Tash99's 75 books for 2010

I'm looking forward to a year of solid reading now that I've officially finished studying (for the time being anyway). I took part in the 50 books challenge last year and got to 120, so I'm quietly confident that I can make it to the target this year - fingers crossed!

I'm also taking part in the Off the Shelf Challenge and have (optimistically) committed myself to reading at least 25 books from my TBR pile.

Books Read in 2010

January

1. Moving Pictures, Terry Pratchett
2. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
3. Jean Rhys, Carole Angier
4. Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
5. The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk
6. Mr Shivers, Robert Jackson Bennett
7. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
8. The Left Hand of God, Paul Hoffman
9. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
10. Selected Works, Cicero
11. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood

February

12. Stolen, Lucy Christopher
13. Fermat's Last Theorum, Simon Singh
14. By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart
15. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
16. Outside of a Dog, Rick Gekoski
17. The Red House Mystery, AA Milne
18. Songs of the Doomed, Hunter S Thompson
19. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
20. Clodia, Robert de Maria
21. Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon
22. The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter

March

23. The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers, Paul Torday
24. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens
25. Heavy Weather, PG Wodehouse
26. The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris
27. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
28. Plan for Chaos, John Wyndham

April

29. Your Skirt's Too Short, Emily Maguire
30. Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett
31. Smile or Die, Barabara Ehrenreich
32. Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris
33. A Confederate General From Big Sur, Richard Brautigan
34. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
35. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
36. The Last Woman in England, Maggie Joel
37. A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defence, Normand Baillageon
38. The Racket, Gideon Haigh
39. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon
40. The Hunchback Assignments: The Dark Deeps, Arthur Slade
41. Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick
42. Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
43. So Much For That, Lionel Shriver

May

44. The Speed of Light, Javier Cercas
45. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
46. I Was Behind You, Nicolas Fargues
47. Beautiful Malice, Rebecca James
48. Soulless, Gail Carriger
49. The Cogwheel Brain, Doron Swade
50. A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
51. Sunday Daffodil and Other Happy Endings, P Robert Smith
52. Obabakoak, Bernardo Atxaga
53a. Victory! Greg Broadmore
53b. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd
54. Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens

June

55. The Caged Virgin, Ayan Hirsi Ali
56. My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
57. Tinkers, Paul Harding
58. Champagne for One, Rex Stout
59. Beyond Bogota, Garry Leech
60. Maurice, EM Forster
61. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black
62. Belching Out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola, Mark Thomas
63. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
64. Sabriel, Garth Nix
65. The Country Where No One Ever Dies, Ornela Vorpsi
66. The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
67. Chasers, James Phelan
68. The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein
69. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
70. The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson
71. The People's Manifesto, Mark Thompson
72. The Eve of St Venus, Anthony Burgess
73. All That I Have, Castle Freeman
74. Atonement, Ian McEwan
75. Lirael, Garth Nix
76. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
77. Better Off Dead, Rex Stout

July

78. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
79. Boxer Beetle, Ned Beauman
80. Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett
81. The Norseman's Song, Joel Deane
82. By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham
83. Light Boxes, Shane Jones
84. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K Dick
85. Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman
86. Call it Sleep, Henry Roth
87. Riding the Black Cockatoo, John Danalis
88. Dark Matter, Michelle Paver

August

89. The Abortion, Richard Brautigan
90. Shit My Dad Says, Justin Halpern
91. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore
92. The Truth, Terry Pratchett
93. The BFG, Roald Dahl
94. Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
....................................................

1. Moving Pictures, Terry Pratchett

Ahem. I had decided to cut down on the Pratchetts this year, but he's just so entertaining, and so easy to read when you're dog tired that I couldn't resist. I think there might be another one popping up on my list again very soon.

2. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

My first Atwood, and I really enjoyed it. I hadn't expected it to be so funny, given that the subject matter is the lead up to and aftermath of an apocalypse. There are some great, very dry one-liners;

These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency

Well stuff it, Jimmy thought. If he wants to be an asshole it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice

Atwood builds up the tension by skipping betweent the different threads of the story - the before and the after, and how things got to after, told from the perspective of Jimmy (later to be known as Snowman). Jimmy is one of life's perpetually peripheral characters, standing on the sidelines as everyone else seems to be in the action, and even when civilisation has collapsed, he is still unable to really react to things around him, not to act himself. Crake - his childhood friend and lingering (looming?) presence - is the real source of action.

I did find some things irritating, like the names Atwood gives to products and companies; 'Happicuppa Coffee', 'Chickie Nobs', 'Rejoov'. I'm sure I'm missing some important point that she was trying to make, but I felt like they rang a bit false in comparison to the rest of her imagined future.

All in all, liked it a lot, and have bought The Year of the Flood to read soon.

Welcome to the group!

Oryx and Crake was my first Atwood too. I liked it better than The Year of the Flood, which I read recently, but I am in the minority on that.

I'm a big Terry Pratchett fan too - just read Unseen Academicals and loved that.

The only Margaret Atwood I've read is The Blind Assassin which I thought was really good. I'll definitely give Oryx and Crake a try, thanks!

Howdy!

I 'discovered' Atwood last year. (I'm still kicking myself for that) And I read Year of the Flood first, before Oryx. Loved both... also liked her Penelopiad. Plan to have more Atwood from the library this year. She is simply wonderful.

Welcome to the group.

I've been wanting to read something by Atwood for years, but I just haven't gotten to it yet. I bought The Blind Assassin more than a year ago, but I need to move it to the top of the TBR pile.

I also keep seeing Pratchett's name around, which makes me want to try something by him, but I have no idea where to start. Do you have any suggestions?

I'd suggest starting with Guards!, Guards! for Pratchett. It's from the Discworld series which is his main series and it's one of my favourite books. It's not the first book in the series but I think his books generally stand alone fairly well.

Otherwise I would recommend starting with Wyrd Sisters or Mort. Hope that helps!

That does. Thanks Heather!

I love what I've read of Margaret Atwood, but I often get thrown off by her synopsises--her books just seem to be all over the place, in many ways. I was fascinated by Cat's Eye, though--it's a really interesting foray into the dark depths of artistic inspiration and how personal history shapes us. I have The Year of the Flood in my TBR pile as well.

I have to admit hat I haven't read too many of the Discworld series, but I really really like Pratchett's Wee Free Men series. Definitely snort-out-loud humor.

>5 _debbie_:: Or, The Truth! It can be read pretty well as a stand-alone, it was one of the first I'd read :)

Welcome! Nice start.

Hi everyone - wow, I knew you guys were chatty, but I hadn't expected so many of you to turn up so quickly! Thanks for the words of welcome.

>5 _debbie_: Any of them really, they're all good. I agree with souloftherose that the Witches or City Watch series are probably the best to start with, and I would add that you should probably avoid the stand alone ones to begin with as I think they tend to be slightly different in tone - but maybe that's just me.

>8 willowsmom: That's exactly what put me off Atwood for so long too - I also have The Penelopiad around somewhere as well, and I hope to get to that soon.

This is the same review I posted over on my Books Off the Shelf thread

3. Jean Rhys (stupid touchstones, why don't you like poor Jean?), Carole Angier

I'm afraid I was a bit hard on this one to begin with. I bought it and then started to read it without actually reading the back, assuming that it was just a bio of Jean Rhys, one of my favourite authors. But I became incredibly frustrated with it after just a few chapters, as it hardly talks about the details of her life at all. Then I actually read the back cover, where it clearly says

"Jean Rhys wanted no biography written of her after her death. Instead, this, moving and beautifully written study follows her search for self-knowledge through the things she wrote about."

I'm not sure how that was supposed to work (how do you describe someone's 'search for self-knowledge' without describing it in relation to what they were doing in the course of that search?), but knowing what that the intention was did influence the way I read the rest of the book. Instead of being written as a straight biography, it looks at each of her novels in turn and relates it to what was happening in her life at the time, but without going into too much detail - essentially, Angier reads into the novels Rhys' responses to events.

Which was interesting from the point of view of literary interpretation, but frustrating from the point of view of wanting to know something about the woman herself. Because she did have a fascinating, tragic life - shunted off to England from Dominica at the age of seventeen, she endured one failed romance after another, due largely to her own fairly severe personality problems, and never really achieved recognition during her lifetime. Which is a pity, as she is a wonderful, gut wrenchingly tragic writer.

Verdict: It stays on the shelf with my collection of Jean Rhys novels, but on sufferance. It's only 123 pages, so I might give it another look at some point.

The Wind in the Willows is a beautiful, dreamy tribute to the English countryside, and to a particularly English way of life of picnics, boating and genteel, gentlemanly entertainments. When I’d finished reading it I drew the conclusion that it was a wistful imagining of an idealised past, written by a wealthy-ish man pining for a world that was already starting to modernise and change out of recognition.

I left off reading the introduction until after I’d finished the book, and found that while my interpretation isn’t wrong, there is slightly more to the story than I had realised. Poor old Kenneth Grahame had a bit of a rough life – his mother died when he was very young, and his father shipped the children off to live with their grandmother. Grahame never fulfilled his ambition of studying at Oxford, and when he married it was quite late in life to a woman he seems to have had an unhappy relationship with. His son Alastair was born prematurely and was nearly blind, and was given the nickname ‘Mouse’. Grahame doted on him, and came up with the stories about Ratty, Mole, Toad and Badger to entertain him, and there is definitely a feeling that these stories are an outpouring of warmth from a man who seems to have been so deprived of warmth for most of his life. The four friends, while so utterly different from each other, share a deep affection and regard, and a willingness to put themselves out to help someone in trouble. The introduction to my copy probably puts it best when it says;

Grahame invests his characters with such wonderful, human qualities; he understands so much about friendship, about appreciating the specifics of one another, the idiosyncrasies that make us tick.

The writing is just beautiful, and reflects a deep love of the English countryside and though the descriptions of the balmy weather of spring are very nice, I think I prefer Grahame’s description of the woods in winter, which seems to me to reflect an unconditional love;

Copses, dells, quarries, and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, til they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering – even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery, He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple.

Grahame’s writing reminded me of P G Wodehouse’s – it is not as funny (though the character of Toad is surely one of literature’s greatest comic creations), but there is a similar timeless innocence to it. There is a sense that most chaps are fairly decent if given a chance, and though there are a few incurably horrible people out there, they are at least obviously bad – this is a fairly black and white world. But sometimes we need to be reassured that the world can be kind and beautiful.

>13 tash99: That's a lovely review, thanks.

5. The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk

I can’t decide if I like this book or if I just feel a bit blah about it. On the one hand it is well written, with superb characters and settings. But on the other hand, it went on a bit and I think it really should have been about 150-200 pages shorter.

Set in 1970s Istanbul, it is the story of Kemal and Fusun, distantly related cousins who meet by chance and fall instantly in love. They begin a passionate affair which ends abruptly when Kemal becomes engaged to his girlfriend, who he also loves. the books starts strongly with the description of how the affair begins and ends, but then sort of trails off into the land of ‘oh my god, would you just get on with it’ as Kemal becomes fixated on Fusun, and finds himself unable to continue with his normal life. He slowly loses interest in everything except his memories of Fusun, and becomes more and more withdrawn into a private world of pain and obsession. The museum of the title is the collection of objects he amasses that remind him of her, which he keeps first in the apartment where they used to meet when they first began their affair, and later in Fusun’s family home, and much of the story is taken up with descriptions of the things he finds or steals to fill the museum.

Then there are pages and pages of description of how sad he feels, and of how much he misses Fusun which I really think should have been cut down a bit. I think I can see what Pamuk was doing when he describes this awful obsession – it is a vivid description of depression, and anyone who has ever had their heart broken knows what the pain is like. The repetitive thinking that amounts to self-torture, the conviction that the one who is the cause of the heartbreak has moved on to someone else, and is happier, the conviction that if you just had one more chance you could make it work. There are some horribly vivid descriptions of the physical sensations of depression;

Let me explain to readers without access to our museum that the pain was initially felt in the upper-right hand quadrant of my stomach. As the pain increased, it would... radiate to the cavity between my lungs and my stomach. At that point its abdominal presence would no longer be confined to the left side, having spread to the right, feeling rather as if a hot poker or screwdriver were twisting into me. It was at first as if my stomach and then my entire abdomen were filling up with acid, as if sticky, red-hot little starfish were attaching themselves to my organs... If I hit the wall with my hand...I could briefly block the pain, but at its most muted it would feel like an intravenous drip entering my bloodstream.

But when Kemal is still going on about it 350 pages later, I felt like giving him a good smack around the ear.

What I did like about this book was the characterisation – Kemal needs a good kick in the bum, but he is also basically a good person, and I felt a lot of sympathy for him, and for the various other people whose lives are affected by his pain. His group of friends are particularly well drawn – this was a time in Turkey during which the wealthy liked to think of themselves as modern, westernised Europeans, but they were still very conscious of traditional roles for men and women, particularly the idea that women had to be virgins until they were married. Most of the angst that plagues Kemal’s social set is to do with the contradictions between these two ways of thinking, and the tightrope women walked – give away too much before the wedding night, and no matter how enlightened society told itself it was you were still considered a hussy.

In fact, Pamuk’s evocation of life in Istanbul for a wealthy young man educated in American is probably the best thing about this book. In Kemal’s descriptions of day to day life there is a glossing over of social unrest and politics that seems believable for someone with such a comfortable position in life, and a focus on the restaurants, fashions of gossip of high society, even as he distances himself from it.

The things I didn’t like about this book were balanced by the things that I did like about it, and I’m keen to read something else by the same author – I have Snow on the shelf, so I’ll try to find time for that soon.

Excellent review! I bought this earlier this month, but I think I'll read Snow and My Name Is Red before I read this one.

Hi Tash

Welcome to our friendly, chatty, well-read and very kind group. I note your reference to The Penelopiad and highly recommend this book. It is very creative.

Welcome! I'm always happy when someone reads an Atwood novel :)

>16 kidzdoc: I'm definitely keen to read more by Pamuk and Snow seems to be pretty well thought of - let me know how you go! And if anyone has a strong opinion as to which one I should read next i'd be interested in hearing it

>17 Whisper1:, 18 Hi - I think I'm quietly becoming an Atwood fan. I'm currently reading The Year of the Flood, and it's probably even better than Oryx and Crake. Always great to find a new favourite author!

I'm feeling sort of wishy-washy about Museum of Innocence, don't think I'll add it to my wish list quite yet. I've got Snow to read--in German, no less! Lol! Not gonna happen, though I will read it in English. (I had wanted to try to read some contemporary fiction in German and that title was one of the few I could find.) I'm a fan of Atwood too, so imagine I'll get to The Year of the Flood and/or Oryx and Crake sometime this year. Happy reading!

>20 bonniebooks: I'm so impressed by people who are fluent enough in other languages to actually read novels! I did study french and spanish at uni and could read bits and pieces but it was a long, hard slog - my goal was always to learn enough french to be able to read marcel proust in the original, but I never got that far. My other dream is to learn russian well enough to read some of the russian classics, but it's always seemed like such a daunting prospect.

Ah well, my husband and I might be moving to spain at the end of the year, so I guess then I'd be forced to learn a bit more!

Good luck with the german, i'll be interested to see what you end up reading!

Love your reading so far - and yours is the second recommendation of Oryx and Crake (and Atwood in general) I've read today, which does NOT bode well for my TBR pile... Happy reading, I've got you starred!

For what it's worth, the knack with reading foreign languages is just to do a bit a day and it soon gets easier. I find it difficult to believe that when I was on my year abroad in France 20 years ago I could read French almost as well as I read English - now I read 15 minutes a day in French and it's getting quicker, but I still move slowly. I've got French books as one of the categories in my 1010 challenge but I think even 5 books will be a challenge (I was aiming for short and trashy, which is always easier in French, but then a group read of the Count of Monte Cristo was suggested, which is long...)

I've only just found out about The Year of the Flood - I enjoyed Oryx and Crake, but my favourite Atwood is Alias Grace
Chloe

Hi Chloe,

That's what I've heard - repetition is the key. I'm actually starting french classes again in a couple of weeks, so I just need to push myself to actually do the homework. My grasp of grammar is appalling, but I used to have a knack for remembering names of things and various phrases so I never worked as hard as I should have because I could usually bluff my way through the classes. I vow to work harder this time, though!

6. Mr. Shivers, Robert Jackson Bennett

Set during the Great Depression, the story opens with a man named Connelly travelling across America in pursuit of... someone. Someone mysterious and malevolent, who, we discover, murdered Connelly’s daughter. As he travels he meets up with a group of people who are pursuing the same man for the same reason that Connelly is after him, and together they track him from town to town, until they finally catch up with the man they call Mr Shivers. Bit by bit they piece together the truth about the man they pursue, and the nature of his relationship to Connelly. A truth that was not that much of a surprise when it was revealed, but which does create a well drawn out feeling of suspense.

This is the book you would expect someone would write if they'd been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy and Stephen King - Bennett isn't quite as good an author as either of those two, but their influence is apparent in both the style and the subject. The writing is pretty good – the same sorts of sharp, staccato sentences that Cormac McCarthy employs – though there are a few bits of clunky dialogue;

”I don’t know about God,” said Connelly. “I know less about God than I do the nation. I don’t think about that. I don’t need to. Some things don’t need to be thought about. You just do them. And I aim to.”

But for the most part it is a well drawn picture of depression era America, with its hoboes and shanty towns, and the tide of people moving across the country. In particular Bennett makes use of the drought and the dust as a nice metaphor for the nature of Mr Shivers, creating a sense of impending doom.

I also liked what I read as a dig either at those various compassionate religious leaders who blame every national disaster on the sins of the people worst affected, or at the smug affluence of our own society;

”I think it goes further. They say the storm is a curse and they say the hungry times are a curse. Like they expect things to be safe and this hunger is new and strange. That there’ll always be plenty. But that’s the strange thing. That’s the new thing. Living comfortably. That’s strange.”

