The Eternal Question: What Are You Reading? 10/ 2023

The scrolling was getting ridiculous in the last iteration. Hope y'all don't mind me opening a new one.

So, what's everyone reading?

Yea, glad to see you Pat. I really liked the Leigh Newman stories. I'm keen to know what you think.

I am reading Circe for a work-related book group and Rebecca Solnit essays Men Explain Things to Me for sanity. I've had a flurry of library books including the slyly funny Case Study and a lot of kind of forgettable mysteries.

I'm reading the new Thomas Mallon - Up with the Sun. It's a novel about the life (sort of) and murder (definitely) of Dick Kallman, a B-list (at best) actor you'll recognize if you look him up. There's a lot going in it - late 50s/early 60s Broadway and all that entails, 80s New York and all that entails and real people woven in with fictional ones; we take a trip to Carnegie Hall for Judy Judy Judy.

Mallon makes me nervous in real life - I really never trust a gay conservative - but he does have a pretty light touch here (though I do think his research shows a little; no vintage detail is left un-detailed). I was an enormous fan of his Bandbox, which Katharine Weber once described to me as "a Broadway musical in novel form," and that's exactly what it was. This one is darker, more like his Fellow Travelers (soon to be a miniseries) in tone - but it's hard to dislike a book that has Dolores Gray swanning around in it right from the start.

Circe really blew me away. I sometimes can avoid a book if it gets too much hype but this was really good and thought provoking and I liked the way she melded imagination and literary sources and . I am looking forward to the group discussion.

I am reading Obasan which is so powerful and upsetting, I can't really read more than a chapter at a time. It's about the incarceration of the Japanese in Canada during WWII and it's beautifully told but totally upsetting.

I loved Brandan Taylor's Real Life - that up close look at a tight knit group of people at a university - plus race, plus trauma. What a debut! And I'm reading terrible book about Yoko Ono that I've had for a while and will probably discard because the writing is atrocious. Woman: The Incredible Life of Yoko Ono It's the worse music journalism or cultural criticism I've ever read.

>2 laurenbufferd: Okay, so when I was about 3 stories into the Newman, I was hesitant to opine on it because of all the rave reviews from here. At the time, I was underwhelmed with the writing. I actually highlighted multiple examples of what I thought were contrived, flat and/or awkward figures of speech.

However...

I'm sooo glad I waited, because by the time I finished the section with Maggie & Danielle's disturbing trip to Calif., and the theft of their Alaska money, etc., I had a completely different opinion. I'll write more when I finish it. The entire reason I stuck with it was because of the recommendations from y'all. So, a big thank you to all who raved about it.

I read Circe quite a while ago. I remember liking it a lot.

Almost done with Cornwell's The Winter King.

Lots and lots of good things. Filthy Animals which is my third Brandon Taylor and in my opinion, the best of the bunch. He seems to be writing the same book over and over again but it doesn't really bother me. The writing - to me- is gorgeous.

I also reading Fierce Poise about Helen Frankenthaler despite my decision not to read biographies of women by men. Its interesting but I'm not super keen on the structure - tying in 10 significant dates during her career with other events in the 1950s. And I hate that he calls her Helen.

I really enjoyed The Three Evangelists which is totally charming but not super memorable and The English Understand Wool which is almost perfect, especially because it can read in an afternoon with a pot of earl gray and some shortbread.

Pat, that story of traveling the Al-Can highway was so incredible - it literally took my breath away and made up for any other weaknesses in the collection.

I'd love to know what everyone is reading.

I'm hot for the most recent Cormac McCarthy 2-parter, but I'm awaiting the limited-edition HB set I ordered (The Passenger ).

Still making my way through my reread of Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles in anticipation of the upcoming adapted TV series.

This afternoon I will be starting Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez due to some of the most intriguing reviews I've read in a long time.

So the book gods must've been peeking over my shoulder as I typed that last post, because my 2-book set of the new Cormac McCarthy arrived within hours of mentioning it. I'm only about 50pp in but oh my. I'm basking, no luxuriating in his incomparable prose. Not quite sure about the storyline, yet, but the writing and motley crew of characters are reminiscent of that/those in Suttree.

Enriquez had a short story in the February New Yorker that was incredible. Seeking her out.

My New Yorker reading is shamefully backlogged. I went to the digital-only subscription and forget to read it now that it's not physically sitting on my end table.

Hey people, are ya still reading?

I am.

I finished Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful which I loved - it's such rich poetic and imaginative descriptions. I am minorly peeved that there's no women in it - except for a small cameo by Billie Holliday in the Lester Young section - but that's not the point of the book and I'm trying to let go of all my expectations. I was lucky enough to hear him read from it last month in Knoxville. The best thing about it is that it just makes you want to listen to music and I do feel like I'm listening on a deeper level.

I was quietly blown away by Farewell Leicester Square - I don't know why I always think that the Persephone titles are going to be light weight because this one truly is not. This is a engrossing novel about anti-Semitism in England between the two wars and a Jewish man who leaves Brighton to become a film director. It's about assimilation, self-hatred, and a kind of innate sense of not-belonging that many minorities carry around with them. I found the writing kind of wooly sometimes but the story really captivated me.

I also read Maame which I thought had a few too many plot points but broke a lot of new ground and created a main character that you could really root for. I worked with someone whose childhood nickname was 'woman' and I wondered if it had affected her in the same way that Maame was. I did think that was a brilliant addition to the story- the burden of the name.

I finished Our Share of Night . I haven't posted about it, yet, because I'm still searching for words that'd do it justice. It's that good.

Still re-reading The Warlord Chronicles in anticipation of the video adaptation dropping in Aug.

Geez, I haven't posted yet this year? Uh-oh. Some standouts:

Dorothy Baker - Young Man with a Horn, really good music (jazz) writing, excellent dialogue, and some very deft-touch writing on race, talent, and human connection.

Leave Me Alone with the Recipes: The Life, Art, and Cookbook of Cipe Pineles: Lauren sent me this, and it's wonderful. If you like food and recipe art, good rare books stories, and tales of NY women's magazine publishing (because hey, who doesn't?) this is for you.

Kimberly Olson Fakih - Little Miseries: This Is Not a Story About My Childhood: She's a friend and coworker but I unbiasedly loved this. I interviewed her for Bloom—a great coming of age story (Midwest, 1970s) definitely worth picking up.

Annie Ernaux - The Years: Such an interesting approach to memoir, even if I'm not familiar with a lot of the French current history/politics/pop culture she discusses. But situating oneself in the news stream to examine a life feels so much like the way people think but don't always write, which was cool.

Elspeth Barker - O Caledonia: I think this was a Lauren rec, and I loved it. It's a coming-of-age-noir set in mid-20th-century Scotland, dark and very funny and beautifully written.

Lydia Millet - Dinosaurs: A solid novel that takes on a lot of threads but doesn't feel overloaded by them, very readable (not meant as faint praise at all).

Andrea Barrett - Natural History: Not absolutely primo Voyage of the Narwhal Barrett, but I love her subject matter and how she treats it, so I was happy.

Joy Kogawa - Obasan: Gorgeous and wrenching, and if you think you know your history of Japanese internment during WWII this is an eye-opener. Just really well done, hard as the subject matter is.

Andrea Wulf - Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self: This was a bit overlong (although that could have to do with my checkout expiring and having to wait for a second hold to come around from the library) and everyone was named Friedrich... yet I was still able to keep the Schlegel's and Schellings and Schillers straight, with all credit to Wulf, because she breathed some real life into them. A very engaging history of the German Romantic philosophers, all living in the same town at the beginning of the 19th century, getting into feuds and being fired from the university and sleeping with each other.

Bernardine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other: Very engaging, contemporary, moved along well. It's a fun portrait of a corner of the 21st century (UK, art/theater world, Black and queer experience).

John Cotter - Losing Music: John is a friend of mine from my blogging days—he was the head of Open Letters Monthly—and this is his story about going deaf owing to a not-quite-diagnosable disease that's a lot like Ménière's but not quite. Beautifully written, one of my best of the year so far. I owe him an email because I want to get him for Bloom. Highly recommended!

Right now i'm reading Katy Hessel's The Story of Art Without Men for an LJ review. The book was born out of her wonderful The Great Women Artists podcast, and it's a lot of fun. Quite a few artists I didn't know, and I've taken a fair amount of art history and followed the art world in general.

Thanks, Lisa. A lot to digest there. Definitely checking out the Cotter.

I just breezed through Lucinda Williams Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You. No big surprises there but I'm glad she has found a therapist. I didn't listen to much after Car Wheels but I'm deeply grateful for every album before that.

I'm reading the about to be published The Fraud and feeling very lucky indeed. It's very very good and quite sly.

Paul Rudnick's Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style is yet more proof that Rudnick isn't really a comic novelist, but he's an excellent comic writer. You can see why he's an in-demand script doctor, because he does have a way with a line. But he doesn't really know how to structure a novel other than "this happens and then this happens." It's a very funny book, though. I've laughed out loud about fifty times.

