a river whose Greek name has become a generic word for indirection.

I hadn’t come across Jeremy Seal before — he’s a travel writer who specialises in Turkey, and now seems to moonlight as a tour guide there (tempting, but not right now…).

Meander: East to West indirectly along a Turkish river (2012) by Jeremy Seal (UK, - )

Ed White, who died just under a year ago, was one of the pillars of gay writing in the US from Stonewall onwards. Not always in a good way, but impossible to overlook. I’ve read most of his books, and for some reason I thought I’d read his last book, but he sneaked in another novel and a memoir before he died. This is the novel…

The humble lover (2023) by Edmund White (USA, 1940-2025)

More local history. I pulled this off the bookshop shelf expecting it to be counter-culture, which might have been fun, but I turned out to be rather better than that: Wlasiuk studies environmental history, which I haven’t much experience of, and it’s been very interesting (especially as I’ve been exploring Ohio together with someone who is knowledgeable about plants and animals, so I had a good starting-point).

An alternative history of Cleveland (2024) by Jonathan Wlasiuk (USA, - ), illustrated by Libby Geboy

Another novel from very late in the author’s career.

The late John le Carré is one of the few real bestseller authors that I still bother with, particularly when I find a hardback copy of one of his books that I haven’t read yet marked down to $5 in Ollie’s Outlet Store…

Agent Running in the Field (2019) by John le Carré (UK, 1931-2020)

Another semi-obscure bit of local history. Severance Hall, with its aluminium foil decoration and its gaudy Egyptian foyer, is a bit of an acquired taste, but being able to go to Cleveland Orchestra concerts is one of the real privileges of spending time here. Interesting to find out a bit more about their history.

Not Responsible for Lost Articles: Thoughts and Second Thoughts from Severance Hall 1958-1988 (1993) by Klaus George Roy (Austria, USA, 1924-2010)

Severance as it is now (one more major rebuild on from Roy’s time)

>48 thorold: Ooh, shiny!

>49 FlorenceArt: Guess what metal John Severance made his money with…

>50 thorold: Oh, I was wondering where the name came from…

>51 FlorenceArt: Yes, I also wondered whether “Severance” could be some obscure American college or sports ritual! The first time I went there a lovely volunteer usher gave us a tour and told us about John Severance, we even got to peak into his private box.

>43 thorold: it seems to be to remind us that the power of the idea of love and sex goes on long after our ability to pursue it in practice. Oh so very true

>53 baswood: True indeed, but so depressing.

>47 thorold: "Have you ever wondered who writes those little essays in concert programmes introducing the music you are about to hear? "

Interesting! During my freelance jazz writing days, I did this sort of work for both the San Francisco Jazz Festival (a.k.a. SFJAZZ) and the Stanford Jazz Festival. I guess that's different, though, because I was mostly writing short entries for season schedule booklets rather than describing the pieces to be played in individual concerts. But it is difficult work indeed to encapsulate the history and style of a musician into a short sketch without simply recapitulating what's already been written elsewhere, or at least it was for me.

>55 rocketjk: Yes, that must have been tricky. Just as with the classical concert, you’d be writing for an audience where at least half of them knew it all backwards and the rest were there for the first time…

I seem to read an Anne Tyler novel about every eighteen months — any more often than that and it would probably feel like being caught in a Baltimore-extended-family time-loop. But she is always a pleasure to read when I do pick one up. This is one from the back-catalogue I hadn’t got to before.

Ladder of Years (1996) by Anne Tyler (USA, 1941- )

One of those “it looks quirky enough to risk $2 on” books. But it did occur to me after I bought it that one of the few things I could remember about Casanova was that he was a serious bibliophile and worked as a librarian in his later years. Fortunately not all the information in the book was as familiar as the piece in the title, but it wasn’t an auspicious start…

Casanova Was A Book Lover : and other naked truths and provocative curiosities about the writing, selling, and reading of books (2000) by John Maxwell Hamilton (USA, 1947- )

I read about half of this monster on an overnight flight: the other half has taken me rather longer… But it is a perfect book for reading in a semi-distracted state, bouncy and constantly changing course.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) by Allan Gurganus (USA, 1947- )

>h9 oh i loved this book! its been a while ,will have to look for the silly parts. am i remembering correctly that Lucille flew over the south and see the trail of the unions fires? plays well with others was good too, and I rmember a character in one of the stories racing to his best friends house after he died to pull out the bags of dildoes before his parents came home

>60 cindydavid4: Yes, that Sherman-trail is in the final chapter!

Back to the TBR shelf, and my Hobsbawm-backlog. I read the first part, The age of revolution in 2012, and the second, The age of Capital, much earlier, maybe some time in the 1990s…

The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987) by Eric Hobsbawm (UK, etc., 1917-2012)

>61 thorold: I'll check if this one is available in audio. It might be just what I need to take along for my walks.

>62 VladysKovsky: I wonder if it is? That would be quite the intellectual workout on a walk…

Back to the francophone theme, which I’ve been neglecting, and another Modiano that’s been on my pile for a while.

Un cirque passe (1992; After the circus) by Patrick Modiano (France, 1945- )

I started reading this about six weeks ago, but I got a bit bogged down in the middle. Took advantage of a quiet day today to finish it…

Bonheur d'occasion: Roman (1945; The tin flute, 1947) by Gabrielle Roy (Canada, 1909-1983)

Another quick one off the pile, although perhaps not entirely appropriate for the first day of meteorological summer in this hemisphere!

John Banville is an author I keep forgetting about — I read two of his books (including the sequel to this one) a few years ago, but never got back to him. This turned up in a local thrift store recently. I should look for more…

Snow (2020) by John Banville (Ireland, 1945- )

>64 thorold: Thanks for this review. I've had my eye on this one and will make more of an effort to find a copy.

>65 thorold: this one sounds like one of his Benjamin Black books. I do enjoy the real Banville but he’s crime thrillers leave me cold.

>67 kjuliff: I agree with Kate. I prefer Banville to Black every time. Yet in Snow and in April in Spain he appears to fuse his two alter egos. A result is interesting. His protagonists lose a bit of their wordiness but, as Mark points out, the psychological insight and the atmosphere are very well captured.

Another book for the Francophone theme-read:

Hewa Rwanda: lettre aux absents (2024) by Dorcy Rugamba (Rwanda, 1969- )

>67 kjuliff: >68 VladysKovsky: I’ve only read one Banville-as-Banville and these two fairly recent crime stories where he dropped the Button nom-de-plume, so I don’t have any strong basis for comparison, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far, this last one perhaps a little less than the other two I read.

Another French book I picked up for the Francophone theme. This won the Goncourt in 1987.

La nuit sacrée (1987; The sacred night) by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco, 1944- )