fannyprice's 2009 reading

At this point I don't have any goals for reading in 2009 other than to make more time for it and to avoid the urge to create lots of lists of TBRs and join a bunch of challenge threads. I like the idea, in principle, of things like the 888 or 999 Challenges, but in reality it just doesn't work for me. The minute I put a book on a formal list, it starts to feel like work & I start finding ways to avoid it.

Thanks avaland, for inviting me! I think we already appear to have an interesting-looking group of readers here.

Total Books Read in 2009



Edited on 02/13/2009 because I want color at the top of this page!
Edited on 04/19/2009 to reflect me dropping the 999 Challenge

Like you, I tend to be an impulse reader; I don't want to have a set list of books to be read, I just want to pick up what I'm in the mood for when I'm ready for a new book. And I've found that I'm not very good at group reads--too many work-related responsibilities keep interfering with my reading schedule.

Glad to see you here, fannyprice!

I have fallen prey to the urge to join challenges and draw up book lists - the lists were my favourite part of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon... I like this practice as a way of creating links between the books I read, but I suspect I may find myself sharing your feelings about challenges turning reading into work.

Perhaps logging reading is a saner practice. Look forward to following along come 2009...

I started the 75 Book Challenge. It's just a number; I didn't feel any big pressure to make it to 75. For me, it was just fun to track my progress. Here, I'll probably still number my reads next year, just to track how many books I get around to.

Ok, so I've done it. I'm in two challenge groups for next year. The 75 books is no big deal. Its the 999 that I'm a little worried about, but I hope I have made the categories a nice mix of hard and easy, so that I always have something to turn to, no matter what I'm in the mood for. And if I don't stick to those categories, oh well! I always have to tempt fate, it seems.

Edited on 02/13/2009: I've gotten tired of trying to keep track of my reading on three separate threads and have dropped out of the 75 Book Challenge. I'm still going to try to keep track of how many books I read, mostly because I like the little tickers & they do brighten up one's profile page, but I am not formally in the 75 Challenge anymore.

(1) Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet - Mark Lynas



Mark Lynas aggregates a lot of studies on climate change - both forward-looking modeling and past-looking geological examination - to postulate about what the world would look like at each stage of overall warming - from 1 to 6 degrees. Although this was a tough book to get through - it reminded me of Jared Diamond's Collapse in that it often seemed repetitive - I am really glad I made the effort to complete it. The book was strongest when it stuck to the science & weakest when Lynas attempted to project the social-political consequences of a shrinking, heating, starving world. Despite the chapter on solutions, I was left feeling profoundly pessimistic at the end. Books of this sort, that deal with global issues that are tough to understand & require immense coordinated action by multiple actors at all levels - governments, corporations, individuals, international organizations - tend to reinforce my feeling of utter insignificance & impotence before a problem of such a massive scale.

Now I think I'm turning to some fiction for a while.

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

More science!

(2) The Planets - Dava Sobel



Fantastic - fun, creative, informative science writing. A series of essays on the standard 9 planets plus Earth's moon, riffing on different associations the author has with each. I particularly loved the Mars essay, which was written as an autobiography & a history of Mars from the perspective of a Martian rock discovered in Antarctica, and the Jupiter essay, which draws heavily on astrology, but in a cheeky - not cheesy - way to tell the life story of Galileo and the Jupiter probe named for him - going so far as to cast the probe's star chart, using its launch date & time as its birthday. Not straightforward non-fiction science writing at all, but something highly lyrical, poetic, fun and informative. I wish I had read the illustrated version though, as other reviewers seem to have commented on fantastic pictures & my book had none. I may try to buy the illustrated version, since this copy was a library book. I really enjoyed Dava Sobel's writing style(s) and her ability to make science accessible to non-science geniuses who wish they were (i.e., me), and I will be looking forward to reading more books she has written.

My Review

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

Thanks for the review on Six Degrees. Just curious, have you read any other books on global warming?

>8 dchaikin:, Nope, this was the first.

Sometime last year I read The Weather Makers, also a book on global warming, also very pessimistic. But, I actually found it inspiring in some ways because of his solutions. For example, the author makes a good argument that developing alternative energies and technologies is actually an economic boost - something to think about with the economy as it is right now.

(3) Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries - Neil deGrasse Tyson



A huge collection of essays on various topics of astronomy, cosmology, physics, etc., many of which I confess I did not understand entirely, despite being authored for the average reader. Still, I enjoyed this book very much.

(4) Peeps - Scott Westerfeld



Yet another new take on vampires - this time its very "scientific." Vampirism is caused by a parasite that is spread much like an STD, which may just be a convenient excuse to insert lots of teenage sexual tension into the book, but was somewhat interesting. Westerfeld's books are weird for me - a lot of the time I think they could be so much better executed than they are - plot pacing, character development, general writing style, etc. - but in certain respects I find them very intriguing and I almost always want to read more of them. So I will probably look into the sequel to this, although from what I can tell, it seems really stupid and deals with an entirely different group of characters. Thank god for the public library, so I at least am not spending money on my ridiculous vampire fascination.

Its probably time to read some quality literature at this point. (Blushes....)

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

dchaikin@10,

It's my (non-economist) impression that a switch to green energy could involve lots of jobs in putting solar panels up, or insulating houses, employing many of the construction workers who are out of work now due to the crash of the US housing market.

fannyprice@11,

Are you on Bookmooch? Avaland mentioned last night that there are several copies of Lucius Shepard's The Golden available. I haven't read many vampire novels, but that one was good - if you're looking for one more. Not much in the way of teenage tension; turns out that newly created vampires are rather innocent compared to the older ones.

>13 dukedom_enough:, Thanks for the suggestion, dukedom! I am not on Bookmooch, but there's always the library!

(5) The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British - Sarah Lyall



I requested this book from the library so long ago that I had forgotten about it; it ended up being a pleasant surprise. The author is an American who married a British man and relocates to England; her book reflects an American's culture shock at various British peculiarities and is arranged in chapters loosely focused on a number of subjects: sex, food, class, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, weather, the British penchant for putting oneself down, terrible customer service, cricket, etc. Actual Brits could probably find much to quibble with, just as an American could object to any number of a series of stereotypes a foreigner might note about us, but the book is quite humorous.

Lyall arrived in England in the 1990s, which she identifies as a time when many English institutions and cultural norms were undergoing changes. The House of Commons was "welcoming" increasing numbers of women, the House of Lords was under attack by reformers who questioned its purpose in the modern era, economic growth was bringing new attitudes about consumption and money, and even the rules of cricket were changing in order to attract younger, hipper fans. Since I'm not familiar with British social history in the 20th century, I'm not really in a position to judge whether Lyall's history is accurate here - one could probably argue that she's overstating the extent of these changes. I did wonder at her characterization of pre-1990s London as basically a provincial town. But I think the focus on changing culture helped the book to be more than just a series of eternal stereotypes about the nature of the British.

I particularly loved the sections relating to public transportation issues in Britain - the author catalogs some of the more ridiculous official reasons she's heard as to why trains are delayed or simply cancelled, including "dew on the rails" and "a leaf on the rails". These stories are certainly not unique to British public transportation & can be appreciated by anyone who's ever had to deal with a subway on a daily basis.

Also great were the oddities of the House of Lords & the number of Lords who appear to have had a serious obsession with UFOs & other related phenomena. In arguing for the existence of the Loch Ness Monster and others, one of the Lords makes an analogy to cookie baking, saying that just as mothers set aside dough for their children to make odd shaped bits of their own, perhaps God gave the angels a bit of the essence of life to play with & the angels in turn created goofy little monsters like Bigfoot and yetis. I love it! I now believe in Bigfoot because this explanation is just so cute!

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

I like the sound of this book, fannyprice! The classic set of "leaves on the line"-type excuses for train delays come from the wonderful TV series made from David Nobbs' book The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Here's the first set of railway-related excuses:

Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, staff difficulties, Hampton Wick."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, signal failure at Vauxhall."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, staff shortages, Nine Elms."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, derailment of container truck, Raynes Park."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, seasonal manpower shortages, Clapham Junction."
Ep.2 "Eleven minutes late, defective junction box, New Malden."
Ep.4 "Eleven minutes late, overheated axle at Berrylands."
Ep.4 "Eleven minutes late, defective axle at Wandsworth."
Ep.5 "Eleven minutes late, somebody had stolen the lines at Surbiton."

The full list - which gets more and more bizarre - is at

http://www.leonardrossiter.com/reginaldperrin/Train.html

That does sound like a really interesting book, fannyprice. And Tim, I love the list. I am afraid to go investigate further, as my quick lunch time visit to LT would get much longer, I fear. I will have to come back later at home...

fannyprice,

You make the book sound entirely too attractive for someone who for the moment has sworn off purchasing new books. However, I wonder what your namesake would have to say about the aforementioned book. I am not sure she would entirely approve ;-)

LOL, urania. old FP would probably bemoan the passing of an even earlier form of Englishness. But I'd hope she's not such a stuffed shirt to pass up on a good laugh!

Oh I'm not sure FP is capable of a good joke.

Right now I seem to be interested in two types of books: non-fiction science writing and young adult "crap" books of varying quality. All my attempts to read actual adult fiction of high quality are petering out. Perhaps I am tired. Its day 2 of a 4 day weekend for me in the DC-area & the library doesn't open for a few hours - killing time picking out new books to check out once it does. Consequently, my list of books to get is now almost a page long....

timjones, thanks for the entertaining list - it definitely struck a chord! I was once waylaid on the train platform in Ledbury. Nobody explained why. I stood in the rain until nearly midnight in a tiny town completely booked up with poetry festival goers, then caught the only possible train to the wretched town of Worcester where I paid a hundred pounds to have a bad night's sleep in some postwar atrocity. When I finally caught my "day return" train to London the next morning, I was tempted to decapitate the poor man who asked me to show a valid ticket... That said, there are many other wonderful things about England and I continue to pine for my London days...

fannyprice, thanks for the reviews. I have long been interested in Dava Sobel, but never read her.

#22, cocoafiend: Eleven hours late, poets on the line at Ledbury.

Dear fannyprice,

I noticed that speculative fiction was on your list of possible choices for the 999 challenge. Might I suggest a couple of titles: The End of Mr. Y, which I think is brilliant, and The Left Hand of Darkness, which can also be categorized as science fiction.

#23, exactly! Transportation infrastructure is notoriously unreliable when it comes into contact with verse - except when it comes to Auden's "Night Mail," of course:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0

fannyprice @11, 14:

At the risk of overdoing the vampire thing (I'm not a fan of vampire stuff, really), I just remembered Peter Watts' excellent "Powerpoint presentation" (really a Flash animation) on vampires. Takes an hour to watch, but it's witty and gruesome. "FizerPharm: Trust. Profit. Deniability."

#s 24, 25: fannyprice, you could conflate two of your categories by reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica, which is near-future speculative fiction set in Antarctica. Not as good as his Mars trilogy, but still good. Of course, Mars is also quite a cold place ...

cocoafiend, thanks very much for posting that!

>24 urania1:, Thanks urania! I am planning to read The Left Hand of Darkness for inclusion in at least one of the 999 categories - someone told me it could also work for the Cold Places category. I will check out The End of Mr. Y, which I have never heard of!

>27 timjones:, thanks for the suggestion, Tim! I might check out both Antarctica and the Mars books! After reading Dava Sobel's The Planets, I have a feeling that nearly any planet can count as a cold place - under certain circumstances. Except Venus - poor poor Venus. And Mercury, I suppose.

#29: The dark side of Mercury would do very nicely as a cold place. (there's actually a scene in one of the Mars books - I think it's Blue Mars - set in a city that travels on a set of tracks in the narrow zone between the light and dark sides of Mercury, just ahead of the sunrise)

YA+SF+cold place=Gwyneth Jones aka Ann Halam's book Siberia. Good, quick read. Also Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus is partially set in Siberia.

coming a bit late to this thread here, but I must comment on the railways in the UK. As a former Brit, I winced with the pain of long suppressed memories of waiting in stations in the middle of the night, broken, frozen, despondent, suicidal etc. Christ, what an unbelievable shithole England is! haha. I must also take issue with the assinine comment that before the 1990s London was a provincial town (meaning before the writer graced it with her presence?). London has not been a provincial town since the middle of the 17th century. Twaddle!!!!

FP, I'm sure you've already read the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, but I mention them here just in case you haven't. They are very good, fabulously trashy.

I'm enjoying following your reading, btw.

>32 QuentinTom:, Yeah, the whole "provincial town" thing struck me as a bit silly. I mean, come ON - its LONDON, for God's sake! Although I liked The Anglo Files, my general unfamiliarity with English culture aside from the world of Jane Austen's novels & a few very specific cultural history books focusing on the Regency/Victorian eras made it hard for me to judge the historical validity of what Lyall was saying. Obviously many of the changes she locates in the 1990s were going on prior to that time - perhaps they just stuck out more because of what she expected England to be like. I'm not quite sure.

Hated Works of 2009 #1

Given up on: Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale - Holly Black



My first failed read of the year & one I was rather surprised to hate, given my new-ish obsession with young adult urban-fantasy type books. This book was teh suck! :)

I felt like I was wading through the diary of some extremely pretentious teenager who had watched too many fantasy movies. Nothing that happened ever really seemed interesting or significant to me & many of the scenes just seemed so cliche - here is the part where the mystical main character falls for an ostensibly bad guy; here is the part where the main character is attacked by the bad guys and feels a million hands scratching at her or dragging her down or whatever; here is where an angry, bitchy teenager tells off the marginal authority figures in the book. Blah blah blah.

I expected to at least enjoy this on the guilty pleasure level but it was almost unreadable. I was shocked at how much I disliked it. After giving it a really good try, I only managed to get about halfway through it, at which point it was so much worse than it had been when I started it - I gave up. I hate giving up - I will generally plow through things because I hate leaving them unread, especially if they are short and easy like this book, but this just felt like such a colossal waste of time I couldn't make myself read any more. I think my vitriol toward this book is so strong because I really did expect to like it and was looking forward to geeking out with another young adult fantasy series for a while; now I feel disappointed that I can't. I'm not planning on finishing it & not planning on continuing with the series.

Find out more about this book that every reviewer other than me loved

ETA: I just discovered that I have never given a book one star before! Woo hoo, I am feeling bitchy!