Comic novelling is hard. So few people can really pull it off.

Just finished Tell the Wolves I’m Home on audio. I’ve wanted to read it for years now. The story strangely feels dated now and I tired of the narrator’s obsession with her uncle. Anyways it’s one more I can knock off my list. Moving on to the new Lorrie Moore which I think I’ll hate and on audio a memoir by the Newfoundland writer Donna Morrissey.

I was completely blown away by Emma Cline’s latest The Guest . Best thing I’ve read in a long time. I’ve never read her before but definitely want to read her collection of stories. The first novel doesn’t interest me. I can’t remember the last time I read a book so quickly because I had to know what happens next.

Angel of Sodom was excellent. A new history of very early gay lib. which is fascinating,essential reading.
And Parallel a translation of a German graphic novel-beautifully drawn and fantastic, heart-breaking story was also exceptional.

I hated The Vixen by Francine Prose. If anyone is familiar with the book it is about a new trashy novel concerning the early life of Ethel Rosenberg. Apart from finding it incredibly tedious,I thought it was pretty stinky that Prose felt entitled to satirize poor Ethel’s life when she herself wrote a book about how she wished people would stop using Anne Frank in their work. My dislike for the book and the author is monumental now.

I'm enjoying your posts Alan.

I was traveling most of last week and so much of my re-reading was old New Yorkers and mysteries that could be discarded along the way. I also read Take This Man which has been on my shelves for years- I read an essay by Skyhorse which kind of blew my mind and made me curious. I'm not into the trauma memoir - I hated The Glass Castle and have a lot of questions about the veracity of Educated; this book also made me a little squirmy - but I was fascinated by the mother's need to remake herself as Native American. I guess i just wanted more of the why.

I'm deep into The Witch Elm and just in awe of how French creates mood and creepiness out of almost nothing. Really enjoyable.

I also reread Lolly Willowes which for me is just about a perfect novel and read One Fine Day which, like Mrs Dalloway, takes place over the course of a day and concerns a couple still living in their big country house after WWII, all the servants are gone, they are fending for themselves and not particularly well, and the village all around them is changing. I loved it but it's very much my thing. End of the empire and all that. Panter-Downes is a great writer, I think.

Keep your eye out for the new Zadie Smith The Fraud, I think its very clever and like Matrix, is in part about 45 without ever mentioning his name.

I have two things going: deWitt's The Librarianist and Stephen Rowley's The Celebrants. I do think Rowley has the market cornered on a particular kind of social comedy - he's kind of taken over from Stephen McCauley - though I'm not as over the moon about this one yet as I was about The Guncle. It is maybe just a shaaaade too Big-Chill-y for me. We'll see, though... he's a very clear, crisp writer.

I’ve had the best week of reading in years. I’m almost finished listening to Donna Morrissey’s -Pluck-about growing up in Nfld. I’m listening to her reading the book and that Nfld. accent is wonderful. I think the book goes on for too long-poverty,drug addiction,single mother,cancer-I really don’t need to hear about all of it in detail but I do want to read her novels now. And Nfld. sounds like a very special place . She talks about an aunt who never went beyond the front gate of her house for forty years. That’s great story-telling.

Nice to see you posting, Alan. Not easy to find many short story fans.

Eager to hear your take on the new deWitt, deeg.

I’ve read all of the praise and finally landed a copy of Nightcrawling and I think it’s one of the worst,most manipulative books I’ve read in a long time. I just can’t stand it and I’m only half-way through. I read somewhere recently that as a society all we want to see are depictions of black misery and this novel tops the list. I don’t expect a book to be sweet and flowery but this book is black misery porn-just dreadful.

I just read I Meant It Once - a good experience of being open to a book that I initially felt like wasn't for me. These stories are mostly about young women in their mid-20s to early 30s adrift in their current relationships or stuck in the past and unable to move forward. Been there, done that. But I'm old now.

However, Moment's Later was such a striking story that I went back and read everything again, this time, really enjoying the language and the subtleties of the stories, especially the linked stories about the three siblings in a highly dysfunctional family.

There is a sameness to the stories but I think they are worthwhile.

I just read the new novel (Booker longlisted) The House of Doors. It's very well written but............... it takes place just after WWI in Malaysia, Somerset Maugham and his secretary/boyfriend are staying with a British couple, everyone has a secret, there's a subplot about Sun Yet Sen and another about a notorious trial that was the germ of Maugham's The Letter. I found it odd that Eng chose this as his topic - it's so Eurocentric.

Going to put a hold on that short story collection. Not sure if I’ve seen it yet.

Reading The Future and cannot put it down.

>26 laurenbufferd: The House of Doors is my number one anticipated fall book, though I can't figure out how books like that ever get published when they are so specifically written just for me to want.

I'll give you my copy when I'm done.

It really agitates me when the advance of a book is-a take on such and such book. They are doing this with the new Anne Patchett-saying it’s a re-telling of a Chekhov play. I love Chekhov but why do they have to do this with her work. Maybe it was her intent-but for me it takes away from my interest in reading the book. There is another new title-Neapolitan’s something-and it sounds great but everything I read says it’s a take on Little Women. Little Women has no interest for me and this just turns me off the book. For so long everything was a take on Jane Austin. I understand literature begets literature and that this is probably a marketing thing-but I’m so much more interested in reading a book on its own terms and not be told it’s a working of King Lear or the Odyssey.

Naomi Alderman's The Future is really good. It's due out in November butt here may be arcs floating around and nab one if you can. It's thrilling and sexy and very funny considering it's about the world ending, also hopeful and thought provoking. I loved it.

I am reading Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet which I'm very happy I'm reading now and not 20 years ago when I think it would have seemed charming and quirky but not relatable and darkly funny. All aboard the S.S. Thumbelina.

>32 laurenbufferd: I am reading Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet which I'm very happy I'm reading now and not 20 years ago when I think it would have seemed charming and quirky but not relatable and darkly funny. All aboard the S.S. Thumbelina.

Absolutely. Had I read it at 50 or younger, it would have seemed almost cartoonish. Well, it still does, in a way, but it cuts close to the bone now in a way it wouldn't have then.

right. It feels just a whisper away and some of the dialogues remind me of current conversations with my 80+ mother.

And I, too, am reading The Hearing Trumpet. Just the kind of thing I needed this weekend. I've read a few other things since I last posted and will get to those in a bit.

>26 laurenbufferd: I Meant It Once is one of the short pile of books I brought home from the American Library Association conference in Chicago in June. I need to start digging into some of this year's short story collections.

>31 alans: I think every new bit of culture needs to be referencing something else these days. People just seem to want more hand-holding, or else marketers think they do. Look at how few major studio films aren't remakes.

I am still working my way thru The Story of Art without Men. Is it great? No. But Hessel's enthusiasm about artists - many who I've never heard of is contagious and I've got a ginormous reading list now to catch up.

For my work reading group we read Gods Behaving Badly. It's pretty silly and I wouldn't recommend tracking it down at all costs but if you come across it, it's fun.

I am reading a thriller about a killer nurse turned meek librarian How Can I help You?. I love that Shirley Jackson got namechecked.

I just finished The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride whom I have never read before and who I know nothing about. I listened to the book on audio and the narrator was by far one of the strongest I’ve ever heard. Too often narrators bungle the voices of their opposite sex and in the last book I listened to the foreign accents were dreadful.
I loved this book in the beginning,but there are so many characters and the book seems to meander so much-it’s four hundred pages-that I just couldn’t care after a while. It’s an interesting story-one that I don’t think has been tried before-it just went on too long for me.

I don't seem to have the gene for him Alan. I've never really enjoyed anything by him.

You know when the neighborhood librarian turns out to be a psycho killer nurse? That's what happens in How can I help You. It's pretty silly though I did like the Shirley Jackson shout outs.

Still though, these novels that exist in a non-time of no cell phones but no other time markers kind of bug me. They feel lazy.

I can't even express how much I loved The Hearing Trumpet and can't wait to read it again.

I'm reading The Tortoise and the Hare . My first Elizabeth Jenkins. I do like a very descriptive novel with a lot of things.

I LOVED The Tortoise and the Hare! I think I've read it three times.

Just finished a memoir by Sean Hewitt. It has to be the most self-indulgent twat I’ve read in ages. Total poor me misery porn. All Darkness Down to review an early copy. Painful. Now I’ve started another early copy of Lisa Jewell I don’t know anything about her but my sense is these mysteries are all the same. Want to start the new Zadie Smith soon and I got the new Emma Donaghue on audio. I’m dropping audible-too expensive.

LuAnn, The Tortoise and the Hare really surprised me as I thought I was getting kind of a genteel domestic village comedy and it was anything but. I don't think I can express how much I truly disliked Evelyn. I don't want to give away the ending but it was fascinating in that nobody was quite where you expected them to be. I also started listening to the Backlisted podcast with Carmen Calill and I quite agree- it's like reading a murder mystery without a body.