This wasn’t a taxing read by any means, but it was an enjoyable one – I read it while I sat out in the sun in my garden on a lazy Sunday morning, and it was just right for that time and place. The plot moves quickly, the characters are interesting and though I don’t think it will make my list of literary highlights for the year, it did make me want to keep turning the pages.

> 15, interesting review of The Museum of Innocence though i don't think i'll get to it soon. i've not read Snow but have heard good things about it. i was really impressed with his writing in The Black Book and have since wanted to go through all his translated novels, though the one i'm reading now, My Name is Red, i find a bit of a slog and have set aside, i hope, temporarily.

Well, looks like Mr Shivers needs to join ol' TBR pile...

Edited to say hello to my two visitors - thanks for stopping by.

Deebee1 - I'm with you on the slog aspect of Pamuk, even though I did enjoy the book I read. It was hard to make it clear in my review that it was slow going and hard work at times without making it sound like something no one in their right mind would want to read. Can things be boring but enjoyable? Like a bowl of porridge.

Drneutron - you sound like you have a fascinating job - an actual rocket scientist, you say? I'll have to pick your brains about some science books! And I'm very sorry to hear that you've added to your TBR pile because of me, though Mr Shivers was pretty entertaining.

7. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
8. The Left Hand of God, Paul Hoffman
9. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett

I feel a little claustrophobic this week. That might be something to do with my reading material, all of which has tended to involve similar themes of bureaucracy, citadels and Machiavellian scheming. First up was Gormenghast. My husband and I were discussing last night the idea of ‘favourites’, and we concluded that we aren’t ‘favourites’ people – I don’t have a favourite band, colour, food, or even book, (or so I thought). I have clouds of favourite things, lists of things I like, but I’m not the kind of person who would lie down and die for, say, Withnail and I, or The Goneaway World, or potato salad, much as I like each of those things. But then I started thinking about Gormenghast and I think that just maybe, (and I’ll type this quietly so the other books don’t hear)... I think Gormenghast might be my favourite book, ever. Oh, the guilt.

But I do love it so very much. It is the first book in the brilliant trilogy by Mervyn Peake (soon to become a quartet, with the discovery of a book by Peake that was left unfinished at the time of his death, but which was finished by his wife Maeve and then packed away in an attic. This is one piece of literary grave-robbing that I think I’m OK with). I’ll preface my effusive praise of this book by saying that I love liberality. If I’m having four people over for dinner, I’ll cook for eight. I love going to shops where they sell nuts and grains out of huge barrels. I think that this tendency towards liking extravagance is why I like this book so much, with its glorious, lavish language.

It is set in Gormenghast - a huge, crumbling castle populated by people who are for the most part just cogs in a vast machine that rolls on regardless of what any individual might want or need. The aristocracy and their various hangers on are inching through their lives, unthinkingly and yet gloomily following the traditions that have been followed for centuries. When an ambitious kitchen boy decides that he would much prefer being in charge no one sees him for what he is, because nothing like this has ever happened before, and he is allowed to carry on with his scheming and manipulation almost entirely unobserved.

But the plot is almost incidental. What draws me to this novel again and again are the characters and the world that Peake has created for them. Let’s start with the names, to give you an idea of the atmosphere. The evil kitchen boy is Steerpike. There is the head servant, Flay, and his arch nemesis Abiatha Swelter, the grotesquely fat head chef (given to such pronouncements as Silensh my fairy boys. Silensh my belching angels. Come closer here, come closer with your little creamy faces and I’ll tell you who I am). There is the mincing Doctor Prunesquallor, who is more observant than he appears, and the bad tempered master of ceremony Barquentine, who is less observant than he should be. Then there are the minor characters, such as Spogfrawne and Rottcodd.

The names alone are so evocative, and they should give you an idea of the kind of feel of the book. But they aren’t just quaint names - Peake backs them up with these incredible personalities that amount to almost physical presences. Here is Steerpike the first time we meet him;

His body gave the appearance of being malformed, but it would be difficult to say exactly what gave it this gibbous quality. Limb by limb it appeared that he was sound enough, but the sum of these several members accrued to an unexpectedly twisted total. His face was pale like clay and save for his eyes, masklike. These eyes were set very close together, and were small, dark red, and of startling concentration.

But my favourite character is Sepulchrave Groan, the seventy-seventh earl, and titular head of Gormenghast, though he never exerts any influence. He is utterly, almost catatonically depressed, and his one love in life is his library. He is also the first person Steerpike sets his sights on to destroy. This is the earl just before Steerpike begins the execution of his devious plan;

There had been a slight but perceptible lifting of his spirit... He had become aware of a dim pleasure in having a son. Titus had been born during one of his blackest moods, and although he was still shrouded in melancholia, his introspection had, during the last few days, become tempered by a growing interest in his heir, not as a personality, but as the symbol of the Future. He had some vague presentiment that his own tenure was growing to a close and it gave him both pleasure when he remembered his son, and a sense of stability amid the miasma of his waking dreams.

There is too much to this book to do it justice in a short review, but I’ll just note here that if I was going to be stuck on a desert island, I would want this almost-but-not-quite-overblown, richly drawn piece of gothic fantasy as my companion (or even the whole trilogy if the person who was putting me on the island was feeling generous). It is a massive book, not so much its length as in its scope of ideas, its wit, and a certain almost indefinable quality that I think can only be described by saying that this book has a sense of itself as a real world.

Book 8 was The Left Hand of God, by Paul Hoffman, and I’m less enthusiastic about this one. The setting is a citadel, as huge and rambling as Gormenghast. It is called the Sanctuary, but as the opening lines make clear; the Sanctuary of the Redeemers on Shotover Scarp is named after a damned lie, for there is no redemption that goes on there, and less sanctuary.

It is the story of a young boy, Thomas Cale, who has been trained to be a ruthless religious warrior. He sees something he shouldn’t have seen and must flee to Memphis, a place that is the antithesis of the Sanctuary. I enjoyed this book for the most part, as it has some great scenes and characters, but the narrative structure is a little odd. At first I thought I was having trouble because when I started reading it it was late at night and I was a bit drunk tired, but then I realised that there is actually something a bit jarring about it. There are sudden jumps away from Cale’s perspective to the perspective of various other characters – Terry Pratchett, among other authors, does the same thing all the time and it never bothers me there, but for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on it bothered me here.
And then there are weird changes in tone – sometimes it’s funny, sometimes deadly serious – that give it a really uneven quality.

But what really bugged me was the ending. I got to within thirty pages of the end and was thinking to myself ‘how on earth is he going to wrap all this up in such a short space?’ The answer is that he doesn’t. After the fast-paced adventure of the previous 400 pages, the ending just sort of petered out... Apparently it is going to be a trilogy, so hopefully some of the plot lines will be resolved in later books.

As frustrated as I got, I think I’d probably read the next book, just because I want to know what happens – if I’d outright hated this book I wouldn’t care, but I would like to know.

Bottom line: this series has potential, even if I didn't love this book.

9. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett

Excellent as always – I find that Pratchett’s stand alone books tend to be a bit more philosophical than the books that are part of a series. This one is largely about religion, and seems to have taken inspiration from a phrase attributed to Galileo – ‘and yet it moves’, which you can read about here if you're interested.

10. Selected Works, Cicero

I don't mind admitting that this was a tough one to get through. I read plenty of Cicero at uni, but I'd never sat down and attempted to read a whole book of his work and bits of it were hard work.

But I am fascinated by Cicero - there are more famous and more glamorous figures from the same period of history (Julius Caesar and Marc Antony for example), but Cicero has always seemed so real to me. You get this picture from his writing of a man who was highly intelligent, a consummate political player, but who was also terribly insecure and given to pomposity and arrogance.

This collection is made up of philosophical works, letters and speeches, the most enjoyable to read being the speeches – those wonderful, muckraking speeches. A hard slog at times but worth it.

Hello.... I've been lurking away and now suddenly there are all these reviews setting my head in a whirl!

1) Can things be boring but enjoyable? Like a bowl of porridge. All that with sugar on top.

2) drneutron - A real life rocket scientist, huh? I'm so envious - I'm fascinated by science, especially physics, but when it came to studying it my literary-minded brain went into mathematical meltdown! Now I just read up myself for fun...

3) I only have Titus Groan so far but it sounds like I have to boost it up Mount TBR and buy the rest of the trilogy to boot! Have you seen the adaptation with a rather young Jonathan Rhys-Meyers? I was wondering whether to buy that as well - I was a bit young when it was on TV I think!

Msg 27: It's funny, I was just looking at Gormenghast yesterday! There was a quote on the back of Flora Segunda (which I had just finished) that likened it to "Gormenghast out of any Ripping Yarn you care to think of...". So, I was just considering it and along comes your review--very good timing :).

Hi ellie - I think I'd had a bit too much coffee yesteday after a night of not enough sleep, hence the sort of lateral responses to people's comments! Normally it would never occur to me to compare a nobel prize winning author to a bowl of rolled oats.

I never saw the adaptation of Gormenghast when it came out, but I did just buy the DVD and I'm just waiting for the TV mood to strike me before I settle down to watch it.

Willowsmom - I'd never heard of Flora Segunda, but it sounds interesting - from you review I can see where the comparison to Gormenghast might come in. I'll have to keep an eye out for it, thanks!

Let me know how you get on with the DVD then - I might have to finally push it from wishlist to basket if you like it... And I thought the porridge thing was really funny - I knew exactly what you meant!

Hi! I think this is my first visit to your thread. You've done some interesting reading! Nice reviews!

Mr. Shivers sounds like something I'd enjoy. I've added it to my list!

Ellie - started watching Gormenghast last night, and I'm really enjoying it so far (two episodes in). It doesn't manage to convey the deep sense of melancholy of the novel, but it does capture the sly humour that pops up throughout it.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is spot on as Steerpike, and with the exception of Fushia Groan and Nanny Slagg, all the other characters have also been really well cast.

From an Amazon review; It really feels like you have entered the imaginations of a flamboyant dystopian; Gormenghast is all at once rich, beautiful, haggard and doomed. The intensity of the film, the strength of the characters and the epic nature of the story may be a little too much for some viewers (like a particularly rich chocolate gateau)

Yep, that's about it.

So this is going to be a bit of a rant, something I just needed to get out of my system. Feel free to skip it if you're not in the mood for my grumbling!

I was saddened this week to hear of the death of J D Salinger, an author whose books I have been reading lately. But I have been amazed at the response on various blogs (ever here on LT) to news of his death. People are glad he’s dead. What? They’re glad he’s dead? We’re talking about the same guy here, right? The guy who wrote some stories, stories that some people (me included) like very much, but which lots of people seem not to have liked. We’re talking about J D Salinger the author, not J D Salinger the genocidal maniac, or J D Salinger the kitten-and-puppy-kicker. He was a writer, a weird dude, and according to some accounts, not an especially nice guy (though that hardly makes him unique as an artist), not a monster.

I don’t ascribe to any religion, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a spiritual person, but I do believe that when someone dies you should show some compassion. I’m always moved by the way people here on LT respond to the news that a member of the community has lost someone – there’s always a spontaneous, and sincere outpouring of kind words. I’m inspired by that response, and frankly sickened by the response of ‘I’m glad he’s dead’. Ugh.

OK, rant over, normal programming will resume.

11. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake was a great book, and I enjoyed it a lot, but I felt that the future it portrayed was sometimes less than convincing. I didn’t like the product names (rejoov, happicuppa) or the animal names (pigoon, rakunk) and found them a bit too gimmicky and cutesy for my taste. I also found the depiction of life inside the compounds a bit sterile and felt like I never got a sense of them as real, working worlds. In spite of all that, I did like it a lot – it was funny, and beautifully written, and I came to care deeply about what happened to Jimmy.

The Year of the Flood was all the things I liked about Oryx and Crake without the things that bugged me about the first book. Whereas O&C is set in the high-security world of privilege of the compounds, TYOTF focuses on the world outside – the pleeblands. The way that Atwood describes life outside the sterility of the compounds was much more convincing, and I felt like there was a bit more emphasis on showing us how that world works. In particular, Atwood spends quite a lot of time describing how the main characters – members of a vegetarian, pacifist cult called God’s Gardeners – manage to survive in the city. The descriptions of life on their rooftop garden manage to be idyllic, but also imbued with a sense of menace. Here are these beautiful refuges from the city, where people spout all sorts of new-agey platitudes, and yet there are all sorts of dark, dangerous things going on underneath.

And, of course, this is such a well written book, with a dry sense of humour, and an earthy, poetic tone. As with the descriptions in the first book of the world after the ‘waterless flood’ (the disaster that wipes out most of humanity), there is a wonderful impression of nature as unrestrainedly fertile, as fecund and bursting with life. I think this is what stops the books from being bleak. There is a feeling that not all is lost – we’ve stuffed the planet up pretty badly, but nature is bigger than us or anything we could do to it and will recover, (whether we’re there to see it or not).

I imagine that you could read this as a stand-alone book without too many problems, but part of the appeal for me was that it filled in so much of the back story from O&C – people from the first book keep popping up, and you get a bit more of an idea of what was going on in the first book.

#38: I have never read anything by Salinger myself, but honestly the 'I'm glad he's dead' philosophy sickens me, too. Even if you disagree with someone's religion, ethics, etc., the death of anyone diminishes us as human beings (paraphrasing Donne). I understand your rant completely.

#39: I am glad to see that you enjoyed The Year of the Flood. I just discovered Atwood last year myself and Oryx and Crake was the first of hers I read. I have since read a couple of others and am hoping to get to at least one more this year.

#38: I completely agree with you & Stasia. Fortunately I haven't seen any of those blogs or posts that you referred to, but those thoughts are despicable.

#39: I loved your comments about Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. I doubt I'll have time to get to these books this year, but I'll plan to read them both next year.

#39: I loved The Year of The Flood as well...I haven't read Oryx and Crake yet, and am not sure I will, especially after your review. If all the things I loved about The Year of The Flood (God's Gardeners, all the references to foraging and self sufficiency, the rooftop gardens, their apocalypse preparedness) aren't as present in Oryx and Crake, I might just skip it by entirely. I think these two books sum up my feelings about Margaret Atwood: sometimes I love love love her, and sometimes I just...don't...GET her. It's interesting that, as an author, she can be so consistently random and all over the place!

#39: I too loved both books but preferred The Year of the Flood and think that you summarized my feelings perfectly.

Add my voice to Stasia and Darryl's regarding your "rant." You're right to be upset by such attitudes. I haven't seen the nasty posts / blogs you spoke of, and am glad of it.

Thanks guys - I needed to get that rant off my chest, and sometimes I feel better when I've written it down, rather than just talked about it!

And I'm glad to see how many other people are Atwood fans too, as I think I'm developing a pretty serious writer-crush on her.

#43 It's funny, though I liked O&C a lot, it wasn't until I'd read TYOTF that I was able to articulate to myself what it was that I hadn't liked about the first book, if that makes sense.

#42 That's the impression I've had of Atwood so far, that she seems to write books about whatever comes into her head rather than to a theme - I love the way you describe her as 'consistently random'!

12. Stolen, Lucy Christopher

I've had such a good run of books lately, I'm almost afraid that my luck can't hold much longer! Stolen is YA fiction, which I've never read much of in the past, but I might have to seek some more out because this was just a revelation. It's one of those great books that keeps you up at night, thinking 'just one more page', until you just can't stay awake any more.

A British girl, Gemma, is kidnapped from Bangkok airport by a young man who drugs her and disguises her so he can get her away. When she wakes up she is alone with her captor in a shack in the middle of the Australian desert. She initially fights him every step of the way, but the more time they spend together, the more she finds herself questioning her feelings for him, and hating herself for doing so.

The novel is written as if it is a letter from Gemma to her kidnapper, and while I did find it hard to believe that a sixteen year old would write the way the book is written, I quickly forgot that quibble. Because even if the style very occasionally fails to convince, the tone of her thoughts and her emotions never do. She thinks of herself as being unhappy at home, that her parents don’t care about her, and that she is outgrowing her friendships, but her experiences in the desert show her how different her life could have been.

I think my favourite part about this book was the way that Christopher invokes the absolute isolation of the Australian desert as a metaphor for the relationship between victim and captor (For some reason I kept thinking of the wonderful, but highly underrated and sadly largely unknown Australian movie ‘Japanese Story’. It starts Toni Collette, check it out if you get the chance). The desert is the third major character, and Christopher does a great job of showing that it is hypnotically vast, and that this vastness can be oppressive and terrifying. And yet at the same time she shows that there is life everywhere if you know where to look, and that even in the heart of an apparently dead wasteland you can find...what? Not contentment, certainly. Perhaps respect is a better word, respect for the sheer power of the environment. That you can learn to love the desert if you know how to.

Any other criticisms? Sometimes the symbolism is a little too obvious, but I can’t say too much about that without giving away the plot, and I really don’t want to spoil this for anyone who might decide to read it. But who says symbolism has to be obscure for it to be effective?

I love this book, and have already begged the Scholastic rep for an advance copy of Christopher’s new book, which comes out in April here in oz.

#39 I loved The Year of the Flood too. I haven't read Oryx and Crake but I'd like to to get the background. Stolen sounds good too - another wishlist addition!

#46: Adding Stolen to the BlackHole. Thanks for the recommendation, Tash.

>>46 tash99:: You may also like Living Dead Girl although it sounds like it would be far more disturbing than Stolen.
There is a lot of good YA stuff coming out lately. I think half of my reading last year was YA.

#47, 48 I heard about Stolen on a BBC radio show called Open Book - don't know if you do the podcast thing but I highly recommend this particular show - I've 'discovered' quite a few great books this way.

#46 eeep, that sounds a bit intense for me! I did look it up on Amazon and read a couple of pages there, and it does look really well written, so maybe I'll get to it one day, thanks

13. Fermat's Last Theorum, Simon Singh

My brother-in-law has a theory that every successfully married couple has a Bert and an Ernie in it. What he means is that a couple must tolerate each other’s obsessions, and have contrasting but complementary personalities in order to be happy together. And according to him, the best way to do this is to emulate puppets from a kid’s TV show. He's been happily married for ten years, so he might be on to something.