Miss Price,

I am shocked. Call for the smelling salts as I feel quite faint. I am completely at a loss. Whatever made you think you would like anything by Holly Black, let alone find her work acceptable reading for young ladies? Oh what would Jane Austen do (WWJAD) at a moment like this? Oh dear! Oh dear! I feel an Anglo-Saxon attitude coming on me. :-)

Yeah, perhaps its time to ask Abby to change my username or something! :)

(6) Death Note, volume 6 and Death Note, volume 7 by Tsugumi Ohba



Continuing on with this manga series. I have watched the anime, so some of the excitement of reading this series is not there, since I generally know how the plot is going to go. I'm reading it for the little details and differences & because its such an interesting concept. I actually heard about this series on NPR, which either indicates their hipness or my lameness.

Basically, its a detective/mystery type story that addresses ethics through a rather bizarre plot device. A high-school boy named Light with an inflated sense of righteousness comes into possession of a notebook that allows him to kill people simply by writing their names in it - if he knows what they look like. He believes that the world is a messed-up place in which people are allowed to commit horrible crimes and get away with it and pretty quickly decides that he can use the notebook to clean up society. He takes on an alter-ego who becomes known as Kira & is both reviled and revered by the public. Along the way, Light meets and matches wits with a young detective - known as L - who has some ego issues of his own & a questionable sense of ethics when circumstances challenge his ability to solve the Kira case.

The characters are funny and intriguing - neither Light nor L is either wholly bad or good, despite one being the "bad guy" and the other the "good." The series does a nice job of addressing moral/ethical questions without being pretentious or portentous. It is fun to watch the cat & mouse game between Light and L, both of whom are quite clever & are engaged in a race to eliminate each other, despite ostensibly being friends & working together on a police task force (I know, I know - strangely, the whole "gods of death" thing and a notebook that can kill people was easier to believe than the idea that a high-school student gets pulled into a police investigation just because people think he's smart). L suspects Light of being Kira almost from the beginning, he just can't prove it; L meets Light under the pretense of being a rather odd college classmate, but Light immediately suspects him of being Kira. Both are gunning to take the other down & each is continually divining the other's true intentions while pretending not to.

In volume 7, the series takes a kind of unexpected turn - at least, I found it quite surprising when I first watched the anime...having done that, it didn't come as a surprise in the printed version and introduces some new characters. In the anime version, the episodes in this second version of the plot were often confusing & the second half was weaker than the first, but I am hoping that the manga will explain things a little more and tell this story better. Not sure when I will continue it though, as the library constantly seems to be out of the next volume & it cannot be placed on hold for some odd reason.

(7) Mosques - Razia Grover



What follows is probably an overly bitchy review - I have been a crabby reviewer lately, savaging things that I find even moderately disappointing when I had expected to like them. I think its because I have gone through a totally dull & disappointing reading period for the last few months and am really struggling to find anything that grabs me, sucks me in and wows me. But here goes. This book served as my first entry into my Art, Architecture, Illustration, Etc. category in the 999 Challenge - I collect art books but I don't end up reading them, which is sad, so I am devoting a whole category to them to plow through at least some of the stack.

Razia Grover's book on mosques is primarily an art/architecture book that showcases prominent mosques (and one not-a-mosque....) from the main regions ruled by Muslim empires. The main sections cover early mosques in the Arabian Peninsula & Damascus, Spain, North Africa, Mesopotamia, and India. Each chapter places the mosques in question in their historical and cultural context & discusses their prominent and distinctive architectural features.

What I Liked

(1) Each building was placed in its historical context with a discussion of the imperium that constructed it & the local cultural influences on its design. Overall the book demonstrates the evolution of the mosque form & the myriad of local variations around its central elements.

(2) Generally nice-looking, although some of the photos could have been better (see what I didn't like) and the paper was somewhat less than the highest quality. I bought this book for significantly less than its $80+ list price, but it seems that a book that is selling for such a price should be on better paper.

(3) Generally gorgeous buildings, especially the choices in the modern mosques section. Also I liked that this section was even present because it reflected a choice to show that the form was still evolving & further demonstrated regional variations in mosque architecture.

What I Disliked

Sadly, I found a fair amount to complain about. This book was nowhere near as attractive as I had hoped, which I guess is my biggest overall complaint. I also had a lot of little nits to pick - they seem really petty, but some of them are actually fairly significant errors/omissions/drawbacks.

(1) A nit: The Dome of the Rock is not actually a mosque & although the author says this in the separate section on the Dome of the Rock (contained in the Jerusalem section), the building is still identified as a mosque in the introductory map showing the locations of important mosques in the world. This is probably not actually important to most people, but its such a common popular misconception that I would hope the author would try to correct it. Its like she felt the building was too beautiful and significant to leave out, even though it has a different purpose than all the other buildings in the book. Either that or she figured she had to have Jerusalem in the book & the al-Aqsa mosque - despite being the third-most religiously significant mosque after those in Mecca & Medina - could not hold its own.

(2) A second nit: The opening map contains a box on significant Muslim empires throughout history but the empires are listed alphabetically which doesn't really make sense. Listing them chronologically by the particular regions they ruled over seems like it would have been more informative & would have mirrored the overall layout of the book.

(3) The sections are too short, which leads the author to sometimes mention structures that are not pictured in the book, which I found frustrating. Iraq is shorted space and Central Asia is almost completely passed over. This may simply be because many buildings that might have been featured have been destroyed over time & the author lacked significant information on them, but I thought it was an unfortunate oversight.

(4) Some of the photo choices were questionable. This was particularly glaring to me in the section on Turkey, which is the only place I have actually been able to see any of the buildings featured in this book. There are postcards that have better exterior shots of the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia), which looks pretty unfortunate in this book & the interior shot she used is dark and doesn't show any of the incredible decoration.

(5) Finally, there is a very pretty two-page feature on Islamic decoration that contains somewhat of an inaccuracy that leads to an unexplained apparent contradiction: directly opposite a statement that Islamic tenets frowned upon figural representation is a photo of tilework containing a very figural painted representation of a man. The prohibition on figures really only applies to representational art for the purpose of worship - which is considered a form of idolatry. Forbidding or claiming that Islam forbids all depictions of human form is a misinterpretation or an over-zealous application of sayings contained in the hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad). There has been representational Islamic art - even of Muhammad - throughout Islamic history. Different sects of Muslims - particularly the Shi'a - have been much more open to depiction of human figures in art than have others. Obviously the author can't address this whole controversy in a single page, but she could have caveat-ed her statement more carefully or avoided the whole issue by not putting tilework depicting a human figure immediately opposite a statement that seems to suggest that such tilework should not even exist. Worst of all, there are no captions on the page or text elsewhere in the book that identifies what this tilework even is, where it is from, when it is from, or who the figure in question might be! I know this seems absolutely silly & it probably is, but inaccurate statements like this drive me nuts. If I didn't know anything about Islamic history or Islamic art, I would be completely confused by that page.

Edited on 02/13/2009 to migrate over some reading material from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

(8) A Certain Slant of Light - Laura Whitcomb



A rather magical love story about two ghosts - Helen and James - who find themselves inhabiting the bodies of contemporary teenagers from totally different sides of the tracks, as it were. James becomes Billy, a misfit druggie from a fantastically broken home who overdoses, allowing James' spirit to enter his body. Helen becomes Jenny, a nearly invisible damaged girl who's basically been brainwashed out of existence by her born-again Christian parents. This book was like three distinct books & I felt very differently about each of them. Much that was new & fantastic in the early portions of the book disappears in later parts of the book, where it becomes a more mundane star-crossed teen love story with a great deal of obvious family secrets & drama thrown into the mix.

All in all, I am of two minds about this book. Part of me just wants to go with the great, dreamy feeling the first part of the book gave me; the other part wants to criticize this book for some its trite and obvious ploys. That probably means it gets a three. Maybe three and a half. Still, I would recommend it to anyone who wants a good "hot water bottle book." (I stole that term from another LT user, cannot remember who, or I would give credit because its quite apt!)

Full Review - has more plot spoilers, but I try not to give anything too major away.

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

I see that you don't have any Andrea Barrett in your library. May I suggest The Voyage of the Narwhal for your cold places (and possibly your science, depending on how you're defining it) category? Barrett writes very science-based fiction, and The Voyage of the Narwhal is about an Arctic expedition. While not my favorite of the Barrett books I've read (I prefer her short fiction, which is unusual for me), I liked it.

haven't read Narwhal, but can certainly vouch for Barrett's collections of short stories.

>39 cabegley:, Thanks - The Voyage of the Narhwal is actually already on my Amazon wishlist! :)

(9) City of Bones - Cassandra Clare



Yet another YA urban fantasy type novel, this time about teenage demon-hunters in NYC. This one was much more engaging than Tithe - I pretty much enjoyed all 400+ pages of it. Some of the "shocking" plot revelations were pretty obvious, although one in particular actually was pretty unexpected... I expect that if the series continues along the same trajectory, I will keep reading it. Overall - three stars. Nothing fantastic or to write home about, but if you like this genre, which I think I do, its fun for a snowy night.

(10) City of Ashes - Cassandra Clare



Not a whole lot to say about this book. Another fun urban fantasy book - more interesting developments for the characters from the first novel. Nothing deep or life-altering, but that's fine. Looking forward to the conclusion of the series in City of Glass.

(11) The Rabbi's Cat - Joann Sfar



FINALLY - something I can unequivocally say I loved. This graphic novel is set in colonial Algeria & Paris and tells the story of an Algerian rabbi coming to terms with religious and cultural change - oh and his talking cat. :) At first, the book drew me in with its story of a devilish cat who devours a parrot and learns to talk; he immediately demands to know if he's Jewish, wants a bar mitzvah and begs to be taught Kabbalah. If the book had been nothing more than a cute story about a cat, I still would have loved it. But it ended up being so much more - sprinkled throughout the text are little trinkets of wisdom on Jewish tradition, colonialism, cultural alienation & interaction, Jewish-Muslim coexistence & cultural syncretism, differences between Sephardic & Ashkenazi Jews in North Africa and in Europe - all done without being at all pretentious, in my opinion.

Near the end of the story, the rabbi and his cat travel from Algeria to France and the book masterfully uses color to contrast how the rabbi perceives his home (bright, warm, dirty, alive, familiar) and the land of his temporary & self-imposed exile (dark, cold, rainy, foreign, somewhat menacing). Using both written and visual cues to demonstrate how alienated the rabbi felt during his first trip to Paris really enhanced the presentation of the story. Thanks to all who recommended this book to me - its my first great read of the year!

Edited on 02/13/2009 to migrate over some reading material from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

(12) Black Hole - Charles Burns



Its been a graphic novel kind of morning, apparently. I don't really know what to say about this one. It was interesting, with both the good and bad connotations of the word implied. Burns uses disease & mutation as a metaphor for teen angst, alienation, and growing pains. Although the book post-dates the AIDS crisis, it is set in the 1970s & so aptly evokes the time that one forgets that its not a foreshadowing of the 1980s reactions to HIV-AIDS.

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

And now you get to read the rabbi's cat 2 which might be even better than the first volume. Sfar is so essentially hopeful about human decency that i feel better after reading anything he's done...from Vampire Loves to the Rabbi's cat stories.

Right now I'm really struggling to maintain interest in The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean for my cold places category in the 999 Challenge. This was recommended by so many people & I figured I would have no trouble getting into it, but there's just something about it that doesn't grab me.

I love the conceit that the main character has failed polar explorer Lawrence Oates as an "imaginary" friend (he's so real to her that its hard to call him imaginary) - its such a clever way to add some polar exploration history without resorting to entire passages of historical exposition. And I love the descriptive passages about the polar landscape - the Antarctic, rather than any of the actual characters - really is the star of the show. But I think that's where the problem lies - none of the characters are really striking me as that interesting right now. All of the main characters - Sym, an awkward teenage girl with a hearing problem; her larger-than life uncle Victor; and the Nordic father-son team who become their primary companions on the trip - have some mystery behind them but right now those mysteries seem a little obvious (won't say more for spoilers). I continue reading just to see where its going, but its kind of a long, hard slog at this point. I hope I will start to enjoy it more.

i know i recommended this one..i do think Sym becomes more engaging as the book unwinds. Your suspicions about the Nordic characters are probably correct. Hope it picks up for you.

Finally getting a chance to put my thoughts together on two great things I read last weekend. First,

(13) A Spell of Winter - Helen Dunmore



I read this modern Gothic tale about a horribly dysfunctional family in World War I-era (and probably pre-war) England on the recommendation of a number of people on LT (avaland and Cariola and probably others) and was not disappointed. Although the book contains a lot of rather standard tropes, it still manages to be incredibly engrossing: a brother and sister abandoned by their parents to live with a distant, haunted grandfather in a crumbling estate; a family of foreign "outsiders" (the grandfather is of non-Anglo origins, his wife was Irish, I think); an overly close brother-sister relationship; unhappy marriages; the cold & dreariness of England contrasted with the light, warmth, and vitality of the Mediterranean; a mother who flees her family to escape the weight of history and family dysfunction; a mysterious father languishing in a sanatorium; and the breath-of-fresh-air newcomer who facilitates the heroine's escape from it all. The themes reminded me very much of Wuthering Heights or of another modern Gothic (that also draws strongly on Bronte's novel), The Thirteenth Tale.

The book's structure was really interesting to me - chapters seemed to jump between the present and various different times in the life of the main character, Cathy, without ever making it precisely clear that the time had shifted. This technique really underscored the sense of the past haunting the present & of the past being perhaps more real and vital to the characters than the present. I loved Dunmore's dreamy, dreary, rather understated writing style; I will seek out her other books just to see if these elements are constant for her.

I read this book with a constant feeling of queasiness in my stomach - which could have been caused by the massive amounts of coffee I consume, but I prefer to think of it as an oddly emotional response to a book in which the reader is forced to watch characters actively reject options that would improve their lives and choose instead the most destructive courses of action - courses of action that will only cause them pain, loneliness, and even madness. Highly recommend.

My Review

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

(14) The Nimrod Flipout: Stories - Etgar Keret



Wow, I am behind in updating this thread. I read a lot last weekend and never got around to it.

Unfortunately, I took a really long time to read this rather small book of short stories by Israeli author Etgar Keret & I was really lax in jotting down thoughts as I read, so I don't have a lot of specific things to say. I think it was the typical short story collection experience in that some of the stories grabbed me more than others; however, I don't think its accurate to call Keret's stories themselves "typical," as almost all of them were very strange. Some of them had a David Lynchian quality to them - full of slightly odd, somewhat sinister happenings - and of course those were my favorites. A lot of them focused on young men listlessly sailing through life in Israel. I will read more by this author.

