RidgewayGirl's 2009 Reading

I'm not going to try and recreate here what I've read so far this year. It's spring and I'll start with what I'm reading now.

The Brothers Karamazov -- I'm almost done, I've been reading it off and on since February.
The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black -- the sequel to the excellent and equally gloomy Christine Falls.
Fall on Your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig -- because the most cheerful of the above novels is The Brothers Karamazov (mainly because of the "Russians Behaving Badly" mayhem) I decided last night to add something slight and cheerful.

I usually have several books going at once, mainly to prevent the horrible, empty feeling of having finished a good book. I'll comment on each one as I finish it.

Up-to-date list of books read:

1. The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston
2. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willis
3. A Stopover in Venice by Kathryn Walker
4. The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
6. Fall on Your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald
7. The Bible Salesman by Clyde Edgerton
8. Tethered by Amy MacKinnon
9. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
10.What Angels Fear by C.S. Harris
11.Garnethill by Denise Mina
12.King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
13.Tattoo Machine by Jeff Johnson
14.Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
15.In the Woods by Tana French
16.While They Slept by Kathryn Harrison
17.The Likeness by Tana French
18.Verdammnis (The Girl Who Played with Fire) by Steig Larsson
19.The Birthday Present by Barbara Vine
20.Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee
21.Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
22.Beat by Amy Boaz
23.Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
24.Children of Men by PD James
25.No Shortcuts to the Top by Ed Viesturs
26.The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi
27.Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
28.Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell
29.A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
30.The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
31.The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees
32.The Private Patient by PD James
33.The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax
34.Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman
35.Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
36.The Road to Rescue: The Untold Story of Schindler's List by Mietek Pemper
37.Life of Pi by Yann Martel
38.Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin
39.The Summer of Naked Swim Parties by Jessica Anya Blau
40.Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
41.The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Hall
42.Possession A Romance by A.S. Byatt
43.A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
44.Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
45.Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
46.The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr
47.The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
48.Serena by Ron Rash
49.Matilda by Roald Dahl
50.The Rose City by David Ebershoff
51.Bad Land by Jonathan Raban
52.Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam

I disagree with the old adage and firmly believe that you can judge a book by its cover. Clearly, a book whose covers feature raised gold lettering, scantily covered breasts and/or Fabio is not 1) translated from the original Norwegian, 2) a prose poem or 3) a masterpiece of magic realism. Likewise, paperback classics usually have something from the National Gallery on their covers and if the cover is of a woman whose face is not visible, the inside of the book will be that type of women's literary fiction popularized by Oprah.

So the dust jacket of The Monster of Florence misled me. It features a really nice photograph of Giambologna's The Rape of the Sabine Women and some highly pleasing font choices. I suggest you take a look at the cover yourself the next time you're browsing in Barnes & Noble; it is esthetically pleasing. I knew that it featured both Florence and a serial killer and so I was ready to enjoy myself. The author, Douglas Preston, writes the kind of thriller that I usually avoid, but I'm willing to be won over. I was more annoyed than intrigued; although the book had great potential, it was hampered by a narrowness of viewpoint and the fatal failing that the murderer is never found and so no questions are answered. Fiction deals with these issues without breaking a sweat; the author can give us the motivations of the killer, let us witness scenes that only the murderer walks away from and provide a narrative that brings order to chaos. In The Monster of Florence not only are we as ignorant at the end as we were at the beginning, but the book ends before the story does. The author is also deeply involved and therefore biased; I was unable to determine the facts from the opinions. For example, one investigator is well liked because he allows the media free access to everything, another who does not is never mentioned without a few insulting descriptors--he answers questions, but in a boring or pedantic way.

In its defense, The Monster of Florence does give insight into the tangled world of Italian law enforcement and judiciary as well as an insider's view of a few cultural practices. So, not entirely a waste of time, but close.

I'm interested to hear what you think about The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. I read it a couple of years ago, and while I found it entertaining, some aspects of it were unexpected :)

In a "And Now For Something Completely Different..." moment, I read The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig. It was outside my usual reading experience, which is something I'm trying to do this year; I have a tendency to stick with my gloomy Scandinavians and shortlisted-for-the-Booker/Whitbread/Orange, etc... It's not a bad way to go, but limiting and I didn't think that throwing in some Ibsen and Hardy would be enough (after all, aren't they just the gloomy Scandinavian and Booker Prize winner of their day?). Also, I worry a little that I'm getting old and set in my ways, now that I'm forty and slouching towards decrepitude. So I've thrown my reading choices open and found a lot of variety. I draw the line at paranormal romances, however.

So, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation is an adventurous romance novel set during Napoleon's reign, in a Paris sprinkled with English spies with names like "The Purple Gentian", very much in the spirit of the Scarlet Pimpernel. It's a very slight creation, where the French are easily fooled and everything is happily solved with a bit of farce and humor thrown it. There is a bracketing story, set in modern London, but it is such an afterthought and consumes so few pages, that it can quickly be forgotten. Lauren Willig writes well and throws in a handful of literary references. I'm so ignorant of the genre that I can't really make any comment on how well it compares with similar books. It's not that I'm too pretentious to read romance novels; most novels are, more or less, love stories, but I think this belongs to its own sub-genre.

So I've stretched a little and can now happily bury myself in Benjamin Black, who is gloomy enough even for me.

John Banville, writing under the name Benjamin Black, has now written two mysteries set in mid-century Dublin, with the protagonist a widowed pathologist. Christine Falls was excellent and I was pleased to get The Silver Swan as my ER book this time. If anything, The Silver Swan is even better than Christine Falls. I very much hope he keeps writing more in this series.

Black's Dublin is claustrophobic and stratified and dank and smoke-filled. Horses pull carts through the same streets travelled by stylish roadsters. He has a real sense of how it would have been to have been a woman then and there, denied freedom but seeing its availability opening up elsewhere. There is so much desperation and longing and anger.

Black's great skill is in description and since the Dublin of these books is long gone, this is invaluable to picturing what it must have been. He also has the gift of describing a character in a few perfectly chosen words, so that one can picture them and know what they will do next.

"He had that smell, hot and raw and salty, that Quirke recognized at once, the smell of the recently bereaved. He sat there at the table, propping himself upright, a bulging sack of grief and misery and pent up rage..."

"She was reminded of a priest giving a sermon, but he was not like a priest, or not like the priests she was used to, at any rate, with their smelly black clothes and badly shaved chins and haunted, resentful eyes."

RidgewayGirl, when I bought The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, it wasn't marketed as a romance novel. I obviously expected an adventure and love story, but I had not expected the (relatively mild) bodice-ripping aspects of it! I had to laugh at a few of those parts.

'slouching towards decrepitude...'

That just made me grin.

"The foul quagmire in which he was sinking of his own volition made him sick and, like so many others under such circumstances, he believed in the magic of a change of place--just to get away from this spot, to be surrounded by different people, to be in a different situation, where everything would be new and different!"

I've finally finished The Brothers Karamazov, which turned out not to be the kind of book I could devour at one long stretch, but had to nibble away at the philosophical musings (there was a section called "The Grand Inquisitor" that I'm still thinking through). There were great, rollicking sections of outrageous behavior (head stomping! wench hiring! public collapses!) that would have startled the Coen brothers and a long segment dealing with a holy man so self-congratulatory that I wanted to pop him upside the head, but I may have been under the influence of those wacky Karamazovs.

