2010 - Your Best Five Reads of Q3 (July - Sept)

Following in the footsteps of paperbagpirate, here is the 3rd quarter thread.

So, what are your best five reads from July through September?

I doubt I am going to read something that will surpass:

A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates (1986, US).
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson (2009, US, short stories)
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple (2007, Australian, literary police procedural)
Oil on Water by Helon Habila (2010, Nigerian)
Buddha's Orphans by Samrat Upadhyay (2010, Nepalese)

So far. . . .

Home by Marilynne Robinson (2008, US)
I'm Not Complaining by Ruth Adam (1938, UK)
The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry by Assia Djebar (2006 translation, Algerian, short stories)
Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym (posthumous--completed 1939, published 1985, UK)
The Monk by M. G. Lewis (1796, UK)

This has been a great quarter's worth of reads for me. I'll pick 2 by male authors and 3 by female:

Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster
Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarita Engle
Pope Joan by Donna Cross

and

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Isiguro
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Hmm- in no order
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Gulag by Anne Applebaum
Old Filth by Jane Gardam
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

So far, in no particular order:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

Will have to come back at the end of the month for mine.

This was a great reading quarter for me and it is difficult to pick just five, and I am cheating a little by listing five works of fiction and one nonfiction; I just couldn't pare the fiction list down!

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson
Wolf among Wolves by Hans Fallada
The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer

Touchstones are touchy today.

Lots of good ones for me, too, this quarter. I'll do top 5 and runners up.

Top 5

Tinkers by Paul Harding (a bit up and down in quality, but the high points are exceptional)
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (remarkable conclusion to a stand-out series
Britten and Brulightly by Hannah Berry (unusually good graphic novel)
A Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson (slow starter for me but real charmer by the end)
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (beautifully written story of an unusual friendship)

Runners Up

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
The Maze Runner
Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie
Sway by Ori Brafman
The Windup Girl
Too Cool to Be Forgotten
Front and Center by Catherine Murdock

Three 5 star books this quarter:

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Wet Nurse's Tale by Erica Eisdorfer
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Two of the 4.5 books that stand out as I go through the list:

The Search by Nora Roberts
Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

Tough one, I have several five stars. But the ones I look at most fondly are:

Tinkers which made me sad when it ended,
The Imperfectionists, Klausen, and Fado.

I also just finished The Dead Detective by William Heffernan, and it's a strong 4-4.25. Haven't finished the review yet.

Tough one, I have several five stars. But the ones I look at most fondly are:

Tinkers which made me sad when it ended,
The Imperfectionists, Klausen, and Fado.

I also just finished The Dead Detective by William Heffernan, and it's a strong 4-4.25. Haven't finished the review yet.

In the order I read them:

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver
The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman
The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg
Misery by Stephen King (reread)

In the order read -

Terrier by Tamora Pierce
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare
Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

This year's third quarter was made up of so many great books it was hard to choose only five. In the order read:-

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Mother's Recompense by Edith Wharton
Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym
A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark
Devil's Brood by Sharon Kay Penman

Fiction
One Day by David Nicholls
The City and The City by China Mieville
The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny

Nonfiction
Chasing Goldman Sachs by Suzanne McGee
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

These were all great, but the standout is absolutely The Forever War which is unforgettable.

Fiction:

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Loving Graham Greene by Gloria Emerson
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Nonfiction:

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light

And two rereads:
Dispatches by Michael Herr (nonfiction)
Whitewater by Paul Horgan (fiction)

The 'Third Quarter' of 2010 wasn't that good for me.

Among my top 5 new reads, the #1 book surprised me. I was very much amazed by how much I enjoyed it.

#2 and #3 are very good books. I would highly recommend them but at the same time they were kind of difficult reads.

The last two are okay books which would not make it to my year ending top ten, not in a million years.

1. Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Susan Vreeland.

2. The Killer Inside Me. Jim Thompson.

3. Tales of Men and Ghosts. Edith Wharton.

4. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Alan Bradley.

5. Eragon. Christopher Paolini.

No 5 star books this quarter, but the following all received 4.5 stars from me:

The Blue Notebook
Little Bee
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Mockingjay
Rebecca

These were all 4-5 star books for me this quarter:

Little Bee
Fingersmith
The Glass Castle
Mockingjay

And I haven't finished this one yet, but I'm over halfway there and I am pretty confident it will make the list:

The Gargoyle

Another great quarter for me. The following books all rated 5 stars.