I also read The House of Gazes which was surprisingly good. I say surprisingly because my mileage really varies with the Europa titles. I loved the Ferrante books but went on record about the Elegance of the Hedgehog nonsense as one of the worst things I ever read. It takes place in and around Rome and is about a young poet who is also an alcoholic whose life is changed when he begins work as a cleaner in a children's hospital. It sounds dreadful and like it would be smarmy but it's beautiful and very moving.

I just started my first Regency romance Frederica. The jury is out.

>41 laurenbufferd: I just finished the Jenkins about a week ago. I guess we all got onto it because of the Backlisted podcast. I’ve had it for a while and it was really impressive. Yes, Evelyn was quite a creep.
I thought Jenkins,
rendering of the mother, son relationship was quite interesting. Her ambivalence about being a mother. It was quite good, and I need to listen to the podcast again.

I picked up a Brunetti novel for the first time in several years. I think it’s good to take a break from these mystery series.

I am now totally absorbed in The Moonflower Vine, which has been on my shelves awhile. I am loving this so much. I do love a saga and the structure is so interesting. When I’m finished, I’m going to have to go back and read the first chapter. I believe somebody,probably Lauren ,sent me her other novel, Claire deLune.

Glad to be back I haven’t posted in forever. Cataract surgery is a miracle.

It’s going to be hard to beat The Moonflower Vine. I totally adored it.

I need to get away from the Brits for a bit. I’m going with Her First American, which LuAnn sent me a while back.

Great to see you here, Karen!!!

>45 laurenbufferd: it’s good to be back. I spent quite a while reading this thread and what good discussions I’ve missed.!

I love The Moonflower Vine, it's a personal favorite. She wrote one other book - Claire de Lune - but it was unfinished when she had a stroke. It's still worth reading, though. It had another title when she was writing it - The Back Alleys of Spring, which is so much more vivid than the dopey Claire De Lune.

>47 DG_Strong: Yeah, I have the other one. That is a great title..

I just read my first - I think - and probably last Regency romance Fredericka. This was given to me by a very dear friend and an ardent Heyer fan. Although I liked the story - and indeed the set piece about the balloon and all that transpired after was quite wonderful - the characters mostly didn't feel like real people to me and I never really cared much about who was going to end up with who. Not that I couldn't tell from the outset.

I know that people make a big deal about the research Heyer did - about clothing language politics, but I have to admit all those facts and words - bacon-faced, blue-deviled, bone box, neckclothes, tulips - began to drive me crazy after a a while. It seemed so full of effort. A little spin through the web revealed she was a horrid anti-semite as well.

I thought this was my first Regency romance but I did read some of the Angelique books in hs so maybe not. Anyway, I think I am not a Regency person.

Those books have never appealed to me at all.

Just finished my second Giller long-listed book Away from the Dead by David Bergen. It’s a masterpiece,heat-breakingly beautiful,an incredible gift to book lovers and readers. Just the most moving,perfect read.

Just finished up LJ's Best Books 2023 short story category judging, which meant reading the first three stories out of something like 20 collections. It was fun to sample so many, but frustrating because I hate to recommend a collection without having read it all the way through. But you can kind of vibe what's strong and what's not, and what will appeal to enough of an audience that a library should spend money on it or not.

I'm going to go back and finish some of my favorites, so right now I'm reading the rest of Jamel Brinkley's Witness, which is so good. There was a lot of great short fiction out this year, for those of you who celebrate.

Also reading a poetry collection by my friend Diane Mehta, Tiny Extravaganzas, which comes out next month. I'm interviewing her for Bloom, which should be fun... having a friend who's a poet can be fraught, because there's just so much so-so poetry out there and you never want to say so to people's faces, but she's a fantastic poet and I'm really enjoying it.

Two things at once: Paul Murray's gargantuan The Bee Sting (jury's still out for me, and I might put it on pause until I'm at the beach for two weeks in October) and, because I like to read short things at the same time as one big long thing, Lisa Alward's Cocktail, which is veering towards being the best set of stories I've read in quite some time. I really hate that every lady short storiest gets compared to Munro, but they're Munrovian, it's hard to say anything else. But Alward is her own thing, too the stories are sharper around the edge, elbowier than Munro somehow. Maybe some Richard Yates sprinkled in too, which is a reference you don't see much these days.

I’ve seen Cocktail and I’m going to get it now.

I’m almost finished listening to my fourth Giller long-listed bookGirlfriend on Mars . It’s my least favourite of the bunch and I’ve had a very hard time sticking with it,but the ending is very powerful. It’s popular sci-fi,very well-written with many popular references,one that is already outdated,it’s just not my thing. An intelligent Beach read-I’m too old for this sort of thing.

I really liked Landscapes a new novel set in a kind of future England overrun with climate disaster migrants, where cities are covered with protective domes and the rest of the county is left to moulder in rain, heat, or draught. It's a tiny bit precocious with the occasional line like 'last night I rewatched Renais' Le Vie en Roman' but I still thought it was fascinating - about a woman in a decaying country house, creating an archive of remaining objects and coming to terms with a sexual assault.

I'm midway through another Dalziel/Pascoe mystery (not sure why but I decided 2023 was the year to read them all in order) and trying to finish Farewell to the Muse. The topic is aces, the writing is pretty awful.

Just finished lessons in chemistry and really liked it, didnt care for the vocabulary learning dog but thats just me

read astray I liked most stories in the collection, except the ones in the gold rush, but worth reading

Finished Study for Obedience , short-listed for the Booker prize. The most boring,self-indulgent crap I’ve read in a long time. Unbearable.

cindy, I remember being underwhelmed by Astray. I like Donoghue a lot but those stories felt slight.

I am enjoying the stories in Tell It to a Stranger but I wish the short ones were longer and the longer ones shorter. They aren't packing the same punch as Molly Panter-Downs but I like the time period and settings.

I also started reading Why Sinead O'Connor Matters . Not that I needed someone to tell me but it's good.

Donaghue’s novel about the Spanish flu is very well-researched and quite a fascinating read. The ending is pathetic but it’s a very strong book otherwise.

two good library books:

And then She Fell This really blew me away, in part, because I had no idea what to expect.

Alice, a young Mohawk woman, raised on the rez, has married her white partner, moved to Toronto and had a baby. Her own parents are gone and she is attempting to transcribe some of the creation stories her father shared, as well as struggle with post-partem depression and what seems to be a deteriorating mental illness (hearing voices, seeing visions) . What transpires is the most astonishing novel about inherited trauma, time travel, motherhood, academia, with a Reservation Dogs vibe, borrowing freely from horror and Disney, tipping its hat to Charlotte Perkins Gilmore's The Yellow Wallpaper There's even a talking cockroach. And it's funny.

It took me reading the last 40 pages twice to really see where Elliott was going and when the penny dropped, I cheered out loud because it's so f*(&ing bold.

The Vaster Wild A spellbinding account of a young indentured servant who escapes from Jamestown and sets out on her own in the wilderness. The novel has many of the themes found in Groff's most recent work (I felt like I was reading this in conversation with Matrix and some of the more recent NYer stories) - human impact on the environment, men's power over women, the individual vs the community. I thought the language was gorgeous and the story was gripping but I can also see how a reader might want more of a story, for a novel that takes place in the woods, it's very very interior. And I have some hesitations about the ending and even the direction of the novel. There's something incomplete about it.

cant wait to read the new goff. thanks for that summary.

reading old new york, which I somehow missed reading it and loving it quite a bit

That Wharton is really good, especially The Old Maid, which was made into a good film with Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins.

I am having trouble finishing Less is Lost. This is the fifth book of his I’ve read and I liked them all.

Late posting about it here but I spent last week with North Woods and it has been a while since I read I book I went so nuts for. None of it should work - it starts in like Puritan days and works up to now, the thru line being a particular New England house in the woods, so characters come and then disappear, sort of. Parts of the plot are dispensed via ballads, another section is a sort of 20th-century lurid tabloid tale. I don't wanna spoil too much, but it's a little bit of a ghost story, a little bit of a magical realist novel and a whole lot of flat out wonderful.

Norah Loft the British writer wrote books like that, including the house trilogyand the suffolk trilogy, and I loved them. So that looks right up my alley

I can't wait to read North Woods but I had to take it back to the library. I'm putting myself on the reserve list again.

I was traveling last week so reading mostly back issues New Yorkers and old mysteries. I did read The road to Dalton which is one of those lovely books in which not much happens, about life in rural small town Maine - a car accident sets off a series of events, some tragic, some not so. I enjoyed it but I'm a bit of a watching paint dry reader.