I first read this book when I was much too young to do more than form rough impressions on which brother was hottest (hey! I was fourteen, what do you expect), so this felt like I was visiting a city that I had once known but that had been substantially altered in the intervening years.

I needed something a little less meaty after my brush with Doestoevsky, but my other book, Fall on Your Knees, is even darker (take out the fights and parties and add incest and it's the Karamazov Brothers all over again), so I've pulled out The Bible Salesman by Clyde Edgerton. It takes place not too far from here and has the advantage of brevity.

Just wanted to shamelessly copy Joycepa's questionnaire:

1) What author do you own the most books by?

Henning Mankell

2) What book do you own the most copies of?

Until recently, when LT made me notice, I had two copies of The Fionavar Trilogy. I have two copies of The Odessey, but with different translators that can't possibly count.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

I have learned to calm down and realize that language is an ever evolving thing.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

Currently, Ivan Karamazov, once the medication for the hallucinations takes effect.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books

Anne of Green Gables.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

A Witch of Blackbird Pond

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?

Some Patricia Cornwell book that was so poorly written and unmemorable I can no longer remember its name.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan for non-fiction, The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff for fiction.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?

To Kill a Mockingbird, surely a popular choice.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?

Ian McEwan

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

Garnethill by Denise Mina.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Any of the Wallender books by Henning Mankell.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

My memory for dreams extends only to nightmares. Involving snakes. And thank you very much for bringing it up.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?

Hannibal by Thomas Harris. I actually felt dirty reading this work of serial killer porn.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. It's a love/hate relationship.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?

I have been relentlessly mainstream in the plays I've seen.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

Currently the Russians, but ask again next week.

18) Roth or Updike?

Clearly, Updike. Roth, ugh.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

Sedaris. I had Eggers's doppelganger as a roommate in college. It was not successful.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

Wow. Sad to say Milton.

21) Austen or Eliot?

Predictably, Austen. Although, Casaubon is my favorite pompous twit.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

There are so very many. I've never read War and Peace or Anna Karenina or any Thomas Mann.

23) What is your favorite novel?

Having to pick one is decidedly unfair. Possibly, Tess of the D'Ubervilles, but I would really rather pick a new favorite every day.

24) Play?

Sunday in the Park with George. I know it's a musical and not serious. Sue me.

25) Poem?

Spring and Fall by G.M. Hopkins

26) Essay?

Several by David Sedaris, especially the one about Christmas traditions around Europe.

27) Short story?

Choose one? Labels by Louis de Berenieres.

28) Work of nonfiction?

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan.

29) Who is your favorite writer?

Kate Atkinson, David Mitchell and Denise Mina. Also several others.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

Joyce Carol Oates, although I have not been able to bring myself to read more than three of her books.

31) What is your desert island book?

Something I haven't read yet, clearly.

32) And... what are you reading right now?

The Bible Salesman by Clyde Edgerton and Fall on Your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald.

Although, Casaubon is my favorite pompous twit.
Loved this! Also loved the phrase: "serial killer porn"
I can't agree with your #30, but no everyone will like every author.

I tried to fill this same questionnaire out on What are You Reading Now? group, but got irritated with a lot of the questions and alos thought, who has time to read 32 answers from every poster? I get bored right around Sedaris/Eggers. That said, congratulations, you are the first person of which I have read all of your answers:-)

Thanks, Avaland. I'm not one for quizzes (and instantly delete the email quizzes I am sent) but a literary quiz that didn't ask whether I preferred Jacob or Edward (I hope I got the names right) had to be done.

"Some of us are just not equipped for suicide. When we're at the bottom, suicide is too creative an act to initiate."

Fall on Your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald is grim, grim, grim. Which is not to say there are not humorous passages, or that MacDonald does not have a lyrical voice, that makes the reading of this relentless tragedy worthwhile, even enjoyable, but the moments of grace are overwhelmed by the unending sadness of this story of a family living on the rough edge of Canada during the first half of the last century. I loved it.

"Frances has grown an inch and a half. She is now five feet tall and old enough to quit school. And she would, except that Daddy will not hear of it. Frances wants to get out in the world and garner some practical experience so she can join the French Foreign Legion as a nurse. She wants to cross the desert disguised as a camel driver by day and a seductress by night, smuggling secret documents to the Allies. Mata Hari and her seven veils. Except that Frances would escape the firing squad at the last second. But Daddy only ever has one response regardless of the extravagance of Frances's ambitions: "Even spies--especially spies--need an education.""

Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, a rocky land where the mines have finally been exhausted and poverty is routine, is ever present, beating out the last ounces of pity from her inhabitants. "...the armed forces are increasingly an option for the jobless and the working poor looking to get off this cursed godforsaken rock that they love more than the breath in their own lungs."

>8 RidgewayGirl:, Okay, RidgewayGirl - you brought it up, so now you've got to spill the beans: which brother DID your 14-year-old self think was the hottest? :)

My teenage self liked the bad boy Demetri. I guess his head-stomping behavior made less of an impression and his passion for Grushenka more than this time round.

"He remembered the old man, the fiddle player, at Indian Springs, up in the mountains, sitting by the spring every day for an hour, playing songs, talking to people who came for water. He'd said the two big invisible life ingredients were hope and fear, and that people took doses of hope from the springs in their jars and sheepskins. That was when Henry had first arrived up there to sell Bibles, and the fiddler told him all about the history of the springs -- the little boy who found it and realized next day that his sore throat was cured by the water, about all the other people cured. He remembered that the fiddle player said he didn't believe in the water but believed in the hope it made. He said fear was hope's brother, that both could do bad and good things to people, just like water and liquor. He'd said water could rot wood and revive plants, and that liquor could rot marriages and revive storytelling."

The Bible Salesman is a funny, slight and comfortable read, about a young man who goes out into the world to sell Bibles and the people he meets along the way, including a crook posing as an undercover FBI agent. I enjoyed it, but thought that it lacked something; themes were forgotten and it felt more like an exercise in writing humorous anecdotes with heart than an actual novel.

I've waited until I was in an extraordinarily good mood to write about Those Who Save Us, in the hopes of being able to write positively about it, but the longer I think about it, the less I like this book.

I'm going to avoid commenting on the subject matter and how the book felt a little exploitative.

It's the writing that annoys me. That MFA, writer's workshop style that makes every author that passes through it's maw turn out books so similar in style and (lack of) plot. First, the story is told without quotation marks. Punctuation is not optional, people. I've read books where the punctuation has been played with, but for a purpose, by an author who's mastered grammar and can therefore play around with it. This was purely affectation.

The book is written back and forth between the adventures of a woman in Nazi Germany and the travails of her middle-aged daughter, a miserable Minnesotan. They didn't advance in parallel, but were smashed together, since each segment needed explanations from the other and neither were strong enough for a whole book.

The research laid heavily over this book. I could see where she grafted her research onto the story as filler. It never felt organic, more like she'd read a book and write a chapter based on that book. The one based on Hitler's Willing Executioners was especially heavy-handed.