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2. Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
3. Buffalo Soldiers by Tom Willard
4. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
5. Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

Fiction:

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
Room by Emma Donoghue

Nonfiction:

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin

My top five for the quarter, in the order they were read:

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano
Kilter: 55 Fictions by John Gould
The Last of the Crazy People by Timothy Findley
Blindness by Jose Saramago
I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody by Sinan Antoon

Fiction:
The Breaking of Eggs by Jim Powell

Nonfiction:
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
The Geometry of Pasta by Caz Hildebrand/Jacob Kenedy

Well, it was a slow quarter for me, but here are five of my faves:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
and then the three in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins

In order read:

1) Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann - love these big, multigenerational novels!
2) The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope - a fitting end to one of my favorite fiction series.
3) The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - hauntingly beautiful and sad memoir
4) Phineas Finn - I suspect Trollope will have a lock on my top 10 of the year list
5) Cosmos by Carl Sagan - 30 years old and somewhat outdated, but some of the best science writing ever

Not a great quarter for reading for me. Only two books really stand out:

Let the Great World Spin - read for a meetup group and enjoyed quite a bit.
Desolate Angel - first in an intriguing new mystery series.

Three standouts for me:

The Bone People by Keri Hulme,
The Scalpel and the Silver Bear (non-fiction) by Lori Arviso Alvord, and
Soul by Andrey Platonov.

I'm not sure I can pick two more from the rest I read, but I guess I'll go for
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, and
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (non-fiction) by Bill Bryson.

1. Wicked Lovely series by Melissa Marr (YA World of Faery)
2. A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City: A Diary by Anonymous
3. Uni Bound? Students' Stories of Transition from School to University by Irena Madjar
4. American Rust by Philipp Meyer
5. Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris

special mention: The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton

My top three would be:

Revolutionary Road
The Sparrow
Middlemarch

Two more that were also good:

Kitchen Confidential
Changing Planes

My favorite books for the 3rd quarter are listed below. This was an OK quarter, but not great.

Frozen Sun by Stan jones
Flint by Margaret Refern
Black Seconds by Karin Fossum
The Indian Bride by Karin Fossum
Stealing Athena by Karen Essex

I managed to get it down to five, but there are several other books that deserve to be in the 5th or maybe 4th palce in this list:

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Der wunderbare Massenselbstmord by Arto Paasilinna
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
The Drowning Tree by Carol Goodman

Like many others, I had an OK quarter, but it wasn't outstanding. Sadly, that's how I feel about the entirety of 2010 so far. Hopefully this final quarter will make up for the rest...

This was a pretty good quarter, my good books were very good, although some of the rest of my books weren't so great. The best of them, though, in the order I read them:

Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman
The City and the City by China Mieville
The Report by Jessica Francis Kane
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley

I read a lot of genre fiction during those months.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Beautiful Child by Torey Hayden
City of Glass by Cassandra Clare
Dry by Augusten Burroughs

Slim pickings during this quarter. Hunger Games and Beautiful Child were very good, the others were ties with the other books in their franchises.

In no particular order

Gold by Dan Rhodes
Northline by Willy Vlautin
Blockbuster by Tom Shone
What was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield

Possibly in no particular order:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies
The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean
These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer

Wolf Hall and Brooklyn were stand out brilliant. The Welsh Girl I would whole-heartedly recommend. The Death-Defying Pepper Roux, young adult fiction, was just so sweet. These Old Shades was a reread and you can't beat Georgette Heyer with a big stick.

It was a so-so quarter, a couple of others I enjoyed but a couple I had to slog through.

The only book that comes to mind is The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. It will definitely be one of my best books of the past year.

In no particular order:

The Yellow Rain by Julio Llamazares
Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

My top 5 for the third quarter are (in no particular order):

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (non-fiction)
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Reckless by Cornelia Funke
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
Something is Going to Fall Like Rain by Ros Wynne-Jones

Losing Julia by Jonathan Hull
The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
The Other side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

Top 5 third quarter reads (in the order read):
The Once and Future King by T.H. White
The Fur Person by May Sarton
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter by J. Nozipo Maraire