Why do I bring this up? Not just because I'm slightly miffed that I have been universally declared to be the Bert of my marriage, but because I think it might be a little bit true. Fermat's Last Theorem belongs to my husband, an engineering student. He read this book with a look of rapture on his face, and kept muttering things about how beautiful and elegant maths is.

I read it and... meh. It is a history of mathematics told through the story of a three hundred year battle to solve a maths puzzle, which to me was as exciting as it sounds. It is very, very well written, and explains a lot of things I hadn't understood before, but I just couldn't get into it. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate the enormous intellectual talent of the people involved in solving the problem, or that I failed to be awestruck by their brilliance and perseverance, it was just that I couldn’t make myself care about the maths. That isn't the fault of the book, it just wasn't for me. The only bits I really liked were the short biographies of the various people who worked on the puzzle over the years – but that’s how my mind works. People are interesting, formulas aren’t.

This book failed to grab my attention in the same way that things like Don Quixote and Brideshead Revisited have failed to grab my husband’s attention, in spite of the fact that they are some of my favourite books and that he has really tried to get into them. Ah well, at I guess I’ve always got my collection of paper clips to focus on.

#51: I really liked that one when I read it a couple of years ago, but I agree, it is definitely not a book for everyone.

14. By Grand Central Station, I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart

Again, a case of 'meh'. Again, a beautifully written book but not for me.

This is a fictionalised account of the love affair between the author and the poet George Barker. It is a passionate, painfully emotional account, but I think this is one of those books you have to come to at a certain point in your life to really appreciate it.

In spite of the fact that I didn't love this book, there was some wonderful writing;

IT is coming. The magnet of its imminent finger draws each hair of my body, the shudder of its approach disintegrates kisses, loses wishes on the disjointed air. The wet hands of the castor tree at night brush me and I shriek, thinking that at last I am caught up with.

#52 Jo also has The Big Bang by the same author, and has said that it is much easier to read (especially for a nincompoop like me), and I did like Singh's writing style so I'll probably read that eventually.

#54: I do not have The Big Bang by Singh, but I do have his The Code Book, which is another one that I liked.

15. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

I love it when a book provokes a strong emotional reaction in me, and this is what I found in reading Wuthering Heights. It is an incredible work of fiction which I found difficult to put down, in spite of the fact that I was repulsed by most of the characters and frequently disturbed by the level of brutality in their actions. I loved the book, and yet hated it as well, which is curiously appropriate, as this is a novel about passion, and what it can become – it can turn into passionate love, passionate hate, or it can be both at the same time. It is an exploration of the psychology of relationships, and though I didn’t think that there was a truly likeable person in the book (though some of them do manage to redeem themselves in the end), each character is brilliantly depicted.

Heathcliff in particular is utterly, convincingly awful. As Edgar Linton describes him; {Heathcliff is} not a rough diamond – a pearl containing oyster of a rustic; he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I wasn’t taken with the elder Cathy either, reading her as manipulative and kind of creepy. I know this is often considered one of the great romances of literature, but I was pretty much unmoved by the relationship between them - as far as I’m concerned, they deserved each other. But their relationship is interesting, though perhaps interesting is too mild a term to describe it. Maybe pathological is more appropriate. I know, I know, their relationship is deeply spiritual, and transcends the bounds of mortal love (though the word that sprang to my mind was ‘histrionic’). It just goes to show how talented Bronte was, that in spite of the fact that I looked on Cathy and Heathcliff as emotionally retarded narcissists, I still loved reading about them.

I wouldn’t say I liked this book in the sense that I think I will reread it anytime soon, but I do understand why it is considered to be one of the great works of English literature.

Having said all that, I suppose the question that remains is; who’s your man, Heathcliff or Rochester? I’ll be a Rochester girl forever – I love Jane Eyre and reread it every couple of years, and I loved the film version with Orson Welles. Sorry Emily, Charlotte just wrote a better love story.

Further fascinating insights into the men of the Bronte novels can be found here, in a piece from the always perceptive Kate Beaton.

Rochester, hands down for me.

16. Outside of a Dog, Rick Gekoski

This is an autobiography of a reading life, in which the author tells you less about the events of his personal life, and more about how and what he has spent his life as a writer, bookseller and teacher reading. I found it fascinating, and loved the dryly funny style – Gekoski seems like he would make a great dinner guest, full of self-depreciating anecdotes; from his description of his realisation that his ex-wife had claimed his books as part of their divorce settlement, to his experiences as a rare book dealer trying to bribe ex-KGB officers, this was a hugely entertaining book.

If the following quotes resonate with you, you will almost certainly enjoy it;

(books) were as close as I came to a soul, they contained my history, my inner voices and connections to the transcendent

Large numbers of books seem to consume the very air. There’s something insistently aggressive about them, something clamorous: Look at me! Read me! Remember me! Refer to me! Cite me! Dust me! Arrange me!

Books are peculiarly adhesive. A throng of characters clamorously demand attention, voices rise and fall, fade in and out of our consciousness. We suspend the everyday, ignore the telephone and doorbell, eat with our eyes fixed to the page, overcome.

#58: I will have to look for that one. Thanks for the recommendation, Tash!

Yeah, I wishlisted it too! You're my "go-to" person for coming-of-age, multicultural books set in Canada. Thanks!

#56 Definitely Rochester. He was my biggest 13 year old crush....

I love Wuthering Heights but I don't love the characters, certainly not in the same way I love Jane Eyre.

Outside of a Dog sounds great too - another one for the wishlist!

#56 I'll vote for Rochester, too. I discovered Jane Eyre in high school via a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV production with George C. Scott as Rochester, and Susannah York, I believe, as Jane. I was utterly captivated, so my Mom dug out her old, battered copy of the book for me, which I've read several times. It's one of the few books I own that I absolutely wouldn't consider parting with, despite its condition -- even for a new, shiny copy.

I'd go for Rochester too. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were pretty early reads for me - my mum handed me her copy of JE when I was an ickle girl and just said 'I think you'll love this.' And I did, even though I didn't 'get' it all that first time - and even now, if I catch the scent of those old pages I get a chill down my spine at the thought of Grace Poole! Now both books are amongst my favourites.

I prefer Rochester, definitely, but I can still see the appeal of Heathcliff, the wild and passionate gypsy man out on the Yorkshire moors. He's the one you want to redeem rather than the one you marry... ;-)

I'm glad there are so many Rochester fans out there, but rereading what I wrote about him in my review I can't help but feel like I've poisoned the well slightly - speak up Heathcliff fans, I'm sure there must be some of you around!

#61 Thanks very much bonnie - that's a very specific skill, but I'm always glad to be of service!

#63 My edition of Wuthering Heights was my mother-in-law's childhood book, and when it was passed on to me I opened it and found that it was full of pressed flowers that she must have put there as a teenager. I ended up getting hold of a different copy to read, as I couldn't bring myself to take the flowers out, and possibly destroy them in the process. That book will be with me forever.

#64 Have you ever read The Wide Sargasso Sea? It's one of those love/hate books (I love it), but it's interesting in that it gives another view of Mrs Rochester and creepy old Grace.

And I do see the appeal of Heathcliff the wild gypsy, but I just imagine him standing there on the howling moor, with his black hair all tousled, turning to me, and saying with his dark eyes smouldering..."where's my bloody dinner, woman?", and the image sort of collapses for me.

Um, nope, when I imagine him standing there on the howling moor, with his black hair all tousled, turning to me with his dark eyes smouldering, I can't say dinner is the first thing that springs to mind... ;-)

I have a weakness for the bad boys, what can I say? Rochester just pipped him to the post for not, y'know, going completely insane, but I still love Heathcliff!

Agreed, the tousled-haired bad boy will always be more attractive than the very nice boy with excellent job prospects, whose eyes stubbornly fail to even begin to smoulder.

17. The Red House Mystery, A A Milne

Written by A A Milne before the Winnie the Pooh books, this is a gentle little country house mystery that made for excellent lazy Sunday morning reading. But I have a feeling that if you asked me about it in a month from now, I wouldn't be able to tell you the names of any of the characters, or what they got up to. It certainly wasn't bad, it was just that it was quite light and fluffy and didn't really make that much of an impression on me.

It has all the ingredients of a classic Agatha Christie style novel - mistaken identity, secret passages, a bit of amateur sleuthing and so on. The main characters are jolly nice chaps, sort of Christopher-Robin-grown-up types, given to exclamations such as 'hullo! a secret door!', and 'by Jove! You mean the locked the door afterwards?'. The plot is, as these things tend to be, fairly unconvincing, but you know that will be the case before you start with books like this so it doesn't really matter too much.

Bottome line: It was enjoyable for what it was, but I'd only recommend it to devotees of country house mysteries and die hard A A Milne fans.

18. Songs of the Doomed Hunter S. Thompson

I had a lot of weird dreams about Hunter S Thompson while I was reading this book. Hunter S Thompson and I bought a puppy. Hunter S Thompson and I hosted a game show. Hunter S Thompson and I went to a party with people from my high school, and he shouted at girl who was mean to me.

Why am I dreaming about HST? Maybe because, like a very strong cheese, the books of HST are not something you should consume just before you go to bed. They seem to have a strange effect.

How to describe this book? The structure is easy enough - this is a collection of essays, articles, stories and letters ranging from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. Over the course of the decades his writing style changes a lot - in the 50s his characteristic style is developing, but it is much milder than anything from the later years. By the time he was covering the Vietnam War his tone of incredulous rage is well and truly established, and by the late 80s bitterness and a weariness are starting to creep in.

HST is a vegemite (or marmite, or whatever yeast-extract based spread you choose) writer - you love him or hate him. I love his writing (though not the man himself) because his voice is so unique. I don't always like everything he writes - much of it is bizarre, verging on the completely mental - but I like tha fact that there are certain things that he wrote that no one else could have.

If you haven't yet read any of HST's books and you think you might like to, do not start with this book. But if you already like HST this is a fascinating book, detailing his development as a writer, and as a figure of notoriety.

Best. Random (yet quite specific). Review. EVER.

#70 I plead the 'it was late, and I was tired' defence

So we just found out that my husband's uni has approved his application to transfer to Spain for the end of the year, hooray! That means I'll be going too, to live as a lady of leisure for 6 months while he studies. So what I need are some book suggestions - I've read Don Quixote, South From Granada and Homage to Catalonia recently, and I did a bit of Spanish history at uni, but I'm open to any and all suggestions!

19. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

I'm a sucker for the evil carnival genre (what's that? “evil carnival books are not a genre?” I consider it to be a genre, and this is my review, so there) - I read The Pilo Family Circus and Johannes Cabal the Necromancer last year and enjoyed them very much. A carnival is just such fertile ground for fantasy and horror. There is a romance in contemplating the lives of these outsiders, these liminal people who are always moving on that both appeals and terrifies. It leads us to fantasies of what life must be life without ties. But there is also the awareness that it must sometimes be a lonely life. Which leads us into contemplation of why anyone would choose such a life. Surely only people with terrible secrets to hide? Surely only people with nefarious intentions? And so we come to the inevitable conclusion that anyone who runs a circus must do so as a cover for something so terrible that it is beyond comprehension.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is the granddaddy of the genre, and is appropriately gothic and creepy. But it isn’t just a horror story - it is also a coming of age story that looks at the ways in which relationships with friends and parent change as we get older, and the ways in which we deal with the knowledge of our own mortality.

#73: I liked that one, too. I had not read much Bradbury prior to LT (only Fahrenheit 451), but have discovered a lot of his books here and that was one of them.

But it isn’t just a horror story - it is also a coming of age story that looks at the ways in which relationships with friends and parent change as we get older, and the ways in which we deal with the knowledge of our own mortality.

Sold. I'm adding this to my wish list. Thank you!

Me too. I seem to be adding so many books to it recently but I have to read some stuff before I can buy more!

#73 I would add that one, too, but I have already read it. And loved it.

(Maybe it's time for a re-read!)

Hello chaps, hope those of you who are yet to read Bradbury like it. It was one of those funny ones that took a while to sink in and I think would probably benefit from a reread (as if there's ever time for that!)

20. Clodia, Robert de Maria

Clodia is the fictionalised account of the love affair between the Roman poet Catullus and the aristocrat Clodia Metelli. From Catullus’ poems we have the story of their relationship, but here de Maria has attempted to it flesh out a bit. This is a well written book, though it is sometimes almost too carefully written, with an eye more to style than to feeling. This is meant to be the searing tale of passion between a scandalous socialite and a poet best known for his bawdy and obscene poetry. For some examples, see here . Yeah, you get the idea. So why was this book so utterly tame? I’m not saying I was in it for the smut (there is plenty of rumpy-pumpy here, but I skimmed over as it was mostly irritating male fantasies of dominance), what I’m saying is that this was meant to be passionate, damn it! Catullus’ poetry was full of risqué sexual jokes, gossip and invective. He was a wit, a roué young man about town. But he comes across here as utterly blank, someone who reacts to other people’s actions but is incapable of taking any action himself. I think I was meant to read this as world weary cynicism, but it just came across as flat to me. The characters are given passionate things to say but they never really came to life.

I feel like I need to say something nice about this book, because it really wasn’t as bad as I’m making it sound, I'm just in a grouchy mood today. As a portrayal of life in Republican Roman it is much more successful than as a love story as de Maria clearly knows his history and I got a pretty vivid image of what life must have been like for a wealthy young man at that time. The seedy underworld is created convincingly, and the author is much better at creating realistic male characters than he is at creating believable females. I also thought it was interesting that the author decided to accept the gossip that Clodia had had an affair with Cicero, making a convincing case for a highly unlikely relationship. But I think next time I want a trip to ancient Rome I’ll go with Robert Graves.

21. Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon

I liked this a lot, and would recommend it to fans of The Princess Bride. It isn't as funny as that (nor is it meant to be), but it is a classic adventure romp and has a similar swashbuckling feel. Set in the 10th century in the Caucasus, the main characters are a pair of opportunistic 'gentlemen of the road' (that is, bandits) who manage to get themselves involved in a conflict over the throne of Khazar and must decide whether or not to help the dispossed youngest son of the old ruler.

#79: I think I will stick to Robert Graves too.

#80: I liked that one a lot as well. Glad you enjoyed it, Tash.

#79,

Whoa, the cover is an unpleasant color... but I think I might give this one a shot if our library has it, despite the fact that it seems flawed. Thanks for pointing it out.

> 80
I read that one this year and liked it much too :-)
Anita

#82 It's definitely worth it if you're interested in Roman history - I mainly picked it up because I'm fascinated by Clodia and I haven't ever managed to find a biography or history about her and this was the closest I could get.

#82, 83 I loved Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon and was really suprised at how different it was from that book - have either of you read anything else by him?

22. The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter

Carter apparently didn't like it when people described her stories as 'versions' of fairy tales, but that's pretty much what they are. That's not meant to be a dismissive comment, just that I don't know how else to describe these stories. There are retellings of Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood and Bluebeard, each told with an inventive little twist. Each story brings a new emotional depth to the story it is based on, allowing the female protagonists slightly more motivation that just wanting to marry a prince.

However, I didn't really read these as feminist retellings. OK, sure, the archetypal figures of fairy tales are given personalities and voices of their own, but they are still largely at the mercy of the whims of men, and their sexuality is usually passive. As one critic points out; "Carter envisages women's sensuality simply as a response to male arousal. She has no conception of women's sexuality as autonomous desire." I don't know if I completely agree with this, but there is definitely sense in which Carter's stories describe sensuality as a conflicting. I other words, I think what these stories do really well is combine sensuality with a fear of sensuality, as in one of my favourite passages from the title story which retells the tale of Bluebeard;

I saw him watching me in the guilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. I'd never seen, or else had never acknowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes, but in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away. The next day, we were married.

I love these stories. I love the imagination and the inventiveness of Carter's writing, her wicked sense of humour, her talent for twisting stories that we know so well into forms that are almost unrecognisable and yet which remain so familiar.

23. The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers, Paul Torday

The world needs more writers like Paul Torday. Light enough in style that you can read his books late at night or on the bus and not feel that you've missed something, and yet weighty enough in subject that you don't feel like you're consuming the literary equivalent of fairy floss. The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers is set in the lead up to and immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. The narrator is Eck, a mid-level functionary for a hedge fund firm in London. He doesn’t really understand what the company he works for does, but he earns a very good salary and can’t see that the way his bosses do business could be doing any harm. By chance he meets Charlie Summers, a man who describes himself as an entrepreneur but who could probably better be described as a bumbling con man. This is broadly a satire of the world of finance, mocking the idea that people ever really expect to get something for nothing.

24. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens

I finally understand why people get all gooey about Dickens. The only book I'd read up until now was Great Expectations, and it was horribly tainted by my high school english teacher (ten years later and I still can't forgive her for ruining so many wonderful pieces of literature for me with her appalling racism, stupidity and just general wackiness). But I now officially have a reader's crush on Chuck.

As has been noted many times, and by people who were much better at expressing it than me, the characters just walk off the page. You can hear them talking, see them in your mind's eye. Brilliant. And the names are just a joy.

The only thing I didn't like about this book something that I knew about it going in - that it is unfinished. But you can make this a positive if you like, in that you can spend ages wondering about what the ending was going to be.

25. Heavy Weather, PG Wodehouse

Looks like some good recent reading, Tash.

I have not heard of Paul Torday. I will see if my library has any of his books. Thanks for the recommendation.

26. The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris

Tim, the protagonist of The Unnamed, has a condition that makes him walk compulsively. He might be in bed, at work, or talking to someone when he starts to walk, unable to stop until the compulsion releases him and he simply collapses from exhaustion. It is never asserted whether this is a mental or a physical disorder, though in an interview I heard with the author he stated that it is quite clearly a physical problem. Far be it from me to disagree, but I don't think it's quite that obvious in the book.

At any rate, whether the disorder is psychological or physiological is beside the point, and the idea seems to be that the body is at war with the mind. Or if not at war, that there is a profound disconnect between the mind and the body in the life of the main character. He is so focused on his work and his inner life that he sometimes seems cut off from the rest of his life.