And, finally, could she find no one in the entire world who had lived or lived in Germany to go over the manuscript ahead of publication? The glaring anachronisms and the lack of any understanding of the German language were unforgivable in a book set in Germany and about Germans.

Well, I'm glad that I wrote that while in a pleasant and forgiving mood. Summer has arrived in South Carolina and I just got back from a used book sale where I found several lovely books and came in under budget. I found a 1940 edition of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in beautiful condition, with a dust jacket, and an Everyman's Library edition of the short stories of Raymond Chandler, as well as very nice copies of Possession and The Road.

>17 RidgewayGirl:, Augh, RidgewayGirl, that sounds positively horrible. Thank you for warning us away from something so icky. :)

I spent a pleasant few days rereading my favorite book by my favorite mystery author. Denise Mina writes in a sub-genre known as Tartan Noir, which I love. She's Ian Rankin and Irvine Welsh mashed together with a strong feminist slant and a cynical sense of humor. Garnethill is her first novel and I was pleased to find that I loved it as much the second time through.

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild is a surprisingly readable account of the colonization of the Congo basin in Africa. Hochschild is hampered by the lack of African voices in this sad tale, but he does his best to keep the victims in view as people and not just Victims. The facts of the story are shocking, and the eyewitness accounts wrenching, as is the casual cruelty of the colonizers determined to wring as much profit as possible and in the process losing their humanity to the point of "decorating" fenceposts with skulls (the other examples were much too explicit for this forum).

I do feel that I've got a bit better understanding of the area's problems today and am off to reread Heart of Darkness, which was based on Conrad's own experiences in the area.

My Early Reviewers book this time was Tattoo Machine by Jeff Johnson. It was a fun, easy-going read about a sub-culture I know next to nothing about. Johnson narrates some truly hair-raising and dangerous occurrences with empathy and sang-froid; he'd be a good guy to have around in a crisis. The most telling story, I found, was one in which he goes on an impromptu road trip to Idaho with a friend and a Spiderman lunch box full of drugs, returning thankfully to his book-filled apartment and Mr. Peepers, his cat.

#20 - Isn't King Leopold's Ghost just an insane story? I found it wild that Conrad didn't make that stuff up.

It's been a book that has stuck in my mind, little bits of unnecessary cruelty in the name of increased profits. I have Blood River on my shelf, but need a bit of a break before I tackle it. And Heart of Darkness needs to be reread.

The reviews of my previous book, Tattoo Machine, compared it with Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. It was on my TBR pile, so I gave it a read.

This is a fun, passionate book about the restaurant industry. Bourdain is profane and opinionated, which made for a highly entertaining book. It's a little scattershot, with chapters about restaurants interspered with chapters about people he's worked with or chapters expressing a firm point of view about some aspect of chefdom. My favorite chapter was called How to Cook Like the Pros and was a surprisingly accessible selection of easy improvements, delivered at a shout:

"Come on! Get in the game here! It takes so little to elevate an otherwise ordinary-looking plate. You need zero talent to garnish food. So why not do it? And how about a sprig of fresh herb-thyme or rosemary? You can use the part not needed for garnish to maybe actually flavor your food. That dried sawdust they sell in the cute little cans at the super market? You can throw that, along with the spice rack, right in the garbage. It all tastes like a stable floor. Use fresh! Good food is very often, even most often, simple food..."

I actually went out today and sowed herb seeds in all my window boxes. A fun read for anyone with an interest in cooking or eating out, although vegetarians and those who don't like truly excessive amounts of profane language may want to give this one a miss.

In the Woods by Tana French. There's been a bit of discussion about Tana French's book, In the Woods, with some people loving it and others not liking it at all. I had it on my shelf, so I thought I'd form my own strong opinion (and the huge issue of the excessive number of books that I own, but have not read, and the obsessive accumulation of same is another issue that we will ignore).

I'm weighing in firmly in the "loved it" category. This is well written and gripping and tells the story of friendships and how we rely on them and how they change over time. Rob, a murder squad detective, has a tragic past. When he was twelve he went into a small wood with his two best friends; his friends were never seen again. When a girl is murdered in the same area twenty years later he and his partner and best friend are assigned to the case. What follows is a convoluted, high profile murder case, while Rob struggles to remember what happened so long ago. The best part of this book is his complex friendship with his partner, Cassie. He says this about her:

"The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands."

I've been busy with far too much to do, sneaking books in where I can, at night propping my eyelids open in the hopes of reading a few more pages. I have two fantastic books underway: A Jury of Her Peers and Verdammnis, the German language version of The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson. It's slow, but enjoyable going, slow because one is dense with ideas and information and the other is long and in German, a language I can read, but at a much reduced speed.

So I took a little break with Kathryn Harrison's While they Slept, a non-fiction account of the murder of three members of a family by a fourth, with a fifth surviving. So a foray into the true crime genre, albeit with the veneer of a "respectable" author and without gory photographs stuck in the middle. I love a good mystery novel, but usually avoid true crime due to the usual pornographic lingering on the depravity of the murders and the inability to get at the inner lives of any of the people involved. This one tried, through many conversations with the surviving daughter, an intelligent woman who has clearly examined what happened while protecting herself. The real protagonist of this book, however, is Kathryn Harrison. You may remember her as the novelist who created a bit of a stir awhile ago with the non-fiction account of her sexual relationship with her father, who she first met as an adult in The Kiss, which she describes in some detail in this book. It wasn't a bad book, but it proved as incapable as any of the more sensational publications of entering into the inner world of either the victim or the murderer. I did learn a great deal about Kathryn Harrison's inner life, though, enough that were I to meet her I would feel slightly embarrassed at the things she's told me.

Tickled there is another reading the Showalter. I hope you will add your thoughts as you read to the Jury of Her Peers thread..

http://www.librarything.com/topic/63592

(which does remind me that I haven't added the comments from my latest reading).

I've enjoyed several of Harrison's novels (i.e. Poison, The Binding Chair and The Seal Wife) but am not really interested in her nonfiction or memoir.

Avaland, I would highly recommend avoiding Kathryn Harrison's non-fiction, but now I will have to give her fiction works a chance, but not until the memory of While They Slept is long gone.

I will go visit the Jury of Her Peers thread, although I am wary of doing so before my own thoughts have gelled a little. I am mainly amazed at how the early writers managed to write anything given the harshness of life and the discouragement given to women who stepped outside of the established parameters.

I'm one of those who came down firming on the "loved it" side of the In the Woods debate, enjoying the ambiguity of the ending, so I had to read The Likeness as soon as I could.

The Likeness by Tana French picks up a few months after the end of In the Woods, but the narrator this time is Rob Ryan's ex-partner, Cassie Maddox. She's left the Murder Squad for Domestic Violence and is in a relatively uncomplicated relationship with Sam, the third wheel detective of the previous book. She is called back into Undercover, where she had worked before she joined the Murder Squad. A girl with an uncanny resemblance to Cassie was found murdered and she is asked to become that girl.

