Wandering_star's 2009 reading

I have had a very good year of reading in 2008, in large part thanks to LT - both for the recommendations, and for the way it's encouraged me to take my time over my reading and really think about my response to the books, rather than speed-reading through.

My favourite discoveries of 2008 have been Elizabeth Bowen (very contemporary, I know) for her amazing psychological acuity, Nicola Barker for the sheer energy and madness of her language, and Jose Eduardo Agualusa (although to be fair, I have only read one of his books so far, The Book of Chameleons - but it was one of my top reads.

My other most memorable reads of the year have been Teta, Mother and Me, a memoir and family history, and Night and the City by Gerald Kersh, a pre-war Soho noir.

Looking forward to many more in 2009!

...and we'll look forward to reading about them!

Agualusa's been getting such raves in LT, I can barely hold off reading it. I plan to in 2009, but I have so much else to do, I can't start it now. Alas... His book Creole looks interesting too, about the Portuguese slave trade.

What did you think of Night and the City? We have a couple of Kersh books around.

I loved it - slickly written, with very telling dialogue, and I also enjoyed the way that it depicted the seedy side of London life. The only thing that let it down really was a slightly moralising ending - probably a child of its time, I suppose.

My first book of the year was Simon Gray's The Smoking Diaries - ostensibly a memoir about ageing (although Gray is only 65, within the first 25 pages he's talked about the deaths of close friends, Alzheimers and piles), mixed with memories of his youth, free-associative digressions, and too many meanderings where Gray pontificates over a phrase or quote (eg his destruction of Auden's poetry).

There were three or four pages of blurb at the beginning, and almost every other quote featured the word "hilarious". I realised after about 100 pages that I hadn't seen one funny line - and I wasn't even finding it interesting.

I know many people really rate it, but one of the things I want to do this year is not bother finishing books that I am clearly getting nothing out of. So that was the first one... I guess that humour is very much a matter of personal taste.

After that, I turned to 1. Music, Food & Love by Guo Yue, another memoir but completely the other end of the spectrum in terms of its lack of artifice. Guo Yue is a flute player, now living in the UK, who grew up in an artistic family in China during the Cultural Revolution. His second love, after music, was food, and so the book includes many descriptions of his favourite dishes, as well as a section of recipes at the end. It's a sweet narrative, but I think there is very little here that would be new to a reader who knows anything about China during the Cultural Revolution, and his writing about food isn't evocative enough to draw you in.

Another abandoned book next - Amagansett, which was nudged-with-a-caveat on the Book Nudgers group. This is a mystery story set in a post-WWII fishing village in Long Island, increasingly becoming the summer resort of wealthy sports fishermen and the city's rich. It wasn't bad, as a thriller, but I found the heavy attempts at literary description a little annoying, and (although I didn't read to the end), it all seemed a little cliched - the spoilt and idle youths, the simple but sensitive fisherman with hidden depths, the beautiful young woman who rebels against her family's snobbery and is beloved by her maid...

Goes to show, Wandering-star, how humour is a personal thing.

I really enjoyed The Smoking Diaires and followed it up quickly with The Year of the Youncer which was definitely not as witty. He wrote a third recently and his negativity re longevity was prescient as he died this year.

So many people raved about The Smoking Diaries.... but what can I say, I just didn't get it.

My second completed book this year is Mrs Stevens hears the mermaids singing, by May Sarton.

This is a short and often poetic book, the story of a day in which a novelist and poet in her 70s looks back over her life, aided by the presence of a couple of Paris Review-style interviewers (although ironically, she tells us far more than she tells them). And through the story of her life, it considers what it means to be a writer.

I feel that I would be doing the book a disservice if I tried to characterise what it's saying too narrowly. It's discursive and sometimes contradicts itself, very much like someone trying to work out what they think. But it's certainly about life as an artist - and how there can often be tensions between life and the art, particularly for women.

For Mrs Stevens, being an artist means having a sensitivity to emotional truth (the "hearing the mermaids singing" of the title) and being prepared to be absolutely honest about it - combined with the element of detachment necessary to turn it into words on a page. None of these seem to sit particularly well with domestic life.

Art - or genius, or the desire to create - is presented as something which demands attention, but is also dangerous - not least because of the vulnerability it creates. "Inspiration? It felt more like being harnessed to wild horses whom she must learn to control or be herself flung down and broken." Mrs Stevens needs to write - but also resents it.

This book, like its main character, is idiosyncratic, charming, thoughtful and occasionally a tiny bit infuriating.

My next book is The Hunters by James Salter. Before I get into the review, I'd just like to reproduce the little author biog at the front of the book, which reads in its entirety:

James Salter was born in 1925 and raised in Manhattan. As a fighter pilot he flew in combat in Korea and has written five novels including The Hunters, A Sport And A Pastime and Light Years, as well as a memoir, Burning The Days. Less known than his contemporaries but always noted for the brilliance of his style, he lives in Colorado and on Long Island.

My italics.

Seriously - I thought this was a great book, but I slightly resented being told before I even started that I was going to find the prose style brilliant.

Am I over-reacting?

Anyway, to the review proper. The Hunters is about a group of US fighter pilots during the Korean War. The main character, Cleve Connell, has always been a good flyer. Feeling that it comes naturally to him, he's never needed to be proud or arrogant about his abilities. He likes to take the necessary risks - and he loves to fly. But when he arrives at his new squadron, his luck turns bad. The book examines how Cleve - a fundamentally decent person - deals with that situation, his disappointment in himself and the gradual way in which the rest of the squadron distance themselves from him.

The book is really vivid when describing the group, with its competitiveness and camaraderie. There is a clear demarcation between the cautious few who are concerned about getting out alive and afraid of what might happen (exemplified by a pilot who each mission fills the pockets of his flying jacket with comforts in case he has to land in enemy territory - chocolate, cigarettes, handwarmers), and the lucky, (over-)confident, bombastic "heroes". Some of those heroes, of course, haven't done everything they claim to - after all, you make your own luck.

And yes, since you ask, the prose style is excellent. The words manage to convey an amazing amount of emotion - the uplift of Cleve's first flying mission, compared to the dull slog of his preparations on the ground, and the surges of excitement, panic and disappointment he goes through during the flights. And it's also a great depiction of the way that leadership can slip away from someone - the way that others can lose confidence in him, and the spiralling effect that has.

If I had any complaints about the book it would be that occasionally the next twist in the story is fairly predictable. But, given the fatalistic tone of the way the story develops, I think that's something I can forgive.

First five star read of the year, and I'll definitely be looking out more of Salter's books. I picked this one up, incidentally, on the basis of an article about Salter in the LRB (sorry - full version to subscribers only).

Wandering_star, Definitely look for Light Years which, in my opinion, is Salter's masterpiece. Very different subject and style from The Hunters, but it was The Hunters that introduced me to Salter and made me a fan.

I've just been looking at some of the other reviews and conversations about Salter's work and I saw you were a fan! I will certainly look for Light Years. I really like it when I find an author who is so good, who I've never read before (Elizabeth Bowen, as I might have mentioned on this thread already, was my personal discovery of last year).

I am slowly slogging my way through Tehran Blues, but after a long and exhausting day broke off to read Tainted Blood in the bath.

I was pretty disappointed - I've heard great things about Arnaldur Indridason but I got about halfway through and realised that I was not fussed about the style, not engaged by any of the characters, and didn't really care what happened...

I think things started going wrong when I realised that the main character was a detective with a messy family life, no-one to look after him and a reputation for not going by the rule book. And all that was introduced to us in the space of about three sentences. I would have thought that one of the benefits of reading detective fiction from non-Anglo-Saxon countries would be to avoid cliches like that.

Perhaps I shouldn't try and get into new detective writers. Given the quality of my memory, I could probably quite happily spend the rest of my life rotating through Dalziel & Pascoe, Rebus and Aurelio Zen...

Finished Tehran Blues. Disappointing. Despite its subtitle ("Youth Culture In Iran") this was basically a history of Iran since before the Revolution, with a short chapter at the beginning and another at the end which focused on young Iranians today - both of which read like an extended Time or Newsweek article rather than anything more considered or academic.

Got home after finishing this to find that I'd finally received my ARC of The Flying Troutmans, so I think I'll be reading that next.

4. The Flying Troutmans. As this book starts, Hattie has just returned from living in Paris to try and pick up the pieces after her sister ("a strange, unsettled planet that had once sustained life") has been hospitalised with depression, leaving two unsettled children at home.

I really liked the start of this book - it was clearly aiming for that difficult balance between funny and moving, and it seemed to me that it was likely to hit it. But as it went along, it seemed to become less effective - possibly because it started to feel quite repetitive.

Scene after scene took place in which Hattie wondered about her own life choices or reminisced about her sister's attempts to die, while her niece chattered away in fake-gangsta style and her nephew played out classic goth-teen behaviour (shrinking into his hoodie, carving moody phrases with his penknife); and although the book ended in a realisation, it wasn't at all clear to me how the journey that Hattie had taken had got her there.

That said, most of the other early reviewers seem to have felt very positive about the book. Perhaps I'm just having a humourless start to the new year...

#4 I brought The Flying Troutmans home from the library, but have been feeling ambivalent about starting it. It seems like it might border on cutesy. I liked Little Miss Sunshine, to which it is repeatedly compared, but didn't LOVE it. Other books may replace its position in the TBR pile...

I agree about Little Miss Sunshine - it was fun, but not really worth the rave reviews it got.

I've now started The Child That Books Built, which is excellent. Every couple of pages there is a sentence or thought which I want to read out to people - some because they are so well-written, some because they describe very recogniseable character traits (of readers), and some because they crystallise a really interesting idea.

I'll just give you one of the first category:

I drank down 1984 while loitering in the O section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop. Nobody at the cash desk could tell that I now contained Winston Smith's telescreen chanting its victories, O'Brien's voice admitting that the Thought Police got him a long time ago. It took me three successive Saturdays to steal the whole novel.

Um, and one of the second:

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, last thing at night, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

So glad it's not just me...

#17, 18 ooh, thanks for these comments on The Child that Books Built; it's been on my TBR shelf for a while now, and you're making me think it's time might have come! Look forward to seeing what you think by the end of it.

Wanderingstar - The Child the Books Built looks very intriguing but I note that the LT reviews are mixed. One LTer described the book as

(my message was eaten up, so retyping .......)

......"turgid" and questioned the book choices. I love reading about book infatuation, so am very intrigued.

I haven't actually got much further (other things on) so I won't comment just yet...

Today I've been honouring the snow (it's very unusual for it to snow at all in London, and for it to settle during the day is really rare) with a few stories by MR James. I didn't think the first couple of stories were particularly scary, but "The Mezzotint" and "Number 13" were genuinely quite creepy, and then I started jumping at vaguely humanoid shapes at the edges of my peripheral vision. So I had to read something else to get rid of those - I picked the first couple of stories from The woman who gave birth to rabbits, a collection of fictionalisations of genuine historical scams.

>22 wandering_star: I enjoyed the stories by Emma Donoghue. Have you read Slammerkin or Life Mask?

I've read Hood and Stir Fry, which I think are her two earliest books, and really liked both. Several years later I read Slammerkin, but I wasn't so keen on that. I can't really remember why, though.

5. The Child That Books Built. This is a memoir based around the books that the author remembers reading as he was growing up. I think I am about eight years younger than Francis Spufford, so a lot of the books he mentioned were favourite reading of my own childhood (I was very excited at the mentions of The Phantom Tollbooth or the Black Hearts in Battersea sequence).

It's also a consideration of how stories and books develop and stretch a child's imagination and understanding of the world around them. Spufford writes beautifully on this - the way that something from a book can just crystallise knowledge that is already there in your head, or the way that a child will skim over words they don't understand until gradually "the gaps in the text where I did not know words began to fill themselves in from the edges, as if by magic... The empty spaces thickened, took on qualities which at first were not their own, then became known in their own right."

There is one chapter (about stories and pre-literate children) which I found tremendously hard to get through, and I wonder if this is why other reviewers have described it as 'turgid'. There was a lot of interesting information in the chapter - about psychoanalytical readings of and the developmental purposes of fairy stories - but it felt like undigested chunks of research and there was not much structure. But the book really lifted off when Spufford started talking about books that he'd read, as opposed to stories that were read to him.

So I would definitely recommend that you pick this up from your TBR piles... but don't feel bad if you need to skip through that one chapter!

6. The Spare Room by Helen Garner.

I read a review of this book which made it sound excellent but really depressing, so I don't think I would have read it but for the fact that I could get it as a bookring. So I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the person who launched the bookring.

The subject matter of this book is simple: a woman has a terminally ill friend to stay with her while the friend undergoes some alternative treatment. The style of the book is equally simple: sentences are spare and concrete, for the most part. And yet they pack an emotional weight far beyond anything that they appear to contain. The book is suffused with sorrow, and pity, and anger, and love. I am tempted to read it again straight away: but I think the emotions, which developed through the first reading, might overwhelm me if I feel them all from the start of the book.

It's also an almost frighteningly honest book. Helen may love her friend dearly - but she finds her state of denial almost impossibly infuriating. It's clear that all the things that drew Helen to Nicola as a friend - her appetite for life, her fearless attitude, her proud unconventionality - are exactly the things which make being with her so difficult now.

At the same time, it's not a depressing book. Sad, yes; sometimes almost horrific in the descriptions of the way the cancer ravages Nicola physically. But something keeps you wanting to read on - the quality of the writing, but also I think the honesty of the emotions described.

A wonderful book.

>25 wandering_star:, The Child That Books Built sounds really interesting. I've requested it from the library already!

wander_star have you read the play Wit by Margaret Edson. It too deals with a terminally ill woman but from a slightly different perspective. It is brilliant. The play was also made into a movie starring Emma Thompson.

I haven't, but it looks very interesting. Another for the wishlist...

I'm still amazed that The Spare Room wasn't listed for last year's Booker Prize.

Thanks for your comments on The Child that Books Built. I bought it quite a while ago and was keen to read it until I ran into all these unfavourable reviews. On your advice I'll bump it up the TBR pile and not feel bad about reading selectively!

Two more for the TBR pile - thanks Wandering-star for the great reviews.

Nice reviews. The Spare Room sounds interesting.

7. The Fish Can Sing, by Halldor Laxness. This is an episodic tale of a boy growing up in an Iceland which is still very traditional, but starting to be affected by the outside world. It manages to combine the cadences of a storytelling tradition with a dry humour (one of the episodes starts, "I have now said something about fish, but I have not said anything yet about the Bible". At first I thought this was going to be about the coming clash between tradition and modernity, and I suppose that is one of the underlying themes, but ultimately it turns into a sort of morality tale - all illustrating, as the grandmother says, that "Slow good luck is best".

It occurs to me, writing this, that that's a moral which Iceland unfortunately forgot over the last few years - with sad results.

If I have a criticism, it's that - because the story was episodic - there wasn't much narrative pull, so that once I put the book down, I didn't rush to pick it up again. But when I did pick it up, its charm drew me in again quickly.

8. Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie.

The "salt" of the title, with illustrious literary precedent, refers to that little ingredient which is hardly worthy of mention, but without which a meal is ruined - a metaphor for the unspoken aspects of well-told family stories. In one visit home to Karachi, Aliya, the narrator, finally comes to understand the story of her family - and that understanding helps her make decisions about what she wants her own story to be.