I am reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and it's really charming and funny and weird.

none of the rules apply atkinso s new stiry collection

theif of time for the disc world book challenge " death

the hearing trumpet

and I am still trying to make my way through Black Sea I find it fascinating but its a bit dry and hard to read without taking breaks. tho I intend to finish

I finished two old women for the RTT indigenous peoples Novemeber theme
excellent, and now i am eager to receive bird girl and man follow the sun and raising ourselves

I'm so glad I read Drive Your Plow in proximity to The Hearing Trumpet. Old ladies, of which I am one, kick ass and both novels are so far from the 'rapping granny' stereotype, they bring me great joy. I was iffy about Flights, those kinds of mosiac-y fictions are not really my thing , but I loved this mystery meditation on community, astrology, murder and animal rights.

I am reading Come and Get It, the not yet published Keily Reid. Man, that woman really knows how to create dialogue-driven plots.

I just started the new Lauren Groff,can’t really comment on it yet. It’s my first by her. I don’t know if I just wasn’t aware of this before but a lot of fiction seems to be about runaway slaves now.

alan, I'll be interested in what you think. For me, something was missing and I'm not sure what it was. The novel does seem linked to Matrix and I know she is thinking of the two as part of a trilogy but not sure totally where she is going.

Pushing all my buttons is The Ghost Theater. Elizabethan England, art, plays, identity, plague, rebellion, bird worshipping, fortune-telling female lead, dream-like/cinematic descriptives, and quality sentences. Some issues with anachronisms, but without revealing too much, I think there's a point to that. So far, a surprising gem.

Half-way through the Groff and totally in love with it. Don’t know the Matrix nor that this is intended as part of a trilogy. The more I read the more the story reveals itself and I can’t put it down.

Just finished The Sleeping Car Porter,wonderful. Won Giller last year and short-listed for Governor General prize this year,very interesting book.

Had to set aside "The Ghost Theater," because both of my library holds came in (at the same time, of course).

Pet by Catherine Chidgey

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

I started the second one after dinner and just now looked up to see it's 10:30pm. I know there aren't many fans of historical fiction 'round these parts, but I think DG might want to check this one out.

ETA: I also have North Woods on hold but there's a wait for that.

>72 Pat_D: Lauren already gave me a copy of The House of Doors! I'm a VERY easy gift recipient!

And North Woods is my favorite book of the year so far, and it's not even close.

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff is a masterpiece. It will be talked about for years. Just a hugely moving book,an incredible achievement.

I am closing in on the ending of the 600+ page The Bee Sting and it's strange: I am very curious to see if he can stick the landing on this, with no clear idea of what that landing should be. It's such a small story but it's so vivid you don't care that it's just going on and on and on. The chapter dominated by the mother - Imelda - is almost a novel on its own, funny and tragic at the same time, and it comes after you've been led to sort of dislike her but then she ends up being the character you feel for the most. It's a good trick.

You all are reading so many books on my physical/virtual pile!

I loved Tiny Extravaganzas—if you're a fan of complex but also accessible poetry, this is definitely one I'd recommend.

Finally finished (after a couple of library holds expired on me) Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone—it's more a history of labor, paid and unpaid, and the politics around it than a polemic. I'm not sure which of those I expected or wanted, but this was a very good, feminist-slanted look at the imbalances of work, from un- and underpaid labor (caregiving, mothering, domestic work) to aspirational labor (internships, low-paying jobs with the often false promise of moving up) to the mythology built up around the privilege of having a creative or "greater good" or competitive tech job that enables exploitation (HI!!). Dense, but good stuff.

I also read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I loved—being now firmly in the older, cranky, animal-company-seeking lady demographic that, I'm discovering, has some wonderful representation in fiction. I've already bought a copy of this as a Christmas gift for a fellow cranky old animal loving friend, and recommended it to another (who will have much more love for the astrology component, which is not my thing in the least but I appreciated as an example of any method that we get attached to to help make sense of the world).

Now I'm reading America Fantastica, the newest by Tim O'Brien, who wrote The Things They Carried. This one's a very post-truth-America road trip hapless antihero satire: MAGA, greed, self-important outlaws and few hapless antihero/heroines. Not necessarily something I'd pick up, but I'm interviewing him for a work event in a couple of weeks and it should be a really good one to talk about at a library directors' conference.

I thought Come & Get It was a mess but a delicious one. Lots of dialogue and description - you will know where each of these college students purchased their Nalgenes - but it does almost add up. Just follow the money, no matter how insignificant, it seems - dollar bills folded up into origami birds, $20 dropped into a boot in lieu of a bank.

I am reading The Accommodation which is quite an extraordinary bit of history- about segregation in Dallas. Schultz is a journalist and it does read like every article that you might have read in Texas Monthly but it's very good with a lot of oh geez moments. I am also reading The Ladies of Lyndon. I've gone on record many times about how much I hate The Constant Nymph and I like this much more - about a group of women who are all connected to a country estate, by marriage or birth. It's very episodic, which I enjoy - almost like linked stories - and except for some implicit anti-Semitism, its quite enjoyable.

For anyone considering tackling The Bee Sting, I say do it. It's a long, immersive haul, with a killer of an ending that resolves things without resolving anything at all (at least for the reader). The ending feels inevitable, though. I was thrilled by the book; that's two great ones in a row, this and North Woods.

I'm stoked for them both. I got a little ways into North Woods and then other reading responsibilities intervened, and now we're going to be reading The Golden Notebook for book club, but those two are high up on my list. Along with, oh, another 50 books that I must read right away.

>76 lisapeet: O'Brien was one of my writer-heroes in college. I remember doing a paper on The Things They Carried. Those stories resonated with me because of my history living in SE Asia during the Vietnam Conflict as a kid. My Dad worked for the U.S. Gov't and my 2 best friends' fathers flew for Air America. We did our shopping at the commissary and holidays were usually the same places the military used for R'n R'. Most of them were just kids only a few years older than me. So, yeah. I could've written some wild stories about interactions with them. Color me jealous, Lisa.

I finished The House of Doors. After a good start, it hit a lull with a story that felt like it was going nowhere and with unclear timelines. But I stuck with it because the characters felt real vs. imagined and I wanted to know more about them. Once Willie and Lesley became each other's confessor, and Ethel's trial took a turn, I couldn't put it down. I'm so glad I persevered because it has a lovely, satisfying ending, and those are too, too rare.

Started North Woods after dinner, and my hold on the new deWitt came in.

Pat, I thought the House of Doors was so underwraps. For a book about passion, it's awfully restrained.

just finished kiaros which was marvelous I knew little about East Germany just befor the wall came done. Excellent I now want to read more by Erpenbeck

I am a fan of hers. I loved The End of Days and Go Went Gone

Finished If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English which was short-listed for the giller last year. My second from last year’s short list. It’s not very long but it’s extremely emotional and the descriptions of Cairo are pretty bleak. The last part is a complete disaster-I don’t know why anyone didn’t tell her to cut it with a chainsaw-but until then it’s a very passionate,beautiful book. You really feel like you are in Cairo.

>82 laurenbufferd: I'm about a third of the way through the copy you gave me, Lauren, and my feeling is that he's doing an awfully good impression of a Maugham novel, that slightly compressed, muffled passion vibe - so that seems intentional to me. I'm holding off on saying anything else until I'm further into it.

I am reading the first volume of the Shiva Purana, a 3-vol translation from the Sanskrit, by Bibek Debroy (an economist as well). The Puranas are a gargantuan collection of books delving into the spiritual otherworlds of the Hindus, organized around some of its prominent archetypes. You don"t have to be religious or Hindu to read one. I believe there is a Penguin Project to get all the 18 Puranas translated, which gives many ways to enter these mesmerizing worlds.

Another book I have just read is The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell. Taut crime fiction with a very humanly drawn detective in Inspector Wallander.

I am also picking up Iain M. Banks" The Algebraist, though scifi isn't really my cup of tea. ( Huge shout-out to Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary, which is amazing.)

I wonder what I should go on to next? A meditation on the nature of the world and of ourselves would be nice.

Theif of Time for discworld DEATH challenge , raising ourselvesfor RTT November theme Indigenous Peopls

looking for something to help me escape the news for a while. A good read, that will last a few hours or more. suggestions? (no mysteries or detective stories please)

I knocked out West Heart Kill on a little camping trip. It is, alas, a "meta-mystery" and it's more interesting as the former than the latter. I was kind of irritated through most of it.

>87 7rudra7: Ooof you've a stout reading heart. The Hindus sound challenging. Do check back on those, please.

Is The Man Who Smiled about the same Wallander that's in the Nordic series on Netflix? I've watched all of those.

Deeg, that's exactly the impression I got from The House of Doors, and why I mentioned appreciating the characterizations. It was a time when facade was everything in society and necessary for some's survival. I mentioned that about a third of the way in I was getting lulled by the descriptions and inactivity. But right around when Lesley has her epiphany, I was in for the duration. I think the best part of the book was the ending.