I felt that part of his problem was a sudden awareness of his body that he'd never noticed before - when he talks about 'the other' he's talking about his body;

The advantages the other had over him, advantages that made hunger gnawing and pain vigilant and a touch from a woman bound up in memories of love more unbearable than all the other ills put together, were insurmountable. The sense were unvaqnquishable... Hungry? Fuck you, two days without food. Hurting? Too bad, it's your funeral...He resided behind armed checkpoints and coils of razor wire and slabs of blastproof concrete, but her touch was a convoy.

I liked this a lot. It wasn't easy to read the descriptions of the Tim's disintegration, but it was gripping and I really engaged with it. I think I would describe this as a cathartic novel - I didn't feel uplifted, but I did feel emotionally stretched by it.

27. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

In my personal literary pantheon, Evelyn Waugh sits at the right hand of PG Wodehouse. They sit there together in the great celestial drawing room, one curmudgeonly, the other kindly, and they plot the mayhem of our lives. Sometimes PG has to gently remind Evelyn to be a bit kinder to his subjects, and sometimes Evelyn has to remind PG to take off the rose coloured glasses. That’s a belief system I could get behind.

But I’m rambling. Scoop is a brilliant piece of satire, targeting journalism and politics. It seems to veer about wildly, and yet you know that Waugh has it under total control the whole time. The plot centres on a case of mistaken identity, and the wrong man is sent to cover the revolution in Ishmaelia (a fictional African country). William Boot is a mild mannered writer of a nature column before he is plucked from his comfortable country house and sent to Africa, where he manages to become the most successful journalist there through dumb luck. He is essentially one of life’s innocents, and escapes unscathed from his trials mainly because he generally doesn’t really register that there is a problem, though he generally manages to leave behind him a trail of confusion.

This is one of those great books that leaves you grinning an evil grin from the sheer wickedness of Waugh’s humour, as in this exchange between Mr Salter the editor and William Boot, who believes that he is about to get the sack;


(Salter) ‘Would you like to go to Ishmaelia?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘Not at all. For one thing, I couldn’t afford the fare’
‘Oh, we would pay the fare,’ said Mr Salter, laughing indulgently.
So that was it. Transportation. The sense of persecution which had haunted William for the last three hours took palpable and grotesque shape before him. It was too much. Conscious of a just cause and a free soul he arose and defied the nightmare. ‘Really,’ he said, in ringing tones, ‘I call that a bit thick. I admit I slipped up on the great crested grebe, slipped up badly. As it happened, it was not my fault. I came here prepared to explain, apologise and, if need be, make reparation. You refused to listen to me. “Good God, no”, you said, when I offered to explain. And now you calmly propose to ship me out of the country because of a trifling, and in my opinion, justifiable error. Who does Lord Copper think he is? The mind boggles at the vanity of the man...’
‘Boot, Boot, old man, ‘cried Mr Salter, ‘you’ve got this all wrong. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, you have no more ardent admirer than Lord Copper. He wants you to work for him in Ishmaelia.’

‘Would he pay my fare back?’

#90: I will have to find a copy of that one. Thanks for the recommendation, Tash.

#89 - Thanks for reviewing The Unnamed. I read and loved Then We Came to the End and have been debating whether to read this next one or not. I have read several reviews, some liked it, some not, but yours is the best short description I have seen. I have to say I still haven't decided whether or not to read it, but at least I'm pretty clear what it will be like if I do. Did you read Then We Came to the End? Did you like it? How would you compare the two?

#90 I went to thumb your review on the book page but it's not there! Really good review, I've never read any Evelyn Waugh before but I have Vile Bodies checked out of the library at the moment and I'm looking forward to it.

#92 Hi Janet - No, I haven't read Then We Came to the End, but my friend has it and has promised to hand it over when he's finished. I would say that The Unnamed is definitely worth reading if you get a chance - it wasn't an easy read, but it was very enjoyable.

#93 Why thank you very much - I'd never considered posting reviews outside of my own thread, I've always left it to those who seem a little more confident! I find it really hard to share my opinions about things I've been reading, which is why I like LT so much, I find it takes the pressure off a bit.

Vile Bodies is my second favourite Evelyn Waugh (first being Brideshead Revisited) - Waugh really digs his claws into the fatuousness of high society and is properly bitchy. Hope you enjoy it!

Added both of those to my extensive LT Recs Post-It Notes of Financial Doom... (one day I'm just going to go crazy and buy EVERYTHING!)

LT Recs Post-It Notes of Financial Doom...

I like that phrase! Well said!

#95 I have been in crazy money saving mode since the start of the year to pay for my trip to spain, and have not actually parted with money for books in all that time - considering that I used to buy at least a book a week, it has been painful. So many beautiful things, I cannot own them all... And then, two magic words; 'birthday money'. Ahhh. Once I get over my crisis of indecision as to what I actually want, I'm going on a (very modest) spree, hooray!

28. Plan for Chaos, John Wyndham

Plan for Chaos was written by Wyndham at about the same time as Day of the Triffids, but was not published by a mainstream press until now. 'Previously unpublished work' is usually code for 'wasn't fit to publish at time of author's death', and it usually turns out to be a cynical grab for cash, trading on the author's good name.

Plan for Chaos is better than most bits of unfinished work that have been getting published, but it still isn't quite as brilliant as some of Wyndham's other books. It's a mash-up of hardboiled crime noir and science fiction, and put me in mind of Bladerunner, but with the added bonus of a sense of humour. Like if Phillip Marlowe had wandered onto the set of The X-Files.

The plot is intriguing - crime photographer Johnny Farthing notices that his fiancee (and cousin) Freda bears an uncanny resemblance to some women who have all died under suspicious circumstances. When he starts to investigate, she disappears, and he is dragged into a bizarre plot involving Nazis, eugenics and plans for world domination. The let down for me was the ending - I felt like Wyndham wasn't quite sure what to do with this massive conspiracy he'd invented.

I have been trying to read Lionel Shriver's new book, So Much for That, and I've had to give up. I have loved her previous books, and I was so excited that there was a new one, but this is just so damn depressing that I hve lost the will to keep turning the pages. I can deal with dark, but this book is just like an extended whine. I get it, American health care has some very serious problems, and illnesses are horrible.

I just looked at the Digested Read in the Guardian, and I think Jim Crace has just about summed this book up for me;

Today was the day, Shep had decided. The day "The Afterlife" would begin. He had three one-way tickets to Pemba in the Indian Ocean and his wife, Glynis, and son, Zach, could come or not. All his life he had been a salt-of-the-earth Man of the Manual, doing his best for his family, sweating 25 hours a day, selling his business at the wrong moment in 1996 and having to go back to work for the new boss as a toilet attendant, but now it was Me time.

"Tough shit," Glynis snapped. "I've got terminal cancer and we need your health insurance."

Jackson wiped his 17-year-old daughter's anus. Flicka had, of course, been born with a rare disability that meant she would die soon. "I hate my life," she spat. "Why did I have to end up in a Lionel Shriver book, where everything is always shit?"

LOL! Hmm, I was thinking about buying this book this weekend or next week.

I'v read some good reviews of So Much for That as well, so if you like Shriver's books it might be worth giving it a go anyway!

29. Your Skirt's Too Short, Emily Maguire

I've never considered myself a feminist, but then I've never really considered myself not a feminist, either. If that makes sense. I suppose I hardly ever really think about it. But as Emily Maguire argues in this book, it’s very sad that my generation (I’m 26) and the generation after mine have largely dismissed feminism as an interesting but irrelevant relic from the past. Feminism, she points out, has an undeservedly bad reputation when what it has tried to do has been so noble. It’s not about ridiculous battles like trying to get ‘humanity’ renamed ‘huwomanity’. It’s not about man-hating bra-burners. What it is about is the pursuit of equality. It isn’t enough to think that the major victories have been won and that we don’t have to worry about it anymore. OK, so women can vote and work and aren’t usually married off at a young age anymore, but there is still a significant gap between the salaries of men and women doing the same jobs, on average women still do more housework, and women are still far more likely to be the victims of sexual assault than men. Feminism is not about emasculating men, nor is it about emulating them. It is about making society as equal as it can possibly be.

The book is aimed at girls in their late teens to early twenties, and rather than try to dictate to her readers what feminism should mean (though she makes her own opinions pretty clear), Maguire encourages people to think slightly differently about the ways in which society works. It opens with a list of questions such as; Are most of the stories in the business section of your city’s daily paper written by or about women? Is there a special ‘Men’s Section’ filled with celebrity gossip, fashion and beauty tips? When you watch female sporting events are there hot guys in tiny outfits cheering for them from the sidelines? Maguire asks the reader to think about the fact that ads trying to sell products to men tend to feature scantily clad women, while ads trying to sell products to women tend to feature... scantily clad women. The point isn’t that there should be more half naked men around, but that women should not be seen as creatures whose role it is to be half naked.

But far from hectoring her readers, this is a book that focuses more on creating awareness in a constructive way – Maguire is witty and warm, and seems like she’d be heaps of fun to hang out with – than it is about preaching. She peppers the book with personal anecdotes, and makes feminism seem like a positive thing to get involved with, a process of establishing new ways for men and women to interact, rather than a bitter battle between the sexes.

If you're interested, she has some greats essays on her website

30. Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett

I'd been saving this new Discworld book for when I knew I'd be able to get some uninterrupted time to read it. Like all of Pratchett's books it is warm and funny, and just makes you feel good about the world. I felt that this one was slightly too cluttered with ideas and characters and could have been pared down slightly, but I'd rather have slightly too much Pratchett than not enough.

Edited to add, because it just occured to me: I don't think Pratchett gets enough credit for the brilliant female characters he creates. Sure, there are the dimwit beauties, like Juliet in this book, but there are so many women who are so strong, and who are basically the rocks that entire societies depend on. I'm thinking of Granny Weatherwax and the other witches, Tiffany Aching, Agnes Nitt, Lady Margolotta, Angua from the City Watch books, and now Glenda in this book. They are almost without exception clever, strong women who don't rely on men to support them. In fact, if there are men in their lives, they tend to be a bit helpless and a bit wet. There you have it - Terry Pratchett, unlikely feminist.

31. Smile or Die, Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich starts her polemic against the 'positive thinking' movement with a description of her experience of dealing with breast cancer. She writes that she was frightened and often angry, but that she was told repeatedly that she had to have a positive attitude in order to beat the disease. Outbursts of frustration and rage were frowned upon, and she was basically given vague threats that a negative attitude would guarantee her death. She found this so infuriating that she launched an investigation into the positive thinking movement. This book is the result, and I loved it.

As someone who is by my nature given to a pessimistic outlook, I find it irritating to the point of offensive when it is suggested that anything that goes wrong in my life is my own fault for not being cheerful enough. Sorry, but I’d rather look at the world with my eyes open rather than fool myself that everything is just fine the way it is. That’s not to say that I expect the worst, just that I am aware that it is a possibility, and I don’t like being told that there’s something wrong with that.

Ehrenreich stands up for people like me, and points out the potential dangers of a relentlessly upbeat attitude. She’s not saying that people shouldn’t be happy. What she does say is that there are serious social repercussions for people who invest themselves too heavily in having a ‘positive attitude’, at the expense of having a realistic world view. She describes one motivation guru who advises that you expel all negativity from your life, meaning that you stop seeing people who have negative opinions. This is fine, up to a point – who wants someone in their life who whinges non-stop? But when you’re the CEO of, for example, Lehman Brothers, and you refuse to listen to analysts who are telling you that you need to reign in your business practices and you fire them to being too ‘negative’, then we have a very big, very real problem.

Just found your thread in my weekend exploration of new unread threads. I agree with you about Pratchett. I think he is stuffing his ideas into his latest books to leave his legacy before he becomes unable to, leaving Nation and Unseen Academicals rather chewy but still delicious. Word is he's putting the finishing touches on the fourth Tiffany Aching book.

Edited to correct touchstone.

Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris

I resisted for so long. But the three million people telling me everyday that I have to read these books finally wore me down, and my friend and I made a pact to read this first book together over the weekend. This in spite of my husband's look of disdain when I showed him what I was reading; 'that's just soft core porn' he sneered. Well, yes and no. And anyway, I'm expanding my horizons. To include vampire romances. God, I never thought I'd say that.

To my suprise, I actually really liked this book, soft core vampire porn notwithstanding.

But first, criticism; this is not a well written book. I mean, it isn't bad. Or not as bad as Twilight, which was what I expected. But it is a bit clunky - we're always hearing in unnecessary detail stuff like how the main character prepares food (coffee was 'ready in a jiffy', 'I ate something I'd nuked in the microwave') and about what clothes Sookie is putting on or removing, as here when she prepares to get into the shower;

I pulled off the skirt and tee, put them away, and stepped out of my panties and unhooked my bra

So... you got undressed?

There's also some painfully bad dialogue, especially in the more intimate scenes, as in one where the two main characters have a bath together; 'Shall I bathe you first?' kind of creeped me out for some reason, and there's a scene in which the Bill the vampire brushes Sookie's hair because 'he used to do it for his sister'. Urk.

But what do I know? I haven't sold a million billion books. And I still liked this book a lot. Harris has a very wry sense of humour (I love that she named the vampire 'Bill') and Sookie is a fun character - she's sweet and a bit naive, but she's not at all the simpering idiot I'd been dreading. It's also refreshing to read a book in which the female character is pretty keen on getting laid, and yet is not depicted as slutty, just as a grown woman with normal appetites. I can't see myself reading any more of these in the immediate future, but I did like this first one enough to want to read more of them eventually.

#105 That's the impression that I get, and I'd rather he stuff all his genius into the next couple of books while he still can. Poor old Terry, what a horrible thing to happen to such a champ!

#104: I like your take on the Ehrenreich book, Tash. I will have to look for that one. Thanks for the review.

#108 Thanks Stasia - I consider it score one for the 'positivity challenged' amongst us!

#109: That is definitely me - positively challenged! I like it.

We could start encouraging people to give themselves negative affirmations every day to demotivate themselves

'Do worry - be unhappy'

'There's always a cloud around the silver lining'

I think we could do very well coming up with slogans for the 'un-positive' movement, lol

It's a market just waiting to be tapped

I can see the bumper stickers now: instead of smiley-yellow faces, we will have frowny-yellow faces

I love it! I'm going to use it as the cover image for my new series of books; Stop Living, Start Thinking, Who Moved My Anti-Depressants? and what I am quietly confident will turn out to be a best seller, Vodka and Tonic For the Soul

LOL

33. A Confederate General From Big Sur, Richard Brautigan

I’m not quite sure what to make of this book. I outright loved it, but I don't really know what it means. Summarising it probably won't help, as it doesn't really have a plot, but here's the rundown anyway.

It's a loosely a story about Lee Mellon and Jesse, two hippies who kind of drift around for a while, meeting up occasionally. They briefly live in the same flat block, (a place that is owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, but it rained in the front hall) and then Lee moves out. When Jesse's relationship with Cynthia (who is only ever referred to, we never meet her) breaks up, he goes to live with Lee in his shack on the cliffs in Big Sur where they are constantly broke and often hungry. Lee claims to be the great grand-son of a famous confederate general, who turns out to have been neither famous nor a general, and Jesse -the narrator - remains kind of an enigma. They encounter Elizabeth, a beautiful part time call girl, and Elaine, a sweet young girl, and Roy Earle, a wealthy businessman who retreats to Lee's place when he has his occasional bouts of madness.

So that's it for the plot. They don't really do anything very much - they acquire some alligators and spend a lot of time eating breakfast, but that's about it.

But this is one of those books to which the plot is pretty much incidental. This is a series of impressions of a life, a celebration of youthful unconcern with the consequences of actions and a refusal to contemplate the future. Jesse is a kind soul, Lee slightly less so, but they mean no harm and kind of drift along aimlessly but contentedly.

The style reminded me a lot of Hunter S Thompson, though maybe only if the good doctor had been assiduous about taking his mood stabilisers. It has just a hint of gonzo about it, but there is none of the anger or manic activity of HST’s writing. It is gently mocking in tone, with flashes of absurdity (as when Lee discovers that that best way to quiet the frogs in the pond outside their shack is to scream ‘Campbell’s Soup!’ at them).
I think that the best summary of this book is from a review of one of Brautigan’s other books on Cory Redekop’s site Shelf Monkey;

I cannot fully understand, or put into words, the effect The Abortion had on me, and I have the feeling that overanalysing the work will only dilute its already-fragile nature. There is very little in the way of plot, and the work as a whole has the effervescence of nostalgia.

Just catching up -
#102 - this sounds a really good book for trying to explain to young women why they need to still care about this. But.... how to get them to read it? My 18 year old daughter will automatically reject anything she thinks is about "feminism", even though she is actively involved in other equality campaigns. How do I get her to even so much as look at this book? And no, leaving it in the toilet won't work - I tried that trick for years and gave up when I realized she never opened a thing I left in there!

Or maybe she did, but told you she didn't, so as not to give you the satisfaction? ;-)

#121 Ha! That's exactly what I would have done at that age!

#120 So true and so sad - I would have been a bit thingy about reading a book about feminism when I was 18 as well, and I was little miss social crusader when it came to just about every other issue. Maybe you could try guiding her towards Maguire's website - she has some essays up about a variety of topics, which might be more appealing than committing to reading the whole book about feminism? There's also a great website called Feministe which combines articles about feminism with other things about a range of social issues. Good luck!

#121 - I never thought of that - VERY VERY possible. I'll hang on to that thought!

#122 - Thanks for the suggestion. Might work. Or maybe I should just wait and hope she meets some people when she goes away to college who have more impact than I do in this area.....

I find it interesting how titles are different depending on the market they sell it in. I read Bright-Sided but would have probably been even more drawn to the title Smile or Die although it's the same book.

I find that interesting too - the examples we get a lot at the bookshop where I work are Down Under by Bill Bryson, which is called In a Sunburnt Country in some countries, and the first Harry Potter book, which is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for most of the world, but Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the US. I've often wondered if this is a marketing thing or a copyright thing.

The same happens for films. "Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves" received a promotion in Germany and became "Robin Hood, König der Diebe" (King of Thieves).