I thought this book was even better than In the Woods and for those whose main complaint were the unanswered questions left laying about after the book ended, I can tell you that the bits are neatly tied together at the end of this one. French also develops the characters further, giving us pieces of Cassie's take on the previous events. And Sam is lovely, maybe my favorite character of all; I could hear his soft Irish accent whenever he spoke. I'm not sure how this book would do as a stand alone mystery, I read it after reading the first in the series (oh please let there be a whole meaty series), but I can say it was one of my favorite reads so far this year.

It was - this always seems to shock people all over again - a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me. Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.

(I had a few other bits saved, but they all gave things away. I would not want to be the one who spoiled someone's enjoyment of this excellent book.)

I have a weakness for Scandinavian crime novels. There's something about the bleak settings and isolated characters that I find cheering. The English translations often give the books a strange, disassociated feel so I read them in German, which is closer in tone to the original Swedish or Norwegian. (This is a supposition on my part based on a few discussions with German speakers and on the my personal view that Germany is much more similar, culturally, to the Scandinavian countries than the United States (with our relentless "look on the bright side" attitudes).

So I have just finished The Girl who Played with Fire, the second in Steig Larsson's trilogy, which took me some time given that it was both in German and 751 pages long. Briefly, if you liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you will like this one as well, which delves deeply into Lisbeth Salander's past.

I've somehow read four books and not written anything about them. It's too much fun winding my way through the other threads, pausing here and there to add comment or to make note of a title. I will catch up tomorrow, but not today.

I don't usually read Young Adult fiction, figuring that 1. I read enough of it at the appropriate time and 2. I will have to read a quantity of the genre soon enough as my children get older. Millicent Min Girl Genius by Lisa Yee was recommended in various places enough so that when I saw a copy, I picked it up and read it. It was nice, I will admit, to involve myself in something that took only an evening to read. It was also really good, being both heartfelt and very funny. I look forward to putting this in my daughter's hands in a few years.

Millicent Min is highly intelligent, having skipped several grades so that she is eleven and about to become a senior in high school. She has never had much time for playing and being so much younger than her classmates has left her solitary. This book is about the summer before her senior year, as she takes a college class in poetry, is forced to take volleyball by her concerned parents, tutors a boy in danger of flunking sixth grade and, surprisingly, finds a friend.

"I know they are anxious for me to make friends. When I was a sophomore my grandmother encouraged me to join more extracurricular activities. She's always been a believer in groups. Maddie is a member of NOW, Greenpeace, MADD and Costco."

"All my life my parents have been obsessed with my having a good time. When I was younger, they enrolled me in Tumbling Tots, forced me to take finger-painting lessons, and even purchased me an annual pass to the Rancho Rosetta Children's Theater with the hopes that I might be smitten by the colorful costumed characters on the stage. Mom and Dad even bought me Sea Monkeys, a Mr. Potato Head, and a kite shaped like a butterfly. Luckily, my father likes all those toys, so they haven't gone to waste."

I received an Early Reviewer book earlier this week and read it right away. Beat by Amy Boaz is the story of a woman who flees to Paris in the company of her seven-year-old daughter to avoid some unpleasantness about the disappearance of her lover's common-law wife. Frances was the most deeply unlikeable protagonist I have ever encountered. Even in The Almost Moon, the narrator had glimpses of self-awareness to redeem her. Frances complained constantly about everyone around her, but remained unconscious of her own reprehensible behavior. She brings her two very young children (2 and 4) with her to a wedding to which they were not invited because she doesn't want to be alone with her husband and then is offended when no special arrangements have been made for them and bitter that she was asked to take a fussy toddler out of the room.

She begins a relationship with a man as unreflective as herself, for all that he is a Buddhist and a poet. As she blithely destroys the lives around her, she remains steadfast in her view of herself as a helpless victim. "We are caught helplessly in this collision." she says.

It's difficult to read a book written from the point of view of a protagonist both self-pitying and unable to see herself or her actions with any sort of objectivity. Her actions are contradictory and impulsive, with no thought to consequences. Her children are either handy tools or impediments. She embraces marriage and motherhood, then feels stifled, then wants another child as a way of binding her lover to her. Her lover is equally selfish, unable to leave a woman without having begun another relationship and unable to speak honestly with anyone, for all his careful organic Buddhist posturing. The writing was good, the descriptions of Paris and Colorado were striking, but I'll admit that I kept reading mainly to see if the main characters received the end they so wholly deserved.

It's hot and steamy here in the Old South. In honor of that I read No Shortcuts to the Top by Ed Viesturs, a mountain climber who distinguished himself by climbing all fourteen of the mountains over 8000 metres without the help of oxygen. He is most famous for appearing in the IMAX film about climbing Everest and for providing essential help when the 1996 Everest disaster occurred (the subject of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air). I'm fascinated by high altitude mountain climbing. I don't like to be cold and really don't understand why people do something so dangerous and uncomfortable, so I read about it. This was a worthy addition to books on the topic. It's not particularly well written, but most mountaineering accounts aren't. There is a little too little about the actual climbs, and what there is has a bit of a gloss over it, but given that the few journal entries read like a teenage girl's diary, if the girl were a climber and the boy was a mountain, this is probably for the best. Viesturs climbs mountains because he loves it. There was also a fair amount of space devoted to describing his own humility, and accounts of how other climbers really admire how modest he is:

Other climbers in my position, out of natural envy, might have given only grudging praise to the climb JC and Alberto had pulled off, but I felt an immense admiration. That's easy to say in retrospect, but you don't usually lie to your diary: "What a climb! 4 days in the Death Zone--not many are tough enough to have done what they did. They walked the razor's edge for sure! Awesome achievement!"

See? Both the laudatory unselfishness and the teenage diary in one example. Still, I really enjoyed this book, although I skimmed the last few chapters, which weren't about climbing, but about inspirational speaking and corporate sponsorship. If you're a fan of the adventurer's memoir and have exhausted the standards, then this is an excellent addition, shedding additional light on the events described in Into Thin Air and commenting on others like Anatoli Boukreev's The Climb and Joe Simpson's Touching the Void. If you're interested but haven't read anything in the genre, I would suggest reading Jon Krakauer's books or Touching the Void first.

Akimitsu Takagi was a best-selling Japanese author who wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. The Soho Press specializes in publishing crime novels in translation as well as interesting crime novels from all over the world. I pick up everything I can find with the imprint. Earlier in the year, I picked up the other novel available in English by Takagi, Honeymoon to Nowhere, and enjoyed it immensely. I found The Tattoo Murder Case, first published in 1948, in my public library.

The Tattoo Murder Case is a classic murder mystery in the old-fashioned, hard-boiled style, with the twist of having been set in a post-war Tokyo. The mystery concerns a body, minus the torso, of a beautiful woman, in a locked room. She was known to have had a spectacular tattoo, something considered both transgressive and prized by a certain class of citizen.

The mystery is interesting and complex, but the real star of the story is the culture of post-war Tokyo, bombed out, people slowly discovering whether friends and loved ones survived the war, American G.I.s everywhere and a sense of defeat palpable. The translator did a fantastic job of explaining cultural references that would have been understood by a Japanese reader of the day, but needed clarifying for the modern American audience.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has created a bit of a stir. I can picture agents and editors agog with excitement--the concept is so exciting. There are many for whom this book is not written; those who hold Miss Austen's books as sacrosanct, those who have never read Pride and Prejudice, and those with weak stomachs. I enjoyed it; it was a fun read. I also liked that because of the situation with the unmentionable hordes, the characters were allowed to think and speak more explicitly than in the original. I do love Pride and Prejudice and enjoyed seeing how this diverged. Lizzie is here quite blood-thirsty and several characters come to extremely bad ends, often involving pus or incontinence. I enjoyed it, but it may offend the gentler reader.