Salt and Saffron was Rushdie-lite in both its style and its theme of a family saga interwoven with the history of the subcontinent. It's not quite good enough for me to run round recommending it to people - for that it would need a little more heart, a little less head, and a slightly more convincing ending. But it was an interesting and enjoyable read, and I'll be looking out for how Shamsie's writing develops.

>7 wandering_star:: Someone had recommended his Paradise Reclaimed to me—now this review, which makes me want to read the book. Have you read anything else by him and, if so, how do you compare them?

>35 wandering_star: I read Shamsie's Kartography, another story set in Karachi (and London and the US), a few years ago. It interested me at first when she focused on the close friendship between two young teens, but then she started on a political rant that was too disconnected from the characters. I know that she has her points to make, but it's almost as if she forgets she's writing a novel.

TadAD - I haven't read anything else of his, but there's some discussion on this thread.

Cariola - interesting - I think a certain part of the problem with this book was also a slight failure to integrate the two parts of the story (family saga and history), although it sounds as if she managed it better in this than in Kartography.

ETA: Why do all the Shamsie touchstones go to the wrong book?

9. The Sound of Building Coffins, an early reviewer book.

What to say.... First of all, this book absolutely defies synopsis. The best I can do is to say that it's about a community in late nineteenth-century New Orleans, and about the impact of one act of rage which brings a demonic and unruly spirit into their lives. But that's not really what it's about. It's a huge, ambitious book, and it's really about life, or lives: love and sin, vodou and superstition, death and murder, jazz and confidence tricks, and all the different sorts of relations there can be between people.

All this makes it sound like exactly the sort of book I would love. But somehow, it just didn't engage me. Partly, I think, the structure was just too sprawling. I think the intention was for the story to be like jazz, with themes and images recurring and mixing together in different ways. But it's hard to sustain that over 350 dense pages. And partly, there was a huge cast of characters, who weren't all that well defined - beyond the fact that they were broadly good or broadly bad, trickster or innocent.

The Mantle Of The Prophet by Roy Mottahedeh. This is a learned and readable book which combines a fictionalised account of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, seen through the eyes of a cleric, and an analysis of the Iranian and Shi'a history, politics and culture which produced it. Despite its readability, I didn't manage to finish it. The book covers a very broad sweep, but may be a little too much for a beginner reader - I was fascinated, for example, by the sections about the history of Persian poetry or the Ashura "passion plays", but less so by the analysis of the impact of Aristotle and Avicenna on Islamic philosophy.

>40 wandering_star:, Ah! The Mantle of the Prophet is one of my favorite books. I'm sorry you didn't manage to get into it.

10. Books v. Cigarettes, one of the Penguin Great Ideas series.

A quick aside - how does Penguin manage to produce such consistently desirable-as-objects books? I'm completely in love with the new designs for their Modern Classics (the ones with a b&w photo taking up the whole of the cover, with bold sans serif type for the author and title).

Anyway, this is a collection of Orwell essays - it starts with three rather charming essays about books and reading, the first one of which is available to read online here, and which gives the book its title - Orwell works out that what he spends on books and reading in a year would buy him 83 cigarettes.

Then two inspiringly clear-eyed political essays and two autobiographical ones, including a long and somewhat grim account of Orwell's primary-schooldays.

All beautifully written, and made me want to read more Orwell, as well as more about Orwell - can anyone recommend me a good biography? There seem to be so many out there.

11. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman.

I was blown away by American Gods when I read it a few months ago, but this didn't do very much for me.

Possibly some of it's because I wasn't anticipating anything particular of American Gods, but having loved that I approached this with different expectations. But I just don't think this one was as good.

I really like the premise - the idea of a parallel universe beneath London, where the people who "fall through the cracks" in our society end up. But the character from our world who ends up there, Richard, seems ludicrously slow on the uptake, and it's full of bad jokes - an angel called Islington? Really?

Deborah - Michael Shelden wrote a good biography about ten years ago called Orwell - the authorized biography.

Bernard Crick also wrote Orwell: A Life which I have but not read so not able to comment.

Hilary Spurling, who has an engaging style, has written about Sonia Orwell and Christopher Hitchens wrote Why Orwell Matters which is sitting waiting for me also, when I get in the mood for a Hitchens' moment.

Orwell died young, in his late forties, of TB, and many have speculated as to where all his money disappeared to after this from his book sales, etc. (Sonia spend the last few years of her life in penury living on a widow's pension).

I'm getting behind myself... blame a weekend in Paris and a flirtation with Twitter.

Unfortunately that also means that I can't remember all the books I've read as well as I'd like to.

Anyhoo.

Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of short and bleak stories about life in, you guessed it, Sarajevo. I read about half a dozen of them, but I found the affectless narration (like Camus' Mersault) a bit off-putting. I think one of the things I like in the fiction I read is a sense that the writer really understands human nature, human emotions and reactions. I know that the deadpan tone is supposed to be saying all sorts of things about the numbing effect of the war, and it did work well sometimes, for example in a story in which the disengaged narrator is deeply grieved by the death of a small cactus which he'd moved down to the cellar so that it wouldn't be damaged in any bombing. But repeated over every story it didn't do much for me. I would much more recommend Balkan Express by Slavenka Drakulic which is angry and bewildered and seems much more real, somehow.

12. The Book Of Proper Names by Amelie Nothomb - a strange little novella about a young girl and her mother, who loves her dearly but who is also seeking to live through her. Nothomb is a sort of surrealistic, francophone Banana Yoshimoto or Yoko Ogawa - the same sort of deadpan and slightly disconnected style, and the same unemotional girl lead. Not quite to my taste, but if you like those other two, you'll probably like this as well...

13. Faces In The Water by Janet Frame. This was quite an incredible piece of work. It's the narrative of a woman in a madhouse in, I guess, the late 1940s.

Frame herself was incarcerated in several mental institutions over about 8 years, and although the book clearly states that it's a work of fiction, some of its power definitely derives from the depth of her own experience.

In many ways, it was a harrowing read - making me angry and sad by turns, and even frightened at the thought of how easily a woman could end up in one of these inhuman places.

It was also oddly poetic, in the narrator's periodic flights of fancy, but also even in the grim descriptions of the institutions. Istina (the narrator) is obsessed by the way that the worst wards have a smell about them, "a temple where a mixture of loneliness and despair was burned in place of interest".

And it's a very poignant read, as Istina slips further away from normality, but is still clear-headed enough to realise what is happening to her. At one point an aunt gives her a present of a bag:

"That bag was like my final entry paper into the land of the lost people. I was no longer looking from the outside on the people of Four-Five-and-One {the ward where the worst cases were kept} and their frightening care for their slight store of possessions; I was now an established citizen with little hope of returning across the frontier; I was in the crazy world, separated now by more than locked doors and barred windows from the people who called themselves sane.
I had a pink cretonne bag to put my treasures in."

Highly recommended.

14. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, a deceptively simple tale of the decisions we make that change the course of our lives, deliberately or otherwise.

15. Craze: gin and debauchery in an age of reason, Jessica Warner. How could you not like a book with that title? But it's also a fluently-written analysis of the "gin craze" of the early eighteenth century, and what it has to tell us about more recent drug scares. Warner persuasively argues that the public concern about gin had more to do with fears that the lower classes were changing and would no longer "know their place", and touches on such fascinating subjects as the first use of "political arithmetic" (now it would be called statistics) to lend gravity to what was essentially an emotional argument, and what Hogarth's famous Gin Lane and Beer Alley prints were really saying (the man fondling the barmaid's bosom in Beer Alley? that's good because beer promotes lust, which promotes children, which means that England's army will have plenty of people to be soldiers in 20 years' time). I would have preferred a little more analysis and a little less on the ins and outs of the passing of the different "Gin Acts", but overall, an easy and interesting read.

Did you really go to Paris for the weekend? Sigh.

Great line-up of books, wandering star. Most on my TBR - I recently read Tokyo Fiancee by Nothomb and could not decide whether I really liked it or not. It was certainly bordering on surreal in parts!

Obviously the Fling in France did not slow down your reading. (If I am reading this correctly!?!?)

I loved Out Stealing Horses too, and the gin (my drink of choice) book sounds fascinating too.

Kiwidoc - tee hee... I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have a very staid life! The flirtation was only with a different website for my get-home-and-kill-20-mins browsing. The weekend in Paris was wonderful, though. I am happily munching my way through all the foodstuffs I brought back - cheese, cakes, rillettes de porc, and that wonderful butter with the salt crystals in (which I have found in London, but only at stupid prices - about £5 a pat). I'm also bemoaning the fact that the cheapest day return on the Eurostar is now £59 - I'm sure it used to be £29, and at that price, it's easily worth taking a day off work to pop across and stock up...

Or £55 return to Lille. Which is a lovely town for a wander and a browse round the shops; a shorter journey; and the train is never as busy. Hmm - I sense a plan coming on.

GREEN with jealousy - i adore Europe. *Trapped in North America*

I'm with you, Kiwidoc. Wouldn't it be nice to say, "oh, I think I'll go to Gstaad this weekend"? Although we can't complain too much--Vancouver is a destination for other people, and we have the Island, the Gulf Islands, Whister and Seattle within a few hours. And we can brag about going skiing, golfing and sailing all on the same day (although I don't know anyone who's actually done that!). But yeah, a impulse trip to Paris for the weekend sounds just great.

Outdoor life abounds here, indoor life with interesting culture, history, etc, abounds there. Take your pick.

I want it all.

If it makes you feel any better, I'd love to visit Vancouver...

We'd love to have you! Let us know when your coming and we'll plan an excursion . . .

Well, thank you!

16. The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue. This novel is based on the true story of a scandalous Victorian divorce - which featured in its cast of characters a stuffy naval officer, his much younger and flirtatious wife, a series of handsome junior officers, and - oddly - an early feminist pioneer, who had been a close friend of the family, but who was called as a witness in the trial. The details of the trial are on the historical record, but not the details of the tangled personalities which led up to it; and it's these that Donoghue re-imagines for this book.

The trial itself takes up perhaps the last third of the book. It is gripping and exciting, and allows Donoghue to pull together all the threads of her themes - about how the same story can be narrated differently by the people who were involved in it, and the contrast between truth and justice (brilliantly highlighted in the chapter titles, which are all legal terminology, with both the 'normal' and the technical definition).

Unfortunately, the story that leads up to the trial is not so well-told - it's rather clunky, with too much telling and not enough showing (especially in the conversations where the two women are talking at cross-purposes), and it's a little bit too predictable.

Oh, too bad! I've liked her earlier books and had this one on my wish list. Maybe not . . .

17 & 18: Farthing and Ha'penny by Jo Walton.

Farthing starts off as a standard country-house mystery, with the historical twist that it's set in a Britain which has made peace with Hitler's Germany. "Farthing" is the name of the house itself, and of the political faction focused around the family. Alternate chapters focus on Lucy, the daughter of the house, and Inspector Carmichael, sent down from Scotland Yard to investigate a murder which took place during a house-party weekend. The focus, initially, is on the complicated relationships between the guests - told in Lucy's gossipy tone but of course, a mystery to the Inspector. But gradually it all becomes a little more complicated, and sinister.

I really enjoyed this. The world is well-drawn, and Lucy in particular is brilliant - the reader soon comes to realise that although she talks like an empty-headed daughter of the upper classes, she's far from that. The story is fast-moving and gripping, and kept me turning the pages late into the night. I'm not sure that I buy the blurb that it's a chilling portrait of how easily a world can slip into fascism - but it's still a very enjoyable thriller with its heart in the right place.

My edition has the first chapter of the sequel after the end of the story, and I read this out of curiosity and then promptly dug Ha'penny out of the TBR pile. This might have been a mistake, as it doesn't quite hit the heights of the first book. Partly it's a little too similar - the alternate narrator here is another deb-gone-bad, this time a Mitford-sister-esque aristo who's gone on the stage - but she's not as engaging or sympathetic as Lucy. Partly it's because the politics take more of a back seat, and because the world is not new I would have liked a little more development on this. And I spotted a few plot weaknesses in this one - which I either didn't notice in the first book, or which weren't there.

That said, it seems that the third book, Half A Crown, is set in the 1960s, and I am looking forward to reading that one, to see how both the political situation and Carmichael's life have developed. (My guess is that if there's a fourth it'll be called Sovereign - what do you think?)

>59 wandering_star: Interesting notes on Farthing. I think we have an old reader's copy around here somewhere. I've seen Walton speak several times, most recently in Boston in February.

>59 wandering_star:: I enjoyed Farthing and was holding Ha'penny on the TBR pile as a "treat" at some point. I'm sorry to hear it didn't live up to the first one.

I think it would have done better if I hadn't read it straight after Farthing, but I'd be interested to see what you think when you get to it.

19. Hellfire and Herring by Christopher Rush (sadly, there's no sequel called "Brimstone and Bream"...)

This is a memoir of a childhood on the east coast of Scotland, in the 1940s and 1950s, in a village whose lives are dominated by the rhythms of the fishing cycle and the rhetoric of the Bible. That probably doesn't sound like the most gripping or relevant of reads, and indeed, not much happens. One chapter deals with the village crazies, another with the intimidating teachers at the school, another focuses on the tall tales of the village gravedigger. Two tour de force chapters focus on the cycles of the year (weather, sea, plants, fish).

But the book is still one of my discoveries of the year so far. It is a deeply moving portrayal of a world which has completely vanished. Rush is not sentimental about the brutal aspects of the life, but the reader can't help regretting some of what has disappeared - in particular, the way that the villagers are so in tune with their surroundings and. It's also intensely poetic - steeped in metaphors of the Bible and the sea. For me, it was a book that needed to be read as slowly as possible, and preferably aloud - I did this for myself, out of necessity, but it would be wonderful to hear it read by someone with the right Scottish burr.

I'm shocked that there are only eight copies registered on LT. I would thoroughly recommend it.

20. The Question of Hu by Jonathan D Spence. This was a short history (novella-length) of John Hu, a Chinese Christian brought to France in the early eighteenth century as assistant to a Jesuit priest returning from China. It's a classic culture-clash story - the trip doesn't go according to either man's expectations, and when Hu becomes too difficult to handle the Jesuit has him packed off to a lunatic asylum (where, of course, he can't communicate with anyone).

I'm a big Jonathan Spence fan, and I also really like microhistories, but I found this disappointing. Spence tells the story very sparely, leaving us to read between the lines. That allows us to take away a story of misunderstanding and betrayal - but his decision not to give us any analysis or context makes it hard to make any sense of the story on any other level.

21. Far North by Marcel Theroux - an Early Reviewers book.

I'm going to give this whole review a spoiler alert, not because I'm going to give away the ending, but because Theroux goes to some pains to keep the back-story mysterious.

This book takes place sometime towards the end of the current century, in the final decline of a small community which was set up in Siberia by a group of idealistic North American "settlers", round about now, who were sickened by the greed and materialism they saw around them and who wanted to return to more natural and simple ways of life. However, the world outside their community declined, and they were not allowed to live quietly, maintaining their principles of generosity, openness and non-violence. When the book starts, one sole remaining representative of that community, Makepeace, is patrolling the deserted city. Makepeace has lived alone in the city for several years But a sequence of unusual occurrences leads to the start of a trip to discover just what else is out there - has the rest of the world also gone to hell, or are there people still living quiet, normal lives?