Review

Oooh, excitement. I couldn't help myself... I've got a birthday coming up and I had to treat myself to the following:

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008
The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Modern Library) - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West
The Night Watch (Watch, Book 1) - Sergei Lukyanenko
Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories (Norton Critical Edition)
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky I already own my mother's old two-volume copy of this (each volume originally sold for $1.95 and bearing her maiden name written inside), but the print is so tiny, I wanted a new one for reading
Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

I'm going to try to participate in some of the group reads going on for Dostoyevsky & Woolf. I am really excited about the Katherine Mansfield anthology - I have wanted to read her ever since reading Anne Fadiman's anthologies in which she is referenced. Return of the Soldier has come up so much lately on various threads, it was just time, plus I feel a real WW1 thing coming over me.

Happy upcoming birthday! Isn't it fun going out and getting a stack of books? I have one at home, but I left most of them in the bag so far. Tonight is a cleaning up night, and one of the things I want to do is get them all scanned into my library. Have fun with yours.

ETA: I am not sure how I posted this twice, sorry!

Happy upcoming birthday from me too!
Excellent choice of books, btw. Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Katherine Mansfield are three among my favourites. Enjoy!
:-))

(16) The White Darkness - Geraldine McCaughrean



This book, recommended by many, was a slog for me, despite its being a young adult novel & therefore presumably an "easy" read. I was of two minds about it, probably because it often seemed like two different books with two different narrators. I liked and disliked elements of the ending - oddly, I found the unbelievable supernatural-type events more believable than the unbelievable mundane-type events. Perhaps this was because I could chalk them to to "unreliable narrator"-type things. The other unbelievable events were just too convenient.

The main character is a nerdy, almost autistic-seeming British 14-year-old girl named Symone (Sym for short) with a tragic family history, a bizarre pseudo-uncle, and a serious obsession with the Antarctic and the doomed men who attempted to explore it. In particular, Lawrence Oates, who is perhaps most famous for his last words, uttered as he crawled out of his tent to die, telling his comrades: "I am just going outside and may be some time." I believe Anne Fadiman wrote of him in an essay in Ex Libris on her obsession with polar explorers. For Sym, Oates is more real and more of a presence in her life than any living, breathing person. This creates an interesting sort of side story, in which Sym and Oates recall snippets of his life & of the polar expedition that led to his death. This portion of the book, along with the amazing & vivid descriptions of the Antarctic landscape, were engrossing and highly readable.

The second portion of the book, which consists of the actual plot of the book - in which Sym's crazy uncle spirits her off to Antarctica to fulfill some bizarre fantasy of his & the ensuing tale of their expedition - was considerably less engaging & seemed like it was narrated by a different person, even though Sym is the narrator throughout. There were secrets & twists throughout and a fair amount of adventure, but the thing that frustrated me most was Sym as a character. Although she ostensibly worships her uncle & thinks he's an inspired genius, I just couldn't understand how she was so blind to his totally inappropriate behavior. Very early on, it seems obvious to the reader that he is a rather sinister individual & based on what she discovers, Sym should at least be somewhat anxious even before they reach the Ice. But she is all too content to let things slide in a way that really did not strike me as believable. Perhaps this is attributable to her being young, shy, socially awkward, etc. but she's not supposed to be an idiot. It seemed to me like wilfull mis-perception being forced on her by the author to further the plot.

Further thoughts and many a spoiler follow in my full review.

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

(15) The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1890-1980 - Elaine Showalter



I actually read this last weekend, but forgot to post it, so now my thread is (horrors!) out of order....I thought it was great, very interesting, if dated (its from 1985, I think). A good example of popular scholarship & I liked how it presents debates rather than closing them off. I ended up with 15 new additions to my TBR list from the novels Showalter references alone! (Part of the sudden rush to read West and Woolf; also, it coincided nicely with my new desire to learn more about WW1, since so much of it focused on WW1-era mental health issues.) I've got tons of pages flagged right now in the hopes of actually posting a serious review of this one. We'll see if that happens. So much to read....

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

Oooh, thanks for the review of The Rabbi's Cat, fannyprice; it's gone straight on my wishlist. I also liked your comments on A Spell of Winter. One of the (far too many!) books I'm reading at the moment is Helen Dunmore's House of Orphans which I'm enjoying. (I was convinced that I'd already read something of hers, but I've no idea what it was!)

(Sorry for the deleted message above - I've just opened a second LT account for my wishlist (The Rabbi's Cat is the first entry!) and I hadn't realised that's what I was logged in as...)

Miss Price,

Your post #55 reminded me of another book, very un-Jane Austenish; but since, I regret to say Jane Austen might not approve of all your behavior, (really, you are becoming like Mary ;-), I will venture to post the scholarly text in question. Ladies, grab your smelling salts.

The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) by Rachel P. Maines.

Which reminds me, my copy went on walkabout and never returned. I must replace it. Toodle-loo, I'm off to Abe or the Amazon. * urania toddles innocently offstage *

Glad to see that you enjoyed A Spell of Winter. Like you, I want to read more of her work. Avaland recommended The Siege, which is on its way from a swap group.

>58 Cariola:, Yes, I requested The Siege from the library, also on Lois' recommendation! She is always adding to my TBR pile. :)

>49 fannyprice:. Happy birthday, Fanny! It looks like you got a nice selection of books. That's one thing I love about LT, you guys are the only people I know who get as excited about new books as I do. Lol.

(17) A Great and Terrible Beauty, (18) Rebel Angels, (19) The Sweet Far Thing - Libba Bray



I've been sick this weekend and these books were great light reading (especially since I read them on the Kindle - Amazon's e-reader - which meant I didn't have to struggle to hold the last book, which I think comes in at something like 800 pages!). They made me feel cozy & I thought in some ways they were actually fairly smart YA books. Bray does some fairly clever things with characterization and language at various points that reveal some hidden things about her characters' true natures rather than just flat out saying things in simplistic ways, like a lot of YA novels sometimes do.

The series reminded me of a combination of The Chronicles of Narnia & Harry Potter, but with a much more female-centered cast and message. (More on that later).

Moderate Spoilers Follow

The basic premise of the series is that 16-year-old Gemma Doyle, who has lived with her family in colonial India, relocates to England after her mother's death under mysterious circumstances and is promptly shipped off to attend boarding school where she encounters the usual crowd of boarding novel characters: Felicity, the rich alpha-female; Pippa, her best friend and loyal follower; a crowd of lesser snotty bitches who serve as Felicity's hench-women; Anne, the mousy orphaned scholarship student who's picked on and scorned by all the other girls; Brigid, the superstitious housekeeper; and a small cast of teachers, including a cold headmistress and standard 'one teacher who really understands me.' Eventually most of these characters are revealed to be more complicated and interesting than they first seem & Felicity, Pippa, and Anne end up becoming Gemma's dearest friends. The girls discover that the school has a number of generally terrible secrets & that Gemma has magical powers that allow them access to "the realms", a world of magical creatures that is both beautiful and horrible. Throughout the course of the story, about a million secrets - most of which are pretty easy to see coming - about the girls, the school, and two linked but eventually competing secret societies are revealed. The girls eventually find themselves in a battle to save both the realms and the human world.

As previously mentioned, the series reminded me a lot of the Chronicles of Narnia. The real world and the realms are distinct places & Gemma must use her special powers to cross between the two; there is a time disparity between the two, enabling the girls to spend hours in the realms while only disappearing momentarily from their world; the realms has its own history that marches on even when Gemma is absent, so the girls often return to find that things have changed dramatically while they were away. The magic & the boarding school setting echoed Harry Potter, but in a much more earthy & realistic way. Magic is powerful but also limited - each time Gemma enters the realms, she and her friends are infused with magic that they can take back with them to the real world, but the magic slowly dissipates in the real world. Spence, Gemma's school, is the standard Victorian finishing school - not a feminist Hogwarts - so the girls spend most of their time learning just enough to enable them to be proper ladies & good wives. There are no potions classes or anything.

I felt that this series was marked by a tension between "enlightened" and "unenlightened' views that made it very intriguing and often difficult to like all the characters at all times but was an honest reflection of the attitudes of its main characters' backgrounds and environment. I think this tension reflects the author's attempt to show a society in flux - new ideas of women's rights, socialism, capitalism, labor rights, anti-colonialism emerging in a society still very much dominated by past patterns of privilege.

Gemma, Felicity, and Pippa are all members of the privileged class (although each is "tainted" by a secret that threatens her privilege) in a privileged colonizing society, yet each is struggling with aspirations and desires that conflict with the narrowly circumscribed lives for which they are training. So while the girls eventually come to consider Anne (who shares none of their privilege, except the Englishness) one of their dearest friends, they can also treat her with a startling insensitivity that reveals the persistence of their class biases. They know they are being groomed for a path that will separate them from her; once outside school, a lady cannot be friends with a governess. They are patronizing and condescending to Brigid, even though they realize that Anne will one day serve just as Brigid does. Although each wants to transcend the strictures of a society that wants to marry them off young, they are scornful of their teachers who remain unmarried into their mid-20s. In many ways, Gemma, Felicity, and Pippa use the freedom of their privilege to rebel against the demands of their privilege, without understanding that it is only because they are rich & white that they can behave as they do. By contrast, Anne - who has a much smaller distance to fall before she finds herself disgraced and alone - has much less freedom to screw up or rebel.

Another area where this tension comes into play is the whole colonizer-colonized dynamic that is present between Gemma and an Indian boy-man named Kartik, who follows her from India & becomes her protector. Gemma treats Kartik imperiously and carelessly - she uses him as a confidant & tells him secrets that she fears would make her family hate her; she falls in and out of infatuation with him and then gets angry when he shows friendship towards a servant girl; she demands his full and immediate attention when she needs him for favors and dismisses him angrily when its time to play the part of an English society girl. At one point in the second book, he accuses her of being so casual and free with him because he's Indian & she responds "I don't even think of you as Indian," which is intended to be a compliment. To the author's credit, Gemma is quick to realize that this is not received as such & there is some quick self-examination. There is also a fair amount of exoticizing the "Oriental" male and his sexuality & I'm still not sure how to feel about how the author eventually dealt with that.... But perhaps I am over-analyzing the series.

The one thing that I really didn't like was how the proto-feminism at times became didactic, with characters lecturing other characters about choice & freedom. This really came to the fore-front in the third book, which was overly long at something like 800+ pages. I thought the author generally did a good job making her characters reflective of their upbringing while still showing how they chafed at it, but it broke down during these portions because I just didn't buy it. Fortunately, this was not an overwhelming thing throughout the series.

One strange synergy with The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter - which I finished last weekend - occurred to me while reading this book. Gemma's brother is a doctor working at Bethlem Hospital, aka Bedlam Asylum and through this plot device, she pays a number of visits to the place & attends a public ball there where the patients are made to perform to demonstrate how Victorian psychiatry has helped them.

Possible Ending Spoilers (But I try to be vague)

I'm not sure how to feel about where each of the main characters ended up - some character's fates seemed like a result of the author's recognition that she could not - given the social constraints of the time & place she had created - realistically allow certain characters to get what they wanted and what the reader might have hoped they would get. And although this kind of aggravated me in some cases - like I said, the reader doesn't necessarily get what she romantically hopes for with this series - I had a grudging respect for the author's refusal to cop out, abandon the rules of the world she'd created, and tie everything up in a neat little bow. Unlike certain YA authors who shall remain nameless.

Edited on 02/13/2009 as part of my migration from the 75 Book Challenge, which has become overwhelming

i enjoyed the first two books, but gave up in the third. I'll try again, i think. Gemma's whole relationship w/ Kartik - who/what he represents as an individual and as a colonial was interesting and, perhaps, deeper than kids reading this might realize(?). Almost a reworking of Kipling. Then it brought to mind Gemma Bovery a witty and rather sad updating of another 19C woman's private war for and against herself and her world.

>62 bobmcconnaughey:, Bob - The third book was overly long, I think. I think it came in at approximately twice the size of the first two...certainly could have used an editor, but I tend not to be able to stop once I get started with a series. If I get 2/3 of the way through a series, I am likely to finish it.

>55 fannyprice: I'd be interested to hear the titles that you added to your TBR list after reading the Showalter (pretty please).

>57 urania1: early 'treatments' by such equipment show up in The Birth House by Ami McKay (I think, that's the book it showed up in).

eta Happy Birthday, fanny!!!

>64 avaland:, avaland said: "I'd be interested to hear the titles that you added to your TBR list after reading the Showalter (pretty please)."

As you command! Some of these are not specific titles, but rather areas of inquiry or people.

Charles & Mary Lamb
I've been reading bits and pieces about them in more and more places - a fascinating pair. I've heard their letters are wonderful

Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith and Florence Nightingale's Cassandra: An Essay - I'm going to confess that until reading about her in Showalter's book, I thought she was a boring old saint. Now I think she may be my new proto-feminist hero. But of course she's too complex for simplistic hero-worship.

Anything related to World War I
This was an interest that I've been slowly developing before reading this book, but now I've got some starting points: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon. Also, The Return of the Soldier and Mrs. Dalloway, both of which I'd wanted to read for a long time anyway.

Miscellaneous
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers came up in the context of its main character being a shell-shocked WWI vet. I didn't realize this was an entire series of detective novels - I'm not big on detective stories, despite having gone as Sherlock Holmes as a child for Halloween (complete with a pipe, I might add!), so this will either be a whole new world for me to explore or something I try once and don't enjoy.

Beyond the Glass by Antonia White and The Ha-Ha by Jennifer Dawson (which doesn't touchstone properly), both fictionalized accounts of mental illness & institutionalization.

Of course, adding these books to my Amazon wishlist sparked a whole new series of recommendations for me, which meant that I actually ended up adding about 30 new books to my wishlist that did not come up in Showalter's book, including Regeneration by Pat Barker (which is based on Siegfried Sassoon's life & institutionalization) - which is itself part of a series of books.... - and The First World War by John Keegan. One thing leads to another, which means I will (sadly or happily, depending on one's perspective) never run out of reading material.

Okay, so I am slowly starting to put together random thoughts about The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture 1830-1980 by Elaine Showalter. Perhaps one day these will coalesce into something approaching a coherent review.

Thought #1: On "the traffic between cultural images and psychiatric ideologies"
One of the most striking things about this book was Showalter's illustration of the relationship between medicine & art. Doctors diagnosed & labelled certain types of madwomen according to types they found in literature - the most obvious being Shakespeare's Ophelia, who came to represent a Romantic fantasy of the young, beautiful, lovestruck, suicidal madwoman. Showalter also identifies the "Crazy Jane" - a poor servant girl abandoned by her lover - who originated with Gothic novelist Matthew Lewis and "Lucy" - a crazed, violent figure who originated in Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor. In all cases, the source of the woman's madness is located in her thwarted love for some man, but that's another issue.