36 - Thanks for the review. I really want to read this for some reason but must get Pride and Prejudice out of the way first. I have seen probably a dozen people reading it on the subway and keep wanting to talk to them about it.

I cringe to think of what might become of Mr. Collins. However, I think I fall into a fourth category, those who have trouble imagining a good read that includes zombies.

When I introduced myself upon entering Club Read, I stated quite emphatically that I disliked any genre that involved the supernatural and struggled with magic realism. Yet, there I was, happily turning the pages of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to find out who would next be stricken by the unmentionable disease or devoured by the army of the dead. I do recommend skimming the reader's guide at the end of the book even if you would rather watch an entire season of America's Next Top Model than read something featuring the paranormal.

I'm not a zombie person either, but I really liked World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It was like a Studs Terkel of a fictional history. I could see Pride and Prejudice with zombies being really enjoyable.

I will have to admit that one of my favorite books, if not the favorite, is A Moveable Feast. Ernest Hemingway's memoir of living in Paris in the 1920s, before he'd written any novels, is just about perfect. Before he died, Hemingway had left instructions that A Moveable Feast not be published. It was put into print soon after his death, substantially edited and rearranged by his final wife. Now a new edition has been released, a very nice hardcover, which I am waiting for Amazon to deliver. Under the supervision of his son, segments have been added and it has all been put back into the order Hemingway left it. I took the opportunity to reread my battered mass market paperback one last time before it's supplanted.

I do love this book, a combination of a writer's guide, a love story to Paris and a conversational recounting of his encounters and friendships with a diverse cast of characters, from Gertrude Stein to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood, and the belief that, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most; his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.

So begins Carlos Ruiz Zafon's second installation in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books tetrology, The Angel's Game, a collection of inter-related books, each which can be read on its own, all of which are set in a magical version of 1920s Barcelona. If you've read The Shadow of the Wind, then you really only need to know that this book is every bit as good as its predecessor. Another rip-roaring adventure novel, full of passion, obsession and greed that will suck you in and cause chores and appointments to be neglected in favor of another hour with this literary page turner.

I'm glad to see a favorable review of The Angel's Game. I adored The Shadow of the Wind and bought his latest book the same week it came out, but put it aside after reading several lukewarm reviews of it, on LT and elsewhere. I'll move it a little higher up the wish list.

BTW, I picked up a copy of the newly restored version of A Moveable Feast at my local Borders a couple of hours ago.

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive. It's not like I don't have anything else to read in the meantime!

Same here. I thought I would bring it with me on my trip next weekend, but I only want to bring one novel and one book of nonfiction with me next weekend, and there are already half a dozen books or more that I'd rather bring.

The Collaborator of Bethlehem was passed on to me with the comment that the mystery's not great, but the setting is. I thought the mystery was less a "whodunnit" than a trip through the lawlessness and corruption of the West Bank. Omar Yussef is a teacher at a UN-run girls school in a refugee camp. A former student, a Christian, is arrested for murder and Yussef sets out to find out who the killer was and so free his friend. It's a very dark, but still somehow hopeful, journey through life on the West Bank, where death is a daily occurrence, helicopters thud overhead and lawlessness reigns.

Khaled Shukri's intention was to build his hometown into something lovely, to replace the reglected refugee slums with functional new homes and to refurbish decrepit Ottoman mansions as hotels and restaurants. The curfews and gunfights had destroyed his career, murdered his father and made his mother suicidal. This was the reward for his goodness. Yet the gunmen thrived, they whose accomplishments and talents were of the basest nature, they who would have been obliterated had there been law and order and honor in the town. Perhaps Bethlehem was their town, after all, and it was Oman Yussef who was the outlaw interloper here, peddling contraband decency and running a clandestine trade in morality.

I was unable to resist PD James's latest in much the same way I couldn't wait to read Ruth Rendell's newest earlier this summer. Like Rendell, James can be relied upon to write a well-written and well-plotted mystery novel despite the fact that they have each written many, many such novels. Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs could learn from these grand dames of the genre.

That said, The Private Patient was clearly written by an aged, upper crust sort of person. James is in her late eighties and it shows. She is of a conservative bent and that shows even more. While still well done, and worth reading, it is a bit of a curiosity to read a book in which only the stately blue bloods are fleshed out into multiple dimensions and the characters are most respected when they hold all emotions tightly within. For example, when the main character, Adam Dalgleish, is visited by his fiancee who has just undergone a trauma, he opts not to hug her or touch her at all, feeling that physical comfort would be inappropriate. In another scene, a man proposes marriage and then decides it would be too gauche to kiss the woman.

So the book appears solidly rooted in the middle of the last century, a period piece despite its recent publication. I would much rather recommend one of her earlier books, written before she became quite so rigid in her views and before she had bestowed a sort of asexual sainthood upon poor Dalgleish. Try An Unsuitable Job for a Woman instead.

The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax tells the story of Feliu, a cellist whose career spans the first half of the twentieth century. Feliu witnesses the great events of age; the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Franco and the beginning of World War II. He meets many of the great names of the day, both musical and political. Despite all of this, Feliu, himself, remains a cipher, unwilling as he is to take action. The parts of his life where he is most active and involved are skirted quickly, the times he let events and people control him are dealt with in detail. Feliu loves deeply, but never brings himself to declare his feelings. His friends, a pianist and a violinist have exciting tales to tell. In the end, it is Feliu's passivity that keeps the book firmly on the ground, failing to soar with the notes made with his beloved cello bow.

This was a frustrating book. It was set in an exciting time and place, with a protagonist who went places and met famous people and yet it was a slog from beginning to end. Feliu was, well, boring and the author skimmed over the interesting bits, or moved the action away from any character who was in danger of bringing life to the novel's limp pages. And the bits of history were perfunctory and tacked on. I wanted more history or more drama, but got neither. I did finish it, though, in a triumph of stubbornness over judgment.

Just before Susan Jane Gilman graduated from college in 1986, she and a friend sat in an IHOP in the early morning hours and giddily decided to travel the world together, to the most exotic and untraveled places they could find. This was back before the internet or cell phones, the Berlin Wall still stood, Eastern Europe was still behind its iron curtain and China had been open to Western tourists "for about ten minutes". So, of course they went to China.

I picked up Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven with the strong impression it would be a breezy, humorous chronicle of disaster, with a strong ironic, mocking voice. What I found instead was a stark, nuanced tale of a girl in a situation so completely over her head, who somehow managed to get through it and now writes with honesty about it. Gilman doesn't spare herself criticism, but she writes about the people she encountered along the way with compassion and understanding.

