***** Favorite Reads for Q4

It's the end of the fourth quarter, and time to think about the books you've read during the past three months.

What were your favorite books during October through December? Did you have any five star reads, or unforgettable four stars?

Have you discovered any new authors that you want to share with the group?

Were there any books that you really disliked, or that you were unable to finish?

I'll be posting a best of the year thread in our 2017 Club Read group.

My favorites for the year end were Pickwick Papers and Tenant of Wildfell Hall, while Robinson Crusoe was a lot of sludge, Stone (by Adam Roberts; impossible to find touchstone and no sense forcing it, I promise, you don't care! Lol) left much to be desired, as did Renfield: Slave of Dracula.

Not a favorite just because it was so emotionally taxing, Les Misérables was still an excellent read worthy of mention, and also of note was And We Are Not Saved, a framing of racial struggles in the US into fictionalized chronicles, mainly looking at the impact of civil rights laws and the future of civil rights.

I'm just bumping this thread up to the top.

I haven't got through that many books this quarter at all, but A Widow for One Year by John Irving will probably be my favourite of the quarter.

My absolute favourite in Q4 was Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Other good reads (4*) were:
- All That Man Is by David Szalay
- The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
- Slade House by David Mitchell
- Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
- Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Not a bad quarter at all!

These last three were my best reading months this year:

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Norberg
The Tumbling Turner Sisters by Juliette Fay
The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer
The Moonspinners by Mary Stuart
Mother Carey's Chickens by Kate Douglas Wiggin

Just noticed that five of these begin with the word "the" and they're all written by women. Huh. Weird.

My best reads of the quarter were:

The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
Lawrence and the Arabs by Robert Graves
Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda by Rosamund Halsey Carr
The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue by Frederick Forsyth
The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth (an annual read)

With just a few pages to go I can safely say Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris will be the worst this quarter. It is certainly the most disappointing.

>6 NarratorLady: I loved The Warmth of Other Suns.

Two stood out this quarter. I got lost in My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. And I was also really taken by H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Another special experience was reading Sappho's fragments. I tried two translations. An old translation by Mary Beard was what captured me.

>8 dchaikin: H is for Hawk was the first book I read this year and I thought it was a good sign of the reading year to come. Unfortunately I read some stinkers and it's not till recently that I got my reading groove back.

Of the books that I read over the past three months, these are the ones I remember most fondly:

A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
The Conjoined Jen Sookfong Lee
Bridget Jones's Baby, Helen Fielding
A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness
The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood

and in non-fiction:

But Can I Start a Sentence with "But", University of Chicago Press