I'm about halfway through North Woods. I'm not sure I'll be able to find the words that will justly convey this reading experience. I'm at the seance part, but I do need to mention that the short section of letters from an artist to his poet friend destroyed me with its beauty and vulnerability. I have to admit I'd not been familiar with this author until DG's recommendation. I'm probably going to attack everything he's written after this. I'm curious, what turned you onto it? Had you read something by him before this?

7rudra7, This book, North Woods by Daniel Mason, is a perfect fit for "A meditation on the nature of the world and of ourselves..."

>90 Pat_D: Pat, I can't remember where I saw it first - it might have been the local bookstore's weekly IG "laydown diaries" (Ann Patchett's Parnassus Books, worth following). It sounded like my thing, which turned out to be quite the understatement!

I finished The Art Thief on audio today. It was ok,I wasn’t crazy about it.
Anne Michaels has a brand new book out. She never appealed to me in the past but I started looking at this one and I’m going to give it a try.
I move to evil,racist,homophobic,anti-trans South Florida tomorrow. I am going to be a snow bird for the first time in my life-something I have always laughed at. But I’ve lived in Canada for 65 years and even though the idea of cold winters is evaporating-I still can’t stand it anymore. Whenever I tell friends I am going they are horrified. One friend said he feels sorry for me.

I finished North Woods by Daniel Mason. Despite the last section feeling contrived, or just not as organically developed as the rest of this entrancing read, I absolutely loved it. Big Gracias to Deeg for that recommendation.

I'm deep into The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, and I'm delighted to report, he's got his mojo back. The characters in this one practically walk off the pages they're so well formed.

>92 alans: Happy Trails, Alan. Not all of Florida is Crackerville.

come to AZ they are about the same except we have a democratic governor and there are no hurricanes (of course you will have summers of 110+ degresses for weeks on end.....)

just finished pip an amazingly well written book thats more than about Great Expectations, but what happens when your rulers cant read....didnt realize this was based on civil war in paupa new guinea, where thousands died. Ill have to read more on that, in the meantime, thought this review was on target "

"You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames."

would like to read more by him, any suggestions?

Oh thanks for reminding me about that, Cindy. I loved that book! I think I meant to find other things by him and simply forgot.

alan, I think you will find your people.

I am catching up on old New Yorkers and Dalziel/Pascoe mysteries. I did read Dykette which made me awfully tired. I didn't know any of the references and the endless performative sexual gestures and postures made me feel like I was 100 years old. On the other hand, there is something to be said for writing a book about some truly unlikable people - it's very Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , get-the-guest and all that. I just think I'm past the point of caring about people whose lives are completely shaped by social media.

Lauren this is one of those books that surprised me when I realized it was a male author. He gets 13 year old matilda to a t. and continues as she ages. I have here at the end of the world we learn to dance coz who can resist a title like that?

Been in southern Florida five days and the weather has been so beautiful-blue skies and very hot weather. Went to the public library yesterday. But sadly there isn’t one bookstore in the entire town. So far I find the locals to be so friendly and open.
I have a good friend who lives in Mississippi and I called today 5o I tell him I’m below the Mason-Dixie line now. He said-I don’t consider that to be below the Mason Dixie line even if geographically it is-and I don’t consider it to be part of the south. It’s beautiful here. The only Cracker I’ve met so far is when I went out for turkey dinner and the manager came into the bathroom and then left without washing his hands. Why does anyone live in the north when you can have these blue skies and sunshine every day?

One word, Alan: *Hurricanes*.

So far I still have a roof over my head.

I just finished listening to Eileen and I feel quite ill. I read it when it first came out but I found it so odd that didn’t know what to make of the book or the author. But listening to it read from the start it reminded me of Patricia Highsmith. After reading about Moshfegh’s latest I really thought I’d never go near her work again. I did read her short stories and they are also quite bleak. But I saw the trailer for the film and decided to try this again. I’m glad I read it but it is very very unsettling throughout.

On another note-I am astonished The New York Times couldn’t list The Vaster Wilds or The Guest
on their top 100 of the year.

have finished the most excellent so long a letter and scarlet song, two books that take place in senegal, read for the Afrcian Author Challenge. These are all she wrote, she passed after this book was published. Sad that there is no more from this gifted author, but she had two books to her legacy that others can enjoy

my review of the latter is here https://www.librarything.com/topic/351927#n8290658

I was really underwhelmed by Behind You is the Sea which I hoped to like more than I did. Linked short stories about Palestinian-American families in Baltimore. I found them very flat and the writing unmemorable.

My son gave me a beautiful book about owls What an Owl Knows and I was so touched that I read it! I don't read too many (any) books about animal behavior. But I loved this and the writing was really good and engaging.

alan, I rarely can't bear Otessa Mosfegh. It's the worst kind of misery porn.

I started a re-read of The Golden Notebook for my bookclub and it's just astonishing. I mean, I read it back when but before I had enough life experience to really understand any of it and even with that, found myself profoundly affected. It's amazing to come back to it as a 63 year old person, mother, daughter, wife.

>101 alans: And you probably always will. I was simply replying to your question of why some people choose not to live in FL.

I sat in a coffee shop and read the entirety of Roz Chast's I Must Be Dreaming and it was like having some laughs with an old friend. Plus, I want to bring back my dream journal...

I just got that for Mr Fufferd for Christmas.

I agree about Ottessa Moshfegh. While reading her book of stories I felt like she was pushing things to the bleakest levels.

I just finished Deliberate Cruelty which is mostly about the rags-to riches socialite Ann Woodward and Truman Capote’s unfinished work Unanswered Prayers. It’s gossipy and trashy but lots of fun. I loved hearing about the world of high society and how the very rich are so obsessed with appearance. I never knew the complete story of Capote’s demise so that was interesting too.

I’ve tried reading the first two stories in this year’s Best American Short Stories and I’m close to giving up. I’ll try one more and that’s it. The first two stories are mind-games and I just don’t have the patience for the weird blah blah that goes on.
In the second story amidst confused philosophical musings three characters vomit-not fun reading at all.

finally reading covenant of water which Im quite enjoying

I had to take a wee break from The Golden Notebook to review Anita DeMonte Laughs Last which is a campus novel mixed with a mystery about an artist's death - the artist based I think on Ana Mendieta who died under mysterious did she jump or was she pushed circumstances. I'm liking but not loving.

also reading here at the end of the world, we learn to dancewhich I am finding very interesting. Enjoying googling the music referenced so I can get into the tango beat

Very much looking forward to Covenant of Water sounds really interesting. Just finished a new title called Map of the Missing . Epic novel of generations of a Chinese family. Somewhat dull but enjoyed reading about the nd Cultural Revolution.

I’m miserably reading Michael Cunnungham ‘s new book Day. It’s like pulling teeth-so boring and inconsequential and to have to read another story about a hip couple in Brooklyn I feel like screaming.
I’m only sticking with it because I need to review it but I hate everyone in the book.

I seem to lack the gene for him.

I liked Anita De Monte Laughs Last which is based, in part, on Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre, although in this the spirit of Anita comes back to mess with her husband in a way that is both amusing and horrifying. It's also a campus novel about a young Latina who is in the art history department at Brown and her discovery of Anita's work which has been systemically cut from all the texts on 70s and 80s land art. It's a very readable look at a pretty heavy topic and I think it works.

Finished Red Scarf Girl last night which is the very moving memoir of a teenager growing up during the Cultural Revolution.
Gave up on the Cunningham after thirty-five pages- too boring. Dumping a book is new for me and it feels wonderful.

manifesto a most excellent memoir by the author of girl, woman, other

OOH. I loved that, cindy.

I'm now reading The Wager by David Grann and it's excellent.

>118 Pat_D: It kind of shocks me how many good books there are that are true stories about crazy adventures on boats.

>119 DG_Strong: They've fascinated me going all the way back to my first reading of Billy Budd, which I still consider one of the finest reading experiences of my life, and one of the rarities I could read over and over. It's general consensus that Melville's novella was based on a real person/event.

One of the attractive features of Grann's book is how well he depicts, not just the era's dialogue, but the literary prose of the time, minus the dryness.

An interesting read in The Atlantic: The Painstaking Journey to a David Grann Book.

"Here’s an example of a finished Grann passage from The Wager:"

And then the clouds blackened, blotting out the sun. The winds began to wail, and angry waves emerged from nowhere, exploding against the hulls. The ships’ prows, including the Centurion’s red-painted lion, plunged into the deep hollows, before rearing upward pleadingly toward the heavens. The sails convulsed and the ropes whipped and the hulls creaked as if they might splinter...

"Grann believes that, like his other books, The Wager is not just an adventure story or a murder mystery. He’s quick to note that this book contains grand themes, such as the dangers of imperialism, the collapse of belief in institutions, the war over truth. It’s also a tale of sedition."

“I’d be getting materials from archives, reading about this 18th-century story, and then I would come home and flip on the cable news or read the newspaper, and there’d be allegations of alternative facts and so-called fake news and disinformation and debates over what history books could be taught in school,” he said. “What was weird is I kind of wanted to write about what was happening in our country at that period, because it was the most dominant compelling story, and then I found some weird parable way to wrestle with that story with a completely different story set centuries earlier.”