I spent a year abroad five years after these events take place, and while I was firmly located in western Europe the whole time, the story resonated with me -- the naive self-confidence of the twenty-year-old, the homesickness and the oblivious blundering into iffy situations. This may have unduly influenced my reaction to this book, but I think it is one of the best books I've read this year. It was also a wonderful look at China before it opened up and before progress changed things. The descriptions of a Beijing without any advertising or logos, the Great Wall served only by a single souvenir kiosk and a house at the outskirts of a village are all worth reading.

I was so pleased when I began Dark Places, Gillian Flynn's newest novel. She writes well and Dark Places has a fabulous protagonist, a troubled, depressed, street-smart kleptomaniac, who as a seven-year-old, was in the house as her mother and two sisters were murdered, apparently by her older brother. She's spent her life since then not thinking about that day, but now the money donated to care for her has run out and her only source potential income is a motley collection of crime buffs interested in the notorious Kansas Farmhouse Satan Sacrifice case. And so Libby begins to confront her memories of her family and to talk to people involved in the events of twenty-five years earlier.

Oh, this is a good, nail-biting read. Libby is a damaged, difficult woman, but I was drawn into her life and quite liked her (on paper--I wouldn't want her in my home!). The events of the day in question are doled out in chapters that alternate with the Libby's present-day efforts, showing that everyone lies and building up to the dramatic ending. And that was the problem. The conclusion felt wrong and overly elaborate. The final twenty pages didn't completely wreck my enjoyment of the first 320, but they did temper my enthusiasm for this book.

I will read her next book as soon as it's released, however.

"No." I folded in on myself, ignoring my meal, projecting glumness. That was another of my mom's words: glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.

After another forty minutes of driving, the strip clubs started showing up: dismal, crouched blocks of cement, most without any real name, just neon signs shouting Live Girls! Live Girls! Which I guess is a better selling point than Dead Girls...There's something disturbing about not even bothering with a name. Whenever I see news stories about children who were killed by their parents, I think:But how could it be? They cared enough to give this kid a name, they had a moment-at least one moment-when they shifted through all the possibilities and picked one specific name for their child, decided what they would call their baby. How could you kill something you cared enough to name?

Mietek Pemper has written an extraordinary account of his life during the second world war in Krakow, Poland in The Road to Rescue:the Untold Story of Schindler's List. He was part of the story of Schindler's Ark, working as a secretary to the labor camp commandant, Amon Goth, and participating in ways large and small to preserve the lives of many of the inmates of the Plaszow concentration camp. His story is meticulously told, without hyperbole or emotion; Pemper here concentrates on factually accounting the events he lived through. This is not an adventure story; Pemper risks his life repeatedly, but recounts the story in such a way that the reader is not constantly aware of the danger of his position as secretary to a notoriously violent Nazi, who would randomly shoot inmates.

Pemper also recounts his life before and after the war. He testified in war crimes trials in Poland and served as an interpreter. Later, he settled in Augsburg, Germany. Presently, he speaks about his experiences, often to German schoolchildren.

Pemper seems to have survived the unthinkable without bitterness. He closes the book with a chapter on remembering the Holocaust, treating all people as individuals, rather than as members of a good or an evil group and finishes with his personal ethical code which calls for personal responsibility and critical thinking. Altogether an important book and one worth reading.

Thanks for that review. It sounds like very good reading.

I own a copy of the video of Shindler's list, which I bought because it was such an extraordinary movie, then I realized it was such a powerful movie I that I would have difficulty watching it again. I'm sure I will at some point but for now I'm just holding onto it, along with Thirteen with Helen Hunter, also powerful and hard to watch again.

In the meantime I can take a look at this book.

The Road to Rescue is an excellent way to reapproach that story. He also has a final chapter about his personal philosophy that is quite thought-worthy, especially since he has good reason to be angry.

Life of Pi has been sitting around my house for an embarrassingly long time. I finally picked it up at the start of the week-end, after determining to get rid of all those unread books that have been living with me for more than a year. I have to read them before I can get rid of them and, in the interests of full disclosure, I decide to concentrate on reading the older members of my TBR a few times a year, each time being happily distracted by something new a few books in.

So, Life of Pi was read, and it was very good, being surprising and thrilling and charming and well worth reading.

RidgewayGirl - I can echo your response to Life of Pi. I haven't stopped by in awhile. I love your comments here and there are quite a few interesting books brought to my attention.

I was also struck by that opening in line in The Angel's Game. I think Ruiz Zafón is playfully criticizing himself, no?

I have one of those nagging TBR piles too. Isn't it great when you finally make time to read one of the books, and it turns out to be great? Which of course is why you put it in the pile to begin with!

Exactly, and why nothing can be let out of the house without having first been read! Except The Shack. I was given The Shack and passed it on without even opening the cover.

I have a similar problem with library books. My library makes it very easy to renew them and, as a result, I have many waiting to be read. Lately I have been checking out music only until I could get the number down, but I went off the wagon the other day, and checked out four Tony Hellerman mysteries, one a trilogy.

It occured to me that I should have recommended the princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson, and he has a couple more, also good, as you said you were a sucker for Scandinavian mysteries. But maybe you've already read them.

Solla, they are on my wishlist, which differs from my TBR in that those books have not yet taken residence in my house.

I've joined a new group -- The Europe Endless Challenge -- to get me to read books from the more obscure corners of that continent.

First, the disclaimer: my biggest pet peeve in historical fiction is when the characters behave and think like modern people, just dressed up in, say, tunics and riding horses, like an extra-authentic renaissance festival. People in the past not only wore different clothes and had bad teeth; they thought differently. Think about how attitudes toward homosexuality, the environment and race have changed in the past twenty years. Even worse, in my opinion, is when the author gives all the "bad guys" the mindset of the time, but the "good guys" are all modern liberals.

So I should have put down Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin after the first twenty pages. The protagonist, a forensic pathologist named Adelia, is not just a proto-feminist, but a full blown Feminist who could lecture Gloria Steinem on the evils of the male patriarchy. She is also shocked at witnessing antisemitism. In the twelfth century.

But, despite all that, it was a fun and diverting read, an interesting mystery full of atmosphere and twists. I would recommend it to anyone who likes historical mysteries and who is able to overlook the anachronisms.

Another disclaimer; I really don't have that many prejudices regarding novels, but there are a few and I have bumped up against another one. I can usually spot a book written by someone who has an MFA in creative writing within twenty pages. It doesn't make a book terrible, and who knows what the author's writing would look like if they hadn't been taught to be creative. Still, there is a cookie cutter effect and The Summer of Naked Swim Parties fits in neatly.

It's not a bad book, the story of a privileged, pretty teenage girl growing up in Santa Barbara in the 1970s, but it never engaged my interest. There are some excellent books about growing up in the 1970s, although most are not fiction--Paul Feig's Kick Me and Tom Perrotta's Bad Haircut, among others, but these leaven the emotional angst of adolescence with a sense of humor. Jamie, the protagonist of The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, pities herself and we are meant to pity her too. Her parents don't understand her and they embarrass her. She has no one to go to the mall with. Her boyfriend's a bit of a boob. And over it all is the overlay of the seventies, which was interesting, but less so than I thought it should have been.

At the end of the book there was an "interview" with the author in which she briefly described her experiences as a landlord in Oakland, California. Just those few paragraphs has more life than her entire novel.

Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis, a young Irish woman, who immigrates to the United States in the 1950s when she can't find work in her small town in Ireland. Eilis is a reluctant American, and intensely homesick, until she slowly accustoms herself to her new life in Brooklyn. She becomes involved with a second generation Italian immigrant and begins to plan for the future when she is called back to Ireland and forced to make an active choice in determining her own life.

Brooklyn is the story of immigration, the newcomer whose longing for home is almost unbearable, the next generation, aware of the past but eager to make a future and the uneasy mingling of diverse cultures on the streets of New York just after WWII.

Colm Toibin's voice is quiet and measured but perfectly describes Eilis's strong emotions. His descriptions of mid-century New York and Ireland are vivid and alive. An excellent, excellent book. It made the Booker Prize Longlist for this year; I hope it makes the shortlist as Toibin very much deserves the accolades. When is the shortlist announced?

Nice review, RidgewayGirl.

The shortlist will be announced this coming Tuesday, Sep 8, and the winner will be announced on Oct 6.

Thanks Kidzdoc! The Booker shortlist always expands the TBR enormously, but somehow I still look forward to it.

Thanks for the review--I think I'm going to try to get my book group to read Brooklyn. I have another book of his, The Master, but I haven't read it yet.

I also have a copy of The Master, but the story of a young Irish Immigrant seemed much easier to pick up than a book about stuffy old Henry James. I will have to now, though, since both Brooklyn and The Blackwater Lightship were so good.

Yes, I think my book club will go for the young Irish immigrant plot but not for the Henry James one!

I think it would be an excellent book club book -- with themes of immigration, integration, etc, as well as an ending that demands discussion.

It didn't even make the shortlist for the Booker! The books that did make the cut had better be spectacular. Remember Vernon God Little won one year.

Last year, I read Chlid 44 and loved it. The sequel, The Secret Speech, is newly released and has received mixed reviews. Happily, I liked this as much the first book, in ways more, since The Secret Speech relied much less heavily on coincidence, while retaining the elements of revenge and survival in the Soviet Union.

The Secret Speech refers to a speech given by Nikita Krushchev in which he is critical of Stalin's repressive tactics. Leo, the former secret policeman, has been given a small, secret homicide department. He's living his life as best he can, with his wife Raisa and the two girls they encountered in the first book. Things don't remain hopeful for long, though and the book takes us through Moscow's criminal underworld, into the gulag and the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

It took me exactly 225 pages to get drawn into A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize winning novel, but Possession A Romance did eventually beguile me.

After Wolf Hall I'm looking for more books by Mantel. I think this will be my next one.

I heard about the restored edition of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast with great excitement. It's one of my favorite books, if not the favorite. It was published after Hemingway committed suicide and against his wishes. His third wife edited the book and removed bits here and there and rearranged the chapters to flow more or less chronologically. The idea that there was more made me very, very happy. I reread the first version in preparation and while I found reading the restored edition well worth while, if you're not a huge Hemingway enthusiast (why aren't you, by the way?) the original version is just as magical. What the restored edition does bring are a few paragraphs and a chapter about his relationship with his first wife, Hadley, which are heartbreaking. A Moveable Feast is full of the joy of a young writer, poor, but in love with a woman and a city. The additional bits show how he destroyed his relationship, the remorse he felt and how Paris was never the same. At the very end, the book shows how Hemingway would rewrite a paragraph over and over until it was burnished and perfect. He starts with almost a page about F. Scott Fitzgerald and, after several rewrites, is left with one brief, perfect paragraph. He says earlier in the book that the thing to do is to leave things out and to remove everything unnecessary, especially adjectives, so that the truth of the thing is revealed.

A Moveable Feast is a book about Paris in the twenties, about the artists and writers who lived there, about Hemingway's relationship with his first wife, Hadley, but mostly it's about learning to write. Read this description of Wyndham Lewis:

Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except for toe-jam and that was a slang word. I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

if you're not a huge Hemingway enthusiast (why aren't you, by the way?)

mmmm.

Where would you like me to start?

Considering the esteem in which Hemingway held F. Puss, his cat, I am surprised at your attitude, Mr. Murr.

Yes, but what did the cat think of Hemingway?

Not much, probably. Cats are not easily duped.

When I was a high school student, I worked in the mall bookstore with a group of university students, pretentious English majors all, and one of them told me sternly one day when I was shelving books that there were two kinds of people; those who liked Fitzgerald and those who liked Hemingway, and one could not be both. Being a Fitzgerald person was also infinitely better, the Hemingway-type person being somewhat suspect. I actually believed this nonsense and it was a good decade before I picked up A Farewell to Arms and discovered myself to be that most inferior kind of person; the Hemingway reader. I have come to terms with my infirmity.

Incidentally, reading Hemingway has made me enjoy and understand both Fitzgerald and Dostoevsky more than I otherwise might have. He has not been able to make me like Ford Madox Ford, however.

hahah
That's a nice story! I didn't even know I was a Fitzgerald type, then.
I don't know, I enjoyed some of the short stories by H, but the full length novels? I can't get past his style: all those dangling prepositional phrases, I want to slap them.
And all the macho posturing, the guns and drinking and wife battering, it's all so.... adolescent? Why did Hemingway hate so much the fact that he was a sensitive artist?

I cant get on with him at all, RidgewayGirl, I'm so sorry.
:(

Well, I can't get along with Joyce Carol Oates at all and Avaland has not asked me to leave, so I guess we must all be tolerant.

I have problems with Joyce Carol Oates and Hemingway.

lol, would they make a perfect couple or what!?

Actually, I think that Phillip Roth is least favorite writer of all time. At least Hemingway's not a fatuous ass.

>77 RidgewayGirl: Great story. In college, we had a similar way of distinguishing "types", but for us it was either Dickens or Austen. I'm an Austen person. I'm also a Fitzgerald person. I will never, ever, ever be a Dickens person. :-)

See now, I would be an Austen person, but I do like Dickens. I just can't look at things that cleanly. I like cats and dogs, mountains and the beach.

Am I truly the only Hemingway fan here? I'll bet there are a few of you who stick his books inside of Dan Brown thrillers so as not to be mocked.

I do remember reading and liking Old Man and the Sea during high school. I don't know that I still would. Other titles are vague in my memory. Perhaps I've read For Whom the Bell Tolls or Farewell to Arms. All I remember is a description of lovemaking during which "the earth moved". I think that I just didn't find anything in them that really moved me, or seemed to justify the hype.

I read all of Hemingway in my late teens and early twenties when he was probably considered the most important 20th c. American writer. I particularly liked The Sun Also Rises -- it seemed to catch the post -- WWI "lost generation" so vividly. But I also read all of Fitzgerald and Lawrence then too. Preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway -- his language was more poetic. And I loved Lawrence who suited my romantic nature at the time. But of the writers of that generation, Faulkner is the one who stands the test of time and brilliance. (And, of course, Joyce).

I'm also a fan of Faulkner, and return to him from time to time. I think that the way that he and Virginia Woolf (say, in the Lighthouse) move through time take the best of the stream of consciousness experiments and use them to enrich emotional reality.

I've read two more books in the meantime; Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande.