I should probably caveat my review by noting that I started the book not feeling particularly favourable towards it, having just seen Marcel Theroux's well-meaning but fatuous documentary about Japan, In search of wabi sabi. That said, it read to me like the first draft of a novel, where the author knows the theme and the broad story arc, but hasn't quite worked the details out yet. What do I mean? Well, partly I felt that Theroux wasn't completely clear about what the situation was that triggered the apocalypse - there were references to every one of the possible four horsemen. Also, sometimes literary value trumped realism - I know Theroux was trying to disguise the backstory, but if people were leaving early 21-century Chicago for a life on the land in Siberia, would they really end up with a pianola? (You can get away with oddities like this if you're writing pure sci-fi, but the meditative pacing of this book betrays its lit-fic ambitions). Worst, though, was the bizarre and hurried ending - rather at odds with everything which came before, and with absolutely no set-up through the rest of the story.

PS: I did like this quote from Far North, though:

"The world is a scaly old snake. She is a cunning old woman ... and the last human being that draws a breath on this planet will be a cunning old woman, who raises chickens and cabbages, has no illusions, and has outlived all her children."

22. Good As Lily by Derek Kirk Kim - a cute YA graphic novel about seizing the opportunities in front of you.

23. Julie & Julia by Julie Powell.

I can't think of any way of writing this review without seeming curmudgeonly. But here goes...

I read this book because it was strongly recommended to me by a friend of my sister's, who doesn't know very much about me except that I, like her, love cooking. One thing she doesn't know about me is that I am fairly wary of books based on blogs. Another thing she doesn't know about me is that I tend to steer clear of books which are based around some sort of artificial "challenge" (examples: taking up hard-core training in a Japanese martial art despite no previous interest or athleticism; hitchhiking while carrying a fridge). And when I see a book which is based on both of these, my immediate reaction is that the whole subject was chosen because the writer wanted to be a famous author, not because s/he had anything to say.

So, this book - which is based on a blog in which the author cooked her way through every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the art of French cooking in a year - I started with a certain amount of trepidation. Well, that's not exactly right. I started off skimming the story, not wanting to take in too much detail in case I had to hurl the book across the room. But I did gradually get drawn in.

For a start, the book is not a cut-and-paste selection of blog postings, but more of a memoir of that year. I could really have done without the author's hyperbolic klutziness - partly because I have issues with women who make a show of being incompetent when they clearly aren't, and partly because it got boring and repetitive pretty quickly. I know effortless competence is less endearing and will probably sell fewer books, but surely there's a happy medium? But it is warm and often funny, and I really liked the way that Julie Powell portrayed the close and supportive nature of female friendships.

Unfortunately I then put the book down for a day, and when I picked it up I was irritated by the constant hysterical tone again.

I think ultimately whether or not you'll enjoy the book is determined by how you react to the fact that on the last day of the year, after cooking her way through over 520 complicated recipes, when the last batch of pastry dough isn't coming out right, the character Julie starts sobbing and howling that the whole "Project" was worthless. If your first reaction is 'stop being so pathetic' - well, this might not be the book for you.

>23 Cariola:: Thanks for that review. That's a book that I've been waffling over for a long time...a friend will say, "you'll love this!" and I'll add it to the virtual TBR list...then I'll read something about it that makes me feel sort of "meh" about it. But nothing's ever crystalized.

If your first reaction is 'stop being so pathetic' - well, this might not be the book for you. That sentence does it...not a book for me.

Glad to have visited your thread for that review, WS. I bought a copy of Julie and Julia on the library cart for 50c a month ago - but have not picked it up. I think it might have to go back. The content sounds too hysterical for me.

Hmmm...doesn't sound like it is for me. I have been considering this one for some time. The premise sounds interesting, even something I would want to do - not particularly work through one book but trying new things with my cooking. However, I don't think I could handle mini-meltdowns. I am with you on disliking the klutzy-to-make-me-seem-more-down-to-earth. It is the same as slapping glasses on a pretty girl in a movie to make her more nerdy-girl-next-door. Blah. I may pick this up at some point, but it is definitely down on the priority list now.

>67 wandering_star: re: Julie and Julia

"If your first reaction is 'stop being so pathetic' - well, this might not be the book for you."

This made me laugh out loud! I brought this book with me to the hospital when I had shoulder surgery, which is one of the more painful things one can have done to one's body. And that is exactly the reaction I had to the book!

Very happy to have been able to save one book from your TBR piles... now if anyone would like to do the same for me...

24. Gang Leader For A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh. As a young sociology graduate student in Chicago in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh decided to go into the projects to do some research about young families. Too naive to be scared off by the first people he runs into - junior members of a drug-dealing gang - he hangs around until they decide he's a forward scout sent by a rival gang to prepare for a drive-by shooting. Trying frantically to persuade them that he is a simple student, he digs round in his backpack for the survey questions his professor has given him, and starts reading: "How does it feel to be black and poor? A: very bad; B: somewhat bad; C: neither bad nor good"...

This book tells the story of how Venkatesh ends up going beyond the simplistic analyses and number-crunching, to a much more in-depth understanding of the way that the people in the projects survive and make their living. He continued to study the projects for a number of years, and befriended many people, which gave him incredible insights.

The details of how the gang manages the project are fascinating - and often Hobbesian. The gang is almost a cross between a legitimate business (in terms of its structure) and a parallel state (which has asserted the monopoly of legitimate force). It'll be familiar if you've watched The Wire. Venkatesh also gets to understand the way that people outside the gang hold and exercise power - his chapter on the tenant representative is almost more devastating than the work on the gangs, because it's so unexpected.

At the same time, Venkatesh is aware that he is becoming uncomfortably implicated, both in terms of his knowledge of what the gang is planning, and his closeness to certain members of the power structure within the project - tensions which he never quite resolves. Maybe that's why he's chosen to write this book less like an academic work and more like a memoir - it's chatty and easy to read, with the results of his research coming out like more of a story.

PS - it's highly recommended. I'm also going to look out for Venkatesh's Off The Books: the underground economy of the urban poor, which draws on his graduate thesis and which came out of the same research he did in the projects.

This sounds very interesting--thanks for the review!

>72 wandering_star:, Is Venkatesh at all associated with Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt? This story sounds awfully familiar & I remember that book briefly mentioned a Chicago student who did sociological experiments while living with a gang.

I listened to a National Public Radio (NPR) story about Sudhir Venkatesh and his book last year, which you can read or listen to here:

Sudhir Venkatesh Becomes 'Gang Leader for a Day'

fannyprice: You are correct.

Just back from a friend's house, with serious library envy. The books weren't even his - he's book-sitting them for a friend who's moving continents. Lots of NYRB books, Penguin Classics, all shiny new copies. Don't get me wrong, I like my pre-worn books plenty, but there's something about shelves of unbroken spines...

Managed to limit myself to borrowing just two - Great Granny Webster and Oblomov. Sigh.

Good choices, WS. I enjoyed Great Granny Webster and almost bought Oblomov on the weekend when I noticed it in the classic Russian section. I think it has been accessibly translated recently? Now maybe I will wait to see what you think before getting it.

I picked it up because I'm sure someone on LT was urging others to read it recently - but I can't remember who.

I'm not going to read it immediately because I'm going on holiday for the next week, and I don't want it to get bashed about, but I'll be sure to let you know what I think when I do!

I've been in an Oblomov discussion on another thread (various posts between 87 and 108), and there are a variety of translations, both old and recent, both praised and criticized.

25. The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.

I really liked Kavalier and Clay and since reading it, have been trying to get hold of other books by Chabon. I think I might stop now.

The Final Solution is, I believe, an affectionate homage to Arthur Conan Doyle. In a quiet town on the South Downs, a murder is committed, a young boy's parrot goes missing, and an ageing but formerly eminent detective is sufficiently intrigued by the case to emerge briefly from retirement. In an echo of Kavalier, there is a serious undertone to the story, as the young boy is a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.

This was a perfectly entertaining, if slight, novella - but I can never see the point of pastiche.

Just back from a week's holiday, with blissful amounts of reading done.

26. Mudbound by Hillary Jordan - a story of "rage and lust, of recklessness and selfishness and betrayal" in the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s. The book, which builds towards a climax which we know from the start is going to be tragic, describes the interlinked stories of two families - one being a dull but dependable farmer, his city-bred wife, his cantankerous father and flighty brother, and the other one of their tenant farmers - a black family whose son has just returned, highly decorated, from fighting in Europe. I bought this on the strength of the Barbara Kingsolver puff on its cover, and like The Poisonwood Bible one of its strengths was the sympathy it had for its characters - each one took turns in narrating, which helped the reader to understand the motivations of each one. I particularly liked the character of Florence, the clear-sighted, no-nonsense wife and mother of the tenant farmer family. The weakness of the book was that it didn't feel very original - each element of the story was familiar to me from any number of other books - and so it was a little predictable.

Montenegro by Starling Lawrence, which I couldn't get through - its convoluted sentences made me realise how simply and clearly written Mudbound had been. However, the story was interesting. It was a sort of subversion of a Boy's Own adventure story - a young man is sent off to the Balkans on a secret mission at the beginning of the twentieth century, only to discover that life there was much more complicated than his masters understood, and to end up disagreeing with the whole premise of his mission.

27. Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing. This was a rather unsatisfying read. Again, the premise was fascinating - Lessing explains in the Foreword that both her parents' lives were blighted by World War One (her father, a vigorous and active man, because he lost his leg, and her mother because her lover died), and so she wanted to reimagine their lives as if the war had never happened. She does this in the first half of the book. Neither parent is given an uncomplicatedly happy life, but her father at least ends up content, and her mother finds fulfillment (although she desperately longs for children and does not have any). Their stories, though, are very rushed - her mother's ten-year marriage is disposed of in 12 pages, and a later flirtation, which lasts five years, in 4 pages. I was also a little disturbed by Lessing's treatment of her mother. She writes, after the first part, that she "enjoyed giving him {her father} someone warm and loving". She also describes her mother's "energy, her humour, her flair, her impetuous way with life", but none of this is visible in the portrait she paints.

The second half of the book is supposedly about her parents' real lives - but in fact much more of it is about Lessing herself - random musings mixed with autobiographical snippets. There is enough information about her parents for the reader to understand how trapped and frustrated her mother must have felt by her life in Rhodesia - working on a failing farm, with none of the high-society colonial living that she had expected, with a husband who was dying by slow and painful degrees. There is not enough information to understand why Lessing's relationship with her mother was so difficult - we are told several times that she hated her mother, but it's not easy to understand why the relationship was so venomous.

28. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Forgive me for being cynical, but I suspect the reason for this book's popularity is that it's an impeccably liberal version of every 3-inch-thick page-turning airport thriller, with lashings of graphic violence and sex, fiendishly complicated villainy and direct retribution. Not to say it's not a perfectly good thriller. But I don't really like grotesquely violent crimes. If only there was a rating for grotesqueness on the book's cover...

29. The Guru Of Love by Samrat Upadhyay, which I picked up because of positive reviews on LibraryThing. This is the story of a poor schoolteacher living in Kathmandu, at a time of political crisis in Nepal and personal crisis in his own life. I thought that it started very well - and I was anticipating a novel about the difficulties of life for a poor but hard-working Nepali. But then the teacher started to fall for one of his students, and the story took a different turn. I thought that the story was well-handled - it was an easy read, and it did give a good flavour of ordinary life in Kathmandu. But I kept expecting complexities that didn't materialise. The main character is a weak-willed person, but everything turned out for him far better than he deserved - especially in the attitudes of the women in his life.

After this I read the first two stories from Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri, which I really enjoyed but had to leave behind as it wasn't my copy.

I loved the epigraph to this book: "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."

I'm interested to read your comments on the Lessing -- I had got more or less the same impression from a couple of reviews in various places, so I think you've confirmed my feeling that this might be a Lessing I can afford to miss, much as I've enjoyed other books of hers.

I just finished Unaccustomed Earth this morning -- will be posting on it as soon as I get a chance. I very much enjoyed it.

I think that's right. What Lessings have you enjoyed? I'd like to read more of her, but I get the impression that she can be a little variable.

>interesting reading, as always. I have read The Guru of Love but it was a number of years ago and I don't remember much about it. I do remember that I liked it but I also remember thinking that I knew very little about Nepal.

I loved The Grass is Singing which was the first I read, and was very impressed by The Fifth Child as well. The Summer Before the Dark didn't do much for me, although I can't now remember why I didn't like it (in fact I can remember very little about it, whereas I still have very clear memories of the other two). I have a couple more waiting to be read -- Mara and Dann and The Good Terrorist.

30. Buddha Da by Anne Donovan - a story about what happens when a working-class Glaswegian discovers Buddhism. He finds increasing inner peace, but as always, there's a conflict between his growing wish to withdraw from the world and conquer his desires, and all of his responsibilities to the rest of his family.

The story is told alternately by Jimmy, his wife Liz and daughter Anne Marie, and we can be sympathetic to each one as they tell their story, while recognising the wrong turns they are taking.

Buddha Da successfully takes a light-hearted approach to deal with some pretty serious issues. The story, at times, is a little bit pat, but it was a charming and enjoyable read.

How did you find the language in Buddha Da? At one time the book was on my TBR list, but it fell off when someone told me that the author used a lot of made up language. Or was it that it's written in dialect? I can't remember, but the allure rubbed off.

It's written in broad Glaswegian - a little less broad for the mother. I think it slowed down my reading slightly, but it certainly didn't impair my understanding of the story. That said, one of the reviews on the book's page is written by a Glaswegian who strongly objects to the language, which s/he doesn't feel is genuine.

On the other hand I didn't think the language added in a whole lot (unlike eg The Sopranos where the way that the girls talk really adds to the impact) - and indeed the author occasionally did that annoying thing where you have a relatively uneducated character who uses a difficult word and then explains where they know the word from. I always find that a little patronising.

31. The Coroner's Lunch, the first in a series of detective stories featuring 72-year-old crime-fighting pathologist Dr Siri Paiboun. The year is 1976, the Pathet Lao (=Lao Communist Party) have recently come to power, and Siri - reluctantly - has been made the national (and only) coroner in Laos. At first the most challenging thing he has to deal with is an over-enthusiastic bureaucratic supervisor. But then a senior Party official's wife is poisoned, and shortly afterwards three Vietnamese officials turn up dead, and things start to get much more complicated.

I really enjoyed this. Essentially it's a sort of Lao version of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency stories with very slightly more edge, but I very much liked Siri's drily sarcastic take on life and the unlikely gaggle of allies that he's gathered by the end of the book. I will look out for the second in the series.

32. Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson - and yes, I have had the Velvet Underground going through my head for the whole time I've been reading this.

Jesus' Son is a set of interlinked stories about one man - an alcoholic junky who drifts from one job and one girlfriend to the next. The stories are really just episodes, as not much happens - a barroom conversation, a strange encounter - and for the first few I couldn't see the point of it at all - they seemed aimless and willfully weird. But then the style started to seep into my consciousness - the hallucinatory tone of the stories; the sympathy for the drifters, addicts and misfits who people the stories, which adds a really poignant edge; and the way they are studded with images which are - perhaps beautiful is not the right word, but vivid, striking and sometimes moving: "She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty. I guessed Wayne was the storm that had stranded her here."

32> Did you know that a very fine film version was made a few years ago, starring Billy Crudup? I believe he was nominated for an Oscar.