#126 My uncle lives in Singapore, and I remember him telling me that when Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me was released there the title was changed to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shoiked Me (shoiked apparently means 'treated me nicely'). I had to google this to check the details as it was a while ago that I heard about it, and according to wikipedia;

In Finland the film was called Agentti joka tuuppasi minua (The spy who bumped me), in China The Spy Who Liked Me a Lot. The Italian version was titled La spia che ci provava, which can be roughly translated as The spy who tried to seduce, but in a slightly more provocative way. In Brazil, it is called O Agente Bond Cama, roughly The Spy who is Good in Bed.

Not all countries translated the title into something less raunchy. The Norwegian title of the movie is Spionen som spermet meg, which is a slightly dirtier way of saying “The Spy Who Ejaculated on Me”. In Quebec, the title is "Austin Powers: Agent 00sexe" (Austin Powers: Agent 00sex).

Well, it's been a craptastic couple of weeks around here, so I'm not going to write my usual rambling reviews of what I've been reading lately, I'll just make a couple of quick comments.

34. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

Loved it. An amazing piece of writing that reminded me of why I sometimes entertain the fantasy of becoming a writer. April and Frank are some of the best, most realistic characters I've ever come across. They aren't nice people, but they are sympathetic. We understand why they're awful, even if they don't. Incidentally, I recently read that Yates didn't mean this to be a study of a marriage, rather as a comment on the failure of American society in the 1950s to live up to expectations, and the disappointment people felt on realising that the promises of near perfection could not possibly be fulfilled.

35. When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris

Hi-larious. I've been a fan of Amy Sedaris for a while now, and this was wonderful too. I especially liked the story about quitting smoking in Japan.

36. The Last Woman in England (no touchstone), Maggie Joel

Well executed (pardon the pun) novel about the fictional woman who was the second last to be sentenced to death in England. In the opening scene Harriet Wallis shoots her husband Cecil dead, in front of a room full of people. The story then goes back to the start of the chain of events that set off this tragedy, showing us that tragedies are the result of incremental changes in a life. Taught, suspenceful writing, very enjoyable.

37. A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense, Normand Baillargeon

Would be great if you're a newcomer to the idea of critical thinking. However, if you're ever read Carl Sagan's brilliant The Demon Haunted World this will all feel a bit old hat. A good beginner's guide, but it failed to hold my interest.

Catching up, throwing books onto my wishlist from these last few messages - and I HAD to let you know that if your deliciously named anti- Have-A-Nice-Day manifestoes ever come to pass, I'm there by virtue of the titles alone. I may even allow myself a sly smirk as I peruse the covers - provided no one's looking, of course...

I've got a couple of months off work coming up, and based on the positive (negative?) reactions I've had to the idea here and from other people, maybe I should look into actually writing these things... By the way, I hold full copyright in perpetuity on each of those titles. I'm on to you, Potten.

More catching up. They've been piling up - I can't believe I found time to read all these books in the last couple of weeks with everything that's been going on. I must have been sleep-reading.

38. The Racket, Gideon Haigh

This is a history of abortion in Australia, but rather than getting bogged down in the rights and wrongs of abortion, Haigh focuses on the role it has had on the development of the criminal underworld. Abortion has always been illegal in Australia though these days it falls into one of those grey-areas where no-one - with one recent exception - is actually arrested for it, but up until the 1960s it was considered quite a serious crime. As with anything that is illegal, but which people are going to continue to do anyway, when it is unregulated and illegal it leaves the door open for unscrupulous practitioners and corrupt cops who can be bribed to look the other way. Which of course means that people who would otherwise have been fairly innocuous end up involved in all sorts of criminal activity. One of Melbourne's most notorious crime families - the Morans - were involved right from the start, with the backyard abortion business of Belle Moran. This is a really interesting book, and I respect the fact that Haigh is careful never to make a moral judgement about his topic, choosing instead to let history speak for itself.

39. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon

I was reading this quite happily until I happened to notice that Chabon wrote it when he was 23, which made me feel horribly washed up. Because this is really freaking good. Wonder Boys is one of my favourite books (and movies), and you can see some of these themes that Chabon explores there developing here, but where WB is more mature and controlled, this book ambitiously tries to fit everything in at once, and for the most part it works. This is in part the story of a young man learning about his sexuality and trying to decide what he wants out of life. He falls in love with the dramatic, somehow unreal girl Phlox, but at the same time he falls in love with the arch, apparently aristocratic Arthur Lecomte, all the while trying to decide how he feels about his father, the genteel gangster. In some ways you could read it as a reimagining of Brideshead Revisited, in that this is the story of a somewhat naive, somewhat directionless young man who allows himself to be swept up in the glamour and smoke and mirrors of the lives of other people.

40. The Hunchback Assignments: The Dark Deeps, Arthur Slade

The second book in a children’s steampunk series about Modo, the teenage spy who can change his body to look like anyone he chooses. The catch is that when he hasn’t ‘changed’ his natural form is a terribly deformed hunchback. He works for Mr Socrates and the Permanent Association, who battle the dastardly plans of the evil Clockwork Guild. The first book was very entertaining, this one slightly less so. It felt a bit rushed, as if the author was under pressure to get a follow up to the first book out quickly. Still, even when the writing lacks something, the plot and the ideas are original and good fun.

41. Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick

Demick’s book about North Korea steers clear of discussing the politics of the situation in favour of telling the story of the world’s last communist dictatorship from a human perspective. She tells the story of a group of defectors, giving us the story of their lives from the early days of Kim Sung-Il’s leadership up to their new lives in South Korea. She makes a point of not hectoring her readers about the evils of North Korea’s repressive regime by instead telling the stories of lives that have been sacrificed to the insanity and selective blindness of the ruling party, and of showing us that these are real people who have suffered, and whose potential has been wasted due to the misfortune of living where and when they did. This is what reportage is all about – letting the people and the situation tell their story, rather than putting yourself as a journalist into the story. Brilliant journalism.

42. Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett

My ‘Oh my god it’s 3am why am I still awake’ book. I don’t know how I’d cope with insomnia without Terry Pratchett.

43. So Much for That, Lionel Shriver

So I threw this book against the wall a couple of times while I was reading it, and at one point I publicly declared that I was done with it. But I couldn't help myself, I had to know what happened. I'm glad I did finish it as it really picked up in the second half and I ended up enjoying it. However, I stick by my original assertion that someone should have cut this sucker down to size. At just under 500 pages there were bits of it that went on and on, but it has an interesting plot and I do love Shriver's acerbic, world weary and suprisingly funny tone.

#132: But I couldn't help myself, I had to know what happened.

I hate books like that! You just get sucked in and then cannot get out again without knowing how it ends.

>133 alcottacre: I hear you on that one- i found "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" like that, and resented it for it (and got annoyed that I got so tense reading it that I got a stiff neck!)

It's true - there is a dent in the wall opposite the end of my bed from where I have thrown books that frustrated me. I'm like a lot of people around here - I tend to be picky about which books I choose to start, because once I'm in I have to finish reading. It drives me crazy, especially when it's a book by an author whose other books I have liked, as I tend to be less cautious about starting them, and then - irrationally - end up feeling betrayed. Still, at least bad books make you realise how good the good ones are...

#134 I think that's first case of Stieg Larsson-related stress injury I've heard of!

44. The Speed of Light, Javier Cercas

Part of my effort to read more Spanish fiction. It was OK, not great. A young Spanish wannabe writer moves to America to teach at a college in Illinois. He meets the eccentric Vietnam veteran Rodney Falk, and the two of them are in the process of developing a friendship when Rodney disappears. The narrator spends several years wondering about Rodney, during which time he moves home to Spain, starts a family and unexpectedly achieves the fame and glory he's always wanted. As he’s basking in his success, Rodney comes back into his life, and tragedy strikes his previously happy life. Cercas explores ideas of guilt and responsibility, and looks at the ways in which we punish ourselves for our mistakes, both real and imagined. This is one of those books that is disappointing in that there is nothing wrong with it as such, but it didn’t really move me.

45. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Why did it take me so long to read this book? What a little nugget of perfection, will have to reread it soon so that I can get a bit more of a handle on it.

46. I Was Behind You, Nicolas Fargues

The narrator of this book lives in Madagascar with his wife, Alex. They have a tolerably unhappy relationship until he admits to kissing another woman. The tensions of their relationship are instantly dragged to the surface and they fall into a soul-destroying pattern of behaviour. The worse her behaviour becomes, including having a full-blown affair of her own, the more abject the narrator becomes. Alex's behaviour becomes abusive, and he still can't bring himself to leave. Until he travels to Florence to stay with his father, and meets the beautiful Alice with whom he falls instantly in love.

This is an interesting book - told in a stream of conciousness style, it has a lovely flow to it. The narrator is just sad enough to elicit your sympathy without being completely pathetic. And it is interesting that the author has chosen to tell the story of a man suffering at the hands of a physically and emotionally abusive woman, something I'd never come across before. He does this extremely well, making Alex seem damaged and yet not actually evil, and manages to tell the story in a way that is emotionally involving without ever straying to the dubious realms of misery-porn. As an exploration of the thought processes and emotions of an individual, this is a polished book and I really enjoyed it. I believe it is the author's first novel - or at least, the first translated into English - I will be looking for more.

Edited to add titles and authors. Going to look for brain now .

#136: Going to look for brain now.

If you find a spare one, would you let me know? I could always use another!

BTW - I am also a fan of Fahrenheit 451.

I eventually found it down the back of the sofa. A bit dusty, but seems to work OK.

47. Beautiful Malice, Rebecca James

I’m being lazy and just posting the review I did for the local paper for this book. Full disclosure: the author is a friend of a friend and I was asked to read and review this book for the weekly column we do for the shop. Having said that, I did genuinely like this book, and probably wouldn’t have reviewed it if I hadn’t. It isn’t amazingly well written, but it is one of those books that you’ll inhale in a day because it is both easy to read and gripping.

OK, so this is technically a young adult novel. But that really shouldn’t put adult readers off, because this is also one of those great books that will keep you up at night, compelled to read just that little bit more. It is the story of Katherine, a young woman who lives in self-imposed isolation after the trauma of a family tragedy. When she is befriended by the charismatic, outgoing Alice, she starts to come out of her shell and to live life again. But Alice’s exuberance gives way to maniac tendencies, which in turn give way to some dangerously disturbed behaviour, and Katherine starts to worry seriously about what her new friend might be capable of. This is a skilfully handled thriller with a strong cast of characters, and James begins building the tension from the first sentence, drawing it out steadily over the course of the book.

Incidentally, the edition being sold here in Australia is set in Sydney, but I understand that the American edition has been slightly rewritten so that it is set in New York. I’d be interested to see how that plays out – location isn’t especially important to the plot, but I did read the characters as very Australian, and I wonder how they would read after their transformation into Americans.

#138: Any extras? I will take a slightly used, dusty one!

#139: I will have to look for that one when it comes out in the States, although why it has to be rewritten eludes me. What is wrong with it being set in Sydney for Pete's sake?

48. Soulless, Gail Carriger

So much fun. It reminded me a lot of the TV show Buffy - it's a bit silly, and doesn't take itself too seriously, and there's this constant feeling that the author is standing over your shoulder and giggling along with you, nudging you in the ribs every time she gets Alexia and Lord Maccon together.

#141: I really need to get hold of Carriger's books. They sound very fun and I am missing out!!

#140 I'm hanging on the the one I've got! Though this week I have managed to misplace my passport, atm card, and glasses, and to overlook the fact that my driver's licence had expired, so maybe I should think about sending it to the cleaners.

As to the change of setting, apparently it was at the instigation of the US publisher which seems weird to me. I'm pretty sure Americans could cope with the crazy exoticism of Sydney.

#142

If the idea of literary love child of Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse appeals, you should definitely try Soulless.

I like the blurb;

Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she is being rudely attacked by a vampire to whom she has not been properly introduced! Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire, and the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate. With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London's high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?

#143: I am sure even American teenagers could cope with 'exotic' Sydney too. Sometimes I really wonder what publishers are thinking.

Too bad about the brain, though. I could certainly use an extra one.

#144: I have had Soulless on my PBS wishlist forever now. I think I am just going to have to break down and buy it.

49. The Cogwheel Brain, Doron Swade

I am currently obsessed with the wonderful 2D Goggles webcomic. If you like steampunk and jokes about maths, poetry and street musicians, you should get over there as soon as possible. As a result of this obsession, my number one favourite historical figure has become Charles Babbage (Cicero and Clodia Metelli are numbers two and three, in case you were curious - why, yes, I am a giant nerd, thanks for asking), which is why I have been reading this wonderful book.

Babbage spent most of his life trying to develop an automatic calculating machine, a quest that was thwarted by lack of funding, lack of public interest and by Babbage's own personality quirks. He is commonly thought of as the father of modern computers, though in this book Swade makes the argument that this is not entirely true, while acknowledging that he was still an impressive man.

This is a really well written book, split between the story of Babbage's efforts to build the machine and Swade's own attempt in the late 1980s to complete the machine. I was slightly disappointed that the focus was so heavily on the story of the machine rather than on Babbage's fascinating life - he was an associate of Dickens and Darwin! He almost didn't graduate because of blasphemous statements he made! He loathed street musicians! - but, to be fair, Swade never intended the book to be a straight biography. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the amazing things engineers and scientists managed to accomplish during the Victorian era.

Next, I'm going to try and get my hands on a book by Babbage called Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, which from the extracts I've read of it looks to be very entertaining.

#146: I am a giant nerd too (my favorite historical personages are Winston Churchill and Leonardo da Vinci), so I will look for the Swade book and I will have to check out 2D Goggles as well. Thanks, Tash!

ETA: I tried clicking on the 2D Goggles link in your message, but it took me to a blank page?

Oops! Should be OK now.

And how could I forget old Winnie C? He was awesome too - my husband and I were looking at wikiquotes the other night and giggling over some of his bon mots. Not content with being a big nerd, I also married one!

Yep, it is working now, thanks.

My hubby is a nonreader, so I have to come to LT to let me nerdiness let fly!

Very odd about the relocation of the book. I've heard of several cases of words being changed for US editions of UK books with quite bizarre results.

#150 Reminds me of the updating that was recently done to the language in Enid Blyton books to make them more acessible to children today - I feel like this sort of thing is missing the point a bit, and that people are much more open to being challenged by words and ideas that they aren't familiar with than publishing companies are giving them credit for. OK, deep breath, I'll take my grumpy hat off.

Two novellas this week, which have broken up my reading of the mammoth tome The Frozen Heart, by Almudena Grandes. I'm going to be plugging away that one for a while! Also on deck, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchen's autobiography.

50. A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognised I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it had expected to find itself.

So opens this stunningly beautiful book, a graceful and emotionally true exploration of the numbing experience of grief and loneliness. The protagonist is George, a British professor at a small college in California. He has recently had to deal with the loss of his partner, a loss compounded by the fact that, as a gay man, he already feels himself to be on the periphery of society. The story follows a day in his life, from the moment he wakes to the time he goes to sleep, and in the course of that day we learn what it is to deal with isolation and grief. The academic, tightly controlled thought processes of the opening paragraph are characteristic of George’s way of looking at the world, and even as he fantasises about the revenge he would like to take on society for being a world that no longer contains Jim, he can’t help but lay out his thoughts rationally and precisely; All are, in the last analysis, responsible for Jim’s death; their words, their thoughts, their whole way of life willed it... Jim is nothing, now, but an excuse for hating three quarters of the population of America.

I don’t tend to cry when I read books, but I don’t mind admitting that at the end of this book I was a little bit weepy. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

51. Sunday Daffodil and Other Happy Endings, P Robert Smith

Ummm... what? I have to say that I didn't get this book. I loved Smith's previous book, the brilliantly named Up a Tree in the Park at Night with a Hedgehog, but I wasn't really sure what to make of this one. It starts out strongly enough, but lost it for me towards the end. But that's not to say that I disliked it. Um.

Maybe I should describe the plot a bit. The narrator is Fielding Montanna, a moody teenager and the only child of wealthy, distant parents. He affects a laconic, rambling Holden Caulfield-esque style of speaking, which Smith does imitate quite well;

I guess what I'm trying to say is we weren't really that close. We weren't the sort of family that sits around gasbagging about our day and stuff like that. You know, like some corny family on some corny old TV show who sit around the table making terrifically witty small talk, even really young kids... I don't know if there ever were any real-life families like that, but I guess there were or maybe there still are, somewhere. Who knows. What I do know is that if we'd ever tried it I wouldn't be surprised if we actually bored each other's heads clean off. I really wouldn't

Walking home one day, he is knocked down by a car, but escapes apparently unscathed. Except that events from this moment become increasingly weird and delirious, and I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to read it as the ravings of a damaged mind, or if it was supposed to be reality. What you need to know is that the events that follow include an abandoned penny arcade, a slime monster, and clowns.

In spite of my 'wha?' reaction, I do love this author's style of writing - he's really good at maintaining a tone that is sardonic, and yet self-aware in a way that lets you know that he doesn't really take his own sarcasm too seriously. This was a very odd book, and I can't say that I really understood what it was all meant to mean, but, man, I really liked it on some weird level. I will definitely be reading anything else this guy writes.

I have the Isherwood book in the BlackHole already. I have to bump it up some!

Well, fish it out of there then, and give it a read! It's only tiny - 150 pages - so I'm sure a speedy reader like you will fly through it.

52. Obabakoak, Bernardo Atxaga (touchstone dosen't want to work)

According to the blurb, this is ‘one of only a hundred or so books originally written in the Basque language during the last four centuries’, a fact that is interesting from a trivia point of view, but which is also interesting in that it becomes part of the structure of the narrative of the book. The author makes a note at the start of the book that Basque is a language alone in the world. It has no connection to any language currently spoken, and if I’m not mistaken, no one really knows where it came from.

Atxaga has written a series of interconnected short stories, made up of letters, diary entries and narratives, all set in or around the town of Obaba. Each of the characters is, like the Basque language, more or less alone in the world, each somehow isolated from society. But this isn’t a sad book, or even an especially melancholy one. Rather, there is a gentle sense of humour and a dry wit that pervades it. It reminded me a lot of Jorge Luis Borges, though it doesn’t try to be quite as ambitious or mind-bending as those stories.