I'm listening to the Barbra Steisand book and have thoughts, mostly about the ego it takes to release a 48 hour audio book. Also, shouldn't an autobiography be your thoughts about your life and work? Streisand's spending an awful lot of time sharing other peopele's thoughts about her work. Instead of saying reviewers were kind, she tells you exactly what they say, over and over again. That said, each part is enjoyable, but it does need a strong editing to make the whole a good work. (I'm listening at 2x speed, and except for the excerpts of her singing, you really can't tell it's sped up.)

I haven’t seen the movie yet and I really didn’t know anything about the story-but I just finished reading The Power of the Dog and I think it’s one of the most beautifully written books I’ve read in a long while.

I am power reading October and November New Yorkers so I'll only be a month behind when 2024 starts. But I am also still reading The Golden Notebook which I think takes apart a lot of pre-existing ideas about fiction and imagination and Dazzling Stranger which is as much about the revival as it is about Jansch and thus slow going.

finished ancestor stonesand plan to start house of doors in january

Hi all, and apologies for the prolonged absence. This really was a hell of a year, and even though I know the flipping of the calendar is an artificial construct and 2024 could hold its own hardships, I'm glad to see the last of 2023. BUT I'm still vertical, for the most part, and the little ship that I'm captain of remains afloat. Jasper is a ray of sunshine, as are the cats.

A few end-of-year reads:

Tiny Extravaganzas by Diane Mehta is a lovely poetry collection (the writer is a friend, but I would think so even if I didn't know her). It's multilayered and complex, but always with a way in to the heart of each poem—musings on on interacting with art/dance/music, on loss, on age, on parenting an almost-grown child—sophisticated, knockout imagery, lurking empathy, and inventive, fun-to-read-out-loud language.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. I read this for book club and loved it—being now firmly in the older, cranky, animal-company-seeking lady demographic that, I'm discovering, has some wonderful representation in fiction. I've already bought a copy of this as a Christmas gift for a fellow cranky old animal loving friend, and recommended it to another (who will have much more love for the astrology component, which is not my thing in the least but I appreciated as an example of any method that we get attached to to help make sense of the world).

America Fantastica by Tim O'Brien. This kind of slapstick social satire isn't quite my groove, but I'm a longtime fan of The Things They Carried and I volunteered to interview him for a work event. I had plenty to talk about with him, and he was charming and had plenty to say, so all was good.

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. I think I am not the target audience for self-help books, but this is a subject that is of some interest to me this year and came recommended by a friend, so I went in with an open mind. There were some concrete ideas that were definitely of value for me, especially around physically managing the stress cycle so that it can conclude rather than keep spinning, and hammering home the importance of sleep... someday I'll internalize that one. I guess that's the point of this kind of book, take what you need and leave the rest... Anyway, I'm glad I read it even if not all of it stuck.

The Possibilities by Yael Goldstein-Love. A parallel universe story hinging on new motherhood and those feelings and fears. There's a missing baby and infant loss, which probably would have triggered the hell out of me 35 years ago, but at this remove felt more like a plot point than a horror. The premise was a slow burn—maybe a little too slow? the book could have done without a couple of the characters/scenes and been a bit more urgent—but it was a good concept.

I'm STILL reading Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook for a late January book club, with other books interspersed. It's a big dense social 1960s feminist novel, sprawling and full of physical and emotional minutiae, and very much of its time. The men are all horrible, and the women very conflicted about pretty much everything, but it's a fascinating collage. I honestly have no idea what's going to happen from page to page. This was on my parents' shelves when I was little, and I'm sure my mom read it—she was very much a proto-feminist—and I wish I could talk to her about it, and what that particular brand of outrage looked like at the time.

I really would like to be more active and present here. I've been a little too underground even for me.

Does anyone have any thoughts on Bright Young Women. I picked it up because I thought the perspective would be interesting and it was so highly praised,but I find it so boring and pointless that I’m on the verge of bailing. I think the book was really over-hyped.

The Golden Notebook: I'm not sure what to say about this book except that when I read it the first time- about 40 years ago- I'm not sure what I ever made of it, I sure didn't have many life experiences to compare. Reading it again, in my 60s, I found it to be an extraordinary, novel about identity, writing, imagination and the forging of life into art. It's about the creative tools used and discarded. The details of life, including a day in a life of a woman having her period, are immersive and vivid

It has a lot of dated stuff to say about sex and sexuality, things that seem like nonsense now about clitoral vs vaginal orgasms and some pretty stale stuff about homosexuality.

And yet.............. there's nothing quite like this novel anywhere else and I can't help but think that, behind all the ideas that haven't aged particularly well, are some truths about what it's like to be a woman, what its like to lose yourself in another persons mental illness, and how to take the pieces of your life and make something new from them. The dilemma of whether to keep parts of your life separate or see how they might mesh remains relevant and fresh.

Olga Dies Dreaming What a glorious mess. Intergenerational trauma, destructive weather, Russian mafia, AIDS, gentrification, by the time non-consensual sex rolled around, I was like, seriously, can you throw more at your character?

Still, I really like Gonzalez' exuberance and compassion. She creates great, believable characters and writes about really important things. We need her voice and the occasional kitchen-sink novel isn't going to hurt you. Her second novel is about Ana Mednaita and Carl Andre and suffers from a similar over-stuffed narrative but with a little more focus.

Strange things afoot on LibraryThing. I posted a long reply to Lisa's post, but it seems I typed invisible pixels because it's nowhere to be found.

I could've messed up, of course, more likely it's the online editorial spirits trying to tell me something.

Listened to seven hours of Geneaology of a Murder and had to give up. This book is full of so many unnecessary details that it just overwhelmed and bored me. I have an early review copy -not early anymore -of Two Dead Wives and it’s terrible. It’s so evident that the author doesn’t have enough information to fill the page-she keeps spinning her wheels.

>129 Pat_D: Aww, the online editorial spirits are a tease.

North Woods was every single bit as good as DG Strong said it was. I don't want to give parts away but it's an ecological fable, a ghost story, and historical fiction that focuses on a single dwelling located in what became Western Massachusetts from the 16th century to the 20th. It's funny in parts and incredibly moving in others with a few moments where you might gasp in astonishment. Vivid, evocative, glorious. Best thing I read all year, if you include 2023.

Yay! Usually when I read something I like that much, it stumps me for a bit about what to read next - but not this time. I've been tearing through things since.

I jus finished The Vaster Wilds - I was on the con side (mostly, I thiiink) for the first half of the book (especially after it occurred to me that it was Island of the Blue Dolphins for grownups) but I did think the last twenty or so pages took some serious nerve, so I ended up in the pro column. And plotting aside, there really are not a lot of people who can write like Groff, so that was a pleasure.

Agreed. There is something incomplete about it - I think it's really in dialogue with Matrix and whatever book would follow it (she's indicated in interviews that she thinks about them as a trilogy).

Over last week's snowpocalypse and a quick trip to Boca to see my folks, I got caught up with New Yorkers and read another Dalziel/Pascoe mystery. The sad thing about Reginald Hill is that he must have been so successful that nobody edited him and the books get longer and longer. No mystery needs to be 400+ pages. I enjoy them greatly, but they are so bloody irritating too.

I am reading The Dolphin House.

Yes on the incompleteness - it felt a little like a very long excerpt of something else.

At one point, I started thinking about all those old James Michener novels where the first five hundred pages was like the evolutionary origin of a hazelnut or whatever and how The Vaster Wilds would have been a really fantastic prologue to something. Maybe North Woods! Lamentations' house could have been the stone starter house in North Woods!

I ended up liking it more than all this indicates, I think.

Boo, is nobody reading?

I am reading Myriam Gurba's Creep. I love her blistering style and her attitude and I wish I could pull off that combination of not having any $%^& to give but still caring tremendously. It's awesome.

The Dolphin House was interesting, based on experiments done on and with dolphins in the 1960s and a woman who worked closely with them. It's not for the faint of heart (some animal abuse) but it's has some fascinating things to say about communication, gender and language. CINDY, there's a hearing impaired protagonist. I didn't love the writer's style, it felt kind of clunky but the ideas were cool.

I loved Saplings about a family during WWII in England and what happens to the children after the father dies in the Blitz. Yes, it's a downer but it's very very on the nose re the way trauma affects kids. I loved it.

I also really enjoyed Clear a different kind of love story about the Scottish clearings where people were moved off their land so the wealthy could have more room to graze their cattle. It's takes place as far north as you can go without being in the Arctic circle. The author is Welsh.

what about y'all?

I had an incredible run of books for a few months but finally hit a snag with The Sea Elephants, which I abandoned at about the halfway mark. I should have loved it: queer, India, theater, a little folktale vibe...but it never really caught fire with me.