No, I hadn't heard of that. How did they make a film of it, given that there isn't much of what you might call a story? Could be very interesting...

I've just skimmed through Murder On The Eiffel Tower, a very one-dimensional and badly written "mystery" novel set in nineteenth-century Paris.

I've also read 33. Broken April by Ismail Kadare, a novel about the culture of blood feuds in northern Albania, which lasted until the early twentieth century, and according to reports has been revived since the fall of Communism.

Broken April starts with a young man named Gjorg lying in wait for his victim, who in turn had killed Gjorg's brother. After the killing, Gjorg has a thirty-day truce before he, in turn, can legitimately be killed. His truce runs out in mid-April, giving the book its title. Hamlet-like, Gjorg dithers over his fate, wondering whether he would prefer to stay alive but live outside the rules of the blood feud, or whether a "fitting" death and a vivid, short life are better.

Kadare quickly establishes the grim pointlessness of the practice, and it comes as a shock to discover that the feud - which has killed 22 members of each family over the course of the last 70 years - could have been ended at any time if the family of the most recent victim had accepted blood money instead of demanding another death. And all this for a feud which began over one insult and drew in one of the families by the merest coincidence.

These first sections of the book are the most powerful. However, the focus of the story soon moves away from Gjorg and we are introduced to a young couple who have decided to spend their honeymoon in the mountains, tourists in what they see as "the world of legend, literally the world of epic that scarcely exists any more". The man, a writer, over-romanticises the exoticism around him, while his bride experiences a much more direct response to the pity and the excitement of life on the plateau. The young couple meet a range of different people and discuss their views of the blood-feud code, and the book begins to get bogged down in didacticism. It does return to narrative in the end, but I would have preferred to spend the thirty days with Gjorg experiencing his doubts and confusion.

Not much time to read at the moment - I've just started an Open University course and I'm also in some intensive language training. So a lot of my spare reading time is going on those, and even when I do sit down with a book it's quite hard to make myself read slowly and thoughtfully instead of scanning for content.

However, I have managed to read and enjoy 34. Banana Yoshimoto's Hardboiled/ Hard Luck, two novellas about memory, love and loss, both rather autumnal and meditative in tone. In the first story, a trip to the mountains brings back haunting, bittersweet memories of a previous romance. The second is a sensitive and moving portrayal of a young woman coming to terms with the death of her sister, which I really liked - it was very clear-eyed and honest about both the pain of grieving and the pain of those moments when you realise you are not grieving.

I've also been reading 35. The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, a collection of very short stories which suits my current attention span quite well. Emma Donoghue has drawn inspiration from genuine historical snippets about women's lives - she imagines the early childhood of a blind girl who became a famous Scottish poet, questions why Mary Wollstonecraft might have been sacked from one of her governess jobs, or considers the possible truth behind a ballad. Many of the stories are quite insubstantial and some are more interesting than others, but they are reimagined with a delicate touch, and I enjoyed the glimpses of (possible) real lives. I also liked the imagery, which was all appropriate to the time, place and character - in "The Necessity Of Being", one of the best stories, an alewife watches church documents being burnt during the Peasants' Revolt, their "edges curl{ing} up prettily like the thinnest pastry".

>101 wandering_star:, What language are you immersing yourself in?

Mandarin. I learnt it at university and was fairly fluent at one time, but am now trying to reverse 12 years of neglect!

I'm currently working my way through 50 patterns of modern Chinese - the sentence patterns it introduces are very useful, but its example sentences are obsessed with war, military expenditure and people "plunging into the thick of life" in order to enhance their literary creativity, so could be more relevant to things I might actually say.

Mind you, it hasn't reached the heights of the previous textbook I was using which asked me to translate the sentence "John often likes to dress as a Catholic priest".

You as well! Suddenly everyone around me is learning Mandarin - I'm getting seriously worried that I'm barking up the wrong linguistic tree! I spent all last week working with a 60-year old colleague who's learning it (in a bid to ward off Alzheimer's, she says), and she was objecting to the fact that her textbook included role-plays requiring her to discuss humane killing methods of animals with waiters (she's vegetarian...)

Good luck!

Hello, Wandering star! Your comment gives me courage--I want to follow your example re studying Mandarin. This year unbelievably marks 30 years since I formally studied Mandarin, but it was my "true love" of languages and now I want to go back to it. I doubt I can reverse 30 years of neglect, but now the use of the Internet and the keyboard (romaji-to-hanzi look-up) are so handy that it cuts down lots of time consuming dictionary searches. I tried looking up the textbook you mentioned, but there was no publication date. What vintage is it?

Mid-90s, I think. I have shelves of Mandarin textbooks acquired at different periods of study... so I thought it might actually be time to read some of them ;-)

I've also recently acquired Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar which is really good - as well as a thorough coverage of grammar it has sections on language for specific social situations.

Do you use Zhongwen.com? I also like Laowai for Mandarin tips...

RE links to Chinese study: Thanks--those look like great sites! I've been looking at the free sample lessons on chinesepod.com, but I'm not doing anything seriously yet. It's hard to carve out enough time in the day, but it's gradually getting easier.

I hope you don't mind me asking, but why are you studying Chinese? (People have always asked me this, so I'm aware that it can be a really annoying question, but I'm just interested).

I don't think it's annoying question - but I wish I had a better answer. I've been surprised by the number of people who turn out to have had Chinese pen-pals when they were little, or to have got interested in China when they had a Chinese boyfriend or girlfriend! I don't have such a good story, although I do have a Chinese mother, which I think must have been part of the decision-making ;-).

But in a nutshell, one of my teachers at school pointed out that it was possible to do a university course in a subject which I hadn't studied for my A-levels, and suggested I investigate. He was probably thinking about law or something, but as soon as I thought of the idea of studying Chinese it made sense... and I've never regretted it.

You?

To avoid hijacking your reading thread, I'll post at your profile page; I hope that's OK?

36. Chinese Tribute by CAS Williams. I picked this up in a charity shop where I'd been nosing around the travel/memoir section, on the basis that it looked interesting - the author worked for the Chinese customs service between 1903 and 1935, spoke Chinese, and lived in many different towns (giving him exposure to both senior government officials and rural life).

As I discovered while reading the book, Williams also wrote several books about Chinese symbolism and metaphor, and drew simple but very attractive pencil sketches of the daily life around him. From the picture on the back cover he's the very model of a British colonial official, from his white-blond hair and steady gaze to his short trousers and long socks.

And yet, despite all his understanding, knowledge and experience of China, Williams seems to have concluded for the most part that what readers really wanted was a memoir full of hilarious anecdotes about life in the Customs service - with just a few chapters at the end on Chinese art, culture, medicine and so on, and very little on the politics. It's a missed opportunity to make you weep.

However, it did give me the pleasure of reading the following passage on the bus home from a particularly testing Mandarin class:

At a dinner-party given by one of my colleagues, his wife remarked to me: 'My husband never studies Chinese. He says people who study Chinese invariably go mad!' Then, hastening to cover up her faux pas, she added: 'Of course, you are an exception to the general rule!'

And a very fascinating journey to madness it is!!
Your post #111 jogged my memory of one of my earliest (1974?) purchases Outlines of Chinese Symbolism and Art Motives by the same author. It's in storage now so I can't glance through it, but I recall it being very dry and pedantic; a few good anecdotes would've helped a lot. :)

#112 - that cover looks very familiar - I think it might be one of my parents' books! I'll have to check next time I visit them.

37. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. This is a monumental steampunk/fantasy novel set in the squalid and pullulating city of New Crobuzon, where humans mix with other creatures such as cactus-people, scarab-headed women, water-spirits, and the Remade - criminals who have been punished by being sculpted, by a combination of magic and crude surgery, into monsters or tools.

Into the city comes a garuda, a creature with the body of a human and the head and wings of an eagle - but this one has lost his wings and wants to regain the power of flight. His quest sets off a chain of events which lead to the city being threatened by monstrous and extremely powerful creatures. Will our motley group of renegades be able to defeat them?

In many ways the city itself is the main character of the book; and for me, I think these were the most interesting parts. I was intrigued by the references to the cultures of the different creatures, and I also enjoyed the political description of the city (it's a paper democracy, with a lottery determining which of the citizens may vote, political parties whipping up and taking advantage of inter-racial tensions, and close ties between the government and crime lords).

The prose style and the narrative are each as encrusted with details, byways, diversions and horror as the city itself. I really enjoyed this to start off with, but as the narrative came to a peak it started to get slightly irritating - the climactic fight seemed to go on for days, and I started to lose interest because it seemed so artificial - if you can just bring in new creatures with different magical powers, you can make anything you want happen.

Also, I think that when I read science fiction or fantasy, one of the things which interests me is how it makes me think about the way that humans live in the present. There is some of that in this book - the morality of the story is all about not treating other people as means to an end - but ultimately it gets swamped by the story.

So I don't think I would read this book again, although there was enough in it to make me want to read more of Mieville's work. I might do it when I can give more uninterrupted time to the book, though.

38. Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. This was the perfect antidote - 100 crisp, astringent pages. The subject matter of the book, however, was almost equally Gothic - a family of (financially and personally) decaying Anglo-Irish gentry over the middle years of the twentieth century. It starts off hilariously over-the-top, but as it goes on it becomes much sadder, and effectively punctures many of the myths of the glittering lives of the upper classes - all without ever appearing to take itself too seriously. There's a blurb by Jonathan Raban on the cover which praises Blackwood's "extraordinary style of aghast relish", which is spot on.

39. Dry Store Room No. 1: the secret life of the Natural History Museum by Richard Fortey. This book is excellent proof of the principle that any subject can be fascinating if it's explained to you by someone who finds it so. Fortey clearly loves working at the Natural History Museum and is fascinated by all its idiosyncracies - of which there have been plenty, although fewer these days (as everywhere). He tells his story with relish - whether he's describing a slime mould as "a patch of living snot", or whether he's talking about the eccentricity of one of his colleagues.

More than that, though, he uses the research of his colleagues to argue convincingly for the importance of studying natural history - and also to effectively convey the joy and fascination of their research, as they investigate the myriad ways in which organisms adapt to fit their evolutionary niche. Also, or perhaps therefore, this book is an impassioned defence of the value in pursuing knowledge without always knowing exactly where the future profit will lie.

I've made note of the title. My daughter is a budding naturalist (with an emphasis on entomology). We've been reading about Charles Darwin (she identifies with his love of rock collections and beetle identification when he was young) and that sounds perfect for gaining a greater understanding of how her mind works.

Richard Fortey is a very good science writer. I've also read his book Trilobite which is about his specialist area, a sort of marine hermit crab-like creature which died out something like 250m years ago. It sounds very dry (I read it because a house guest left it behind) but it was a great read and very interesting. If your daughter is interested in fossils and rock collection that might be a good one for her too.

Title noted. She got to dissect a squid during a day camp last week, so she's excited about anatomy right now.

Hope she enjoys it/them!

40. The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon. This book (which should be read with a soundtrack of London Is The Place For Me) is about the experience of West Indian immigrants in London in the 1950s. It's narrated from the point of view of Moses, a Trinidadian who's been in London for 10 years, never quite saving up enough in summer to get a boat home when winter comes, and looking with a weary and cynical eye at the more recent arrivals who feel like they've arrived in the big city and start to live it up.

It's a fascinating book. Not only does it come from a perspective which I've very rarely heard about (and that's working-class London life in the 1950s as well as what it was like to be an immigrant), it's written beautifully, in musical and often very sharp and witty Caribbean English.

Despite the many downsides of living in London (the cold, the unfriendliness of the English, the difficulty of making ends meet, the discrimination) the book is fairly light in tone, often focusing on how the men make a living for themselves and enjoy life when they can. But it's given poignancy throughout by the title, and Moses' wariness, and supplemented in a passage close to the end: "Moses ... could see a great aimlessness ... As if the boys laughing, but they only laughing because they fraid to cry, they only laughing because to think so much about everything would be a big calamity".

41. The Not Knowing by Cathi Unsworth, a noir thriller set in the seedier bits of London. A British film director, the UK's new Tarantino, is brutally murdered and his legion of fans are in mourning. Our protagonist, Diana Kemp (an outwardly tough and cool journalist on an underground culture magazine) was close to the director's circle, and gradually she is drawn into events, almost against her will.

My response to this book was mixed. The book takes you right into Camden and Soho, and the edgy London worlds of rock music and hip films, and it certainly passed the page-turner test (it kept me up till the middle of the night). There's a lot of interesting elements which lift the book out of the formulaic. But at times the writing could be clunky, and the plot happened a bit too quickly, if you see what I mean. This was disappointing. But I've got Unsworth's second book, and I'll certainly read that - there is a lot of potential in this one.

I've had Selvon in my sights for a while now, but haven't got round to reading him yet. It sounds like The Lonely Londoners might be the one for me. Have you read any others?

I haven't, although I would be interested in reading some of his others.

I am trying to avoid reading jags at the moment, and am trying to dip into my tbr on a whim, but I have noticed a largeish pile of Caribbean stuff building up, so I may tackle it all at once later this year. If I do, I know Bristol library has some Selvon, so I may try to throw one in there.

I asked a Jamaican colleague to recommmend some Caribbean writers a while ago, and Selvon (and The Lonely Londoners in particular) was one of her top choices. (I haven't made it to him yet - thanks for the review!)

ETA her other recommendations are on my profile page, should anyone be interested.

I read The Lonely Londoners a couple of years ago, and loved it. Although I haven't read any of his other books, I did read a book about black writers in Britain, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City by Sukhdev Sandhu, which discusses Selvon and other writers who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Sandhu writes that Selvon's best books, in addition to The Lonely Londoners are Ways of Sunlight and The Housing Lark, which seems to be out of print.

42. Why Not Catch-21 by Gary Dexter.

This is a collection of short essays about books, loosely themed around their titles. The cover picture gives a good idea - a pile of books with titles like A Robotic Banana by Anthony Burgess, or Gold Hatted Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald.

The interest level of the essays is variable. There are certainly some fascinating facts - for example, when Around the world in 80 days was being serialised, travel companies offered Jules Verne vast sums of money to have Phileas Fogg travel on their routes.

But I'm not really sure who the book is aimed at - lots of the books are ones which would only really have been read by people on university courses, but the mashup of history, trivia and analysis in the essays wouldn't be news to anyone who had studied them.

I bought this because it was one of Nicholas Lezard's paperback recommendations, which have given me some excellent reading pleasure - but sadly, not this one.

I have also given up reading The Harrowing, an Early Reviewer book about two working-class brothers from Leeds during World War One. The elder is the 'good' brother - dutiful, obedient, beloved by family and friends alike. The younger believes that since birth he has been mistrusted by his parents and ostracised by the rest of the community - but he has managed to woo and win the young woman that both brothers are attracted to. At the outbreak of war, the brothers argue - the elder believes he has a duty to join up, the younger can't see the point of it at all. And yet, due to a plot twist which I won't reveal, it ends up being the younger who goes to fight.

The story of the book is reasonably interesting, but I can't take any more of the portentious prose style (which I think is intended to be timeless and archetypical). In fact, even the title now seems to me an indication of the author's overblown intentions.

Come to think of it, I haven't enjoyed ANY of the early reviewer books I've been sent. Maybe I should stop applying for them... I have plenty of other things to read, after all.