Doctors turned to artists & later to photographers to create representations of their female patients in the images of these types of madwomen - regardless of what these women actually looked like - as part of their clinical practice. These images were, in turn, used to study the flavors of madness and diagnose new cases. These images is that they are all very stylized - doctors and photographers dressed, decorated, posed, and accessorized patients in certain ways, sometimes with the compliance of the patients themselves, other times without. These images became representative of the medical "truth" about madness even though they were themselves a fiction.

These medical texts then fed back into cultural representations of madness, lending them the weight of "science". Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason Rochester is a classic "Lucy", representing the danger of women's sexuality & madness caused by lost love. John Conolly - a Victorian doctor who radically overhauled the treatment of madness - was in turn influenced by Bronte's portrait of Bertha when he argued that home care and restraining of patients had led to a bad end for both the madwoman and the household in which she was confined. And so on and so on.

And this is not a coherent review? Keep the thoughts coming on this one, Fanny, they are very interesting.

I hate to add to your tbr pile, but you should read Lyton Strachey's Eminent Victorians for more on Florence Nightingale. She was an incredibly fascinating woman, and definitely a proto-feminist hero, one to worship without shame, one of the Great Victorians.

For your WW1 jag, You should also read Vera Britain's memoir of the war, Testament of Youth for a feminist perspective on the war. VB lost her lover, her brother and many friends in the war. Their letters are collected in Letters from a Lost Generation. Both of these books are very moving. You will need a box of tissues. If the military history in John Keegan's excellent book interests you then I also recommend Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August for another perspective on the outbreak of the war.
And for WW1 poets, Isaac Rosenburg and of course Wilfred Owen are must-reads.

Awww, you're the best Murr. Thanks for adding to continent TBR! Seriously, those all look fascinating.

I confess I am not much of a poetry reader - the only poetry I truly feel like I "get" is foreign language poetry that I studied while training in the language in question, which for me is mostly Russians. So much poetry slides over me without my ever feeling like I understand what its about, why its considered beautiful, and so on. Perhaps I need a class in poetry appreciation - I do feel like I am missing out. Anyone out there care to share thoughts on how one can learn to read poetry? (or if? Perhaps I am simply doomed?)

BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES by ISAAC ROSENBERG

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old Druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems, odd thing, you grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurl'd through still heavens?
What quaver---what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping,
But mine in my ear is safe---
Just a little white with the dust.

65> The Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker is marvelous. I'd also recommend Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks for WWI fiction (about, not written during), if you haven't read it already.

fanny, for WWI lit, I would recommend you to MaggieO who has a large collection of it and would, I'm sure, have some recommendations.

Interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing what got added to your TBR list.

>71 avaland:, Thanks Lois for directing me to MaggieO. She does have quite a collection of WW1 lit!

Wow, I feel liberated. I just dropped the 75 Book Challenge because I got tired of posting basically the same thing in three different threads - I was starting to feel like a spammer every time I finished a book! Plus, the "Your Groups" view in Talk was just completely overwhelmed with 75 Challenge threads. I've still got a number of people starred that I'll follow, but I feel that I have just given myself a few more seconds a day for actual reading & reading time has been a precious commodity this week.

I've migrated most of what I had in the other thread over here, some of which is pretty low-brow. :)

Reading tonight

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, who is probably soon to be added to my favorite authors list - I am loving the incredibly descriptive & intricate prose in this novel - right now I am having to read some sentences twice in order to decipher their proper subject. I don't think I've read another author who writes like this.

Also started The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008. The first essay was on hybrid animals like the liger - a lion-tiger cross. Some of this happens naturally, other times its forced. Particularly odd in this essay was the story of a Soviet scientist obsessed with crossing the genetic material of a human being with that of a chimpanzee. He actually was able to fertilize chimp eggs with human sperm and was thisclose to impregnating a female human with chimp sperm - someone actually volunteered - but the project went south for rather mundane reasons that I can't remember. I think I am really going to enjoy dipping into this volume.

>73 fannyprice: Kris - I did the same thing, and suddenly Talk was fun again! There are lots of interesting people over at the 75 Book Challenge, but it was just so very overwhelming.

Well, Ms P, as a member of this group only, and not of the 75 challenge group, I for one am glad you've decided to stay here, so I can follow your reading!

I am a selfish puss. It's my nature.

You know, I'm the person who started the 75 Books Challenge last year, and I'm about to drop out of it as well. Like you, I'm overwhelmed; I haven't posted on any of the talk threads in ages, just updating my list and responding to a few comments. And most of the people whose reading I followed have come over here. I just starred the few exceptions and check on them now and then.

One of the reasons I came to LT originally was that I got overwhelmed by the number of people and digressive postings on another book thread elsewhere. I was devoting way too much time reading about books that I wouldn't enjoy, skimming for interesting books, reading about things that I'd rather not have known, and feeling guilty for not remembering everyone's personal situations. It's great that you can pick and choose here--big groups, small groups, specialized groups, personally chatty groups. Something for everyone.

>77 Cariola:: The 75 Books Challenge last year was a completely different animal. It was much smaller—about 50 active members, despite its official size—and people tended to focus a bit more on books. I think that's why so many people enjoyed it.

This year's version is huge in number of members who post and quite digressive...I would say that most of the posts are not about books. I guess it's the nature of the beast to become a victim of its own success.

Perhaps this group will end up completely filling the void.

(20) The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West



I don't really know what to say about this book that won't sound really trite. In the absence of a list of adjectives that would certainly sound silly, I make the following preliminary statements: it earned a rare five-star rating from me, ended up being tagged "favorite", Rebecca West was added to my favorite authors, her other books have been added to my wishlist, along with collections of her letters and biographies. I want to read it again right now; I never want to read anything ever again because everything else will seem like trash by comparison; I want to immediately read everything I own because the book reminded me how much I love to read.

Oh, and it affected my subconscious so deeply I had a nightmare that was almost certainly influenced by the book. Possibly more thoughts later. At a minimum, I will be posting some of my favorite passages from the book.

>79 fannyprice:: You're the second to give it the utterly glowing reviews. I guess I need to try this one.

>80 TadAD:, My advice - read it when you know you won't be disturbed by anyone. The book is not long, but the writing style is complex & many of the sentences bear re-reading in order to even fully grasp their most basic meaning. West tends to put the ultimate subject of the sentence at the end of a lengthy descriptive phrase. Also, reading the book - for me at least - was truly like being pulled away from myself & my surroundings. I was quite disgruntled when I was interrupted during my reading. I almost certainly owe my poor boyfriend an apology for some rudeness.

Fanny -- I'm so glad you loved Return of the Soldier too. But of course, you have great taste in books.

>82 Nickelini:, Aw, Nickelini, you're too kind. That means a lot coming from someone with your taste, library, interests!

This one is in my stacks. I think I'll have to move it up.

With that high praise, it's on top of my wishlist!

On the wishlist it goes.

I need a new TBR depository. This one is getting too small.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/11/wondersoftheworld/image/10taipei.jpg

Fanny, can you post some examples of RW's sentences? I'm intrigued after your description.

Sure - unfortunately I won't be able to do it until next weekend, as I will be out of town with no computer! :(

>87 QuentinTom: Murr,

Modesty doesn't become you ;-)

I know. that's why I only indulge in it with close, understanding friends.

Fanny, I 'll wait.

>90 QuentinTom:, ok Murr, here's a tease:

Quick context: The main characters in The Return of the Soldier are Chris Baldry, a shell-shocked upper class soldier, Kitty Baldry, his "perfect" wife whom he no longer remembers, Jenny Baldry, Chris's cousin who lives with him and his wife and who narrates the story, and Margaret West (nee Allington), a lower-class woman whom Chris was in love with 15 years previously. When Chris returns from war, he has lost 15 years of memory and thinks he is still courting Margaret. In this passage, Jenny has had a vision of Chris in a store examining two crystal orbs - in one, he sees Margaret, in the other he sees Jenny and Kitty.

This passage is actually one of the more straightforward, stylistically & it actually doesn't illustrate what I was talking about above, unfortunately (will post one of those, I promise), but it seems to me typical of the understated, yet devastating emotion West is capable of conveying in this book. After I finished the section that this passage caps, I was actually breathless & stopped reading for the night, so that I could linger with the memory of that final sentence. (I feel quite melodramatic, I am not usually one for expressing emotions about books....)

"We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. No one weeps for this shattering of our world."

"We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming.
Oh I like that very much. Truth as seeming. Therein lies the very nature of fiction, and of great literature.

I understand totally how you feel, Fanny, about not being able to continue reading until what one has read has been absorbed. I often feel like that in my reading of Dostoevsky, and it does slow me down somewhat.
However, I think it's terribly important to resist the temptation to put this feeling aside in order to keep on ploughing through the book, and instead to dwell on one's reading. After all, who knows when /if one will come this way again, right?

More Birthday Purchases

I was just informed that I've been given one for my birthday - its not yet arrived - and I don't know if I want it. Yes, it would certainly help with finding a place for all these books since I've officially run out of shelf space with my most recent purchases - only one empty shelf remains in the house, but its little Mischa-cat's favorite place to attempt to hide from her brother.... Can I steal from a kitten? - and I wouldn't have to carry 5 books with me when I can't decide what I actually want to read at a particular moment, but I'm just not sure about it.



Just started my free trial subscription to World Literature Today. Publisher's Weekly looks like it might be a bit much for me, in more ways than one!

I also just ordered a couple of back issues and a one-year subscription to Banipal, an Arabic literature journal published in the UK. The last three issues have had a feature on modern Syrian literature, which seems all but impossible to get in English translation in the US (at least by comparison with say Lebanese or Egyptian novels).

http://www.banipal.co.uk/home/

Also started a free trial subscription to World Literature Today, on avaland's recommendation. My favorite magazines are those that add to my TBR pile, so this should be excellent

fannyprice, I have finally made it here and have read everything. First of all, such a relief to read that others have those spells where nothing seems to spark a response. When I am reading so many ecstatic responses to books on LT, I begin to feel there is something wrong with me when I can't seem to generate that same passion or interest. You made me feel vastly better about the last two or three months.

Fascinated by your YA readings. I read Un Lun Dun by Mieville this winter and it was one of the best reads of 09 so far - it too was tagged YA. There's a whole world out there (e.g., the Libba Bray series).

You've prompted me to pick up The Return of the Soldier after I finish the three I'm reading at the moment.

Good thread, super reviews. Thanks, and happy reading!

>94 tiffin:, Thanks tiffin! Glad you're enjoying reading what I'm up to. I too have those feelings that something is wrong with me when nothing sparks an interest for months - oh, who am I kidding, I feel guilty if I have a single week like that! I feel that I should have chosen better, that if only I was reading great classics, instead of YA "trash", things would be going better. But we all go through different reading cycles & not everything has to be War and Peace, which is still languishing on Mt. TBR.

>94 tiffin:: I've been feeling the same way lately: what is wrong with me that nothing sparks a conversation? An occasional "nice review", but no real discussion.

I've only read Perdido Street Station by Mieville. I'd like to read more, but there are so many books pouring into the house...

>94 tiffin:, 95, 96: I think we all go through periods like that. Just so you know. I have starred all of your threads (and they've been starred for a while). I am going to read The Return of the Soldier. I've liked everything else I have read by Rebecca West. Regarding Un Lun Dun, I read a review copy last year. I found Mieville's comments about writing this book more interesting than the actual book. He says that in some ways this book is a commentary on the whole theme of "the chosen one" that shows up in so much fantasy literature. His point is this: the chosen one can decide not to be it and any one of us can take up the cross so to speak.

With regards to "He says that in some ways this book is a commentary on the whole theme of "the chosen one" that shows up in so much fantasy literature. His point is this: the chosen one can decide not to be it and any one of us can take up the cross so to speak," above in 97, here is Calvino's Mr. Palomar:

"Or else, or else: it is not a matter of choosing the right cheese, but of being chosen. There is a reciprocal relationship between cheese and customer: each cheese awaits its customer, poses so as to attract him, with a firmness or a somewhat haughty graininess, or, on the contrary, by melting in submissive abandon."

>98 polutropos: Andrushka, a provocative comment. I think Calvino's point is a good one: mutuality or a kind of synchronicity must exist between chooser and chosen. I think Mieville's point is a bit more simplistic. A friend of mine who works at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee (Highlander is world-renowned for its work in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s) has spoken to a number of my classes. He says that Highlander has always experienced stretches when everything done there seemed to go nowhere. However, it is all a matter of positioning: the right person at the right time. None of us can predict who or when that will be. For example, a lot of mythology has arisen about Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. In reality, several other attempts like hers had been made. The community was ready. Rosa herself had been at Highlander nine months earlier. At that time she told people in a workshop in which she participated: "You guys aren't in touch with reality. Nothing will change where I live." Nevertheless, she trained and was ready. However, no one could have "predicted" that hers would be the attempt that would spark the revolution. Was she chosen? Did she choose? A complex knot.

94 -97
I'm a little confused at this point. Are we talking about a lack of response to one's own reading, to finding something gripping to read, or a lack of response to the reviews we are posting on our threads?

Murr,

I think we're referring to lack of intense conversation and debate about the books we review.

#100: I meant that I was having trouble getting absorbed in a book - this is really unusual for me. I think it's a case of winter brain where the grey matter has frozen. Nothing is pulling me in, gripping me (as you put it), making me forget the real world. Nothing to do with my own reviews or the reviews of others.

>104 tiffin: I think I need to send you another book;-)

No da think about it read another book malitask for all i care, dont took about the same book all the time!

Don't hog it, perkydakota, pass it round. I want some too.

so we do actually have two separate issues under discusion:
1, responding to one's own reading;
2, responding to others' reading;

to number 1, I can only say, when in doubt, read Hoffmann. Always works for me. his stories are weird and witty and short enough so that you don't feel you're getting bogged down into a long classic.

to number 2: this is tricky. Perhaps it would help if we put specific questions after our reviews to help the discussion? perhaps also, it's because not many others are reading the same books you are, and therefore have not much to say?

>108 QuentinTom:: Yes, re-reading the posts with that in mind, I do see how there were two separate issues being discussed.

#1, I usually just re-read something light and simple that I really enjoyed in the past and it does the trick.

#2, I just try to ignore it as best as I can, figuring that if there's nothing that people want to talk about, worrying about it won't make it any better.

There was a whole discussion about "posting into the void" in another group. I lurked on it for a while as it was fairly interesting. There was some consensus that, as a group gets popular, interactions between members tend to fall as people struggle to keep up. Also that groups that have a "core membership"...e.g., carryover from a previous year or something...tend to have low interactions with later members.