Then I moved on to Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, by the same guy who wrote Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. It's a series now! It was fun to read but I really did forget it AS I WAS READING IT, which helped make the resolution more of a surprise, I guess.

Marking time until the next Tales of the City book, Mona of the Manor, due in a couple of weeks, I think.

>134 laurenbufferd: a bit late, but I read this book and was really disappointed. Only boook of hers I didn't like.Knowing that its part of a trilogy makes sense, i think. Loved her descriptions of the run (heck I felt like I was running too!) but the end didn't work for me

I read the excellen heaven and earth grocery store and just about finished with wifedom about geoge orwells wife a book that surprise me given I always thought he believed in freedom; apparently only for him and his friend. Poor Eileen, he basically killed her through his neglect; and didnt realize he was quite the misogonist.

>4 laurenbufferd: Oh I loved Circe too. found her firsr book (but printed afterwards)song of achilles had some problems for me. Eager what else she comes up with. She has a short story galleta but nothing for almost 10 year? I hope shes ok

Just looked; she posted an essay in WP about her long covid, and its upended her life. Weird i have annother favoirte author who did the same,Kelly Barnhill except hers is from a fall with brain injury. I hope good health returns to them!

I just read Marjorie Fleming which is a lovely little jewel though very sad. Malet gives us all of Fleming - a mighty talent in a very little girl, overwhelmed by her talent and living in a conventional family that is ill equipped to understand her. She is moody, prone to tantrums, attention-seeking, challenging, enchanted - in short - gifted.

This is a beautiful and sobering novel, a little jewel.

I also just read my first official romance novel Kissing Kosher. Friends, it had everything - intergenerational trauma, family infighting, kosher baking, medical weed, and a chronic illness! Plus Jews! I'm not sure what to say about it but I didn't hate it.

just finished The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot I was a little worried about twee, but tbh there is some at the very end but I thought it was a very realistic look at the two terminally ill patients, as well as the people helping around them. I think she could have ended it earlier, which is where it gets twee. but for a debut author, think it was pretty good

Read The Best Short Stories Of Edith Wharton which I really loved. think i like her shorts better than her novels, tho I did read old new york

February was a good reading month for me -- kicked a long reading slump finally. Enjoyed all of them with only one slight disappointment. Here's the list

After the Funeral and Other Stories - Tessa Hadley ****
Absolution - Alice McDermott *****
Antarctica - Claire Keegan *****
A Room with a View - EM Forster (audio book read by Juliet Stevenson) *****
I am Homeless If This Is Not My Home - Lorrie Moore *** (loved the first third, after that too many zombies)
Erasure - Percival Everett ****
The Vulnerables - Sigrid Nunez ****.5
In Memoriam - Alice Winn ****

Just started Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward for my book club. Tough but very good so far.

I thought Let Us Descend was amazing. A little woo-woo but still, that woman has imagination for days.

Lorrie Moore lost me a few books back.

I am reading the strange but riveting Every Eye. Just the kind of dry, slightly unreliable narrator I really like. A woman going to Ibiza with her much younger husband reminisces about her high-maintenance aunt and a long ago love affair.

I just reviewed The Safekeep which is a first novel by a Dutch Israeli author - I loved it - a woman lives in a house in the Dutch countryside in the early 1960s and her brother's girlfriend comes to stay with her. Small things begin to disappear around the house and the visitor seems to have a connection to the house that the resident can't understand. A very un-Holocausty take on postwar Europe and some steamy lady on lady sex. Highly recommend.

I am also about done with Making Our Future which you probably have to be me to like but it's very cool.

finished tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and cant decide how to rate it. the beginning which I read as a Kindle sampler, was excellent and the empitus for me to continue reading. The only gaming I did was D&D back in the stone age when we played in a F2F group, and I sorta played some in the 80s. Much of the book was about gaming, but the book was more than that, it thought it dragged in spots, and that some editing would have been a good idea; but the writing kept me reading so thats gotta count for something

Finished The Aushwitz Detective part of a series new to me. Very interesting and looking forward to reading the other eight books in the series.

Wow, I haven't been here since I was reading The Golden Notebook? Well, I finished that, and while it drove me nuts in part—so much nonstop introspection from unhappy minds—it was still a really worthwhile read, and the book club discussion it sparked was great and multifaceted.

Since then, I've also read:

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski—I think self-help really isn't my genre, but I give it a chance every so often.

Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore—neat, seriously offbeat queer art memoir/biography with zero accompanying images (at least in the library ebook I read), which made for some sometimes frustrating and other times interesting visual imagination-stretching. It was set largely in Baltimore, and I was there for work about a week after I read it and had hoped to do a little walking around and landmark-spotting, but it was 22˚ there and icy, and... nope.

Drinking from Graveyard Wells by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu—contemporary retellings and reimaginings of African folk tales centering women. The author is Zimbabwean and her take is consistently interesting, though the stories felt very short-arc (as, I guess, folk tales are).

American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff—good historical-ish fiction about a girl growing up in a Russian immigrant family in an early 20th-century Pennsylvania mining town. Some lovely writing, and a lot of good—if not deep—characters, generally a good read.

Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History in Ten Exhibitions by Daniel Belasco—a very interesting and super well-researched dive into 10 all-women shows that predated the feminist art consciousness of the 1960s and onward. A little on the academic side but really fascinating and knowledgable, and he doesn't shy away from talking about the lack of women of color represented and how that could have been addressed.

Now reading Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede, which I'm loving, though it's been a bit slow going because my copy has tiny type and I'm ooooold (and very tired at the end of the day).

"my copy has tiny type and I'm ooooold (and very tired at the end of the day)."

Glad I'm not the only one!

"my copy has tiny type and I'm ooooold (and very tired at the end of the day)."

Glad I'm not the only one.

I started Kelly Link's first novel, The Book of Love, but I just couldn't get into it. Felt like YA, and I just wasn't in the mood for that. I'll give it another try since I paid for it.

I am also reading In This House of Brede which I've read before and am really enjoying. I love the structure.

Reading A Little Devil in America which was not quite what I thought but intriguing all the same. Abdurraqib was at Big Ears last week, as was I, but I missed him reading which I am sad about. He has a new book coming out- I hope to see him come through town with that.

finished glimpses of the moon and loved it! who knew she could write a happy ending! also a bio the brave escape Edith Whartonwhich I found very well written with enough about her life to make me want to read more of her work

Listening to Giovanni’s Room on audio. It’s read beautifully but,well I understand the historical significance and I think Baldwin was incredibly brave to publish this when he did,but for the most part I find the book very dull. I know the book was written about sixty years ago but there are these passages that are so overwrought-it’s like he’s trying to write another Death in Venice and I’ve always hated that book. I can see the line between Baldwin and such insuferable pretentious snobs such as Edmund White and Alan Hollingsworth ,there is this preciousness to the writing that really annoys me. But reading Baldwin for both his homo-ness and his writing on black lives and racism is essential. People seem to think the only gay fiction-and I don’t include Baldwin in this because he was writing before such a thing-has to be akin to having tea with the queen and a stick up your ass. Dreadful stuff. These people have read too much Henrietta James as my university professor,a closeted predator used to call him forty years ago.

Having said my rant-as a well-known nasty readerville poster once called me,can anyone recommend a good bio on Baldwin? The only one I could find devotes six pages to this book. Is that all there is?

>154 alans: Talpa search for his bio https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=biography+of+James+Baldwin&se...

BTW, all your Baldwin touchstones lead to another author

Thanks. I fell across an interesting account of Baldwin’s work in the Times last night.

I need to change my opinion on Giovanni’s Room.
It’s brilliant and very moving. The narrator is fascinating and my version was read so well.

Just finished Black Robe this morning. I saw the film in the eighties and loved it. The book is very good but in this case I think the film is better.

to shape a dragons breath a first in the series excellent writing but really needs some editing. But this is a first novel so Im cutting her some slack 4.5

I did not love the new Tana French The Hunter. She's a great writer but there's like zero plot in this and it reads like a Brigadoon out take. Nobody says Sure and beggorah in it but they might as well. Thumbs down.

I am enjoying the essays in A Little Devil in America. They are uneven but what's good is really good and a few of the them quite eye opening. I'm thinking more about Whitney Houston then I ever have before.

I started reading This Great Hemisphere for review. It's really not my thing - a speculative novel about an invisible woman who sets off on a mission to find her brother accused of a high-profile political murder. It's very very heavy handed.

I started Jamel Brinkley's collection Witness last summer, I think, reading for LJ's best short stories of 2023, and then it got nudged off my virtual nightstand by one book and another. I picked it up again for my trip to Columbus and liked it a lot. These are largely stories of people whose lives veered off, either largely or in small ways, from the course they thought they were on—which is simplifying things in an effort to sum up, but I think it's a good frame. Brinkley writes beautifully, and I'm not always sure I buy his dialogue, it's part and parcel of that elegant prose so I'm fine with that. Less of the fierce energy of his first collection, A Lucky Man, but a good set of stories that make you think about life and trajectories and expectations, and care about even the most poorly behaved of his characters (there are a few).