Great reads, Wanderingstar. I really enjoyed the ascerbic style of Great Granny Webster, too. The Fortey book is high on my TBR pile.

43. Reversed Forecast by Nicola Barker. This is the first full-length novel by Nicola Barker, a writer who I really like. In this book, she hasn't yet quite developed her over-the-top and idiosyncratic voice, although her interest in eccentrics and marginal characters is already evident. If you haven't read her before, I'd start with some of the later stuff.

127> Well, that one is moving down my wish list!

I've had pretty good luck with the ER books. The only two I really couldn't stand were How Do I Love Thee? and Weaving a Way Home. Oh, and Firmin was just not for me. Most of the others were things I won't rave about but did enjoy. And a few have become favorites (most lately A Reliable Wife). I have gotten more picky about what I request and rarely mark more than two or three of the books offered.

I've also seen other people's reviews of ER books which look great. Dilemma...

...and who can pass up the chance of getting a free book??

I noticed that you mention The Book of Chameleons in your first post. I've just ordered it after seeing Agualusa's translator, Daniel Hahn, speak at an event recently. It was really interesting to hear about the translation process and I'm looking forward to reading the finished product.

44. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns, an understated but desperately sad story of a marriage broken down by poverty (the title refers to the fact that when they got married, they couldn't afford a set of proper silver teaspoons - but there are times when they can barely afford to eat), combined with bohemian irresponsibility on his side and timid naivety on hers. Beautifully written and highly recommended.

The first line of the book is "I told Helen my story and she went home and cried". There is a comforting Author's Note at the start of the book which says "The only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters 10, 11 and 12 and the poverty", but according to the book's introduction much of the story is actually autobiographical. It's a relief to find out that Comyns' circumstances improved in later years.

45. Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. This is a collection of short stories set in Thailand, but not a Thailand that any of us is likely to have seen. Most of the protagonists are young, poor Thai men - although while their circumstances might be specific to Thailand, the emotions they go through are very much the human condition.

The stories are pretty bleak - people betray their friends, get old and have their faculties decay, or are humiliated by those stronger than them.

There are some uplifting/redemptive moments, but ultimately these are stories of the powerless. That certainly makes them worth reading, but I'm not sure that I would want to read them again.

Thanks, wandering_star; I'll add Sightseeing to my wish list.

#132, charbutton, I read The Book of Chameleons earlier this year and there was an interesting essay/conversation with the translator in it (I don't have the book in front of me so I can't remember which it was). I'll be interested in what you think of the book.

>136 rebeccanyc:, I finished it about 5 minutes ago! I'll post thoughts in my thread in the next day or so...

My edition didn't have anything with the translator - I would be really interested to hear what it says.

46. Pakistan by Owen Bennett Jones. This is an excellent beginner's introduction to a country which I knew very little about. Bennett Jones was a BBC correspondent in Pakistan for three years, but explicitly set out to write a general history rather than a journalist's memoir. He divides up the history thematically, which for me worked very well - with chapter titles like "The Bomb", "The Army" and "Democracy" - and strikes the right balance between providing enough information without swamping the reader. He also has a great eye for the telling quote or anecdote, which makes the book very readable. For example, in the photo pages there is a series of pictures of Pakistan's rulers, each one accompanied by a derogatory quote from that person's successor.

Apparently Bennett Jones is currently working on an update - I'd highly recommend that when it comes out.

I appreciate your comments on Pakistan: Eye of the Storm and have added it to my wish list. The more I read from Pakistani writers, the more I need a reliable "context" to view them in, and it looks like Jones's book would help.

I think it would. I was thinking how strange it was that I've picked up a fair bit of modern Indian history from my reading and other things, but had really little idea about Pakistan.

47. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer - another book of short stories focusing on the marginalised. Most of the main characters appear bemused or alienated in the world they inhabit, a number because of their religious devotion, others because they are the only black student in their (school or college) class. The title comes from a story (available here) in which a woman imagines herself out of her life and 'drinking coffee elsewhere'. Often, the stories focus on the extreme reactions which can arise when these characters find themselves in difficult situations.

I enjoyed the stories - particularly the style, although it could be a little bit creative-writing-class in the shininess of its metaphors. However, I found them a little bit formulaic - my favourite story, "Geese", was the one which moved away from the pattern a little bit, focusing on a group of foreigners in Japan, lucky if they're stuck in dead-end jobs. I also enjoyed "The Ant Of The Self" in which a young man gets stuck with his father trying to make some money out of the Million Man March in Washington DC.

I've also abandoned a few books, some of which have been staring up at me from Mount Half-Read for some time:

Dubai Tales by Muhammad al-Murr, a book of short stories which was billed as highlighting the tensions between tradition and modernity in that rapidly-changing society. I only read a few, but they didn't really do it for me - for example, one story turns on the fact that people can have a rubbish time on holiday but boast about how great it was when they get home - hardly worthy of mention!

The Mammaries Of The Welfare State by Upamanyu Chatterjee, the sequel to English, August which is one of those books which had more of an impact in my memory than it did when I was reading it. English, August is about a young, English-educated Indian who joins the Indian civil service and is promptly posted to a backwater which will fulfill all your nightmares of bureaucracy. I'd certainly recommend that. Mammaries is grotesque, over-the-top, scabrous, and teeming with detail, but for me, without detailed knowledge of Indian politics, the satire was too broad-brush, and couldn't make up for the very loose structure.

To The Hebrides, an amalgamation edition of Johnson and Boswell's reports of the same journey around Scotland, which I bought and read with enthusiasm when I was in the same places, but haven't touched since I got back from the holiday. I guess it's a bit like the way you bring back various alcohols from holidays which tasted perfect in the sun but are grotesquely sweet (or bitter) in your own kitchen.

re "Mount Half-Read": Yes! I have as many in *that* figurative pile as in Mount TBR. Some of mine need to move to "The Pit of Never Will Finish."

The Black Hole of 'Stop Making Me Feel Guilty'?

>143 wandering_star: I definitely need one of those. :) (Though my purchasing and reading habits have improved with the use of LT).

Really? I am sure mine are much worse. Well, LT and Bookmooch - fatal combination.

48-9. Two playscripts - I didn't see either of them in the theatre but my sister did, and bought/recommended the scripts.

Landscape with Weapon by Joe Penhall, which is about an engineer who invents a killer (in all senses) weapons technology. He gets into it for the love of the science - creating a machine which can do something previously impossible. As it nears completion, he develops doubts about his work - but by then, it may be too late to get out of the game. I thought the setup of the play was excellent, but a bit disappointed by the way it developed.

Penhall also wrote the excellent Blue/Orange, which I have seen at the theatre.

Black Watch by Gregory Burke. This is about the Black Watch regiment and their experience in Iraq, particularly after they were sent north to Fallujah to back up US forces. It's based around verbatim interviews with ex-members of the regiment, with some scenes set back in Iraq, and highlights the complex motivations and reactions of different members of the forces. This was a powerful read - subtle and moving. I really wish I'd seen the production.

Black Watch sounds fascinating.

I'm entertained by Mnt. Half-Read. I think you should call Mnt. Abandoned, then instead of feeling guilty and compelled to finish them, you can hold your nose high in the air and just imagine that they must not have been good enough to keep your interest. ;)

(and, of course, you can still pick them up later.)

50. The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, the true story of a Victorian crime - the murder of a small boy inside his (well-off) family home. The crime appears to have been something of a Victorian cause celebre, arousing all sorts of middle-class fears about the sanctity of the home and the sort of things which might be going on inside it, including whether the middle-class family was really as pure and upright as it was painted, and how far you could trust the servants which you brought into the heart of your home. It was also investigated by the celebrity detective of his time - a man who appears to have been involved in many of the most famous cases, and whose every act while investigating the Road Hill House murder was watched and commented on by press and Victorian public alike. According to the book, he was also the model for The Moonstone's Detective Cuff, and through him to many of the detectives in the stories written today. The case also spawned a genre of its own - the "sensation" novel ("tales of domestic misery, deception, madness"), from Lady Audley's Secret on.

There are many fascinating things about the case, and the book is gripping from the start, although it gets a bit bogged down in detail at times. It reads like a combination of the detailed story of the detection process and a social history of what the case meant. I would have preferred more emphasis on the latter - the story of the detection doesn't move fast enough to make it the backbone of the book.

Therefore I would say I was slightly disappointed by this book, which won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction last year and which has been widely praised. It's certainly an interesting story, but I think a different author might have been able to make more of it.

A few books to catch up on!

51. Water For Elephants. This book regularly gets rave reviews on LT and I'd like to add mine to the heap. It's the story of Jacob, who during the Great Depression was a vet with a travelling circus. Now he is in a nursing home, with dutiful visits from his children and grandchildren every Saturday. There are some stories from his past that he's never told anyone - but when a circus comes to town, old memories come back to him.

This was a good, quick read. The stories of life in the circus are vivid and fascinating, and the historical research is worn lightly - it's very convincing but I didn't feel the author was cramming in things just because she'd been able to research them. The sections set in the present were just as good to read - 90-year-old Jacob is an extremely sympathetic character. He can be cantankerous, but the reader wants the nursing home staff to see the best side of him.

The book is not perfect - the "love interest" is a bit unconvincing, as is the feelgood ending (although it was what I wanted to happen, so I cared less about that!). But it was a very enjoyable, interesting and fluent read.

52. Dissolution by CJ Sansom. Another good page-turner - set around the time of the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, although the title also refers to the dissolute living which was going on at some of them. An up-and-coming lawyer is sent down from London to a monastery on Romney Marsh, with two tasks - to persuade the abbot to surrender the monastery to the Crown, and to find out who murdered the last man who tried to do the same. He carries these out dutifully - but at the same time, he begins to question the value of the reforms which he has always supported. That storyline, and the historical detail, add extra levels of interest to what is already a good mystery story.

53. The Big Necessity by Rose George, a book about shit. (Sorry, but one of the author's key points is that we are all too embarrassed to talk seriously about this important topic, and that includes footling about with words like 'waste' and 'excrement').

I read it on the recommendation of a friend, and I'm glad I did. At first, I thought it was going to weigh in on the quirky-amusing end of the spectrum, with chapters about the London and New York sewers and the amazingly high-tech Japanese toilet industry, but gradually the book gets more serious - and the reader gets more concerned.

The key fact is that 2.6 billion people worldwide have no access to sanitation. And that does not mean that they have a long-drop or a bucket - it means that they have to shit on waste ground, or in a plastic bag. And yet sanitation is one of the lowest-priority development issues - there's plenty of focus on supplying clean water, but not on the thing that makes it dirty. (As George points out, 'water-borne diseases' is really a euphemism for 'excrement-borne diseases'). It also has impacts beyond health - there is evidence, for example, that in some schools the foul state of the toilet facilities is one of the factors which causes children (especially menstruating girls) to drop out.

George finds some encouraging stories - mainly grassroots projects which are having a positive impact. But these are small-scale and outweighed by the shocking and depressing aspects of the book (say, India's caste of "manual scavengers" whose job is to pick up other people's shit, or the health impact of the US farming industry's use of untreated industrial waste).

And yet, I would describe this as an enjoyable read as well as an important one. I don't know how Rose George manages to maintain both a light tone and a clear sense of injustice. But she does, and the result is highly recommended - I'll certainly be giving copies to many of my friends.

(You can get an idea of her style here in a Slate article which became, I think, some of the early part of the book). I'm also going to try and seek out her earlier book, A Life Removed, which seems to be out of print, about the lives of Liberian asylum-seekers.

Recommended for*: anyone who is interested in development (there's some interesting stuff about top-down vs bottom-up), or in China, or India, or the future of humankind, I guess.

*am plagiarising Nickelini's format, as I think it's a great way of summing up a book, and I like the idea of trying to find positives!

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. I know a lot of LT-ers have really enjoyed this, but I had to stop reading it as it was setting my teeth on edge.

It's the story of a young woman living in London immediately after the war, and the correspondence she gets into with a group of Guernsey islanders who tell her about their experiences under the German occupation.

There are plenty of elements in the book which I thought I would enjoy, but perhaps that was part of the problem - I ended up feeling like it was too knowingly charming, almost cynically put together: let's have a couple of irrepressible and feisty (but big-hearted) heroines who cock snooks at convention, some uptight members of society who disapprove of said snook-cocking, some yokels who find unexpected joy and transformation in reading books...

I may be being too harsh here, but that's how I personally experienced it.

Recommended for: anyone who enjoys books about books and reading, wants a light read, and doesn't mind if it's a bit cutesy.

54. The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk. Here I've been complaining about the quality of early reviewer books, and then one comes along which knocks my socks off.

The Bradshaw Variations is about an extended family. The main characters are all just about in their 40s, and slightly puzzled as to where they ended up where they have. They all relate to each other in well-established ways; each of them, at times, resents the way that others assume that they are unchanging, and yet they continue to see each others' lives in particular lights, "as a harmonic key governs a melody".

One of the book's epigraphs quotes Sartre as telling us that Bach "taught us how to find originality within an established discipline; actually - how to live", and that's really what the book is about - the way that we all construct and are constrained by the myths of our own lives. We would all say that we want to live freely, and yet is it ever possible for us to escape from ourselves? And indeed, what would it really mean to live freely? Cusk builds up a sense of the fragility of the world we construct, without which we would just be human beings hurtling through space - no wonder we cling to the certainties of our lives.

Cusk has a sharp eye for the trappings of a life - the clothes, the houses, and what they say about us and our tribe. She also writes beautifully - I was often torn between letting the prose take me rushing on and stopping to explore a complex thought which was quickly expressed.

It's probably not for everyone - it is quite cerebral and emotionally detached, and not very much actually happens. But I enjoyed it enormously. I have another book by Rachel Cusk on my TBR pile (Arlington Park) and I hope to get to it very shortly!

Recommended for: anyone who wants a thought-provoking book about human relationships, and who doesn't mind books about middle-class people worrying about middle-class concerns.

I love your 'recommended for' sections. I was very tempted by The Bradshaw Variations until I got until the last sentence and now I know it's not the book for me!

>151 wandering_star: I'm with you on The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society; I had to give up on it after not very long at all, and you've nicely summed up why. So many LTers have enjoyed it that I was expecting it to be the ultimate in comfort reading, but it just didn't do it for me.

>153 charbutton: - yes, it's a niche interest...

>154 rachbxl: - I'm so glad I'm not the only one!

>155 wandering_star: So am I...!

Its odd, but I think that comfort reading is much more divisive than (e.g.) a big heavy classic, based on conversations on LT. I think with the latter, people will tend to see the point, even if the book itself bores them or annoys them, but if comfort reading misses the mark, it just becomes a big wasted space in people's reading lives. It seems counterintuitive, but 'comfort' books seem to provoke more debate than other types of literature.

Good point. And a lot of the time how you feel about this sort of book will be about where you draw the line - between satisfying the demands of the reader and the genre, and not being too cliched or predictable, so that's much more personal.

55. Stardust by Neil Gaiman. I think it's a tribute to Gaiman's writing that even though all the way through this book I was thinking that it wasn't really what I was in the mood for, I still couldn't put it down. This is a fairytale - a young man setting out into the wilds to find his heart's desire. Being Gaiman, it's a fairytale with a twist, but actually a pretty gentle one.

Recommended for: someone who wants a witty fantasy novel which is quite a light/quick read.