The first fits my experiences but I'm not sure I buy the second one. I've been in a number of groups where late-comers are actively involved.

Personally, I think it's just a gap between expectations and reality. Expectations are that everyone comes to these groups to talk about books. Reality is that a number of people just come to chronicle their own reading and get suggestions for new books. This lowers the pool of people who will chat about something you've read.

Your suggestion about posting questions is an interesting one...but I'd be afraid no one would answer and then I'd look foolish, wouldn't I? *grin*

Hey Tad,

any question you care to pose, I promise to answer, even if I have no idea what the real answer might be :-) .

Seriously, while I follow a great many discussions, with questions posed explicitly or implicitly, sometimes one has to NOT say anything, because the knowledge base is not there.

It is discouraging sometimes not to get a discussion going on your topic, but you just have to accept it.

yes, two interesting posts there! Also, it's worth reminding yourself that people are reading, but perhaps just not leaving any comments.

>95 fannyprice:: just to agree with >111 QuentinTom:. I read a lot of threads but don't always comment unless either I've read the book in question, or I want to, or it sounds interesting and I've never heard of it before.

I'm getting used to 'posting into the void' myself :) I just try to remember when I don't get any comments that I'm using my thread as much to track my own reading for myself, as to chat about it with others.

flossieT I cant find your thread!!!!!!!!!! I've searched and searched but I cant find it (maybe it's the vodka). Can you post the link on my profile page?

#113 - maybe it's the vodka
-----------

Tomcat . . . I'm almost positive my vet said to keep the vodka away from the cats. But I'm always confused about that sort of thing. Of to see if I made any notes . . .

Pshaw!! What do vets know! I mean, really.

Ooops, I go away for a week and its craziness around here. I was originally referring to the feeling that nothing I read is grabbing me or fulfilling me. Although I love the great conversations here, I don't have any expectations that others will read or respond to anything I happen to post, so I'm not referring to the second issue Murr identified in post 108.

In terms of responding to others' posts, I have gotten into the habit of trying to avoid posting meaningless comments just to let the thread owner know that I'm there. There are a number of really interesting readers on LT who are clearly followed by a lot of others & I actually find it impossible to follow along - even though I'd like to - because I come back to a thread after a day and see that it has 50 new messages! I just can't keep up with some people.

(21) Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde



I didn't think I would get back into this series, despite having really enjoyed The Eyre Affair - I tried a couple of times to read this book and just wasn't feeling it. But this time, I liked it quite a bit. More book-jumping fun with our literary detective, Thursday Next, who saves the world from turning into pink goo in this one. I love the references to literary characters, the idea that book worlds are just as real as our world & go on about their separate business when the chapter is over, and the bizarre time-travelling events. At the end of this book, I was a little terrified because it seemed like Thursday might "move sideways" - ie, into a parallel universe - that was exactly like our own & part of the fun of these books are the twists that Fforde puts into our world, so I think that would have been a horrible move. Fortunately it did not happen - I won't spoil what DOES happen, though.

On the Kindle! Got to play with the annotating features, which I am hoping will make me better at collecting my thoughts for reviews and keeping track of quotes and passages I liked. Now I just need to figure out how to transfer those notes onto the computer.

I do enjoy this series--I did them as audiobooks after The Eyre Affair--although I'm iffy about First Among Sequels, and was particularly irked with the ending. I may have to go back and read The Eyre Affair again soon, now that you've nudged it back into my brain!

can you play suduko on the kindle? kind of serious, could be a selling point w/ Patty

>119 bobmcconnaughey:, Hmmm, I don't believe so. If you could, I would think it would be cumbersome, since there is no touch screen. Would involve a lot of scrolling around and clicking the keypad.

>117 fannyprice: I very much enjoyed The Eyre Affair but found the 2nd book less fun, maybe because I found the humor played out. I think I may have read the third also - or at least part of it.

I thought the 3rd and 4th book of the Thursday Next series were better than the first two.

they were over the top cutesy for me; in general i don't have issues w/ "cute" and many from my dead readers group had recommended the eyre affair but i couldn't grok it, man. I mean i got most of the references but the concept didn't work for me.

I agree with bobmcconaughey - the basic idea was intriguing, but beyond that, I couldn't really see what all the fuss was about

I liked the first to books of The Eyre Affair. They are fun fluff fiction for readers who have read a lot of the "greats" of English literature plus a couple of other countries. If you're not pretty well-read, you miss the jokes. However, after the first two books, the plot device gets old.

I thought the first two books had a lot of characters to remember. Well, maybe not too many characters. But characters that were barely mentioned chapters back popping up again. I was also reading them sporadically in the bathroom, which probably didn't help matters.

(22) The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory



Eh....I read this over the course of a couple nights when I was feeling too tired for anything serious. I have never read anything from the "historical fiction" genre before, so I didn't really know what to expect (I also have not seen the movie because I almost never get around to seeing movies when they are current). I had thought that this book would be kind of a balanced combination of history and fiction - the events described would be real, but the author would be creative about filling in the gaps & feelings & motivations of the characters. Unfortunately, knowing nothing about England under Henry VIII, I was completely lost as to what was history and what was fiction & I felt uncomfortable drawing conclusions about social and moral norms of the period based only on this book.

What I "learned" about people during this time in history from this book was pretty horrifying - so generally unpleasant that I found it hard to believe. For anyone unfamiliar with the plot of the book, the basic story is that Mary Boleyn - the sister of the more famous Anne - becomes Henry VIII's mistress while he is still married to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, who is unable to give him the son he so desperately needs. Mary's family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming upstarts completely devoid of morals & ready to sacrifice their daughter to gain power. Early in the book, Mary's uncle, who is the family power-broker who seems to manipulate everyone, crudely says: "If the king has her, and she conceives his bastard, then we have much to play for." During the course of her affair with Henry, Mary - who is already married to another man - has two children by him, and her family gains in wealth, power, and titles. Eventually, Mary loses her taste for the King and he for her & Mary's evil, calculating, back-stabbing sister Anne becomes his favorite & his queen. In the process, Anne is blamed for destroying the sanctity of marriage, the existing social order, the peace of England, the Church, the King, her family & England's foreign alliances. And probably a bit more, as if that weren't enough.

So, knowing nothing about the actual history of this period, I turned - of course - to Wikipedia, where I read entries on the six wives of Henry VIII, the King, and Philippa Gregory and her books, focusing in particular on the section on historical inaccuracies/fictional inventions in this book. Which kind of just cemented my generalized hatred of this book - which I realize is too strong a word, but I've kind of turned into a fan of Anne Boleyn after reading this book, oddly enough (more on that later). Basically, most of the book seems to be an invention that ignores pretty solidly established historical data about events, social norms, the Boleyn/Howard family's social standing, Mary's seedy moral character before becoming the King's mistress & Anne's influence on the King himself.

Mary is presented as a naive young girl completely manipulated by morally bankrupt family, ignoring historical evidence that she had a number of sexual dalliances while growing up in European courts. Also, I think the author makes her considerably younger than she really was. It seems like she becomes the King's mistress at the age of 14 or so, which is about 5 years too early. Over the course of the book develops annoying anachronistic feminist tendencies and outrage over things that are supposedly completely normal within the context of the period. For example, Anne adopting Mary's son is interpreted as yet another example of Anne's perfidy & jealousy of her sister, when it seems that it was perfectly common at the time for a wealthy relative to take a family member as a ward. Despite becoming the King's mistress & repeatedly betraying the Queen in various ways, she still sees herself as a victim in solidarity with Katherine, which results in one of the best smackdowns in the book, when Mary tries to blame her betrayal on destiny. "'I want to beg your pardon,' I said. 'It is my destiny to belong to a family whose interests run counter to yours. If I had been your lady in waiting at another time you would never have had to doubt me.'" and the Queen replies: "'If it was not in your interests to betray me then you would have been loyal.'"

Anne is basically Satan in this book. She is cold, calculating, manipulative. In the end, she is blamed for overthrowing the existing social order & placing all wives in the position of insecurity. She is also blamed for Henry's unsavory behavior - "...Anne has taught the king to be a tyrant and now he is run mad and they cannot prevent his tyranny."- which I thought was particularly funny, given that the book opens with a public execution of one of the King's closest friends, suggesting he is already capricious and unchallenged. While I definitely think it was interesting to show how Henry's annulment of his marriage to Katherine & his subsequent marriage to Anne established a precedent for his behavior with all his future wives, it seems ridiculous to spend the whole book lamenting the powerless position of women in the Tudor period & then to suggest that one powerless, if shrewd, woman, managed to utterly turn the King of England from a righteous man to a lecherous, heretical autocrat.

So, in the end, I was left with a serious desire to read an actual history book about this period and a feeling that despite the author's attempt to position Mary Boleyn as a proto-feminist heroine, it was Anne Boleyn who I actually admired, at least as she is portrayed in this book. Mary just floats along, doing whatever she is told, feeling completely victimized by her family & by society. Anne shapes her destiny and appears to have a head on her shoulders (god, I stepped right into that one, didn't I?). There is something wrong with me, right?

One thing I did enjoy about this book was its description of courtly life & the utter dependence of the courtiers on the King, although I guess I have no idea if that is actually historically accurate either.

Is anyone able to recommend a reputable history of this period? Right now I have samples of David Starkey's Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII and Eric Ives' The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn on my Kindle. I think Tudor history may be my newest obsession - I am so 5 years ago (sigh).....

Great comments! Historical fiction can be fabulous, but it's often hideous. I'm not a fan at all of Phillipa Gregory, but there are even worse. One thing I think Gregory got right though is that these people were nasty. My Medieval & Renaissance lit professor describes Henry VIII as a "psychopath".

Interesting period, no doubt. I've been reading about the Tudors since I was in elementary school, and so I'd say there are many hours of literary enjoyment waiting for you if you go down this road. I'll have to think back to the best books I've read. Are you done with fiction now? Are you just looking for non-fiction? Alison Weir has written a lot of non-fiction about the Tudors, so you may want to start with her.

If you haven't given up on fiction, The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers, by Margaret George is fun. It's a sympathetic look though--he doesn't come off as a psychopath.

I read The Other Boleyn Girl last summer when in a similar mood as you, and I won't read anything else by her.

The David Starky is good. Anne Boleyn was a tragic victim of Tudor dynastic politics, which were ruthless and bloody. Mary Queen of Scots was another, and a fascinating figure as well. Also Lady Jane Grey. I weep to think on her.

Fanny, try these to feed your Tudor obsession. Who cares if it's five years ago!

Mary Tudor (this is a bit dated and sometimes a bit dry, but a leader in the field nonetheless.)
Anne Boleyn
My Heart is my Own
Elizabeth and Mary

All of these are good biographies. For a more serious and scholarly look at the period:

Tudor England
New Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors

There's lots of good stuff on this period. I hope the touchstones work.

You should also look at Schiller's play on Mary and Elizabeth. Totally inaccurate historically, but a great Romantic classic, subject of an opera by Donizetti. Listen to it while you read.

Enjoyed your review.

Also struggling through Bram Stoker's Dracula, which is unbelievably dull. It strikes me as so odd that such a tedious book contains a story that is such a cultural touchstone. I downloaded this from Project Gutenberg for my Kindle. I think now that it is so much more convenient for me to read PG books, I will be reading a lot more (free!) classics this year. I've also added Agnes Grey, The Professor, Wives and Daughters, and Clarissa to the electronic pile. I love my Kindle.

Ditto on Philippa Gregory. I read a lot of historical fiction, but I try to avoid books (like hers) that attempt to revise history or fall into romantic slop. I hope you don't give up on the genre; there are a lot of excellent writers out there. There is a thread on the Historical Fiction group discussing Gregory's distortions of history.

Starkey's book is a good one, and although a lot of people dislike Weir, her biographies are easy and fascinating reading.

Sorry I didn't know sooner, or I'd have warned you off the Stoker. It's a dreadful bore. Hard to believe that it was the spark for so many great vampire novels, stories, and movies. Give Frankenstein a try instead.

Wives and Daughters is excellent. Have you read Gaskell's North and South? or Mary Barton?

>131 Cariola:, I have not read any Elizabeth Gaskell, so this will be my first (but hopefully not the last). I have heard she is wonderful!

What historical fiction would you recommend? I was surprised that Gregory's book was so bad, since it seems she actually has a background in history. Has she written any non-fiction?

Did you say Wives and Daughters? Upon the highest recommendation of an LTer who likes to dance as much as she likes to read I have just bought a DVD of it, and hope to be watching it this weekend. Here is the blurb on it:

Mobil Masterpiece Theatre presents Elizabeth Gaskell's timeless tale of romance in 19th-century England. WIVES AND DAUGHTERS is the humorous and often heart-wrenching story of two single women, one sweet and one sexy, searching for love and finding nothing but trouble when the man destined for one falls for her sultry best friend instead. Return to a time when such events were the talk of the town and nothing but scandal, supported by an excellent cast that includes Francesca Annis, Michael Gambon, and Ian Carmichael.

I love historical fiction when well done. Some terrific historical fiction I've read and would rate highly, includes Music and Silence by Rose Tremain, As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann, the Secret River or The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville, Jack Maggs or Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, Poison by Kathryn Harrison, In the Fall by Jeffrey Lent, Pope Joan by Donna Cross, Martha Peake by Patrick McGrath, Possession and The French Lieutenant's Woman by Byatt and Fowles respectively (both have dual timelines) and finally, the trilogy written by Jane Stevenson which begins with The Winter Queen. I haven't read much HF for the last year or two, but I can still be quite enthusiastic about it:-)

>127 fannyprice:: I really liked The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser. I find her books to be as gripping as historical fiction but more accurate. After reading that one, I tried reading the Alison Weir book but found it dull.

If you want to give historical fiction another go, I just finished The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman. From all I've read, it's pretty impeccably researched (as I understand all her books to be). It's about the end of the War of Roses and covers Edward IV and Richard III. I highly recommend it.

>130 fannyprice: Ahh, Dracula. For my master's degree, we had to do what was called "the two-book." Each year, a group of professors would choose two books - one literary, one theoretical - and there would be a written essay test on the two books. The year I took it the books were Dracula by Bram Stoker and The Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates. (I have no idea whose idea it was to pair these two books, but . . . . ugh is all I can say.)

I think I read through Dracula at least 5 times, and I must say that after that, this whole vampire trend that's going on now has absolutely no appeal to me, none whatsoever.

My only tips for enjoying the book a bit more is to look for the Victorian equivalents of sex throughout. Basically, one can read just about every vampiric act as sexual (including what happened to Jonathon). Once the woman in the story have been "bitten," they become fascinating to the men around them because they are "experienced." I found VonHelsing to be especially icky for some reason, like some older father figure who is drawn to the sexuality of his daughters. It's all terribly repressed.