Now I'm reading Alice Winn's In Memoriam, on the recommendation of a bunch of people.

james by Percival Evertte (wrong touchstone) Really loving it. havent read anythig by this author before, I am going to after this

>162 cindydavid4: I just downloaded that, too, Cindy. I have the Annotated Huckleberry Finn thing, so I'm going to revisit that first then read James.

>3 DG_Strong: very late to this but im a huge fan of bandbox as well. Think i might try that new one

>4 laurenbufferd: Re Circe, I was wondering if she was coming up with anothe book when I saw this "She has discussed how Long COVID has affected her life since a February 2020 COVID-19 infection. In an op-ed in The Washington Post in August 2023, she said that having had the disease for three years, she had regained the ability to write but her fatigue had worsened."

Oh Im so sorry for her; so hope she gets better not to write a book but for herself to be well

>90 Pat_D: I just ordered north woods on DG and your rec; might be my next after James

pat where did you find that anotated Huck; Id like a quick review, its been a while

also read spectator bird it was sitting on my shelf with the rest of STegner but realized I hadnt read it. A good read.

Ive been on a Wharton run, finished twilight sleeping and easily one of the best books Ive read.

> Got the HC off Amazon a while back. It's a great reference book plus it's very pretty.

166 The Annotated Huckleberry Finn (The Annotated Books)

North Woods was very good. Another excellent rec by deeg.

North Woods was my very best book of last year, even though I read it in 2024.

I felt the same way about Witness, Lisa. Beautiful but not much of an impact.

I read Stories I Might Regret Telling You: A Memoir which was very dishy and am reading Pandora's Jar for work which is much better than anticipated.

Thx Pat just ordered it

Lauren have you read any of Haynes? IMHO she is one of the best authors around re retelling classic mythology. i think my faves were the children of jocasta and a thousand ships

I've been reading the The Kenneth Williams Diaries for a couple of weeks now (it's huge; 800 pages of tiny print without a lot of white space), at the same time that I'm reading a biography of him (Born Brilliant; not 800 pages, just 400) and together, well, that is a lot to think about.

I had no idea who Kenneth Williams was before I started the Diaries - and honestly, based on a zillion YouTube clips, I'm probably never gonna be a huge fan of his work - but ohgosh, he's just the kind of person who should have written diaires for forty years: gifted and smart and bitchy and in the absolute right place at the right time (60s-80s London: so many Italian lunches in the early 70s with Maggie Smith!). It's also a pretty astonishing record of someone who suffered from massive depression for decades but managed to be articulate about it. Very highly recommended, especially if you've already run through the Cecil Beaton and Noel Coward diaries.

I don't love the biography as much, but it is helping me contextualize just who Williams was and exactly how famous (apparently, quite).

Thx Pat just ordered it

Lauren have you read any of Haynes? IMHO she is one of the best authors around re retelling classic mythology. i think my faves were the children of jocasta and a thousand ships

eta found out that there is a new collection of essays Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Mythlooks like it will be interesting

well in to north wood and also thank deeg for the rec. I feel a little bit of Vaster Wilds in the writing, but its so much better.

>171 DG_Strong: Huh, I don't know him at all, though I can at least name check that milieu... and I do love a dishy diary, so—noted.

I’m so looking forward to In Memorium . I read recently a wonderful Canadian novel about the First World War and I find the period fascinating. It was such a different war than World War Two.

I know she’s the Queen Bee but I’ve never been able to return to Tana French since she ripped us off with that dreadful ending to her first novel. It seems as though people have forgiven her for it and apologized for it and I’ve heard she has gotten stronger and stronger,but that book really got on my nerves.

I just finished So Late in the Day another writer of the moment. I’ve read the final story Antartica twice and it angers me so much. It’s a nasty,misogynistic piece of work and people should really call her out for it. It’s so regressive that it upsets me very much. If you haven’t read it the story is very much in line with Looking for Mr. Goodbar-a married woman with kids wants a fling and she gets punished really badly for it. I thought we’ve moved beyond this female sex shaming but the book is beloved and I think it’s nasty and gross. Actually all of the three women in each of the stories are quite gross. When I asked a friend decades ago why this sort of thing happens-she said to me-it’s because men make the rules. Claire you should be ashamed of yourself.

>175 alans: ok what book was that? dont think I ever read her actualy

I just read Vengeance is Mine. There's nothing quite like NDiaye - her novels are very stylized and moody where nothing quite is what is seems. A mediocre lawyer in southern France takes a high profile case and becomes convinced that she meet her client's husband when she was a child - the question being did he or did her not assault her. At the same time, she becomes obsessed with her cleaning woman - an undocumented Mauritian woman who doesn't seem to want her legal help. Things spiral from there. Dreamy, creepy, sinister, you can read it over a rainy afternoon

I guess you could compare her to Mossafegh who work I actually deeply dislike. But it really does have a kind of misery porn gloss. The stakes in NDiaye are a bit higher though.

Now reading a cozy-ish Dorothy Whipple novel They Knew Mr Knight.

I finished Alice Winn's In Memoriam on an otherwise unambitious post-errands Saturday. I had heard a lot of positive things from friends who'd read it and it didn't disappoint—a solid, often gripping, story of two British public school boys/young men each silently in love with the other who both enlist to fight during WWI. It's a very strong first novel, where you can see Winn exerting very careful control over the pacing so that it's not all carnage—but I did feel that when the story left the trenches it lost some energy, I suppose by virtue of how do you write non-action action that stands up to that. But I was still drawn in, and I thought she did a good job of keeping the love story not too sentimental, given the backdrop. Plus you've just got to hand it to the author for taking on that war as subject matter in the first place—it was an ugly, out-of-scale conflict (I know, when are wars not).

Now, finally, doing what I've been wanting to all year—picked up Daniel Mason's North Woods again after having put it aside months ago for various other distractions. So far it's very charming, and a nice break from the Somme.

Enjoy!

I just finished So Be It touchstone wrong, written by sarah weeks Read this for the RTT Theme 'considering characters with disabilities in books' This was a very well written YA book about a woman opening her apt door to see a woman and child crying. She ends up taking them in. the mother has cognitive delays and cannot answer questiojns where she came from. as the child grows, she must have answers to her questions. an excellent book introducing characters with disabilities and even if some of the events that take place are rather duex de machina, i enjoyed it quite a bit

Now reading the children another Wharton. Hoping this does not become Lolita, but inher hands I doubt it will be

>179 lisapeet: I said when I read it that I thought In Memoriam was a better war novel than it was a love story, though it made a serious run for my top 2023 spot anyway. And it's really stayed with me in a way that a lot of books have not. One of the things that impressed me was that there weren't a bunch of factual clinkers; she does seem to have done her research (for ONCE, I loved all the citations and references in the back) and she's like eleven years old, so she really did pull it out of thin air in a lot of ways.

received the Annotated Huckleberry Finn and it did not come with a magnifying glass. It is lovely the illustrations and old photos are grand by I honestly cant read it. ah well

Did you get the HC, Cindy? That's what I have, and I haven't had any issues with the type.

>181 DG_Strong: Yeah, it really shone as a war story. And I agree, her research was solid—the In Memoriam school notices really scaffolded the whole thing, rather than being fancy addenda. Wonder what she'll do as a follow-up.

>183 Pat_D: yes its HC, I think if dont try to read too much at a time Ill be ok. Just got new cataracts so it shouldnt be a problem but there we are.

I really enjoyed They Knew Mr .Knight.No big surprises, it's pretty clear from the outset what is going to happen and Mr. Knight is a right shit that is going to drag this sweet family into financial ruin. But I loved the descriptions of the three houses and the relationships in the Blake family, especially Celia and her daughter Ruth. There is a lot of truth in this novel and I appreciated the anti-materialist sentiment and the grace among even the most minor characters.

Wanderings Stars was on the lucky shelf at the library and I feel lucky indeed!

Wandering Stars manages to be both a prequel and a sequel to There There and I'm not sure it totally works either way. The 'historical' chapters feel too short and the 'future' chapters are too rushed, so what you have is a long exploration of what happens to Lony, Orvil, Opal and Jacqui after the pow-wow shooting that ended There There. It feels slightly under-edited or overworked and I wished for way more Opal and Jacqui and a lot less Orvil and Lony. I can only read about teenage boys for so long.

But who else writes about generational trauma as the remains of a star shaped bullet in your system, about addiction and the decision to OD or not, about genocide and massacre and a different kind of Oakland than anything we might have known about. Despite some long stodgy sentences, this novel glitters with all kinds of truths and observations and like There There makes you think about the land you walk on very differently.

I'd rather read a novel like this where chances are taken and some failures occur than a book that totally plays it safe.

I'm rereading There, There

I'd rather read a novel like this where chances are taken and some failures occur than a book that totally plays it safe.
Amen to that.