Lazy day today, read two graphic novels. I'm counting them as one because they only took a couple of hours to read.

53a. Doctor Grordbort Presents: Victory, Greg Broadmore
53b. V for Vendetta, Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Doctor Grordbort Presents: Victory was just a fun little thing, I think it's only really about 20 pages long. It grabbed my attention because of the awesome subtitle: Scientific Adventure Violence for Young Men and Literate Women. It's a collection of steampunky short stories - snippets, really - about Lord Cockswain, a swashbuckling adventurer exploring the moon and Venus, and putting Johnny Alien in his place. There are also lots of nice illustrations of aliens and steampunk weapons. A nice bit of whimsy.

V for Vendetta was a bit meatier, an exploration of totalitarianism with an atmosphere that reminded me of 1984. I've never read any of Alan Moore's graphic novels before, or many graphic novels at all, but this one made me appreciate what the genre is capable of. There are a few images from this book that will stick with me for a while.

I preferred Moore's Watchmen to V for Vendetta, Tash. You might want to give it a try some time.

I think I will - I've heard that it's pretty dark by comparison, did you find that?

#158: I did not think it was all that much darker than V for Vendetta, but that is just me. I thought they were both dark.

Hello! A Single Man's going on the wishlist... I didn't realise it was the original of 'that movie' that everyone talked about but nobody seems to have seen - until I got interested and clicked through to the book page. Sounds wonderful anyway!

Hi! It's funny how much hype the movie has had, but I don't think I've seen it on release anywhere. I wasn't at all interested in seeing it before (for someone who can spend hours flat on my back reading a book, I have suprisingly little patience for movies and TV - yes, I'm one of those annoying people who doesn't watch TV, something that always makes me feel slightly and obscurely ashamed, a bit like some sort of terrible hipster-wannabe), but I'm curious now to see how they did it, given that so much of the book is about emotions and states of mind.

And Colin Firth does seem like he'd be good as George though - I might have to check it out if I can find it.

Edted fro speling mistkaes

No, me neither! All the awards whispers around it and I've not heard a peep about it since. And good for you on not watching TV! I definitely watch much LESS TV these days, which is healthier for my reading life, but every now and again a DVD box set gets me hooked, and there are a couple of programmes I am too fond of to miss... If you watch A Single Man let us know if it's worth looking out for!

I say that about not watching TV, but my neighbour just offered to lend me the box set of season 1 of True Blood, I have to admit that I've taken her up on the offer. Will report back on my foray into TV land...

54. Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens classifies it as a memoir rather than an autobiography, which explains why he doesn’t talk about his children or either of his wives. He opens the book by describing who he will be talking about, saying;

Caute

I can claim copyright only in myself, and occasionally in those who are either dead or have written about the same events, or have a decent expectation of anonymity, or who are such appalling shits that they have forfeited their right to bitch.

He does talk a lot about his parents, especially about his beloved mother, whose tragic death he describes honestly, and without a sense of self-pity. He also describes his days in boarding school, with the frank admission that yes, he was a ‘little bit gay’ as a teenager, and that two of his...shall we say partners, are now members of parliament, and extremely anti-gay. If only he’d drop those names, though I suppose it would be easy enough to work out if you were so inclined.

The majority of the book is taken up by his reminiscences of his political activism, and his friendships. He seems to have been everywhere, just at the moments when it was most interesting and dangerous to be there – Cuba, Northern Ireland, pretty much every Eastern European Communist state.

He does drop a lot of names, but them he seems to have met just about everyone at some stage, and seems genuinely to be friends with them. It has to be noted that very few of his friends are women – I don’t necessarily see this as misogyny, which he has been accused of. Some people just prefer the company of members of one gender over the other, it doesn’t necessarily make them bad people. And he does talk admiringly of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Susan Sontag and, of course, his mother – though I don’t want to be seen to be trying to defend the absence of women in the book, I just feel that it's unfair to accuse him of misogyny.

My biggest problem with the book was when he talked about his support for the Iraq war. I agree with him on some points, but still, when he talks about having quite matey conversations with Paul Wolfowitz and Michael Chertoff, I did feel a bit queasy, and I did feel that he protested a little too much about his support. He sets up a pretty big straw man argument against the attitudes of the Left to 9/11, which really gave me the irrits, and I felt that he was deliberately misrepresenting the arguments against the war. And there is also a chapter about a young marine who died in Iraq after enlisting because he was persuaded by Hitchens’ arguments for the war. It is actually quite a touching story, and the family involved sound like wonderful people, but I felt like the classy thing to do would have been not to write about it. But I feel that if I’d read this book and agreed with everything he’d written, I wouldn’t really have enjoyed it, if that makes sense.

I suppose that the thing about this book is that you’ll really only enjoy it if you enjoy Hitchens’ personality and persona, because at 400-odd pages, this is a pretty big dose of him talking about himself. If you already dislike him, I can’t imagine that you’d get anything out of reading this book unless you’re prepared to have a pretty big argument with him in your head as you read. But if you do like him, and wish that there were more people like him – intelligent debaters of ideas, rather than just talking heads who get paid to go on Fox news and scream at each other – you’ll probably enjoy this book.

I look forward to your review of the Hitchens book - I don't like him but I'm curious about the book.

Yep, he definitely provokes a strong reaction - I personally have tagged this book in my library as 'people I would leave my husband for', but I think that most people I've talked to about him tend to react with anything from mild dislike to outright loathing. Ah well, it would be a funny old world if we were all the same.

55. The Caged Virgin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

While she is a very inspiring individual, I did find this book a bit repetitive and not always as clearly argued as I had expected. She makes the argument that Western countries need to be less accomodating to extreme religious behaviour, but I look at what's happening in France with their attempts to ban the burqua, and here in Australia where we are about to deport a Muslim cleric without trial or explanation, and where the building of an Islamic school was protested by leaving pig's heads on stakes on the buiding site, and I wonder how far she thinks this should be taken. But I take her point, especially that the lives of Muslim women must be improved if anything at all is to be changed. This was interesting and thought provoking, and I'll be looking out for her new book.

56. My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok

It's nice when serendipity drops something in you lap. I was waiting for my husband to finish at uni the other day, and was mooching through Basement Books (the shop under Central Station, for Sydney-ites), and I found a copy of My Name is Asher Lev in the classics section, lurking under the more usual collection of Austens, and Dickenses. Since I still had an hour to wait for him, I parted with my $7.95, and sat down to read it, and by the time he finished I had ploughed through a big chunk of the book. I hate the expression 'unputdownable', but that was what it was - something I didn't want to put down.

Sorry, I'm whittering again. I'll get to the point. Asher Lev is the main character, born into a Hasidic Jewish family in the 1940s. Blessed or cursed, depending on your view, he has an amazing gift for painting, which he cannot deny even though it goes against everything his parents want for him. As time goes on he grows further away from his father, until he commits a terrible betrayal of both his family, and his religion.

The book moves along at a slow but steady pace, building inevitably to Asher’s betrayal in a way that leaves no doubt that he had a choice in the matter. The language evokes painting, without ever really describing the paintings themselves - I ran the brush against the newspaper, feeling the play of oil against the paper, watching the hue come off and streak, testing how long a streak it made - this is a book that understands that descriptions in words of deeply felt images are inadequate.

Something that I really liked about this book is that in spite of the fact that it is about the conflict caused in a Hasidic community by one member who flouts the usual behaviour, it is not set up as a criticism of religion or of secularism. I mean, that is certainly part of it, but I didn’t leave the book feeling that the author was criticising either side in particular. I read it as more of depiction of conflict within families, and as a look at the sacrifices people make to accommodate the people they love, and the suffering that is caused when people are torn between the different needs of family members. The repetition of ‘My name is Asher Lev’ throughout the book suggests that the main character knows that whatever else may happen, he has to be what his gift drives him to be, regardless of the pain it causes.

57. Tinkers, Paul Harding

The Random House rep dropped off one precious advance copy of this, and we had a bit of a tussle over who got to read it first. I won (don't be afraid to use your nails, people), but the downside is that I only got to have it for two days - it's only 190 pages long, but I feel like I should have given it more time.

This is a beautiful, beautiful book, a meditation on death, ageing, mental health, and family. It tells the story of two generations of the Crosby family, but opens with the sentence 'George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died', so I was left wondering whether the stories that followed were just his imaginings. Both father and son suffer from epilepsy, and they both talk about the strange mental state that accompanies the onset of a seizure, and there is that kind of feel to the book, especially of heightened awareness of some odd things.

A lot of the book reads like poetry;

He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the tinkle of tin silibant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a mop and brush drummer.

The sun was going down. It sank into the stand of beech trees beyond the back lot, lighting their tops, so that their bare arterial brances turned to a netting of black vessels around brains made of light

I can't wait till this comes out here, and I can get a copy of my very own - I want to read it again.

>168 tash99:, that book was a surprise find for me too (Elizabeth's Boook Shop in Fremantle) and I also loved it. I think you're right about it being about conflict (internal and external) and thought it was handled so well.

#168: I must get to that one soon. I loved Potok's The Chosen when I read it last year.

#169: That one is already in the BlackHole. I just wish my local library had a copy of it!

58. Champagne for One, Rex Stout

I've been meaning to read something by Rex Stout for ages, mainly because Bertie Wooster often reads them and when it comes to books recommendations from fictional characters I like, I'm as impressionable as a blob of warm wax. And I'm always happy to find a new 'insommnia author' - light enough that my sleep deprived brain can process the plot at 3am, but not so fluffy that I get annoyed with it. The characters are great, especially Nero Wolfe, a man after my own heart. If I could sit indoors all day with books and fancy food I would. Luckily, we've just ordered in a bunch of the books in the series for the shop, so I'll be swiping a few to keep on my bedside table in case of emergency.

I thought I'd posted this above, but obviously not;

#170 I had no idea that Elizabeth's Books was a chain. I've been to the one at Newtown a few times and always been impressed - now I know where to look for books if I'm ever in Fremantle!

#171 I don't usually take much notice of literary prizes, but I think the book definitely deserved the Pulitzer, and the more I think about it the more I like it. And I just realised why the passage about the trees with 'a netting of black vessels around brains made of light' struck me so much - I just looked up from my kitchen table and that's exactly what the crepe myrtle tree in my garden looks like at the moment - always nice when something you read makes you look at something familiar more closely.

59. Beyond Bogota, Garry Leech

Part autobiography, part passionately argued case for human rights in Colombia, this is flat out the best non-fiction book I’ve read this year. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to run out and buy one for everyone you know, and to force them to read it too.

Leech is an American journalist who has been travelling to Colombia and reporting on the political situation there for the past fifteen years. While most foreign journalists tend to stay in Bogota and report from there, Leech has made it his goal to travel to the furthest reaches of Colombia and report on the impact of the drug trade and the war between the FARC and the paramilitary groups on the people whose lives have been hurt the most. Travelling by whatever means necessary, he has met farmers who are forced into growing coca, indigenous people who have been displaced from their land due to mining operations, as well as meeting with guerrillas and paramilitary members. He paints a pretty bleak picture of life caught between the crossfire of the various military groups.

In 2006 he was detained by the FARC guerrillas for 11 hours after straying into the wrong place. He has framed the book around the 11 hours he spent with the family of a guerrilla as he waited to find out what was going to happen to him. Each chapter starts out with a description of his situation as a captive – for the most part he was left pretty much to himself, though he was treated well, even being invited at one stage to sit with the family as they watch the deliriously awful sounding Latin American soap opera Sin Tetas No Hay Paradiso. Each hour he reminiscences about something that has happened to him over his time in Colombia, then lets his anecdotes lead into reportage.

This is a fascinating book – my copy is bristling with post-its marking various things of interest as I went – and the problems in Colombia are heartbreaking. I recommend this to anyone with a conscience.

60. Maurice, E.M. Forster

Originally written in 1913, Maurice was not published until the year after Forster’s death in 1970, mainly because it was anticipated that it would cause a bit of controversy given that it is the story of the sexual awakening of a gay man.

Maurice Hall, the title character, comes from a solid, though dull middle class family – their neighbour takes ‘a moderate interest in them. No one could be deeply interested in the Halls.’ Which makes you wonder why you as a reader should be interested in Maurice either, and for most of the book I wasn’t. Forster describes him as handsome and athletic, but as only just short of being totally stupid, with no particularly striking personality traits. As with the Hall’s neighbour, I initially found it hard to care deeply about Maurice.

While at Cambridge he meets Clive Durham, and the two of them start a sort of platonic, chaste, though above all dull, affair that lasts for three years until Clive breaks it off and gets married. Maurice is devastated, in a dull sort of way. Am I building up a picture here? Basically, Maurice is a bit boring. Until he meets Clive’s gamekeeper Alec, and they start a much more carnally focused relationship, and a potentially much happier relationship than the one he had had with Clive.

The most affecting moments in the book are the ones in which Maurice despairs over his condition, and resigns himself to the fact that eventually he’ll have to marry some woman he doesn’t love and live out his days in a fashion that will be emotionally barren at best, totally miserable at worst. He visits his doctor and confesses everything, saying; I’ve been like this ever since I can remember without knowing why. What is it? Am I diseased? If I am, I want to be cured, I can’t put up with the loneliness anymore...Anything you tell me, I’ll do. That’s all. You must help me. This is one of the most heartbreaking things I think I’ve ever read, and it was at this point (two thirds of the way through the book) that I actually started to feel something for Maurice. After this he gets more interesting, especially the point at which he (spoilers ahead) metaphorically gives society the finger, and runs away with his (much lower class) lover. Hooray!

As to style, Forster is wonderful. He has a brilliantly arch way of describing people, as in the comment about the Halls above. Other gems included;

Mr Read, the junior assistant, was a master of the same type, only stupider, while Mr Dulcie, the senior, acted as a stimulant and prevented the whole concern from going to sleep.

{The schoolboys} seemed to {the schoolmaster} a race small but complete, like the New Guinea pygmies...And they were even easier to understand than pygmies, because they never married and seldom died. Celibate and immortal, the long procession passed before him, its thickness varying from twenty-five to forty at a time.

This is an odd novel, and I can't say that I enjoyed all of it - it starts and finishes strongly, but sags a bit in the middle - but it was interesting.

As a side note, I just looked up reviews of it on Amazon, and there was a corker there. I'll post it here in its entirety;

a typical story talking about gay people, while the style was good, I felt the content was bad.

Ah, le mot juste.

61. If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black

I think this one suffered slightly from hype - I'd heard really good things from a number of reviews and my expectations were high, so I suppose it was pretty likely that I'd been a bit underwhelmed. But it is a very well written book and I'm not trying to land a back handed complement on it when I say it's very competently written.

It's a collection of short stories, all about the ways in which families interact. In each story somebody is lying, someone is suffering gently in their attempts to shield a family member from pain. And yet I found this to be a generally fairly upbeat book, with each story ending on a note of hope, however faint.

One thing this author can do really, really well is come up with an opening that hooks you in. From the title story;

I I loved you, I would tell you this: I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer. And that is why you should be kind to me. I would tell you that for all you know I have cancer that has spread into my liver and my bones and that now I understand there is no hope. If I loved you, I would say: you shouldn’t be so hard on us

This is basically an extension of the maxim: be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. In it, the narrator lists all the reasons that her horrible new neighbours should be kinder to her, but out of pride she refuses to tell them. But the point is that it shouldn’t take terminal cancer or a child with developmental problems to elicit sympathy – kindness needs to be more than a response to tragedy. And in a way, all of these stories are about life's small kindnesses, or the lack of them.

The message and tone of this book can probably be best summed up with a quote from the penultimate story;

There are things that go on, I believe, important things that make only an intuitive kind of sense. Silences, agreed to. Intimacies, put away.

I saw a movie based on this book over 20+ years ago; it was even sadder then. Books are usually better than movies, so I'll have to try reading the book now.

#177 The introduction to my copy was quite scathing about the movie version, which only made me want to see it more! I'll have to keep an eye out for it, thanks Bonnie.

#174: Thanks for the review of that one. I will look for it!

Great reviews! I'm adding Beyond Bogota and Maurice to my wish list.

Thanks guys - I found it to be one of those 'slap in the face' books (in the best possible way), in that it introduced me to things about the world that I had never suspected. I suppose that it leans pretty far to the left, but then I suppose I tend to lean that way too, so it was OK by me!

>174 tash99:: Sometimes my kids give me a hard time when I tell them about things I've learned from books like Bogota. They say, or imply, "Why are you always talking about all the bad things happening in the world? Why do you read books like this--you don't do anything about it!" I console myself with the idea that I'm at least willing to open my eyes and ears as to what's going on in other parts of the world (and here in America too) that's so wrong. I do feel a wave of guilt when I finish books like this that I don't do more; that I just read, and don't put my caring into action.

eta: I went to "thumb" you, but no reviews listed.

I know what you mean - I read these things, then think to myself 'well, now what do I do?' I mean, I'll sign petitions when they come my way, and boycott products from companies with poor human rights records, but I'm not quite sure what the next step is short of actually going to these places and helping out there.

Also, I've never added any reviews because, um (please don't laugh)... I don't know how. I was just over there having a look and I can't see how to do it. Can anyone give me a hint?

#183: Once the book is in your library catalog, you can go into the Edit mode and on that page, find a section where you can type (or copy and paste if you like) your review.

Hope that helps, Tash!

Thanks very much!

You are most welcome!

62. Belching Out the Devil, Mark Thomas

If Michael Moore took himself a bit less seriously, this is the kind of book he might write. Mark Thomas is a comedian and political activist, which makes it sound as if he would be terribly dour and earnest, but he is a very funny guy, even when he’s talking about some pretty messed-up stuff. This is an account of his investigation into the ways in which the policies of Coca-Cola have affected the communities in which they have set up operations around the world, particularly in Colombia and India, and I really think it’s an important book. Coke has built up such a warm and fuzzy public image, and it’s about time that they got taken down a peg – I already avoid Coke products, partly because they have absolutely no redeeming qualities health- or flavour-wise, but also because they are just not a very nice company (I know I’m being naive to think that any multi-national company is by definition ‘nice’, but some companies are definitely worse than others).