133> It's a wonderful production--as are those of North and South and Cranford. I'm sure you'll love it (or at least your wife will).

131> I'll check my book list when I get home and will give you some suggestions. Offhand, you can't go wrong with Restoration by Rose Tremain, Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, or either Ragtime or The March by E. L. Doctorow.

One of my all-time favorites has the unfortunate title of Passsion (subtitled, not much better, "A Novel of the Romantic Poets and the Women Who Loved Them"); it's by Jude Morgan. A fascinating and very well written novel about Shelley, Byron, and Keats, written for the POVs of Mary Shelley, Fanny Brawne, Lady Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh, and Claire Clairemont.

Am I the only person in Club Read 2009 who likes Bram Stoker's Dracula? (Answers on a postcard marked Poste Restante, Transylvania, please.)

I love it

I love it

>139 timjones: timjones - Actually, I liked Stoker's Dracula the first time around. But as with almost anything that is reread, picked apart and dissected for 6 months, by the time I took my master's test I really did not like it.

>152 Talbin:, The Signifying Monkey and Dracula are not works I would immediately link. Did you have to read Dracula using Gates? If so, I want to know how you did it. I've been twisting my brain into Gordian knots trying to figure this one out. I think I may have a trauma.

Murr, what the hell did you do to my thread? :)

>154 fannyprice:,

Murr has gotten into the skeins of yarn again. All is starting to unravel, ravel????? If I were you, I would quickly gather what fragments you can to shore against your ruin. Either that or eat a peach since the mermaids are on strike right now. I heard they are not talking to each other.

>153 urania1: - Mary - I'll attempt to relieve your trauma re: Stoker and Gates over on your thread so that poor Kris can attempt to re-ravel her thread.

Fanny, I'm so sorry lol. There I was typing a long defence /appreciation of Dracula (admittedly rather full of vodka martinis), and in my haste I must have struck some secret combination of keys. The computer went berserk, belched clouds of steam, groaned, whistled and flung up multiple postings on your virgin thread!!!!!!

And my appreciation/defence of Dracula is lost forever! I will try to recapitulate it later today. I have to first deal with this terrible headache. However, there will be time
there will be time

Would that be a vodka martini headache? ;)

Don't shout! Ai yo!

LOL. Bad kitty, no treat. :)

My Banipals have arrived! I am quite excited. Its getting less difficult to find contemporary Arabic literature in translation, but I still feel like the US is not as interested in Arabic literature for its own sake and there is a lot that never makes it over here - poetry, drama, short stories - because there is simply no good vehicle for publishing it. This journal contains lots of short form literature & excerpts from new Arabic books. In addition to the newest issue, which focuses on the late Mahmoud Darwish, I also received three back issues, two of which focus on contemporary Syrian literature.



Also, Foreign Affairs has started arriving, so I am snowed under with journals all of the sudden.

Ok, its been a while since I've checked in. Right now, I am struggling painfully through a low point in David Starkey's Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII. I absolutely loved the early chapters on Katherine of Aragon - her background, her upbringing, how she came to be Henry VIII's first wife, and her influence in European political affairs during her reign. The book started to drag HORRENDOUSLY, however, once it came time to address her divorce from Henry & the author began to delve into every...single....little....detail of the diplomatic and religious wrangling behind the divorce. At first, one is impressed by Katherine's ability to play the game, but that quickly gives way to the sense that this is possibly the most tiresome subject ever. I skimmed quite quickly over many of these passages - I'm sure I have lost something by doing so, but frankly I am not that interested. The book is slowly picking back up, introducing Anne Boleyn & discussing some of the religious ideas that were evolving at the time, which is more interesting. I will continue to read this book, but I think it may end up being something I dip in and out of for a very long time.

I am also reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, a book I started for the sole reason that its currently a free Kindle download from Amazon & I thought I'd go for something light. I am actually really impressed - this is pretty thoughtful stuff - so far the author has wrapped in a lot of social commentary to a story that is interesting in and of itself. A quick wikipedia search reveals that he is very concerned about ethics & ecology and the role that scientists play in shaping society. I'm excited to keep reading this book. A nice change of pace from the Starkey history.

That's a shame about the Starkey, Kris--the subject matter itself sounds fascinating.

Kim Stanley Robinson is almost always interesting and thoughtful. His writing can drag at times, but his ideas don't. He's very interested in the sociology of science as well as science itself.

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favourite SF writers, and is a fine writer when at the top of his game; sometimes the volume of material he wants to get across to the reader overwhelms his storytelling, but I'd much rather have a writer with too many ideas than one with too few.

I loved both Red Mars and Green Mars; to get through all of Blue Mars, the third book, one needs to have a greater-than-average tolerance for fictionalised discussions of global constitutions. It's still well worth reading, though - and what a joy to see an author who's put so much thought into creating the world he writes about, rather than picking up some off-the-shelf high fantasy or SF scenario.

I think I've suggested previously KSR's Antarctica for the forthcoming Reading Globally thread.

Its been a slow, mostly disappointing time with books recently.

(23) Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson



This was a fairly interesting sci-fi novel about a Mars colonization mission that goes rather awry. Sometimes I tired of the descriptions & the constant travel that the characters seemed to be doing, but overall an interesting story.

and two total crap young adult books from series that I thought I liked, but it turns out I'm sick of:

(24) City of Glass - Cassandra Clare



Boring and predictable. Every single plot twist was completely obvious from the beginning - some were obvious two books ago (this is the third in a trilogy!).

(25) Hunted: A House of Night Novel - P.C. Cast



Boring boring boring. I read the first four books in this series at the same time - when read like that its hard to realize that each book takes place over the course of a few days & that nothing really happens, despite the constant rush of events. A lot of this book was just the silly teenage main character being an idiot teenager. I need to stop reading this kind of book. Its not even fun in a mindless way anymore. Its just annoying.

My Dear Miss Price,

Perhaps you should lay off the sci-fi/fantasy for a while . . . although I have heard Elizabeth Bennett has involved herself with zombies, much to the dismay of Jane Austen, who is ready to rise up from her grave and snatch the body of the erstwhile fool who introduced zombies to Miss B.

>166 fannyprice: As the Monty Python gang used to say, "and now for something completely different..."

Yeah, I might need to take an extended vacation from LT for a while. I feel like I'm not bringing anything thoughtful to my reading/reviewing/posting any more.

Fanny --- oh no, please don't go! I had a blah month of reading in March too--in my case it was because I was reading a long book for school that was an absolute dog, and then rereading other stuff for school. So I didn't contribute much either. I've mostly just read and added the odd smart-ass comment where I could. But the next book is a whole new world. Like Lois says, "and now for something completely different . . . " That totally sums up how I feel this last week of the term!

Fanny, you cannot leave us. You are bored because you are reading YA literature and other junk. Stop it at once: it rots your mind as you are finding out. You need to get stuck into a good 19c century novel. How about Oblomov?

#168: absolutely. The beauty of books is that there are so many out there, unread, waiting, extraordinary. You'll find them. Sometimes some good poetry can act as a sorbet between courses of novels, to refresh the palate.

Or non-fiction . . . I went into a literature slump last summer and some juicy non-fiction rescued me.

I agree with the others, you must stay! We can't all be in top form all the time and sometimes our literary ball ends up in the gutter (to use a bowling metaphor).

Perhaps we all need to virtually shop for you! Hmm. I'm going to do that and post my virtual book gifts on the new thread created for this very thing!

Aww, thanks guys. Sometimes a girl just needs a pep talk & a kick in the ass. I've been feeling rather down overall lately and my reading choices probably reflect that in some weird way. I'm choosing easy reads because they don't require any thought but then I get irritated because the books aren't fulfilling...its a vicious cycle.

Anyway, the other night I started Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I've been meaning to read for way too long. I don't mean to sound like a fawning idiot, especially since I'm only 10 pages into the book and may decide it sucks any day now, but WOW.... I don't know if its just the depressed mood I've been in, but this book hit me hard from the first page. The sparse language somehow makes everything much more painful than if McCarthy used flowery elaborate prose. I felt like I'd been punched in the gut and actually had to stop reading because I just couldn't take it. This book seems like its going to be extremely bleak, which is probably an obvious statement, since I think its about a post-apocalyptic wasteland...but usually these "end of the world" books do not provoke an emotional response from me.

I like McCarthy's writing , but The Road just blew me away (although my husband hated it). If you like the beginning, you'll probably like the book, although it is indeed bleak. That's a great way to describe it.

One nice thing about a book-reading rut is finally finding a book that is super good. You've picked one that is a winner to me. I'm not one who usually likes to read apocalyptic novels, but The Road is an exception.

P.S. I vote for you to stay as well. :)

>175 fannyprice: Put me in the less-enthused camp regarding The Road. And I read it twice! (and chose it to write a paper on regarding American bedrock beliefs and values in McCarthy's The Road for a popular culture class). I think the way he has written the book invokes a biblical tone, emphasizing the fact that this is a moral tale.

>175 fannyprice: I'm someone who really loved The Road. For me, it was the writing style, which I found beautiful. And I rather liked the biblical tone. Like Squeaky said, if you like the beginning, you're almost sure to like the entire book.

And I'm another one who hopes you keep posting, boring reading or not!

I loved The Road, loved No Country for Old Men, loved Pretty Horses. I think if you buy into his style, you are hooked. He is a great star in the pantheon of modern American fiction.

(And do you need another pat on the back, Fanny? OK, here it is.) :-)

(27) North Korea Kidnapped My Daughter - Sakie Yokota



(yes, I know I skipped #26 - still collecting my thoughts on The Road, which I loved)

An early reviewer's book from December that came way late & I'm now just getting around to reading and reviewing.

This is one of those books that one feels bad giving a negative review to because of the obvious emotion behind it; unfortunately, it just wasn't a very well-done book. Other reviewers have mentioned that it really seems much more like a cathartic exercise for a grieving mother whose daughter disappeared and whose fate was never really resolved. The author spends a lot of time reminiscing about her daughter and very little time talking about the investigation/discovery that her daughter might be alive in North Korea. This is fine, I guess, but not at all what I expected.

Like other reviewers, I would have appreciated a lot more in the way of context - the timeline at the end of the book simply doesn't do it. This could be a fascinating book if it delved more deeply into why. Why did North Korea seem to make a practice of kidnapping Japanese and South Korean citizens? Why does it seem like the Japanese government has neglected these families and not pressed more vigorously for information about their kidnapped citizens? Also, I thought it would have been interesting to learn about the abductees lives once they were in North Korea, but I realize this information is probably extremely hard to come by. Like others, I was confused by the brief mentions and photographs of a husband and daughter of the author's kidnapped child. Did they ever meet? How did the alleged granddaughter come to have a picture of her grandparents?

In the end, I was left with feelings of great sympathy for this family, but a lot of questions about why this had happened in the first place.

(28) The Devious Book for Cats: A Parody



This was a very cute little book, written in the style of a "how to" guide for cats and riffing on those faux-retro books for boys and girls. I loved the little pen & ink illustrations and it was clear that the humans who participated in the writing of this book really understood cats - some of the topics discussed could have been taken straight from my cats' daily activities. This book made me laugh & I needed that after The Road. A good addition to my collection of cute cat books.

To all readers of The Road:

I have had a copy for about a year now, but I haven't read it yet. I am saving it for a day when I feel really bleak, depressed, and generally disgusted with the world. Why waste a bad mood.

>181 fannyprice: Miss Price:

I wonder if Murr has read The Devious Book for Cats?

>182 urania1:, Urania, I believe Murr could have written that book. He seems quite devious. :)

>183 fannyprice:, Miss Price, I quite agree. ;-)

Count me as one who liked Cormac McCarthy's The Road (touchstone was picking up Kerouac's On the Road); however, it fits a certain context in my reading: (1) I'd never read anything by McCarthy (2) I didn't even read the book cover, but plunged into the story not knowing what it was about (3) I rarely read this type of book (doomsday fantasy??).
I read it because my high school-age children were reading it.

It swept me away. Despite the sparse prose (or because of it?), the effect was so deftly executed that it still haunts me several months later. Will I reread it? Probably not. Will I examine its literary merits/demerits. No...unless I decide to try to figure out exactly how the author achieved such an effect on me. :)

A comment about the Yakota book North Korea Kidnapped my Daughter--thank you for posting your review. I have no particular interest in reading the book because here in Japan the Yakotas are on the TV news so frequently. I skimmed the book in the store and concluded it is more of the same. They are the poster family for all the abductee victims, it seems. On a human level, I feel great sympathy for their plight, yet, on the scale of international diplomacy, the abductee issue must be handled with care.

I would be interested in a book that explores all the affected families (some probably don't welcome the attention). I seriously doubt if N. Korea's efforts (kidnapping people to teach Japanese to N. Korean spies) were very successful. Another book in this arena is Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins.

My reaction to "The Road" was similar to your post in #175. While I was reading it, I remember driving home late at night on empty streets with the book just freaking me out.

I do sense a bit of theme in the types of reactions readers have to it. It seems the less expectation one brings to it, the more ensnared they are by it.

edited to fix a little typo

>168 avaland: dchaikin - "It seems the less expectation one brings to it, the more ensnared they are by it."

Good observation - I agree. When I read The Road, I had never read anything by McCarthy and only knew that it was about the aftermath of some sort of global catastrophe. So for me, the first thing that sucked me in was the language - I had no idea. Whether or not one likes the prose style McCarthy chose to use (and I did), you have to admit that it's different than 99.8% of anything else out there. From page one I was entranced.

(BTW - If an initial touchstone isn't correct, try clicking "others" next to the touchstone on the right. You'll get a list of more books. In this case, McCarthy's The Road comes second on the list. For whatever crazy reason, with work touchstones LT searches for the words and then lists works with those words in the order of popularity. That's why On the Road shows up as the default - it has more copies on LT than The Road.)

>186 dchaikin:, 187 agree, a good observation! I came to it having read quite a lot of post-apocalyptic, dystopian literature and having just read The Pesthouse.

I loved The Pesthouse.

(29) The Intellectual Devotional: American History: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation's Past



The second installment in the "Intellectual Devotional" series. Meant to be read a page a day, I didn't manage to read it that way. A fun way to learn a little bit more about the US, American literature, US history, etc. - all things which have never interested me all that much when there's a whole world out there to explore. :)

>188 avaland: So, are you saying that The Road doesn't compare favorably to other dystopias? Or that the differences are jarring enough for you not to like it? I go back and forth on whether I want to read this one: I generally quite like dystopias, but the bleakness turns me off. I have read and appreciated sad books before, but there has to be a pretty big payoff for it to be worth going through a bunch of bleakness.