56. The Exception by Christian Jungersen.

Four women work together in a genocide information centre in Copenhagen. One day, two of them receive emailed death threats. At first, they assume the threats are from one of the mass murderers they've written about, but then booby traps appear in the office, and they start to mistrust each other. As the relationships between them deteriorate, things get worse and worse...

In a nutshell, the novel argues that all of us have deep-rooted fears and concerns, which if played upon can lead us to irrational behaviour - and when taken to extremes, this is what leads to genocide. It's an interesting idea, but I have two problems with it:

- first, the execution. The book's focused on its didactic intent, and everything is just so implausible - from the main story development to the little details (if you thought you were being victimised by work colleagues, would you really react by reading about the psychopathology of evil?). Also, the writing (or the translation) is very clunky, and the characters are pretty annoying.

- secondly, I don't really buy the proposition that, say, reacting irrationally if you think your more attractive friend is interested in the same guy you are is really on the same spectrum as clubbing your neighbours to death. Or if it is, it's so far the other end of the spectrum as makes no difference.

So, an interesting rather than enjoyable read for me.

Recommended for: someone who is interested in ideas about the nature of evil.

I was all set to order this book after the first sentence of your second paragraph, but your review convinced me otherwise.

It's a shame, because I'd heard great things about the book and been looking forward to reading it for some time.

>161 kidzdoc:, Yeah, me too. I hate disappointment. :)

57. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - early (Victorian) feminist sci-fi, in which three Victorian males discover a land which has been all-female for two thousand years. The three men have different preconceptions about women (one is a Lothario, another has an exaltedly idealistic view of the feminine), but none of them are expecting what they find.

I found this very amusing to start with. For example, the men are surprised when they meet large numbers of women who are in their forties - none of them had pictured anything but young and attractive women. I think that would probably be the same today.

But as the men discover more about the land, it becomes apparent that it is a place where everything is perfect - a paradise on earth. And then it started to get kind of boring. I was waiting for the moment when the dark side of it all was revealed... but it turned out there wasn't one.

So I would say this was an interesting historical document, but it was too overstated. Part of what Gilman was trying to say was that if women were allowed to, they could be full members of humanity and not just fluffy creatures who are only interested in flirtation and later children. I'd have been happy with that.

I am totally with you on The Guernsey book, which I thought was quite overblown in it's accolades. I finished it, but also with some major teeth gritting.

Very good review of the Summerscale book - quite surprised that it won the Johnson Prize but a worthwhile read nevertheless. I totally agree with the social vs detective story emphasis.

I forgot the "recommended for" for Herland. I'd say, read it if you're interested in the history of feminism, or in the history of utopian sci-fi.

58. Eat The Document by Dana Spiotta. In 1972, a young woman called Mary (then Freya, then Caroline) goes on the run after involvement in bombing the houses of executives of companies involved in producing munitions for the Vietnam War. The novel alternates between her story and that of a group of people in the 1990s - three in their forties and the rest young people with varying degrees of alienation.

So, is this a book about the decline in activism since the 1970s? I can't make my mind up. On the surface, yes - there is some pretty heavy-handed satire on disaffected 1990s youth. But at the same time, the 1970s narrative effectively shows the wide range of approaches to the counter-culture, from the deeply committed and active to the people who were attracted for the lazing around and smoking drugs.

In fact, the 1970s storyline is much more interesting - both the way that Mary is affected by having to go on the run (having to discard her identity, and never sure that she has any future) and in the spectrum of how the counter-culture affected different groups of people. The 1990s story, as I said, is mostly heavy parody, but reading parody of something I know almost nothing about feels quite exclusionary!

There were a couple of interesting ideas - I liked a thread of conversation about why people choose to dress a certain way: "to remind you of who you want to be", because "you get treated in a certain way and it helps you become what you want to be", or so that "you control what people believe about you". But overall it didn't hang together.

Recommended for: someone who believes that kids today just appropriate radical imagery with no understanding of what it really means!

August doesn't seem to have been a great reading month. I've only kept one of the books I read. Wait, I've checked back through, and I did read two excellent borrowed books. But even so that seems a low number. I hope September will be better.

Well, I couldn't have asked for a better start to September.

59. Bloodletting and miraculous cures by Vincent Lam. This is a collection of interlinked short stories dealing with a group of medical students (and later doctors). We see the trajectory of their lives, as well as evocative snapshots of the lives of their patients. Lam is himself a doctor, and his stories demonstrate the frailty of human beings - both physical and mental. They also made me wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to be a doctor.

Beautifully observed and written, honest, tender, frank and sometimes not for the squeamish. I think the most remarkable thing about the stories is the way that we are left to interpret so much about what happens between them, with just a hint and a clue here and there, and yet we end up with a pretty clear picture of the characters we have seen grow. Very highly recommended.

According to an interview in the back of my edition, Lam was working as a doctor on a cruise ship when Margaret Atwood came on board as the ship's writer. He sent her some of his work and she emailed back "CONGRATULATIONS YOU CAN WRITE". I'd agree - he can.

Recommended for: everyone.

That is one book I still have not read, and being medical based and Canadian I really must. Thanks for the great review. I have not seen anything further of his since that first book.

Ditto, except that I'm not Canadian. :)

I have this, but probably won't read it before the new year. Thanks for the great review!

I liked Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures when I read it a few years ago too. One thing it really showed me is that doctors are human and it's really unrealistic and unfair to expect them to have all the answers.

60. The Language Of Things by Deyan Sudjic. Sudjic is director of the Design Museum in London, so you might expect him to have plenty to say about design. And yet this book reads more like a series of lectures than a coherent manifesto. Perhaps that's due to the difficulty of pinning down what design actually is (and what it isn't) - and the fact that Sudjic is torn between liking nice things and being uncomfortable with the volume of modern consumption (he says he's 'disgusted' with it, but I think the niceness of things wins out).

Sudjic is writing for an audience au fait with design, but he is still accessible. My favourite part of the book was the chapter on design archetypes, which (after discussing the Anglepoise lamp) moved on to banknotes.

"With nothing more than an image and a choice of font ... a banknote has to convince us that it is worth more than the paper on which it is printed ... steel engravings still seem to denote a valuable piece of paper with more conviction than, say, a watercolour sketch. ... Look at the way that the states of the former Yugoslavia rushed to design themselves banknotes even before they had internationally recognized governments. Out went the heroic steelworkers and apple-cheeked peasant women bringing in the harvest ... you could tell that Macedonia was going to run into problems imply by looking at a national currency decorated with images of white-coated technicians sitting at computer screens, which projected - and had - the financial probity of a tram ticket."

Unfortunately, a lot of what Sudjic says in this book is either preposterous or banal. But it was worth reading for the occasional spot-on and acerbic comment - such as carbon offsetting being the modern equivalent of buying papal indulgences.

Recommended for: a good read for someone interested in design.

61. The Bridge by Geert Mak. An elegiac extended essay about Istanbul's Galata Bridge, its people, its history, and its influence on literature. Mak spends time hanging out on the bridge, and gets to know its denizens - the pedlars, policemen and other regulars. Their lives are used to illustrate modern Turkey, and the bridge's history is used to illustrate the way that Turkey has changed over the centuries.

Recommended for: holiday reading on a trip to Istanbul.

62. An Audience With An Elephant by Byron Rogers, a quite wonderful book of essays, although it's very hard to describe as none of the words which come to mind quite do it justice. It is charming and offbeat, but both those words make it sound cutesy, which it definitely isn't - there's a desert-dry humour, as well as a deep sense of humanity, behind these essays. (To quote the start of one of the driest, about Rogers' accidental stint as a speechwriter to Prince Charles: "{the Prince's Private Secretary} had always been careful of speech to the point where you fancied you saw semicolons form in air. But this time he sounded as though English were a foreign language in which he was taking an oral exam.")

Rogers' interest is in English villages, and the individual human lives within them, both now and the traces that are left from the past. He has an eye for the quirky - one essay deals with what "the last Turkish POW in British hands", a tortoise captured at Gallipoli - but in fact, his interest is in the tortoise's owner, and how the story of the tortoise came to define his life. Even when he's writing about Roman tombstones, Rogers manages to bring to life the individual characters buried under them.

Truly a gem.

Recommended for: anyone with an indulgent eye for English eccentricity.

63. Mrs 'Arris Goes To Paris by Paul Gallico, a sweet and charming fable along the lines of Miss Pettigrew, in which the world is full of simple and upright people and virtue is rewarded.

Recommended for: an afternoon lying on the sofa.

Oh - I fondly remember The Snow Goose and Thomasina as a child - he transported me completely into his world when I was young. I must read more of him.

As an innocent child of 11 I was perverted by my grandmother's volumes of Reader's Digest Condensed books. Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris was among them. I remember enjoying it.

I have marked the 60th anniversary by reading 64. The Dragon's Village by Yuan-tsung Chen. Described as "an autobiographical novel of revolutionary China", it tells the story of those heady days almost 60 years ago, as Ling-ling, the daughter of a well-off family in Shanghai, volunteers to go to the remote northwest of China to help carry out land reform. Nothing in her life up till then has prepared her either for the aching poverty or for the process of overturning centuries of traditional relationships, and the forces of anger and revenge that can be unleashed when you do so.

The work teams feel their way through the reform process, from trying to mobilise the peasants to destroying the power and mystique of the landlords. This may not sound like the most gripping subject, but I found this book fascinating. It's told very much from Ling-ling's perspective at the time, and so her dominant emotions are positive. But it's not a whitewash. Ling-ling, for example, is troubled by the fact that traditional attitudes are hard to change, even when the subject of those attitudes is different (the landlord's widow is ostracised the same way a woman perceived as bringing bad luck used to be). There is also a grim but all too believable account of the way that ends can come to justify means, and how the voice of conscience can be gradually stilled.

I picked this up in a charity shop - I always look at Women's Press books when I see them secondhand, because (shallowly) I like the way the stripy spines stand out on my bookshelf. It was a very lucky find.

Recommended for: anyone interested in China, or in the upheavals of 20th-century history.

I try and seek out Women's Press books too, although I do find them to be hit and miss.

Me too, that's why I was pleased that this one turned out to be a goody.

65. The Ladies Of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke. I really enjoyed reading Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell - it reminded me of all the books I loved as a child where magic was just part of the normal world (like Joan Aiken), and for a little while after I finished it I had cravings for books with magic in.

I should probably have read this book then. Right now most of it just felt unbearably twee - from the framing conceit that the stories are actually histories of the relations between humankind and Faerie, to the intermittently archaic spellings ("shew" instead of "show" being especially popular).

Recommended for: those who like magical and fairytales and want something light and bite-sized.

66. The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr. This is a very entertaining romp through the story of the finding of a lost Caravaggio painting, tracked by different Caravaggio lovers and experts over a number of years and through different countries. It's a great story, and told in an effective and suspenseful way. It also gives a fascinating glimpse into the world of art scholarship and museums.

I wouldn't say there's more than a glimpse - and I think another author might have chosen to weave in more about the wider context of the art world. But that would probably have been a less character-driven book and therefore less easy to read (I got through this in less than 24 hours).

Recommended for: a good read, an easy introduction to the world of art scholarship and museums.

I also really enjoyed the Harr book - it was a very interesting story. I rushed to read his other book A Civil Action but did not enjoy that one half as much. Probably because of the content rather than the writing.

67. A Short History Of Progress by Ronald Wright. This was originally a series of lectures, asking whether civilisation is a "progress trap" (ie something which looks positive but contains within it the seeds of its own destruction).

To address this question, Wright looks at a number of previous civilisations - Easter Island and Sumer, which fairly obviously drove themselves out of existence; the Roman and Maya empires, which flourished for a long time but eventually collapsed; and two which do not seem to have gone through the same cycle, Egypt and China (although he spends less time on these, arguing that they have survived, at least in some form, because of unusually high soil fertility).

The story of Easter Island is familiar, but still incredible, and Wright tells it well, wondering what was in the mind of the person who "felled the last tree". Sumer failed because over-irrigation led to salinity (and even today, half of Iraq's irrigated land is saline). The reasons for the collapse of the Roman and Maya empires are still disputed by scholars: Wright argues that in both cases, it was over-cultivation leading to agrarian failure. He expands on this to say that as societies or civilisations develop, the population grows to the maximum possible that resources allow, and also that society becomes increasingly stratified, putting power in the hands of the few - who are insulated from the effects of the environmental degradation which the civilisation is causing. This second point was new to me, but it certainly sounds familiar.

I don't know enough about the decline of the Roman or Maya empires to judge how convincing Wright's argument is, but he writes acerbically and covers a wide range of ground. As well as the overarching argument, the book is full of thought-provoking facts. I'll note three here.

- The thick skull of Neanderthal man may not have been a sign of low intelligence, but of better adaptation to cold weather - but when Europe began to warm, the more versatile homo sapiens suddenly had the benefit.

- The division of pre-history into stone, bronze and iron age is not appropriate as a marker of the development of non-European cultures: the highly developed Maya civilisation made little use of metal, and sub-Saharan Africa had developed ironworking as early as China (around 500 BC) but never developed to the same extent apart from that.

- The "self-governing democracies" of native Americans inspired the Founding Fathers, in their social equality, free debate, rule of consensus, and the ability of dissenters to leave the rest of their nation and found an independent group. In 1775 James Adair wrote of the Cherokees that "Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty!". But these societies were the result of the mass deaths by smallpox that happened in the 1500s. Before that, societies were larger, more structured and hierarchical.

Recommended for: anyone who is worried about what we are doing to the world.

>183 wandering_star:, Intriguing. Thanks for posting your thoughts on this.

The Wright book sounds really interesting - an approach to human societal development. Perhaps similar to Guns Germs and Steel which I found rather overrated and very dry. I really like the sound of Wright's theorizing - must get to it.

Wright actually has some quite critical things to say about Guns, Germs and Steel! He describes it as "informative on germs but should not be relied on for archaeological and historical data ... his portrayal of the Spanish conquests omits important data and strikes me as tendentious". I like the "informative on germs" - talk about damning something with faint praise. Because of this it's quite funny that one of the recommendations on the work page is to Jared Diamond's Collapse... although they do cover a lot of the same ground.

Truthfully, I cannot believe it won the Pulitzer (Guns, Germs and Steel that is). He gave no references, made bold statements that had been previously visited and claimed them for himself, was dull and repetitive. I slogged through it and wrote my review of it in a bit of tizzy. The Wright book sounds alot more engaging.

Hmm. I actually have Collapse in my TBR pile but maybe it's slipping down the list a bit now.

>189 wandering_star:, I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel but found Collapse to be tedious and repetitive. I think A Short History of Progress sounds much better!

I enjoyed both Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, but probably prefered Collapse (which sounds a lot like the book you reviewed).

68. Affliction by Russell Banks. This is the story of an individual from a small town, a man who might at one point have had a good future ahead of him, but because of poor decisions, lack of confidence and bad luck, it slipped away and he has ended up divorced, in a dead-end job, and drinking heavily. Gradually, piece by piece, a picture is built up of every wrong turn, every frustration and humiliation - and a sense of coming doom when all that finally comes to a head. An interesting twist is that the story is narrated by the man's brother - who, to any external observer, might be thought to have made it, got away from his family and his past, but who feels quite the opposite - as if he and his brother are two sides of the same coin.