In the course of his investigations he meets people who work or have worked for Coke in Colombia who have tried to set up trade unions, and who have had their lives and the lives of their families threatened for it. In fairness, Colombia has a pretty bad track record with trade unions in general so I don’t know how many of these problems you can lay wholly at the feet of Coke, but the fact remains that people have actually been murdered in Coke factories in Colombia for being members of trade unions, without any protest from the company. Coke’s defence is that the bottling plants are franchises, and are not run directly by Coke, but this is really not a good enough response – if your name is on the product, you have a responsibility to the people who work for you. I don’t think that’s much of a moral grey area.

In India Thomas investigates the fact that Coke has set up bottling plants - which require vast amounts of water - in areas known to be affected by drought, with the result that the plants are using up all the water and leaving nothing for the farmers. Thomas makes the point that these farmers are trying to grow enough food to live, whereas no one will die if Coke don’t make their fizzy sugar water. They are not producing anything that anyone actually needs, especially when you contrast what they are doing with what the farmers are trying to do.

This is an easy read, very funny in places, and with an appropriate sense of moral outrage.

63. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth

So instead of reading this book, I should have just got Philip Roth to hit me over the head with an inflatable mallet with the words ‘masturbation!’ and ‘blowjob!’ painted on the sides, while he screams ‘I’m Jewish! I’m Jewish!’ It would have saved me some time, and hey, at least I’d have an interesting story to tell later on.

I really hated this book. OK, it’s pretty funny. But that’s about it for redeeming features. I get that it was a big deal when it was published, but I am officially over Roth’s books. I read The Human Stain a couple of years ago and it was fine, but it didn’t make any particular impression on me. In fact all I can remember about it is that I shouted at it a few times for being so misogynistic (which is incidentally best way I’ve ever found to get a seat to yourself on the bus). I’m not a prude my any means, and I didn’t really object to the sex or the language as such, I just didn’t really care about Alex or any of the other characters enough to make it interesting, instead of just annoying.

64. Sabriel, Garth Nix

For the Group Read of the Abhorsen trilogy. I loved this – Nix isn’t always the most subtle writer, but hooray for awesome female characters like Sabriel. Have just started the second book in the series, and it seems like it’s going to be just as fun.

65. The Country Where No One Ever Dies, Ornela Vorpsi

This was a strange little book, but I really liked it. It’s sort of a fictionalised autobiography of the author’s childhood in Albania, told in a series of loosely connected vignettes. Vorpsi changes the name and age of the character between chapters of the book, but it is always supposed to be the same person. She describes the experience of living under a communist regime through the eyes of a child – her father is a political prisoner, and various neighbours disappear over the years for unknown reasons. There is a mix of childish innocence and weary acceptance in the tone of the stories, along with a morbid sense of humour – the result of living under the uncertainties of a brutal, unpredictable government. In one of the stories the narrator and her cousin find some long, white sticks in a jar in the garden, and use them as swords in a game. Their grandmother comes out and is horrified at their game, for reasons that the children don’t understand until years later; Our interrupted duel remained a mystery for years. We were already grown-ups when we learned that we’d been playing with the bones of our uncle, the one we’d never known because Mother Party had executed him when he was seventeen. His only crime was wanting to run away from Albania. He’d fallen in love with a Slavic girl who lived on the other side of the border...Honestly, where could he have gotten such a crazy idea? Didn’t the poor boy know it was illegal to leave paradise?

Gallows humour and deceptively simple writing make this a very fun, though oddball, read.

66. The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

I love Margaret Atwood.

I was going to leave the review at that, but I suppose I should really say something about the book as well. It is a take on the myth of Odysseus, in which we learn what Penelope was up to while he was gone. I liked the fact that it gives her a voice, and giver her credit for being a more interesting person than the myth allows. I love how snippy the book is about Helen of Troy. And I thought the reinterpretation of Odysseus’ adventures were very well done, and very clever – rather than battling a Cyclops he was fighting with a one-eyed tavern owner. Rather than sleeping with a goddess, he was living with a brothel owner. Good stuff.

67. Chasers, James Phelan

A young adult novel, this is a sort of 28 Days Later/Tomorrow When the War Began style of thing. An Australian boy, Jesse, is in New York on a school trip when a mysterious disaster tears through the city – buildings are flattened, most people are killed instantly, and survivors are transformed into what Jesse and his fellow survivors term Chasers. They are people who are basically zombies, but zombies who are driven desperately to consume liquids, even if this means killing people so they can drink their blood. Jesse and his friends barricade themselves inside the Rainbow Room and wait for rescue, venturing out occasionally to look for other survivors.

This is a readable book and I found it diverting enough, if not gripping, but then I guess I’m not the target audience – it would probably appeal to teenage boys much more. There is a nice stringing out of the tension, and a good build up of the horror of the situation, but the ending (SPOILERS) was infuriating – partly because it was a bit clumsy, but mostly because IT DIDN”T EXPLAIN ANYTHING! Because this is the first book in a series, and they want to get you to read the next book. Curses! I probably will end up reading the next one, too, because I want to know what happens. Damn cliff-hanger endings. There ought to be a law. Ahem. I guess the take home message is: read this if you’re a teenage boy who won’t go utterly berserk when you realise that you’ve just read a 250 page book with no ending.

68. The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein

The book is told from the perspective of a dog called Enzo – a slightly melancholic, philosophically inclined Labrador-Terrier cross. When the book opens his owner, Denny, is a single guy with dreams of being a professional racing driver. Over the course of the book Denny marries, becomes a father, and begins to make the first steps toward achieving his dream, and Enzo comes to accept that he is no longer the most important thing in Denny’s life, though he is still a beloved pet. When a string of tragedies strike the family, Enzo feels that he has to do what he can to keep them together.
It was OK, but not the best written book I’ve ever read, and it was a bit drippy and sentimental for my taste. Having said that, I did have a little cry at the end, partly because it is quite a bittersweet, affecting ending and I suppose partly because my own dog is getting on a bit now, poor thing.

69. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

I first read this when I was about seventeen, then again a couple of years later, and now again at the age of twenty-six, and it’s amazing how I have taken different things from it each time I’ve read it over the course of just a few years. If you’d asked me what I thought about it when I was seventeen, I probably would have told you in all earnestness that it was one of the books that saved my life (and it may well have done). At twenty-one or so I was a bit less dramatic about it, and I remember finding it all a bit histrionic. Reading it again now I am struck by what a beautiful, brilliant, sad person Esther is, and I feel empathy for her that I never could have felt at seventeen, when I just identified with her misery without really seeing her as a person. There are some books that you know will be with you for life, and this is one of those books for me. I wonder what my life will be like next time I read it.

My goodness you have been busy, Tash!

I am adding books 62, 65, and 67 to the BlackHole. I have either read or am reading, in the case of Sabriel, the others. I am with you on Portnoy's Complaint. I do not get its success at all. The only other Roth book I have read is the nonfiction one about his father. I have no desire to read any others.

Hi Tash, I often look at your thread, as our tastes seem to overlap somewhat. I'm interested in what you write about The Bell Jar. I also read it for the first time when I was 17 and periodically re-read it, and I, too, have read it differently each time. Nothing will match the intensity of the first time I read it (I was a straight-A student convinced she'd just messed up her exams and that she wouldn't get into the university of her choice and that life was finally unravelling etc. etc,), but I was surprised to find how humorous it was the last time I read it (aged 29, I think) - perhaps something to do with having a bit more perspective about life??

I also love your review of Portnoy's Complaint and hope you've posted it on the review page!

Hi, I felt similarly about The Art of Racing in the Rain, again, it was one that came highly recommended so had a lot to live up to.

>196 Rebeki:, agree with you there. I read it years ago and think a re-read would give me way more from it.

#63 - I haven't read Portnoy's Complaint, although I have a fairly good idea what it's about and why it was a big deal at the time. Your review did remind me, though, of how sad I feel when I think about Philip Roth these days. I think he's a great writer - American Pastoral is one of the best books I have ever read, and I really liked The Plot Against America. But I also think he lets his obsessions - with sex, with death, with maleness - get in the way of his writing at least as often as they enhance it. I used to eagerly anticipate each of his books, but after The Dying Animal and The Human Stain, I just think I'm over him, unfortunately.

Holy ----! So much to respond to. I want to read Mark Thomas's book about Coca Cola. It's scary how these huge international corporations have so much power; and are destroying the environments, the economies, and the lives of so many of the "small people" around the world. (Can't help the snide reference to BP!) Another book that deals with this is Confessions of an Economic Terrorist. Oops! The Touchstone isn't working, so I must have that title wrong. I'll have to go back and look in my library.

I really love Atwood's writing as well. Not sure if I want to hear any version of the myth of Odysseus, but you're tempting me, you're really tempting me. Great review of The Country Where No One Ever Dies as well. Totally agree with you about Portnoy's Complaint. And your comments about The Bell Jar make me wish I had had LT around, so I could go back and see what I wrote about it. I'm going to trust your impressions of The Art of Racing in the Rain and take that one off my list for now.

#193: When a string of tragedies strike the family

To me it was as if the author was thinking "OK, what else bad can happen to these people?" and then threw whatever it was into the book, which ended up being to soap operaish for me.

Hi everyone - thanks for dropping in!

#195 I finished Sabriel a bit earlier than the schedule, but, I just couldn't help myself - don't tell anyone, but I may also have devoured a chunk of Lirael last night.

#196 I think you're spot on about the perspective thing - looking back now (and with the added benefit of having a very nice doctor telling me a year or so ago that, yes, it is depression, and yes, we can do something about it), I realise that nothing was as bad as I thought it was at the time. But I suppose that The Bell Jar will always be popular with teenage girls who read it and feel relief that someone else went through the same things that they're going through, and worse things as well. But I'm glad that I can now enjoy it in a different way.

#198 His rep as one of the great writers is what make me pick up Portnoy, in spite of having not really liked The Human Stain. And in spite of not liking either of those books, I still peversely want to like him.

#199 Oh man, don't get me started on BP. Everyone involved in that debacle on both the government and the corporate side deserve a public flogging/rotten tomato pelting. Though I do think it's odd that people seem to be blaming Obama directly - I mean, there should really have been tighter controls in place, but I didn't think that he'd actually gone there personally and hacked at the pipes, giggling maniacally and muttering about how much he really hates those uppity pelicans. Maybe I just read the wrong newspapers.

But I digress.

I think I know the book you're talking about, I'll keep an eye out for it, though I don't know how much more of these kinds of books my blood pressure can take!

#200 Yeah, I think the orginal draft also had a scene in which Denny's blind mother falls down a well, and Denny has to rescue her with a rope made out of his racing trophies. Or maybe it was Denny's illegitimate half brother, (who has no arms or legs) who fell down the well and had to be rescued by his blind mother. I forget.

Hi Tash, just caught up with your thread- it seems I may have found someone with pretty similar taste in you! I loved Revolutionary Road this year and LOVED it, but found out not many others on this site do. maybe its too tragic for most readers? Anyway, I thought it was brilliant. Added several of your books to my reading list and look forward to your reviews in the future!

Oh and I also love Margaret Atwood. I can't stop buying and reading every book of hers I come across no matter how giant they can be.

So I haven't been reading much lately, mainly because I've been Dealing With Stuff - a death in the family (which led to me, for the second time in my life, having reason to have to utter the following words; 'due to ongoing police investigations, I am unable to comment further'), I've suffered from some sort of horrible, debilitating disease (known to the rest of the rational world as 'a bad case of the flu') and to top everything off, constant freaking migranes.

Sorry about the whinge. Here is some books what I done read.

70. The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson

In a remote Swedish village there are two outsiders; one is the wealthy, reclusive children’s illustrator Anna Aemelin who lives peacefully if somewhat stagnantly alone in her large inherited home. The other is the aloof, intimidating Katri Kling, who prefers the company of books and of her dog to that of people, with the exception of her younger brother Mats who she quietly adores. To the surprise and suspicion of the villagers, Katri takes it upon herself to start visiting Anna, and little by little, she starts to take over the other woman’s life. This is a gripping story about the way in which the relationship between the two women unfolds – what does Katri want from Anna? And who ends up the winner in their strange, obsessive game? The confining sphere of life in a small village is intimately dissected, and this is one of those great books that effortlessly draws you into the lives of the characters. It also goes to show that you don’t need violence or even the threat of violence in order to make a story scary. I suppose you could call it psychological violence, but in honesty I don’t know if it even goes that far. There are threats here, certainly, but what sort of threats?

This was a good ‘un, and I recommend as a soundtrack some Bach cello suites - they just complemented each other for some reason.

71. The People's Manifesto, Mark Thompson

More of a pamphlet than a book really, this is the result of a project that Thompson conducted during a comedy tour. He got people to write down their suggestions for better ways to run the country, and ended up with this. Some of the suggestions are funny, some are serious, one is just wonderfully, anarchically weird (‘goats are to be released on to the floor of the House of Commons (no more than four); MPs are forbidden from referring to them ever). Some of my favourites;

*Party manifestos should be legally binding

*Politicians should have to wear tabards displaying the names and logos of the companies with whom they have a financial relationship, like a racing driver

*MPs should not be paid wages but loans, like students, because they get highly paid jobs after they graduate from Westminster as a result of attending Parliaments. They should therefore pay back the load they received while in office.

72. The Eve of St Venus, Anthony Burgess

Two stories, one by Burgess and the other by Merimee, both with the same plot – a young man carelessly puts a ring onto the finger of a statue of Venus, and finds himself inadvertently married to her. The story by Burgess is a little less solid than the Merimee, though it is more fun to read, a sort of Bacchanalian Oscar Wilde drawing room comedy with drunken uncles, scheming lesbians and ineffectual priests.

73. All That I Have, Castle Freeman

Castle Freeman has quietly become one of my favourite authors. It’s almost too obvious to compare him to Cormac McCarthy, but his writing definitely has that flavour to it. Though I might acknowledge that McCarthy is probably the better writer, I think I still like Freeman more.

All That I Have is a thriller of sorts, set in a small town in Vermont The narrator is Sheriff Lucian Wing (one of the things I like so much about Freeman are the wonderful names he comes up with for his characters – for example, Wing’s father in law is named Addison Jessup. In this book there are also characters called Chalmers ‘Chum’ Babcock, Errol Toobin and Morgan Endor, each named in a way that is almost Dickensianly appropriate to their personalities). Wing is an old fashioned kind of sheriff, believing in keeping social harmony even if it means that he makes fewer arrests than are really deserved, much to the frustration of his ambitious deputy. Wing’s philosophy is ‘Don’t be lazy. But it’s okay to look lazy’, and he carefully maintains the image of a relaxed small town sheriff, refusing to wear a uniform, and eschewing the squad car in favour of his old truck. In a very understated way he is a natural politician, grasping instinctively that what people need from him is a sense that the stability of the community is being maintained by the fact that the sheriff is just there year after year, unchanged.
When a Russian man is found beaten and tied naked to a tree, Wing has a pretty good idea of who was responsible, but as usual prefers to approach the situation his own way;

If I’m giving {the culprit} some extra rope – and I am – it’s because it’s my method. That’s sheriffing. In sheriffing you don’t stop things from happening. You know you can’t do that, mostly, so you don’t try. People are going to do what they’re going to do. You let them come to you.

But when – in a related crime – a house belonging to some wealthy and menacing Russians is broken into, Wing’s usual ‘wait and see’ approach to policing is challenged and he is caught up in a battle between the Russians and a local man. Also involved are a motley collection of locals and out-of-towners that Wing must negotiate in order to settle a potentially explosive situation, and to save the life of the man he knows to be at the centre of events.

Wing is a fantastic character, a dryly witty man who protests his ordinariness, calling himself an ‘illiterate redneck’, even as he makes observations that make it clear that he is anything but. It is clear that though he may not be an especially well educated man, he has an intuitive way about him that serves him better than any level of education could. If this book ever becomes a movie (and it would make a great movie) the only actor who could possibly play him would be Tommy Lee Jones, and Wing did remind me of the character of the sheriff from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

74. Atonement, Ian McEwan

For the first part of this book I was thinking ‘I love it, I love it, I love it’.

But by the start of the second part I was losing patience, and by the third part of the book it was an effort to keep going – my brain slouched down like a surly teenager, protesting every page, looking out the window and chewing gum when I asked it to pay attention. The book has so much promise, and starts so strongly – a young girl sees something that she misinterprets (or does she...?), and the consequences of her actions have repercussions that she couldn’t possibly foresee (or could she...?). So she spends the rest of her life atoning for said actions.

Ian McEwan can write like a dream, and there is undeniable beauty in this book. But there is also a hell of a lot of sentimentalism. It hasn’t put me off McEwan, but it was a bit disappointing.

75. Lirael, Garth Nix

Very enjoyable fantasy, I'm loving the series. My only negative comment is that there seemed to be a lot of stuff in the middle of the book about Sam hanging around his parent's castle that could have been trimmed. But I did like it a lot, and I think Nix's characters (especially the Disreputable Dog) are nicely drawn.

76. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me, but I’ve always felt like reading Hemingway is like being buttonholed at a party by a tedious drunk. There are long, pointless passages interspersed with snatches of lucidity, though few of these are particularly interesting. Except for the narrator the characters are pretty one dimensional, and basically exist as foils to Hemingway’s Jake’s ego. I will admit that the scenes of the bull fights were very well written. But I pretty much skimmed over the bits in between.

My husband and I both read this as we’re going to be living Pamplona for a few months and we thought it would be good research. But we both hated it. The best use for it that we can see is as the basis of a drinking game. Every time one of the characters drinks, you take a drink. Every time one of the characters says ‘I’m a bit tight’, you take a drink. Every time someone is randomly aggressive or rude, you take a drink. Guaranteed to put you in hospital or your money back.

77. Better Off Dead, Rex Stout (touchstone issues)

Nice and light, I've really enjoyed the two Rex Stout books I've read.

78. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

We watched the new Alice in Wonderland movie last weekend, and it was OK, I guess (though what was up with Johnny Depp's dance at the end of the movie?). It made me want to reread the book, mainly to wash the Tim Burton zaniness from my eyeballs - that's not me being nasty, by the way, it's just that AiW was one of my favourite childhood books and I wanted to remember why I liked it so much.

Sorry to hear you've been having such a difficult time lately, Tash.

Some interesting books there, though. And while I've not read that particular work, I can see what you mean about Hemingway.

Your Hemingway review made me giggle on a Monday morning. Wonderful!

Congrats on hitting 75!

Congratulations on passing the 75 book mark, and I certainly hope you are feeling better! Sorry to hear about the death in the family, always a hard thing to bear even when the police are not involved!

Hi!
The People's Manifesto sounds great in concept and the parts you've put in are funny! (book 71) I'm drawn to Castle Freeman now too- cant resist the Cormac McCarthy comparison.

Hi guys - thanks for the comments and kind words. I just looked back at last year's thread and realised that I hit 75 at almost exactly the same time of year, nice to know that I'm nothing if not consistent!

79. Boxer Beetle, Ned Beauman

Imagine if Evelyn Waugh was kidnapped by Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahnuik, and forced to write a novel about Nazis, eugenics and boxing. And that they then gave the manuscript to Kurt Vonnegut to edit. They might possibly end up with a book like this. Maybe. Anyway, Boxer Beetle is by far one of my favourite books of the year. It is weird, elegant, dirty and very clever, and I loved every page.

The plot is a bit too complicated to go into, but it is basically about a young Jewish boxer in London in the 1930s called Seth ‘Sinner’ Roach. He is approached by a wealthy, aristocratic wannabe-Nazi and eugenicist, Philip Erskine, who wants to use him as the basis of a series of experiments. The rest of the book can be summed up with the following key words; beetles, alcoholism, homosexuality (both latent and enthusiastic), Nazis, social satire, and more beetles. This is a really impressive debut novel, and Beauman rarely puts a foot wrong. The language is glorious, the pacing is tightly controlled, the characters are horrible and yet intriguing. And what’s more, the author (damn him) is only 25, so hopefully this will be the start of a career – I can imagine that as time goes on and his voice matures, that he will really be something special.

80. Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett

I didn't like this one as much as some of the others, but I did still enjoy it. There are some characters that Pratchett obviously has a lot of fun writing, and Susan Death and the Auditors seem to inspire him to new heights of absurdity.

I've tried getting through Thief of Time twice, but for some reason have never managed it. I really like Susan and Death (Susan's probably my favorite character) but this one didn't do it for me. Maybe the third time's the charm...?

I'm a bit of a Pratchett tragic and have read most of them over and over, but Thief of Time I've only read twice. Susan is my favourite character too, but I just can't warm to this book the way that I can to the other books in the series.

Tash, I am sorry to hear that you are dealing with so many things right now. I feel for you.

Eh, I feel a bit silly now for whinging about it to everyone, especially when I read what other people - you included - deal with. Sometimes it's just nice to blow off some steam.

I think we all need to blow off steam every now and again. It is healthy, right?

Absolutely, it’s like when you’re in the mood for a good, cathartic cry, so you watch a sappy movie which you know will have you sobbing.

To lighten the mood, I thought I’d share a couple of stories from the bookshop – I know that’s really Ellie’s domain, but her lovely stories have inspired me to tell my own.

We had a lady in the shop the other day – nice looking, in about her mid-thirties. She picked a copy of Looking for Alibrandi off the shelf, came to the counter, and started telling me something about it. She was rambling a bit and I wasn’t really following her – I thought she was trying to get a refund on it, and I was girding myself for the fight that always comes when people try to do dodgy returns. Eventually she got to the point, which was that the book had been recommended to her by another staff member, and that she’d loved it and wanted more books like it. She was a bit standoffish and awkward at first, and it was really hard to get her to talk about other kinds of books she was interested in, and eventually, looking simultaneously embarrassed and relieved, she told me that Looking for Alibrandi was the first book she’d ever read in her life. She was a bit sheepish about the fact that it was a young adult book, but once I’d assured her that heaps of adults read them she was much happier, and she got more and more enthusiastic about the books I showed her as we went on. Eventually we ended up with a nice big stack of books (I don’t remember all of them, but Stolen, by Lucy Christopher and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society were in there), and as she was leaving she said that she’d never felt excited about reading before, but that now all she wanted was to get stuck into some books.
I get this a lot with kids, who are still really, really excited about books, and will tell you proudly and at length about what they can read, but most adults take the whole reading thing for granted. It was so nice to talk to someone who was just so thrilled at the idea, not just of reading, but of reading for fun. And the nicest thing about it was that she had her (about 10ish) daughter with her, who was evidently a big reader already, and it just warmed the cockles of my shrivelled little heart to imagine the two of them reading together. It really did make my day.

I do have another (sad) story, but I’m on the work computer and I really should be doing one of the things that I actually get paid for.

What a great story, Tash! Thanks for sharing it.

That IS a nice story! My brother-in-law isn't a reader either and I was so stoked to see him reading a book I had 'sold' to him on a family holiday last year- i tried not to be too overt in my recommending it to him in case it was too much pressure. It's so nice to see someone surprise themselves in how much they love reading!

Love that story, thank you!

I've been working in the bookshop on and off for about 10 years now, and I'm definitely getting to the point at which I'm burned out on bookselling. But then things like this happen and I remember why I haven't got around to getting a 'real' job yet.

Real job schmeal job- book selling is a fine profession. Go you.

Thanks - I get a bit defensive about my job sometimes because people I went to uni with have the kinds of jobs where they have business cards and can afford to buy houses, and I still work in a shop. I sometimes have to remind myself that if I didn't love my job I wouldn't do it, and that wearing a suit and going to business meetings aren't the defining characteristics of adulthood.

Go easy on me if I'm less coherent than usual - suffering from a mild whiskey hangover, we drove two hours down the coast to help my dad move his old truck out of the back garden to be towed away which involved what I believe is known as 'hard work', then turned around and drove the two hours home with an anxious, flatulent dog in the back seat. I need a back rub and a cup of tea.

81. The Norseman's Song, Joel Deane

This one just missed the mark for me. It was mostly well written and had an interesting plot, but just didn’t do it for me. The plot is split into two strands. One thread tells the story of a sailor who goes by the nickname of the Norseman. Known for his skill as a whaler as well as for his extremely violent nature, he is pretty much a loner until he is seduced by the wife of his captain. The other thread follows a Melbourne cab driver who picks up a decrepit old man who asks to be driven out to the country. As they drive the old man makes his confession, and the cab driver ends up becoming involved with the old man’s search for redemption. The two threads intersect and Deane (who is also a poet) has a lovely way with words, and does a very good job of creating morally reprehensible, marginally likeable, interesting characters, but I couldn’t really connect with it, and I felt that the ending was a bit of a letdown.

82. By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham

Peter and his wife Rebecca live a life that is almost a parody of urban trendiness – he’s an art dealer, she’s the editor of an arts and literature magazine, and they move amongst the wealthy bohemian-leaning elite of New York. But then Rebecca’s younger brother Ethan – nicknamed The Mistake – comes to stay. A recovering drug addict and college drop-out, he is nevertheless utterly beautiful, and Peter soon finds himself drawn to his brother-in-law in a way that he is unable or unwilling to understand. This is a novel about the dangers of an obsession with beauty that obscures the ability to see under the surface of things. It is also a novel about the ways in which we can be surprised by the people we think we know. Cunningham plays this idea cleverly, never letting the plot head in ways that the reader might find predictable, and maintaining a sense of uneasy tension over the course of the book. The only other book of Cunningham’s that I have read was The Hours, and I remember really liking it – he’s very good at depicting the little ticks and quirks of individuals in a very compassionate way.

83. Light Boxes, Shane Jones

A gentle fable about the nature of love and grief, Light Boxes is set in a small town in which it is always February, always snowing and always dark. But February isn’t just a month, he is also a man who the villagers blame for the constant cold, waging war against him as he first brings constant snow, then steals all the town’s children, then starts to drive people to despair. Written in a dreamlike fashion that reminded me of Tinkers, Jones is particularly good at writing effervescent, evocative set pieces so that the story seems often to skip from one beautiful, thoughtful scene to another. This is probably not a book that everyone would enjoy, but if the idea of a whimsically inclined Jorge Luis Borges appeals to you, you will find a lot to like in this little wisp of a novel.

The opening paragraph;

Thaddeus: We sat on the hill. We watched the flames inside the balloons heat the fabric to neon colours. The children played Prediction. They pointed to empty holes in the sky and waited. Sometimes all the balloons lit up at once and produced the nightly umbrella effect over the town beneath whose buildings were filling with the sadness of February. Nights like this will soon die, Selah whispered in my ear.

84. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K Dick

I have to admit that I like watching Bladerunner more than I enjoyed reading the book. I find I often have this problem with sci-fi novels – I love the ideas, but I often find the writing... less than inspiring.

85. Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman

Holy crap. I read this with my heart in my mouth. Based on the movie of the same name, the graphic novel is utterly gripping and does an amazing job of depicting post-traumatic stress disorder, and the yo-yoing banality and terror of war.

86. Call it Sleep, Henry Roth

I really, really loved this book, and when I’d finished it I went to Amazon to seek out negative reviews, as I couldn’t imagine how anyone could fail to have loved it. The negative reviews of it surprised me. What came up again and again was how boring the book was. Really, boring? I mean, nothing much happens, and it continues not to happen for about 450 pages, but this is one of the most convincingly written depictions of the world from a child’s point of view that I’ve ever read.

The novel opens with a husband and wife being reunited at Ellis Island just before World War One. The story is told from the point of view of David, the couple’s son. The book follows their lives over the course of two years, and if I describe it as minutely detailed I think I’ll be doing the book a disservice as that makes it sound tedious, which it is anything but. The book is a series of impressions of what immigrant life was like for Austrian Jews as seen through the eyes of a child who struggles to find any sort of stable ground, other than the love of his mother. The world is reduced to microcosm – his world is the block on which he lives. People are either good or evil – his mother is unimpeachably saint-like, while his father is utterly terrifying in his remoteness and the threat of violence that always hangs around him. Or that is the way that David sees them. David is a fragile child, easily upset and reluctant to make friends, and his loneliness and confusion make this a sometimes heartbreaking story to read.

I really liked the language of the book – David and his family speak Yiddish to each other, which is rendered as ‘normal’ English speech. But when David speaks to the other children in his neighbourhood he speaks a heavily accented version of English which is delightfully rendered. Roth is also adept at writing the other accents that David comes across in the (dare I use that most hackneyed of phrases?) melting pot that is his neighbourhood.

The book has a meditative feel, and I found that I was only willing to pick it up when I knew I’d have a couple of hours free to read uninterrupted – it was really nice to read something that demanded patience and slow reading, and I could feel myself slowing down to accommodate the style of writing. Lovely.

87. Riding the Black Cockatoo, John Danalis

In Riding the Black Cockatoo John Danalis makes a convincing attempt at breaking down what it is that lies at the heart of the disconnect between Aboriginal and white Australia. The book starts with the admission that for years Danalis’ family had kept the skull of an Aboriginal man (nicknamed ‘Mary’) on their mantelpiece – unthinkingly, because it was part of a collection of curios, not out of any sense of deliberate malice. Then one day Danalis came to the abrupt realisation that by keeping the skull his family was responsible for a gross insult to Mary and his descendants. This book is the story of the author’s journey to have Mary returned to his people, and his subsequent thirst for knowledge about Australia’s past. This is a touching and unflinching look at the ways in which different cultures and generations interact.

88. Dark Matter, Michelle Paver

The true masters of horror know that you never show people the monster, you let them imagine it themselves. Hoo boy, does Paver know this – I haven’t slept with the light on since I was about ten, but I left the light on a bit longer than usual the night I finished reading because this is one hell of a creepy book.

It’s told in diary form, which I usually find distracting, but it worked really well here. The diary writer is a bitter, middle class misanthrope who ends up on a mission to the arctic with a group of aristocratic adventurers. Set just before the start of World War Two there is a sense of impending doom right from the start as Jack, the narrator, makes references to the looming troubles in Europe. The sense of disaster builds slowly as one by one, the expedition members are forced to drop out of the mission until Jack is left alone. Left by himself at the mission base in the Arctic circle, he starts to sense that there is something else out there, and though he keeps telling himself that it is just an ‘echo’ of some part tragedy and that it cannot hurt him, he finds it harder and harder to convince himself that he is not in danger.

Wow! You have been busy, Tash. Adding several to the BlackHole.

By Nightfall sounds good. I didn't realize Cunningham had a new book out (or is it an old one?) I also liked The Hours, as well as A Home at the End of the World, and would gladly read other books by him.

Call It Sleep is one of my favorite books, and I've read it several times. I'm glad you liked it. Like you, I can't believe it got negative reviews on Amazon.

>225 tash99:, 228, that book looks so interesting, I've just added it to my wishlist and looked up the online catalogue for my library to see they have it! YAY. It certainly didn't get bad reviews here on LT, better quality of consumer??!! :-)

#227 Oops, I forgot to mention that this was an advance copy - I think it comes out at the end of September. While I'm at it, Dark Matter was also an advance, coming out in October

#228 I imagine it bears up well under rereading - I'm sure I'll be going back to it. I don't usually read books by the same author back to back, but I have a copy of An American Type sitting on the shelf that looks good too, have you read it?

#229 I agree - a far superior bunch of readers around these parts!

I didn't read it. There was a gap of many years between Call It Sleep and An American Type as I recall. When An American Type came out, reviews were rather bad, so I decided not to read it. Maybe I should give it a chance, since reviews can be wrong.

Just caught up on your thread, wanted to say I'm sorry you're having a hard time at the moment but try to be gentle with yourself.

#233 Thanks - you guys are the best!

My reading has been particularly light lately - the big move is next week, and I'm having a bit of trouble focusing on anything too complex due to extreme levels of anxiety. Rocking back and forth and whimpering softly is more my speed at the moment.

This is what I have managed to read;

89. The Abortion, Richard Brautigan

Brautigan's writing is some of the gentlest and kindest I've ever read. He has so much sympathy for his characters, but he's never sentimental, never mushy. I love his books.

This one is about guy who works in a library in San Fransisco that only stocks unpublishable books. The librarian never leaves the building, spending him time receiving the books and talking to their authors, until one day he meets and falls in love with Vida, a transcendentally beautiful young woman who loathes the attention her body brings. Like the other Brautigan book I've read this year, it is hard to describe the plot or what it is about the writing that is so wonderful. I described the last book as like a very relaxed Hunter S Thompson, but on reflection I think Brautigan is more like Kurt Vonnegut.

90. Shit My Dad Says, Justin Halpern

Books based on internet memes are usually pretty disappointing and feel rushed, but I felt like they went the extra mile with this one and produced something that isn't just a regurgitation of the website and that is acutally worth your time and money.

Justin Halpern moved back in with his parents after being dumped by the girlfriend he was supposed to move in with, and - being somewhat underemployed at the time - spent a lot of time with his retired father (a cantankerous straight talker with a foul mouth), recording some of his more forceful bon mots. I think this is one of the funniest books I've read this year, and it also surprised me by having a very sweet, moving ending.

91. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore

Just gut wrenching - the story of a lonely spinster in Dublin who thinks she's finally found her man, this is one of those books that forces you to get inside the head of a sad little person. You couldn't even go so far as to call her tragic - it's too banal for that. And yet you ache for this poor woman, left on the shelf, looked on with pity and contempt by people she wants desperately to think of her as a friend. Brilliantly written, though I'd have a hard time recommending it because it is just so emotionally gruelling.

92. The Truth, Terry Pratchett

Yay, Terry. This is one of my favourites of the Discworld books.

93. The BFG, Roald Dahl

As far as I'm concerned, Roald Dahl is up there with the masters of the English language - what's not to love about this passage, spoken in the unique idioglossia of the BFG (Big Friendly Giant);

It is a flushbunking and a scrotty mistake to let the bubbles go upwards! If you can't see why, you must be quacky as a duckhound! By ringo, your head must be full of frobsquinkers and buzzwangles, I is frittered if I know how you can think at all!

I loved THe BFG when I read it last year. I do not ever remember reading it as a kid.

I'm glad I'm not the only grown up reading kids books! Though I think there are definitely a few children's authors transcend their
genre, and are just straight out excellent books - Dahl is one, Garth Nix is another I've read this year who just tells a damn good story

Adding a pile of books to the wishlist... No change there, then.

Echoing what everyone else has said, Tash - I'm sorry you're having such a rough time of it right now. Vent away - LT is a great place for rallying round! And when times are rough, try to step back from it every once in a while and look after number one. Sometimes it seems impossible to do that, but it really does help make everything else more manageable. Not that you need anyone to tell you this I'm sure, but maybe it'll be a little bit reassuring at least...

And that was such a lovely bookshop story! I love customers like that, where everything comes together to give you a really good experience and a good bookish chat - it makes my day! And like you say, it reminds you why you fell into bookselling and restores your faith in people if it's been a bad week!

#238 I'm much better now, thanks, the only ongoing problem is the crippling anxiety, but I plan to treat that with booze and pills (not together, obviously, but in sensible, doctor recommended doses) until I'm off the plane.

And you're dead right about the nice customers - now that I'm down to my last couple of days I realise how muuch I'm going to miss them. Two of my favourite customers were in yesterday (enthusiastic American guy who has the exact same taste in books as me, and a little old German lady who is sight impared and who gets me to look for audio books for her), and when I told them I was leaving they both said how much they'd miss coming in and talking to me about books - it really gave me the warm and fuzzies.

#218 - Love that story!!

Gee, you write some fantastic reviews. Hope the move goes well and keep reading!

#240 Thanks, I can't wait til we're settled in and I can focus on reading again!

I think I'm going to start a new thread - 250 seems to be the magic number, but I'm sure no one will call the LibraryThing police on me for cutting it short by 8...

I'm over here now