I am glad you are sticking around, fanny! I enjoy your thread.

I've been travelling and am a little behind on my updates. I've still got to share my absolutely revolutionary thoughts about The Road, which I know you all are dying for (heavy on the self-mockery here...) and update my reading, which has actually been rather productive.

Here's what I'm currently working on:

The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out - a small book of hobo-cat cartoons by one of my favorite comic artists.

Amphigorey Also by Edward Gorey - Its strange to say this, but we have finally purchased a coffee table and I find its existence is actually making it easier for me to read certain books (probably why they call them "coffee table books"). I can just pull a couple of nice photo books off the shelf where they are inconveniently stacked in a pile, put them on the table, and graze through them. Its rather amusing to me how space shapes what we do it in. Or perhaps I am just incredibly lazy.

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter, who is fast becoming one of my favorite writers of non-fiction, in part because she picks such fascinating topics and in part because many of her books are AVAILABLE ON KINDLE - yay! Kindle has fast become my preferred platform for reading most everything, but I find it works particularly well for reading non-fiction that I want to take notes on. Previously I needed pens, highlighters, post-it notes - it was a pain in the a**. Now all those tools are contained within the reading device itself. Anyhow, this book is dangerous because its introducing me to a whole new universe of writers whose work I'd like to explore. Other Showalter books that I've got Kindle samples of include: Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage, and Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin De Siecle.

Also working on World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which is really pretty enjoyable. Its told as a series of interviews with people from all over the world & of all walks of life, detailing their experiences during some great cataclysm that is mostly - but not entirely - past in which the dead rose up and walked the earth. When I first heard about this book, I took it for nothing more than a stupid horror novel, but then after reading TadAD's review of it in this group, I really wanted to give it a try. It is quite long and while I worry that the premise may wear thin by the end, I am still enjoying it quite a lot and the interview format makes it easy to dip into here and there. It was great airplane reading.

I'm completely stalled on two books started at some point last year that I really DO want to read, but can't seem to make much progress on: Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World and The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. I'm also dipping into Bram Stoker's Dracula, which - thank God - I got for free from Project Gutenberg, because it is so unbelievably tedious. Fortunately, I also have Joseph Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla on the Kindle & I am told that is much better.

On tap hopefully very soon are: Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 by Katie Roiphe, about which I am really excited. Seems like a fascinating topic & I always love to read about literary scandals.

Also need to get on task to read some Virginia Woolf - I was planning to participate in the February-April read for the Author Theme Reads and got copies of Mrs. Dalloway, The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room and Night and Day, but I've been remiss in starting that project. I tried to start The Voyage Out on the plane, but I was completely delirious & felt the need for something that didn't require much brain power. With Woolf, I feel like I need to be in a state of mind where I can appreciate not just the plot but also the use of language. I'm also hoping that I can still get around to reading one Evelyn Waugh novel during the month of April, since he's the featured author in the Monthly Author Theme Reads & I lobbied hard for him month after month. :) Finally, rounding out my list of things I should be reading but am not.... Dostoyevsky. Unfortunately I bought a lot of these books a week before I was surprised with a Kindle and already I have trouble with a paper book. But eventually I'll stop making excuses.

I just received The Hunger Games from the Early Reviewers Group, so I've got to tackle that. I always enjoy a good dystopia though, so that should be fun. Plus there is the not-so-small matter of catching up on all the fascinating ClubRead threads. :)

Oh additionally, I am continually thinking of pulling out of the 999 Challenge. I am so bad about these challenge things. Part of my problem is that I am a dilettante in many respects. There are certain topics or types of writing that I have a deep & long-abiding interest in; and I will always want to read those books. This year I tried to craft categories that encompassed those books, thinking that would make it easier. But then I realized that just because I am committed in the long-term to reading books about Jewish things or frozen-a** places doesn't mean that my tendency to get obsessed with a new topic every time I read something that touches on something else won't override those interests & I won't find myself careening off on some bizarre Tudor England jaunt or something. In short, I am finding it very hard to actually read the kinds of books I've "committed" myself to reading because I find a new interest nearly every day & then need to know everything I can about it....until something else sparks a compulsion. I'm starting to seriously wonder if I have ADHD or something.

ETA: Plus, I am honestly finding it tedious to update more than one thread. All I do is copy the posts over to another venue....In that time I could read at least 5 more pages of whatever book I'm currently working on! :)

Thanks to avaland and urania, respectively, I also now have samples of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which sounds incredible, and Angels of Destruction, by Keith Donohue, who wrote the highly enjoyable book The Stolen Child. Damn you ladies and your recommendations (shakes fist)!

To just gently corrupt your resistance to The Shadow of Wind, I'll 2nd or 3rd the recommendation. I don't know that it's incredible, but I enjoyed it.

Haha, thanks Dan - there's not much resistance to corrupt, its just a matter of when.

Hi - just tracked you down to here from the 999 challenge. Like #195 dchaikin, I also enjoyed Shadow of the wind. I've been on holiday and flew through Dracula, possibly helped by recent viewings of a few Dracula movies and that I could read for longer periods. Kate Camp discusses the novel on this link http://www.radionz.co.nz/__data/assets/audio_item/0007/1630933/sat-20080705-0945...

>197 avatiakh:, Hey avatiakh, I'm glad you tracked me down! I wonder if part of the problem with Dracula is that it is such an iconic story and has been made into so many films that reading the original just feels derivative, even though intellectually I know that the films and imitations came after this novel. The Nosferatu film is one of my favorites - I used to own it on VHS, if you can believe that! The creepy black and white and the jerkiness of the filming just makes it that much scarier!

Of course, I'm currently on a little zombie jaunt, reading World War Z, which is good & watching some new zombie movies, which are terrible. I used to be a big fan of horror movies when I was a kid & I still get a huge kick out of watching 70s & 80s movies like Halloween and The Omen. The 1968 version of Night of the Living Dead is actually quite a good film, although I confess its been years since I saw it. I remember it dealing quite interestingly with race, which was quite a potent issue at the time the film was made. I saw the 1990s remake recently and was irritated by how they tried to translate that message to the recent present, when some of the racially motivated events of the original are just not as believable. I also saw the much more recent remake of Dawn of the Dead, which was just gory, stupid and dithering. Horror movies now seem to be much less about being creepy or eerie and much more about seeing how much blood & guts the filmakers can toss at us. I love a good scare, but its happening less and less with these new movies.

Two movies that I saw recently that WERE good for a scare were both by Guillermo del Toro - I finally saw Pan's Labyrinth, which was rather unsettling and good; I also watched The Orphanage, which was a somewhat more conventional haunting story, but actually made me jump, which is rare. Perhaps its foreign horror from now on. del Toro really does know how to make things creepy and ambiguous.

Oops, this post has turned into a "What Am I Watching Now?" post. Apologies!

I'm also a movie fan, my daughter did her MA in Film studies, so it seems to be a family thing. I love Spanish movies and thought Pans Labyrinth was brilliant and hoped like anything that it was based on a book so I could read it - unfortunately not. Not really a zombie fan but laughed through Shaun of the Dead. The Japanese make some interesting horror flicks.

>199 avatiakh:, ....and then the Americans remake them. Generally badly. :)

Fanny, your reading is impressive. you seem to have recovered from your I don'tknowwhattoread phase and seem to be in a I'mreadingeverythingnow phase. I can't keep up! So happy you didn't quit!

I read this review of Showalter's latest book, and thought it would interest you. I can't agree with her assessment of Plath (terribly overrated imo) or Gertrude Stein (terribly underrated imo) but she is always thought-provoking to read. I'm especially interested in what you have to say about the Daughters of Decadence. I love this period and it will be great to learn about some women writers from the period.

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=yq3wny99v1lhxh68w9y811tljpqq9pt8

I agree wholeheartedly with your remarks about VW. She is the kind of writer you need to make time for, but when you do, she repays you in spades.

I must get a copy of the devious book for cats at once.

#199 oh yes, generally, Asian horror films scare the bejaysus out of me: Korean and Japanese. I can't watch them at all.

Avatiakh, my husband recently bought Pans Labyrinth and I too thought it brilliant and hoped it had been based on a book.

>198 fannyprice: - if you liked those two films you should like The Devil's Backbone, a ghost story made by Del Toro (director of PL - his Mexican vampire film, Chronos is worth seeing as well).

Re Nosferatu - it wasn't actually released in B&W, the original prints were hand-tinted, for example, the sky when Orlok is moving through the city was originally blood red. A minor technical point - the reason it is jerky (and this applies to most silent films) is to do with the Frames Per Second it was released at - while 24/25fps is standard, in the silent era it could be anything between 12-24 as the cameraman did this manually. Modern technology can't actually cope with the lower speeds so the film is speeded up, creating the jerkiness, people moving too fast, etc.

>201 QuentinTom:, Haha, Murr, you flatterer. For the record, I was never planning on quitting LT, as some seem to have thought. Perish the thought - I am too addicted. I was just planning on taking a break from posting until I could write something other than complaints. But you know, I took the suggestion that I try reading something other than crap, and its amazing how well that seemed to work.... :)

Thanks for posting the link to the Showalter interview. I do agree with her - at least in other contexts (since I am less familiar with American women writers than women writers from other cultures), that there is a real unwillingness to judge quality and a focus instead on social significance. Both are important, but women writers will never be taken seriously if the only justification for reading them is that they are important because they are women. Certainly women writers operated (still operate?) under a set of disadvantages that men did (do?) not, but at some point the actual quality of the prose has to come into play, or reading women writers just seems patronizing. I hope I'm being clear, I don't want to offend.

I'm really enjoying A Jury of Her Peers so far - I thought the chapter on Mary Rowlandson, who writes of being held captive by Narragansett Indians, was especially fascinating. It seems that the Indian captive narrative was fairly common and that women used it to explore questions about identity and culture - Showalter talks about a couple of women who wrote about women who were captured and became completely assimilated and then refused to rejoin white society. That's an interesting story, I think.

I confess, however, that much of American literature has never interested me, which I know is a horrible, horrible attitude. I have read and LOVED some works of American literature, mostly in high school. I enjoyed The Grapes of Wrath and went around thinking in accented English for weeks afterwards; Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were particular favorites when I was younger & I actually think one can glean a lot of historical and social detail from these "children's books", although I confess I didn't notice the racial attitudes until re-reading the Little House books in grad school for a break from critical literary studies of Lebanese women's novels (shows you how well THAT worked, that I just couldn't stop analyzing everything to death). So much of it just strikes me as pioneers and more pioneers. I am hoping that this book will open me up to reading more American literature, both by men and women.

Re Daughters of Decadence - I am completely unfamiliar with this period and this literary trend, but I love Showalter & I thought this might be a good intro. It might be a while before I get around to it, but I will definitely put down my thoughts when I do. Maybe ClubRead 2010, if avaland feels so inclined. :)

>201 QuentinTom:, Oh also, re The Devious Book for Cats, I feel I must warn you, my feline friend that I fear it is not actually intended for cats. No self-respecting kitty is unaware of the basic techniques of mischief described in this book. I fear this book is actually a manual to aid humans who are owned by cats in thwarting the wholly natural impulses of their felines. If you have humans in the house, I would NOT recommend this book, as they may overcome their puny intellects, read it, and start interfering with all your fun.

>204 Jargoneer:, Thanks for the background, jargoneer, that is really interesting. You seem to know a lot about old film. Thanks also for the recommendations - two more for the Netflix queue!

>fanny, I am also picking away at the Showalter and am trying to settle down to read it cover to cover. I found the first chapter on Bradstreet & Rowlandson interesting having read/reread both women's works in the past year. I also enjoyed the 2nd chapter which also covers some literature I have read recently (In the last year, I have read mostly from the mid-19th to before 1850). Both the Plath & Stein entries were mentioned in reviews and I'm inclined to agree with Showalter (sorry, Murr).

I will probably only read a chapter every now and again, but I will look forward to your comments, fanny.

>208 avaland:, Yeah, I think its going to be one of those things that I dip into throughout the year. I said the same thing about the Henry VIII book, but I think this one is actually conducive to that style of reading. Whereas, with the Henry VIII book, every time I stopped for a few hours, I was completely confused by all the names and events when I returned to it.

(26) The Road - Cormac McCarthy



SPOILERS FOLLOW

A new author for me. I read this because its a futuristic dystopia/post-apocalypse story, rather than because of McCarthy. Most of the descriptions of his plots do not really appeal to me. Honestly, after all the hype surrounding this book, I did not expect to like it. Happily, I was pulled in from the first sparse, bleak sentence.

Some sentences/phrases I particularly loved:

"Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire." (Describing the main characters, identified only as "the man" and "the boy".) The part I've italicized struck me as so heartbreakingly painful. Reading this phrase was like a swift, sharp jab in the gut. Between reading this passage and simultaneously listening to a really depressing acoustic version of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, I was basically overcome. I had to quit reading and watch a totally stupid movie to distract myself from the overwhelming bleakness I felt.

Another portion of the book that I particularly liked was about midway through the book, when the father reflects on his life and his past while the boy sleeps after they've found a safe place. "Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without without constructing the loss as well...." I thought this passage effectively captured how utterly the world had been changed by the catastrophe - which is never clearly explained - that occurred basically when the boy was born. The boy has never lived in a world other than the one he currently inhabits.

In general, I very much enjoyed the sparse & generally understated narration. There were a few times where it seemed the author resorted to shock tactics, describing acts of cannibalism and other brutality in gory detail, but most of the time the power was in the understatements. On fantastic little narrative trick that I noticed very near the end of the book, when it appears that the father is not going to make it. For most of the book, the book - although written in third person - occupies the father's position. When the author writes "he", it almost always refers to the man. Near the end of the book, "he" suddenly refers to the boy and the narrator seems to be looking through the boy's position (although its still in third person). I thought this was an intriguing way to symbolize the father slipping away and leaving the story to the son to continue.

I thought it was interesting how this was a very "domestic" novel from an author I've heard described as very "manly". Significant parts of the narrative are devoted to describing the man finding and preparing food, building camps, bathing and cleaning the boy, caring for him when he's sick, and keeping him warm so he doesn't freeze to death.

I'm honestly still not sure what I thought of the end. All I know is that I had tears in my eyes & I'm usually the first person to scoff at excessive sentimentality. So that either means I'm getting wussy in my old age, or the book was really really sad.

(Ok, back to moving forward)

(30) The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008,



an anthology of "science and nature" (defined very loosely, which didn't really bother me) writing from magazines and journals. Like all anthologies, this one was of mixed quality, but overall I enjoyed it.