Recommended for: a reader who values well-written prose and a well-told story and doesn't mind ending up a little depressed.

69. Before Lunch by Angela Thirkell. This charming book could be a sort of companion piece to Cold Comfort Farm, but with the gentle satire focusing on the gentry rather than the farming folk.

There isn't really very much story to summarise - the county gentry unite to try and stop a plan to build a shop on a piece of local land, various people fall in love with each other (happily or otherwise).

When I started the book I thought it was pretty light, and the satire seemed rather arcane, with stock figures like the architect who has delusions of being a country gentleman and believes himself (against all the evidence) to be deeply in tune with the natural world, the overbearing lady of the manor, and so on. But as the book progressed it developed in both wit and heart - I found myself laughing out loud, and even, at the end, wiping away a quiet tear.

Recommended for: a summer afternoon with tea and scones, ideally eaten on the lawn.

Yours is one of my favorite threads to follow on Club Read. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on books. I especially enjoy the "Recommended for" comments at the end.

Thank you, nobooksnolife! It's always nice to know that other people are reading this, so I am glad you enjoy my posts.

My next several books are going to be about India, inspired by this thread and the fact that I found several dozen India-related books in my TBR Himalaya. I'll probably put more detailed comments on the Reading Globally thread and try and summarise them here.

70. Surface by Siddhartha Deb, a murky tale set in India's northeast (between Bangladesh and the Burmese border). It doesn't quite work as a thriller, but the atmosphere it captures is amazing - the whole novel is illuminated by the flickering light of a cheap, decaying hotel.

Recommended for: lovers of Graham Greene-type stories of futility and whisky-sodden compromise.

71. The Bus Stopped by Tabish Khair, an enjoyable glimpse into several life stories of passengers on a bus journey - daily life in a city block, childhood reminiscences of a boy from a wealthy family about the family cook, the tension between the lazy, sensual driver and his more upright conductor. All this is told in deceptively simple but moving prose.

Recommended for: a light but warm-hearted read.

72. The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor, a retelling of the Mahabharatha as a story of the modern history of India. A fast-moving, epic tale, which is funny (and sometimes groansome) but also moving.

Recommended for: highly recommended for anyone interested in India, although it probably shouldn't be your first book which refers to Indian history or culture - that might be a little incomprehensible...

Just catching up with your reading. Great stuff, it seems. So many books...

73. Begums, Thugs And White Mughals, an edition of the journals of Fanny Parkes, selected by William Dalrymple.

Fanny Parkes lived in India from 1822-1846, and wrote the journals so her mother would be able to imagine the way she lived. She is a lively woman, curious about everything, and fearless in following up her curiosity. Sometimes she seems quite gleeful at her own adventurousness: on her first trip into the hill country, she writes proudly about getting used to riding on the precipitous paths ("At first I felt a cold shudder pass over me as I rode by such places; in the course of a week I was perfectly accustomed to the sort of thing, and quite fearless").

One of the pleasures of the book is following her viewpoint from her first arrival in India. Imagine experiencing a tropical thunderstorm for the first time, seeing palm trees, or riding an elephant ("when he rose up, it was like a house making unto itself legs"), with no images from tv or films to tell you what to expect. But more than that, Fanny's understanding and love of India also grows. Her first visit to a Hindu temple is dismissed with a comment about native superstition and gullibility. But by 1830, her description of Diwali festivities moves into an explanation of the different ways in which the goddess Kali is worshipped. She learns to play the sitar and speak Urdu (the court language), and comes to admire and respect much of the culture of the Indian ruling classes.

Recommended for: anyone who is interested in the stories of extraordinary lives (Fanny rambles all over Northeastern India, from Delhi and the hills to Calcutta - including a two-month boat trip upriver to visit the Taj, which she is deeply moved by), or would like to imagine what it would be like to have visited India in the early nineteenth century.

>197 wandering_star:, Begums... has been sitting on my TBR pile for quite a while. Reading your review makes me want to pick it up immediately!

It's definitely worth reading. I just wish there had been some decent footnoting - there's a glossary for the Hindi words, but actually I needed more helping out with the C19 English culture!

74. The Madwoman Of Jogare by Sohaila Abdulali and 75. Nampally Road by Meena Alexander. These are both short novels written in English by Indian women. They both feature young women trying to decide how to live in the face of corruption and violence around them.

Recommended for: The Madwoman Of Jogare is probably only recommended for people with a real interest in portrayals of Indian village life - it's not very well-written, although undeniably sincere. Nampally Road is a more interesting read - focusing on the political more than the personal.

76. Eating India by Chitrita Banerji, a mouthwatering introduction to the various cuisines of India and how they have been influenced by the changes and upheavals of Indian history.

Recommended for: all food-lovers, as long as they aren't too hungry. And to have by your side while planning a foodie trip to India. Mmmm...

77. Q&A by Vikas Swarup, the novel that Slumdog Millionaire was based on, a Bollywood-inspired rags-to-riches fable. I love the idea of the story but it didn't quite work for me.

Recommended for: I find it very hard to say, actually. I was going to recommend it as a light read, but there are too many really nasty things that happen in the 'rags' portion of the story - on the other hand, these are interleaved with melodrama, so it's not really sad or poignant, just a bit gruesome. Equally, the feelgood ending is both too pat and too quickly disposed of to make it a very uplifting read. This is not to say it's a bad book - I've read plenty worse - but I just can't think of the sort of person I'd recommend it for. Sorry.

Thanks for that excellent description of Begums, Thugs and White Mughals. I couldn't find the title in our library. Do you know if White Mughals : love and betrayal in eighteenth-century India is related or something quite different? Maybe I'll check out interlibrary loans.

White Mughals is different, but also highly recommended! It's written by the person who edited Fanny's journals into Begums, Thugs, and it's about some of the people that Fanny knew. William Dalrymple argues that in the early days of the British in India, many of them came to understand and respect Indian culture, and to adopt some of it into their lives - these are the people he calls 'White Mughals'. So his book also has some stories of extraordinary lives. It's a good read.

201> I'd recommend it for college freshmen who are not English majors--mine are reading Q & A right now, and they like it so far. I think the quiz show angle is what really draws them in; then they are surprised at how brutal life in India can be. I know they will want a happy ending; at least it's not as sappy-happy as the film (Slumdog Millionaire).

Sadly, they hated the beautifully written When the Emperor Was Divine--too sad, and they got "confused" by the multiple narrators (even though each was assigned a specific section). I was also informed that Frankenstein "is really, really horrible." They read for plot only, and they expect fast action and happy endings. Forget about an appreciation of style or an author with something to say.

Cariola - that's very interesting! But even so, I don't think that this is a book I would suggest for someone like that - I can think of other fast-action, plot-driven books which I would feel happier about recommending. How do you choose the books you assign them? It sounds like it could be pretty frustrating sometimes.

Do you think When the Emperor was Divine was also challenging because it's against the grain of a lot of perceptions of the US role in WWII? (I'm guessing they aren't history majors either).

78-80. I've been reading some short story anthologies - New Writing In India by Adil Jussawalla (pub. 1974, so not so new now!), Truth Tales: stories by Indian women and Truth Tales 2: The Slate Of Life: contemporary writing by Indian women, both published by The Women's Press and edited by a Delhi-based publishing house, Kali for Women - all three books are mostly translated, so it's interesting to see the contrasts with Indian writing in English. The first anthology is mostly quite politically-driven writing, trying to get to grips with questions of social change, poverty and so on. I found the two Truth Tales books more accessible, although even here, they were interesting rather than enjoyable reading.

81. Delhi by Khushwant Singh. This was quite a hard book to pin down. The author starts off by explaining that the book is about his "life-long, love-hate affair with the city", but it ends up rather bleaker than you might expect from that introduction.

The format is that the narrator alternates tales of his life in Delhi with episodes in Delhi's history, told by eyewitnesses. These episodes often focus on intolerance and massacre, with many self-justifying accounts by rulers responsible for such violence, and a few stories from underlings who are buffeted by (or manage to take advantage of) forces much greater than them. This was an interesting book, if depressing. Unfortunately the historical episodes take a lot of previous knowledge for granted - I found many of them quite hard to follow, especially the ones told by the rulers.

Recommended for: I think this would be a good companion to a guidebook if you were in Delhi - you could get the basic historical outline from the guidebook and flesh it out with the story.

Taking a break from India, for 82. Love by Elizabeth von Arnim (for the Monthly Author Reads group).

I read the early part of this book on the underground, and I was shaking with laughter in my seat and occasionally even chuckling aloud. Christopher has fallen exuberantly in love with Catherine, but she is all-too-conscious of the age gap between them, and hopes to cool his ardour with politeness.

"I've always known you", he said solemnly; and at this she rather quickly offered him some cake, which he ignored.

Spoiler alert: At this point I imagined that Love was going to be one of those delicious, escapist books, like Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day or Mrs 'Arris Goes To Paris, in which quiet, patient virtue is finally rewarded and a dusty existence comes to life. And that does happen in this book. But the trouble is, the story continues on afterwards, and reality comes rushing back in with a vengeance. For Catherine is 47, about to become a grandmother, and Christopher is 25. Social disapprobation is one thing, but Catherine's own consciousness of the gap in their ages (which Christopher is blithely unconcerned about) leads her to ever more desperate measures. I found this part of the story almost unbearably sad.

The blurb is very much focused on the romance and the comedy and barely hints at poignant undertones. I kind of hope that was a sales-pitch thing - that's much better than the possibility that someone could read this and see it as a comedy throughout!

Recommended for: anyone who enjoys the light social comedies that I mentioned above but is prepared for a harder centre with this one.

83 & 84, The Adventures Of Feluda and The House Of Death by Satyajit Ray - two sets of short stories involving the private investigator Feluda. In the preface to the first one, Ray talks about his love of detective fiction, and there are definite hints of Sherlock Holmes in the stories - not least the very intricate plots! One nice thing is that the crimes take place all over India, allowing the stories to introduce different areas to the reader.

Recommended for: people who like quite gentle crime stories in an unusual setting.

201> My ROTC guys really got into When the Emperor Was Divine--but they were the only ones. No, I don't think students were bothered by the book blowing apart their ideas about the US in WW2, because most of them know little or nothing about WW2, and it doesn't interest them. It's not "relevant" to their lives. "Relevant" has become a magic word in young adult education these days. I always thought that one goal of a university education was to broaden one's horizons, but apparently not.

If I were to let them choose, we'd be reading the Twilight series, graphic novels, Harry Potter, and contemporary murder mysteries--and even then, many would not be happy because they hate to read anything. I have one student who asks every day if we will get out early "because I hate literature."

Yes, it's extremely frustrating. Every semester, I go on a hunt for new books that I think they might enjoy. That means: contemporary, short, fast-paced, with a main character who is under 25. But I do have my standards. I refuse to teach The Lovely Bones or The DaVinci Code (as some of my colleagues do) in a college level "literature" course.

I'm working on an article about this situation.

Lord. How very depressing. I have every respect for your efforts.

85. The Far Cry by Emma Smith. I won't reprise my review, but in a nutshell, this is an odd book (because there are so many different things going on in it) but very worth investigating, both for the vivid descriptions of India (the author travelled to India in 1946 and her writing about the country feels very fresh) and for the skillfully depicted (but painful) relationships between the characters.

Most Persephones I've read recently have been on the frivolous side, so this was not what I was expecting at all and it amazed me.

Recommended for: lovers of good writing, especially fans of Elizabeth Bowen - there is the same sort of deceptively simple description of personalities and emotions.

86. Everybody Loves A Good Drought by P Sainath, a depressing collection of journalism from the poorest parts of rural India. Again, more details in the review, but it shows how the poor and powerless are regularly ignored or even cheated by a system which doesn't care about them.

Recommended for: anyone interested in rural poverty and development.

I'm adding Everyone Loves A Good Drought to my wish list. Nice review!

87. When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro, inspired by the Author Theme Reads group which is focusing on Ishiguro this month.

Christopher Banks is a celebrated detective in 1930s London. But he is driven by the memory of a long-ago mystery - the disappearance of his parents when he was a small boy and the family lived in Shanghai, where his father worked for a trading company and his mother campaigned against the British-run opium trade. Eventually he is able to return to Shanghai to carry out his own researches - but is he prepared for what he will find there?

The main focus of the novel seems to be Christopher's own personality. He is the narrator, with a very distinctive pedantic and dry voice - he lives very much in his own head and is rather an unreliable narrator - all this is quite reminiscent of the butler in The Remains Of The Day.

I found this quite a puzzling book. In particular, it didn't really hang together for me. In the first part of the book there were so many things which looked as if they were going to be leading somewhere - but I didn't feel that any of these were ever really resolved. Perhaps, thinking about it, the lack of resolution was deliberate - the message being that you can think that your life has a certain shape and direction, only to have that completely overturned. There certainly seems to be a theme that you can be implicated in the most awful things without realising. But for me this still ended up a frustrating read, although a very well-written one.

Recommended for: hmm, people who like good writing, and don't object to some implausibilities in the story, perhaps?

88. The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher. This brick of a book (750+ pages) follows the stories of two families growing up across the street from each other in 1970s Sheffield, and of the other lives which intertwine with theirs over the next 20 years. Within each section of the book, the reader is plunged into a dense network of daily detail, but several years go by between sections.

You might be able to guess from this that the book is more about the passage of time than individual personalities. The upward mobility of the two families comes to stand in for the upward mobility of the whole country's self-image, along with the shift in virtues from thrift to display.

This is also one of those books where details of furniture, clothing or language are used to identify the social status and aspirations of the characters. The 1970s seem to be drawn in more detail than later decades, although since I'm not old enough to remember them I don't know how accurate the depiction is - it seems spot-on but it may only be a good depiction of stereotypes about the 1970s. In particular, the focus is on the way that old certainties and traditions are beginning to show little cracks, indicating the seismic social shifts to come.

Katherine decides to get a job in a flower shop, because it's the first shop she's seen in the area which is about useless, wasteful beauty rather than practical, hard-wearing necessities. The owner, Nick, says he first needs to

"...talk it through with my brother. It's half his money."
"Where is he?" Katherine said.
"New York," Nick said. "I'll mention it at the weekend."
"Is he coming over, then?" Katherine said, treading cautiously. She was inexperienced in lives and brothers like that, New York brothers; she felt in danger of saying something that showed where she was and where she'd seen. What she was.
"No," Nick said. "I'll speak to him on the phone."
"Can you do that?" and "That's an awful expense," came to Katherine, but she managed to say, "Of course," in quite a natural way, and went away soon afterwards.

There were lots of things I enjoyed about this book. Despite its length, it's a page-turner, and there is a lot of dry wit - including a few occasions when I laughed out loud. (Katherine becomes obsessed with Nick to the point that she can't stop talking about him. At the same time, her youngest son is monomaniacal, in the way small boys can be, about snakes: At first Jane felt that she would never get on with her mother's conversation, the way you waited for Nick to enter it at any moment, but time wore down anything. Soon it was the same as Tim's dreaming evocation of snakes, his paragraphs of detail and longing, and they divided the long evenings between them like a pair of madmen supervising the silent sane.) The painful adolescences of the children are also very well drawn.

However, there were two big problems for me with the book. The first is that the characters, by and large, feel like representatives of types rather than real people. This meant that I didn't particularly care about them. For example, there is a scene where Katherine's husband, long into their marriage, comforts her after a life-shattering embarrassment by encouraging her to look through the family's old photograph albums. This should have been an incredibly moving incident - quietly demonstrating his delicacy, tact, and concern for her - but I didn't have the emotional engagement for it to be so.