The articles I found most engaging were:

--a linguistics controversy regarding the nature of an Amazonian language called Piraha, which appears unrelated to any other human language and contains just 8 consonants and 3 vowels but possesses a huge number of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths.

--a rather disturbing article about biotechnology which seemed to basically ignore the ethical and ecological implications of genetic engineering and focused more on the "isn't it cool?" factor, suggesting that one day biotech will have advanced to a point where "Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture" and will be used to entertain bored housewives or children.

--an interesting but rather short-sighted article about robotics in the military. The author predicted that one day all important military forces will rely on robotic land forces (in addition to current air-based systems, like automated Predator drones). Basically he says that war will one day be fought only between robots & will essentially be meaningless because robots will decimate other robots & no human lives will be lost. Still, this article made me want to learn more about military robotics, which is not generally a reading area of mine. :)

--Islam and science - I don't remember why anymore, but I remember being irritated by this article.

--an article about viral outbreaks and how viruses spread across species

--And finally, an article about people who devote significant time & energy toward scamming people who run Internet scams and whether these people are racist, given that many internet scammers tend to be from African countries. This was a really weird article about a topic I'd never even heard of. The most outrageous story provides the background for the title, "How To Trick an Online Scammer into Carving a Computer out of Wood". A version of this article originally ran in the Atlantic Monthly & might be available online, if anyone is interested in really bizarre scams.

>210 fannyprice: I love your descriptions and citations from The Road. I picked it up partly to see what all the fuss was about, not expecting much, but it has had a lasting haunting effect on me due to its incisive prose. Thanks for sharing.

Well, you have convinced me to read The Road at the earliest possible opportunity. What an evocative review. I will lay in a supply of flowers and cheerful movies in preparation...

Sorry for the accidental double post.

I have read so many good reviews of The Road, including this excellent one, that I feel I no longer need to read it at all. Thanks everyone!

Fanny, I was thinking of creating a separate thread for discussion of the Showalter book, but I can't decide whether to do it here or over on Girlybooks. I like the idea of a more mixed gender participation but I suspect most male readers would feel it is stuff they just don't need to know and thus the conversation will remain mostly among those of us of the female persuasion. What do you think? (It seems there is someone else around here also reading this, but I fail to remember who it is).

>216 avaland:, avaland, I think marise was saying she was going to pick it up. She and I were talking about Susan Glaspell, whose story "A Jury of Her Peers" was the origin of the title of Showalter's book.

I understand being unsure about where to start this discussion. I will be totally unhelpful and say "its up to you!" Based on the subject matter, I would certainly think that the Girlybooks group would have an interest in discussing it, but I do think that there is more gender balance in this group, which might make for an interesting conversation. Murr has already weighed in at post #201 above.

(31) Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII - David Starkey



I took notes on this book. A LOT of notes. I need to download them from my Kindle and organize them into something coherent, but I wanted to list this book here because I've gotten way behind in posting and I get annoyed when my list gets out of order. Will be back to post more thoughts later.

(32) The Partly Cloudy Patriot - Sarah Vowell



Some funny quotes that I might or might not come back and jot down. A lot of people really like Sarah Vowell and while I get the appeal, none of these essays about the author's rather complicated relationship with American history, patriotism, George W. Bush, the electoral process, etc. really grabbed me. I read them half asleep on a plane though, so that might have something to do with it.

Not a whole book, just a short story that Amazon sells as a book, A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell



I read this short story because Elaine Showalter mentions that it provided the title for her most recent book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. Glaspell is apparently one of the skilled American women writers Showalter believes time has forgotten. I believe she was a Pulitzer Prize winning writer in the early part of the 20th century. The story, which is based on a true crime, focuses on a woman who is suspected of murdering her husband. However, when the male inspectors talk to her and examine her house, they can find no obvious signs of distress or rationale for her crime. Their wives, however, who have been brought along to the woman's house to collect clothes to bring to her in jail, quickly notice "insignificant" details that reveal the accused woman's mental and emotional state and compellingly suggest that she was responsible for the murder. When they discover why, they conspire to hide the evidence and help her go free.

I enjoyed it as well & upon reflection, I think it was rather fantastic. The problem that I had was that I read it soon after reading Showalter's rather comprehensive summary and discussion of it in the introduction to her book - in some places, it actually seemed like a word-for-word retelling - so I kind of felt like I knew what to expect, where it was going, what the style would be. That having been said, it is a powerful story & a remarkable picture of quiet domestic discord. I am a big fan of "quiet" unrest, if that makes any sense - writers to manage to convey potent emotional turmoil with the smallest, most subtle words or images, rather than characters who have a screaming fit and tell the reader exactly what the problem is in long speeches.

I loved the gender dynamics at work in the story - how the two women were treated like idiots for focusing on small, "insignificant" domestic things by their "smarter" husbands, who were formally investigating the crime. Showalter points out in her discussion of the story that this can also be read as a criticism of how the male-dominated world of writing scorned the concerns of women's fiction as small-minded and "domestic". I actually love "domestic fiction" - I think some of the most fascinating books I have read succeed because they recognize that the most interesting drama is often that found in the home, in daily life, in interactions between family members, etc.

I read about other Glaspell works in Marise's thread & I am really interested to read more. She seems like just my kind of author.

(33) The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins



Go me! I read an actual paper book! I received this book through the Early Reviewers' Program - I'm not really sure why it was offered, since I think its been out for a while, is already a best-seller and probably doesn't need any more buzz. But I have added my review to the 140-some already there, as required.

This book was a fairly decent young adult dystopia set in a destroyed version of our world in which 12 "districts" scattered across the remains of the US serve as the source of labor and raw material for a central capitol, where people do nothing of real value and where children are brought each year to compete in a deathmatch that will result in the winning child's village getting special favors, which seem mostly to consist of food - the Hunger Games. The book focuses on a teenage girl from District 12, a coal-mining area that is even more poor and crappy than all the other districts, who volunteers for the games in place of her younger sister, who is originally chosen.

There was nothing really WRONG with this book & in many ways it was much better than a lot of the young adult books I have read. The author used normal, adult language & avoided lapsing into slang or teenage colloquialisms in attempt to be cool, unlike some YA authors. The plot was interesting enough and some of the twists were surprising. But I think the book went on for too long - there were several chapters where nothing happened & I think these chapters were meant to give us time to get to know two of the central characters, but it just felt like dithering, rather than character-building. These sections really broke up the tension and made me lose interest in the narrative. I was particularly disappointed in one major plot decision that kind of made it seem like the whole book was just a set up for a sequel in which a teenager has to decide which boy she really should be with - the familiar one or the new one? Oh me oh my.... It seemed misplaced in a book that is literally about teenagers fighting for their lives.

Two things that I thought the author raised in a generally good way - how does one sustain the ideal of compassion & human sympathy in an environment of extreme selfishness & brutality? and the difficulty of trusting people in such an environment.

Overall, this was a decent book, but nothing that knocked my socks off. After the glowing things I've read and the fact that this book seems to be every where/on every list right now, I thing I had higher expectations. I wonder if the author made a mistake in making this part of a series. It would have worked really well as a single, contained novel. I will probably pick up the second one once its out, but I don't know that its high on my list.

#217, 216 I hope you start it in this group. I am not a girly, but the subject does interest me immensly.

>222 QuentinTom: Will think on it.

>Fanny, not sure if you have come across the Women Writing Africa initiative from the Feminist Press or not, but I recently came across the 4th (?) volume in the bookstore and was very, very tempted to buy it. It was the North African edition.

http://www.feministpress.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&i...

The only thing that stopped me was my tremendous TBR pile... Still, when has not having time to read something stopped me from hoarding it...

(34) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks



From a previous post of mine: (This book) is told as a series of interviews with people from all over the world & of all walks of life, detailing their experiences during some great cataclysm that is mostly - but not entirely - past in which the dead rose up and walked the earth. When I first heard about this book, I took it for nothing more than a stupid horror novel, but then after reading TadAD's review of it in this group, I really wanted to give it a try. It is quite long and while I worry that the premise may wear thin by the end, I am still enjoying it quite a lot and the interview format makes it easy to dip into here and there. It was great airplane reading.

Finished zombies. I don't have a whole lot to say about this book. It was enjoyable and the premise didn't end up wearing thin over time, which was good. I thought the author did a really good job of writing a believable oral history of a future imagined war. I felt like I got a number of different perspectives, which is always the reason to read oral history. There were a lot of sort of "deep thoughts" concealed in this book & I could see a lot of parallels to contemporary society - especially when I turned on the radio and heard about some outbreak of swine flu & that the CDC was advising people in the southwestern states to "avoid each other..." I have a lot of great books on tap right now, but I think I was to clear my mind by reading a short, pop-ish work of smart non-fiction - something like Freakonomics or Blink, that doesn't require too much thinking but is based in reality. I feel like I've been in fantasy-land for my last couple of books. Any suggestions?

Wittgenstein's Poker maybe? a history in recollection of one of philosophy's most memorable arguments. Musicophilia - a bit lighter or This is your brain on music - same general topic as Musicophilia, but a but less case study oriented. All 3 are well written.

I often get annoyed w/ pop-econ-sociology but that's a bias of mine and not shared by friends to whom i loan/give books.

>225 bobmcconnaughey:, Oh, I think I actually have that one too. I've actually decided that, in light of all the current debate about torture, the CIA, etc. that I am going to read a book I've had my eye on for a while: Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying. The author is a former CIA case officer and, from looking at the table of contents in the sample I downloaded, it appears that the book offers a brief look at the philosophical foundations of espionage & then moves into some real or hypothetical scenarios that the author might have encountered in his career. That should be "real" enough for me.

Bob, I too often get irritated with the pop sociology books, but sometimes one is in the mood for that. I find, in general, those books tend to be very silly and sort of half sociology, half self-help. Blink's main message, in my recollection, was "people make snap judgments and sometimes that's not bad; trust your instincts". And for that, Gladwell become a sensation? I do have a fondness for Levitt's Freakonomics, though, if only because of the stories about the funny names people give their kids.

I think Blink was pretty drawn out--should have been a magazine article. Did you read his earlier Tipping Point? I think that one had more to say. And it was fun to read Freakonomics, which contradicted some of Tipping Point. I didn't know those books were pop sociology, but yeah, sometimes I'm in the mood for that too.

Argh.... Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying is kind of stupid. So far I've read the author's personal introduction, which is a heavily sanitized history of his employment as a CIA case officer working overseas, the very weak and superficial sections on espionage & philosophy, which is rather labored and silly, and about 8-10 of the fictionalized case studies. Thanks to the Kindle, I know that I have read approximately 27% of this book before giving up on it. I think that is a good-faith attempt.

The thing that is so dumb about these case studies is that rather than present a discussion of the moral dilemmas that each one brings up (for example, should the CIA torture people? should the CIA have undercover officers impersonate journalists or aid workers in order to get more information? etc), the author just polls random professors, graduate students, and "former CIA officers", among others. I think the point is to show that reasonable people disagree on the issues, but it just comes off as shallow and random. Especially since half the time the logic behind any individual response is completely tortured and illogical! I wasn't looking to get a lot of clear moral guidance out of this book, since I understand that a lot of actions that we take in foreign relations are probably unsavory, but I was hoping for a thoughtful discussion of the issues at hand from someone who had worked in the intelligence world and most likely had to confront similar dilemmas in his career.

Instead, I got the opinions of Joe Average on the street, who - let's face it - has probably never confronted and probably never will confront a situation in which he is being told to protect his country by doing something that is possibly immoral or unethical. The author missed an opportunity to enrich this book with his own unique experiences - or fictionalized versions thereof - and instead just gave me an unscientific poll with standard bits of CIA history that have already been written about in other books on the cold war and the CIA. This book is pretty disappointing and I don't think I'll actively work to finish it.

>228 fannyprice: Sounds disappointing. However, it is interesting that you can know the percentage of a book read. I see there is a kindle app for the iphone, but I would probably not be downloading enough audio books to make it worth it (imo). 25 - 30% is probably about what I read of a disappointing book before I dump it (which is why my ratings seem high - I don't finish the sub-standard stuff).

Hurrah! I finally jumped in and read your entire journal to date (was waiting for a chance to read everything from the start)... and wow. So much great stuff here. The Rabbi's Cat and The Return of the Soldier are now on my wishlist. (I was blown away to learn that graphic fiction set in colonial Algeria exists!! MUST find!!!) And I've enjoyed your comments on Showalter very much. I too am a big fan of "quiet unrest" (#220)...

I look forward to following your entries from now on. :)

>230 Fullmoonblue:, The Rabbi's Cat is wonderful. There is also a sequel, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Honestly, a cat who wants to be a Talmudic scholar? What's not to love about that, right?

I'm enjoying following your reading as well, FMB.

>220 fannyprice: Marise now has a copy of the Showalter. Bawahahahaha! *rubs hands gleefully* So, sooner or later, one of us will start that thread (I've started the forthcoming Atwood, so no other reading will get down until that is finished...)

>231 fannyprice: You mean there is another feline Talmudic scholar out there!!!!!! Oh, be still, my fluttering heart! Is this feline marvel of the female gender?

#220 - I had no idea she had written a short story. I read the play - Trifles - in college and loved it. I think I will track down the story now. Thanks.

>234 janemarieprice:, Jane - I think they are very similar, but I'm not sure....

Yes, it is the same plot. I had to look it up because I knew I had read a play that was very similar. Apparently she wrote the play and later expanded it into the short story.

(35) Running with Scissors - Augusten Burroughs



I must confess I read this book now simply because I thought I might not like it and I wanted to be able to donate it. I am out of space in my house. And gosh, I was right! I didn't like this book at all!

This memoir is just a little too dysfunctionally cute - its like the author wrote it with a checklist of dark quirk in hand. Although a number of genuinely disturbing things actually happen in the book, they are all presented in a light, breezy style that I found rather disturbing. Nothing, no matter how bizarre or wrong, ever seems to faze young Augusten. Everything is fodder in his quest for fame. Nearly everyone in this book is completely idiotic and reprehensible, but not in an interesting way. Augusten and his mother are weak narcissists who prey on mentally disturbed individuals for their own gratification - both emotional and sexual. The book displays an almost infantile delight in bodily fluids, excrement, and sex-related noises; I'm not a prude, but I was grossed out. The book itself just seems so cheekily self-aware; at some point one of the author's adopted siblings tells him he really HAS to become a writer and should write a book about their crazy family. I was really disappointed in this book, which I at least expected to be funny. I will not be reading any more of this author's attempts to mine his personal tragedies for fame....

I've opened up a new thread here, as this one has gotten a little slow loading.