The second is that since the story is really about the larger social changes, there's not a lot of structure, and this is most obvious at the end of the book. Hensher brings it to a fairly artificial climax. I can't help feeling that the book might have been better if it had stayed in the 70s, maybe with a few hints at what was to come, and had put more thought into its characters as individuals.

Recommended for: I'd like to recommend this to someone who remembers provincial Britain in the 1970s, to see how accurate the portrayal actually is. Other than that, I do think the way the writing captures the beginnings of social change is excellent, so I would recommend it to anyone who likes books with a very specific spirit of time. Not for anyone who needs very plot-driven books, though!

I've been looking at this one for awhile. Think I'll pass on it.

Great review of The Northern Clemency. I bought it, since it was on the Booker Prize longlist in 2008, but gave it to a good friend instead, who loved it. I was planning to borrow it from her, but I think I'll pass on it, too.

And despite your reservations, I am even more eager to read The Northern Clemency.

I certainly enjoyed reading it, so I certainly wouldn't advise other people not to! It's just that the impact at the end of it kind of fizzled out.

Anyway, time for something completely different...

89. Naked Brunch by Sparkle Hayter. A werewolf is stalking New York, tearing the throats out of evil corporate shills. At the same time, a mild-mannered vegetarian called Annie has taken to waking up every few weeks with aching limbs, no memory of the night before, and a strange taste of meat in her mouth. Two men are looking for Annie - Marco, a psychiatrist who runs a programme which allows individuals living with LMD (Lycanthropic Metamorphic Disorder) to control their condition with heavy medication, and Jim, a former member of the programme who is now proud to live as a free werewolf.

This was lots of fun - pacy and page-turning. Hayter manages to pull together a variety of different stories and keep all the plates spinning, including Annie's city friends, a Noughties pair who only want to be famous, and the down-on-his-luck reporter who picks up the scoop. And, of course, a bit of good old-fashioned werewolf romance...

Recommended for: anyone who feels like a funny, sassy read.

What a contrast between your last two reads! I've been wondering whether to read The Northern Clemency but feel I'll never get round to it. Anyway I'm going to have to find out more about Naked Brunch as I enjoyed Lonely Werewolf Girl so much and this looks like it's in a similar style.

Funnily enough, I was planning an early night and didn't fancy any of the books I've got on the go - they all seemed too heavy. So I thought I'd have the first few chapters of Naked Brunch before I went to bed. Mistake! Those pages just kept on turning themselves...

90. 32 Stories by Adrian Tomine. This book brings together the comic strips from Adrian Tomine's self-produced magazine, Optic Nerve, before he was picked up by a publisher. A lot of the strips are very short - one or two pages - and there is quite a range of styles as Tomine experiments with what suits him. Many of them are episodes rather than stories - a dream Tomine had or a conversation he overheard. The fictional ones tend to be about solitary people, unhappy relationships, or strange out-of-character moments. At the same time, because they were so short, none of them felt adolescently self-indulgent in the way that indie fiction can sometimes do. I enjoyed them all, and will look for more of his work.

Recommended for: anyone who likes graphic novels about real life.

91. Double Negative by David Carkeet, a murder mystery set in an academic institute. This book was recommended to me as a witty, offbeat mystery, and I could see the bits which were meant to be funny - in particular the contrasts between the noir-ish style and the academic context, and the narrator, obsessed with what other people think of him. But humour is such a subjective thing, and it didn't really work for me - and without that, the requisite intricate plot just felt too implausible.

Recommended for: people who like intricate mysteries.

92. A Book Addict's Treasury by Julie Rugg & Lynda Murphy. This is an anthology of quotations and extracts about books and booklovers, and it's a perfect example of what this kind of anthology should be. The quotations range in length from a couple of lines to a couple of pages, but they are all interesting, fresh and cleverly expressed. They are intelligently arranged: by topic - a chapter on buying books, say, or on shelving them - and within this clustered around themes, so sometimes one quote disagrees with the one before it. And as a final gift, the index is a joy:

teeth, painted scarlet, 49
temptations,
- defied, 77
- liable to great, 199

or margins, a tabula rasa, 195
Marines, tell it to the, 156
Marks and Spencer sandwich, 99
marks, needing an index to give conformity and meaning, 200
masterpieces, woefully mistaken on power of, 132
men, greater, unable to find, 142.

You can find something quotable on almost every page. I've chosen this one because it's about the right length, as well as being one of my favourite ones:

I remember once on coming into my library that I was persistently disturbed by my 'Jane Eyre'. Going up to it, wondering what was the matter with it, restless because of it, I only after a morning's uneasiness discovered that it had been placed next to my Jane Austens, and anyone who remembers how sharply Charlotte criticised Jane will understand why this would never do. (Hugh Walpole)

Sadly the story about Wordsworth cutting the pages of a book with a dirty butter-knife, bemoaning the damage as he did so but unable to stop long enough to get a clean one, was too long.

Recommended for: EVERYONE in this group, and also any book devotee who will be relieved to realise that they aren't alone in their strange book-related behaviours!

93. In Search Of A Lost Ladino by Marcel Cohen. This brief memoir is in large part an elegy to the Ladino language, mourning its decline and coming death and celebrating what the language brings - childhood memories for the author, and an encapsulated history of the community of Ladino speakers. The community flourished under the Ottoman empire: "in the seventeenth century, envoys from proud Louis XIV had to learn Djudyo to do business in Greece and Turkey; that the first books printed in the Ottoman Empire were in Ladino". But the book also mentions the 54,000 speakers of Ladino who died in Auschwitz. Cohen suggests that Ladino is now, for the most part, an academic interest rather than a living language.

A lot of the book is about the vividness with which the language calls up the community - one section is a list of Ladino expressions: "when someone's getting upset over nothing: 'The fish is still in the sea but the oil has to be heated?' ... When someone had waited in vain: "He inherited a cucumber's ass'."

Cohen also discusses the inherent impossibilities of translation. "Do you remember what Kafka said about the German language? He explained that his mother would never be a mutter because she had nothing in common with Teutonic mothers. This is why Kafka felt he was totally incapable of evoking his mother in his writings. That's my case exactly. My madre wasn't a mère, nor was my nona a grandmother. Between the madre, or mama, of the Sephardim and the French mère, between all the sweetness of a nona or a vava and that of a grand-mère, are five centuries of life in the Ottoman Empire that sink into the unsayable."

Recommended for: anyone interested in languages, or in the lost communities of Istanbul and Salonica that Cohen describes.

I will look for In Search of A Lost Ladino, wandering_star. Have you read Out of Egypt by André Aciman? It is the story of a Jewish family with long roots in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire and who finally leave in the 1960s. Much more compelling, to my mind, to the highly praised but somewhat superficial The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado.

I meant to talk about how I got my copy of A Book Addict's Treasury. I was in the Owl bookshop in Kentish Town, and there were a pile of pale-blue proof copies by the door, free to take away. I pounced - and was very surprised that the friend who was with me - someone whose house is as overflowing with books as mine - didn't do the same!

As for my next book, I found it in a second-hand bookshop in Bangkok. It's published in India so I imagine someone who's backpacking their way across Asia, picking it up in India and dropping it off at the next stop along their route. I am pretty puzzled, though, as to who the backpacker might have been who found this book of interest.

It is 94. Journeys Through Babudom and Netaland: governance in India by TSR Subramanian.

To explain the title, the "neta-babu Raj" is a phrase used to denote "mindless bureaucracy" - neta meaning politician and babu meaning bureaucrat. The author is a retired senior civil servant, and the story he tells confirms much of the angry journalism of Everybody Loves A Good Drought - some very similar case studies are used.

Subramanian conveys clearly the way that the neta-babu Raj ignores both the welfare of those they are supposed to serve, and the wider good for India (preferring turf wars). He has extensive experience of what he describes and a justifiably sad and angry response. However, the impact of the book is undermined by the fact that it is written as a memoir - at times this turns into a string of anecdotes, only a few of which are of wide interest. A book that focused on the issues and drew in his experience to demonstrate them would have been much more powerful.

Recommended for: people with a real interest in the topic only. A much more fun and readable book on the same sort of topic is Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August.

95. In Spite Of The Gods: the strange rise of modern India by Edward Luce, who was the Financial Times' correspondent in India from 2001-05. You could argue with some of Luce's interpretation, but overall I thought this was an excellent overview of modern India - easy to read, interesting and thought-provoking.

Recommended for: anyone who would like to know more about India as it is today.

96. Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica. This book was pressed on me by a friend with lots of experience working in restaurants and bars - who firmly believes that everyone should have a compulsory year doing the same (a sort of modern-day military service) so that people would stop treating waiters etc. so badly. The author also writes the Waiter Rant blog, which is still live, and this is part memoir, part musing on the life of a waiter. Of course, it's been compared to Kitchen Confidential, but it's much less macho and more reflective than Bourdain's book. It's not really as cynical or outrageous as the marketing material makes out - although the working conditions the waiters in the book have to put up with are pretty horrific, at least as much from the psychotic, penny-pinching owner as from difficult customers. The thing that shocked me most though was the fact that a standard tip in the US is 20-25%! No wonder the author complains that Europeans don't tip enough...

Recommended for: a quick, amusing read.

97. Memories of Eden by Violette Shamash, a memoir of the author's life in Baghdad up to the Farhud, a terrible outbreak of mob violence against the Jewish community in June 1941.

Violette Shamash was born in the last years of the Ottoman Empire into one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, which at that time made up 40% of the population of Baghdad. (Incidentally, one of Violette's schoolfriends, who emigrated with her family in 1947, became the mother of Charles and Maurice Saatchi).

The book has been complied from notes and writings that she made for her children and grandchildren, and she writes a lot about daily life during her childhood - playing games with her cousins, walking to school through the bustling souk, preparing for the High Holy Days. Their milkmaid brings a cow to the house and milks her on the doorstep; their seamstress stays in the house for a month at a time.

In the 1930s, Violette is in her early 20s, and Baghdad is developing. The first department store opens - selling Bally shoes and Petit Bateau children's clothes! Even more exciting, Violette spends 1933 and 1934 in Palestine visiting her sister, enjoying sea-bathing (in Baghdad, women were only just stopping wearing the veil in public), flirting with young men, and buying her first proper bra ("a revelation - until then bras had not been made to enhance bosoms but rather to flatten them by tying them down").

At the same time, however, the anti-semitic propaganda coming out of Europe is finding a ready audience in Iraq, and eventually undermines the distant, but not hostile, relationship between the communities. This leads to the Farhud, a terrible attack which marked the beginning of the end for the Jewish community. Violette and her family emigrate almost immediately afterwards. Her description of spending the two days hiding out in different locations, listening to the chaos overtaking the city, is vivid and terrifying.

Recommended for: a fascinating glimpse into life in Baghdad in the early years of the twentieth century.

The standard tip in the U.S. is really more like 15-20%. Maybe the author is trying to get his readers to increase their tips!

Memories of Eden looks really interesting.

Funny! He's definitely leaning towards the 25% end, as well. That's much less eye-watering - although in the UK it's more like 10-15%, unless something really special happened.

98. Wit by Margaret Edson. This is a play, which was recommended to me back in February by urania1. The main character, Vivian, is a professor of English, who has always prided herself on her intellect at the expense of everything else - indeed, she's taken pains to strip away any hint of sentimentality from her character. Now, though, she is in the last stages of an aggressive cancer, and her intellectual armoury is not providing the solace that she needs. One of the remarkable things about the play is that it manages not to be either sentimental or devastatingly sad, mainly through Vivian's personality, which remains prickly and proud - you can't pity her, despite her awful situation. There's a lot packed into the play's 85 pages and I think its impact will grow the more I think about it. I will also be looking out for the film version (with Emma Thompson). Thanks, urania1!

Recommended for: I think it might be better watched than read, because there is so much unspoken emotion, but if you like to read interesting, challenging plays, this is a good one.

99. Better by Atul Gawande. This book of essays, by a practising doctor, argues that what makes the most difference in the quality of modern medical care is not technical skill as such, but "diligence and ingenuity" and attentiveness. It's a well-written book, with each chapter using one or more case studies to illustrate the point, but for me, the book lacked the 'so what' - it said "this is so", but not "this is so, because..." or "this is so, therefore...". This meant that it seemed like a primer on issues in contemporary medicine, but without too much wider relevance.

Recommended for: medical professionals (especially ones who'll be treating you or people close to you).

The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling. It was apparent quite soon after I started this that it was cookie-cutter sexed-up-Victoriana so I skimmed through it. Disappointing given the rave reviews.

Recommended for: um, fans of the genre, who don't mind writing that's a bit clunky.

100. Sisters By A River by Barbara Comyns. This was one of my Christmas presents, which I started straight away. It's a sort of cross between Alice in Wonderland and Jessica Mitford's childhood memoir, Hons and Rebels - episodes from a surreally Gothic childhood (death, madness, passion, parental neglect and financial decline) in a crumbling country house, told in childish ungrammatic prose whose deadpan nature adds to the surreality. I don't think it's a book I could sit down and read all the way through - the weirdness would start to irritate me - but in lots of small doses it's perfect.

Recommended for: people who enjoy surreal, black humour.

The Foreigner by Francie Lin. Emerson Chang is a buttoned-up, forty-year-old Taiwanese-American. He's always known that his mother preferred his younger brother, Little P, even though Little P lost touch with the family ten years ago after moving back to Taiwan. But even so, it comes as a shock to Emerson when after his mother's death, he finds out that she left her motel to Little P. Emerson goes to Taipei to track down his brother, and enters a grimy, dystopian twilight world.

The book then rapidly declines into foreigner-in-nightmarishly-incomprehensible-situation cliche. Walls drip with mould. Sinister comments are made. People Emerson has just met issue obscure warnings: "get out now ... I can't tell you why. I have an obligation." Terrified women are glimpsed in dark corners. And I, regretfully (because it would be nice to read a good book set in Taiwan), close the book and hurl it from me.

Well, doesn't look like I'll be finishing any more books this year. I thought a good way to end this thread might be with this extract from Sum by David Eagleman, which I heard on a Radiolab podcast (an excellent way to make use of time that can't be spent reading, by the way).

In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.

You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.

You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through, it’s agony-free for the rest of your afterlife.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can’t take a shower until it’s your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower. Two weeks wondering what happens when you die. One minute realizing your body is falling. Seventy-seven hours of confusion. One hour realizing you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Three weeks realizing you are wrong. Two days lying. Six weeks waiting for a green light. Seven hours vomiting. Fourteen minutes experiencing pure joy. Three months doing laundry. Fifteen hours writing your signature. Two days tying shoelaces. Sixty-seven days of heartbreak. Five weeks driving lost. Three days calculating restaurant tips. Fifty-one days deciding what to wear. Nine days pretending you know what is being talked about. Two weeks counting money. Eighteen days staring into the refrigerator. Thirty-four days longing. Six months watching commercials. Four weeks sitting in thought, wondering if there is something better you could be doing with your time. Three years swallowing food. Five days working buttons and zippers. Four minutes wondering what your life would be like if you reshuffled the order of events.

Only one year?

Happy new year to everyone, and very best wishes for 2010.