I dislike instructional books on writing, but also inspirational books that advocate dream journals, with the predictable result that there are few books on creative writing that appeal to me. Bird by Bird sometimes edges toward the inspirational, but jumps back into reality every time. Lamott is clear about why she writes and focuses more on internal blocks to writing than the nuts and bolts of plot construction or character development. She's both a believer and irreverent, which may mean that she ends up offending everyone, but I enjoyed a book that encourages the reader to accept their own schadenfreude.

I'm fond of bird by bird as well. It is one of the few books that I own.

I'm a Fitzgerald person I suppose. I did a term paper on Hemingway's short stories and it put me off reading any of his novels for years - all that hunting and wife hating. Last year I read A Farewell to Arms which I liked but didn't love. And I will have to agree with my name-twin that Faulkner is my favorite from that group.

The Lost Painting is a fast-paced romp through Rome, Dublin, London and Edinburgh in the search of a lost painting by Caravaggio. The artist and art history are short-changed, but if you are interested in the competitive world of art historians, restorers and academics, this is an excellent peek at how reputations are made and lost.

Caravaggio was a paranoid nutbag who was forced to flee Rome when he killed a guy. Being a fugitive changed his personality only for the worse, but the guy could paint. Most of his paintings have been lost or destroyed over time and so the discovery of a new Caravaggio was enough to send the art world into a tizzy. This book had a limited scope, which allowed Harr to write a tightly plotted and exciting book about a fairly unexplosive topic.

"tightly plotted and exciting book about a fairly unexplosive topic."

A very apt summary, IMO.

He was indeed an incredible and irreverent painter.

The first, spontaneous reaction with regard to the stranger is to imagine him as inferior, since he is different from us.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman is the story of the infant daughter of Hmong refugees and how misunderstandings on both the side of the parents and of the American medical community led to tragedy. Lia Lee had severe, hard to control epilepsy. Her parents brought her to the hospital many times but were unable to communicate with the medical professionals caring for her due to both linguistic and cultural barriers. The result was that Lia did not receive the care she needed, and her family, as well as the Hmong community, were given ample reason to distrust American authorities.

The first half of this book was the amazing story of what happened. It's strength was that it was clear that from the beginning everyone wanted to do what was right. Her parents loved her and were excellent caregivers. Her doctors were dedicated and professional. Nevertheless, they spent much of the time in conflict, fatally separated by differences of beliefs and traditions. I appreciated Fadiman's telling of the story, which was both compassionate and impartial.

She lost that strength a little in the second half of the book, which detailed the history of the Hmong people and why they emigrated to the United States and why they didn't integrate in the way expected of them. In a nutshell, the US used the Hmong in their "quiet war" in Laos, bombing their villages and jungle environment into a wasteland, then leaving most of them to their fate when we pulled out of South East Asia. Many escaped across the Mekong river and settled in refugee camps in Thailand. The American government reluctantly allowing them to come to the US when Thailand shut the camps down. The Hmong didn't want to come, but there was truly nowhere else they could live. They believed that their wartime service had earned them a degree of thankfulness from the Americans, and we wondered why they were given welfare out of our tax dollars. It was a fascinating history, well-told, but in the telling she lost a little of the impartiality that had marked the first half. Maybe she had no choice; this wasn't a case of a story having two sides--we destroyed their way of life, while they fought valiantly on our side, but when the war was over we were resentful of our responsibility. And as Americans, we are often too attached to our melting pot view to allow immigrants to keep their way of life. I did agree with her views, I just felt a little preached to, which is never fun, even when you agree with the preacher.

Hmm. Preachy second half or not, I may have to check that one out.

It is well worth reading. I knew absolutely nothing about Hmong history or culture and this was an excellent introduction.

I've finished a few books in the past week, but have lacked both the time and the coherence to write anything meaningful (to me, at least) about them. I think I'd better get something inadequate down before they're forgotten.

Serena by Ron Rash is a MacBeth-inspired tale set during the Great Depression a lumber camp in North Carolina in the Appalachian mountains near the Tennessee border. It's an excellent historical novel, full of history, without feeling researched, the characters interesting but also fully set in the time that they lived.

Roald Dahl is a great favorite of my children, who love his more blood-thirsty stories. This is one of his sweeter stories, about a clever girl who saves herself from her uncaring parents and her teacher from an evil school principal.

I read The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff last year and loved it. The Rose City is his debut book, a collection of short stories about coming of age, coming out or discovering that youth fades. It took awhile to read through this slender volume because while the stories were very well-written, they were also so, so sad. The author was kind enough to answer my questions about this book when he was recently featured on an LT Author Chat, and he told me that he thought the stories were more hopeful than sad, so there you go. I try not to keep many of the books I read, but I'm keeping this one. It's the kind of book worth a second reading.

It is a long time since I read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down but I remember being utterly amazed by it, and it started me reading anything Anne Fadiman wrote. I don't recall feeling preached to; in fact, I bought a couple of books about the Hmong afterward so I could learn more about them, but they have been languishing on the TBR ever since.

Well, I'm so far behind in recording what I've read that I think I'll just go from whatever I finish next.

The gift buying season is upon us and I have a sister-in-law who loves those vampire books that are so popular. You know, the ones that feature sexy vampires who talk about their feelings and wear hair gel, not the scary kind. Any suggestions from your secret stash? Or rather, any suggestions that you discovered accidentally because you never actually touch the things? I'm looking for something outside the well known by every teenage girl type book. I thought maybe Sunshine by Robin McKinley, but other suggestions would be gratefully received.

And please don't think I look down on the genre. We all have our indulgences, from manly science fiction with extra large rocket thrusters to English village murder mysteries in which cucumber sandwiches are discussed in a charming, whimsical way.

Although, I suspect that for some of you, reading Plutarch in translation qualifies as literary indulgence.

Bad Land: An American Romance is the story of one of the last homesteading opportunities of the American west. A hundred years ago a railway was built from Chicago to Puget Sound, across the great, unsettled expanse of North Dakota and Montana. Now railroads need customers and so "The Big Open" was advertised as a great opportunity, with homesteads carved from what previously only held a few ranches. New, scientific farming methods were sure to bring prosperity to all who farmed there. By the middle of the Great Depression, the land was almost as empty as it had been before the homesteaders arrived, the decaying towns and abandoned farmhouses the only evidence of what had once been.

Jonathan Raban, a transplanted Brit, explores the geography and the history of eastern Montana, learning about the kind of person who stayed through the worst of it and about the people who still remain. Bad Land is an intriguing combination of a social history and a contemporary look at the people who live there today. He's clearly fascinated by the place and it's impossible not to get caught up in the passion he feels for this difficult land.

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam is a book of interconnected stories that follows four people from before and during medical school into their early forties. Lam won the Giller Prize for this book and deservedly so, although it reads easily and unpretentiously. I look forward to more by this author.

I'm intrigued by Bad Land - or at least by your comments on it.

I initially picked up Bad Land because it reminded me of The Worst Hard Time, and there are similarities, although Raban tells the story of eastern Montana through to the modern day. He tries to explain a little about the political viewpoint of the average Montanan (really far to the right) which I found interesting since I have a hard time understanding that point of view. I do plan to take a look at his other books since he writes well and thoughtfully with an outsider's eye.

Although, I suspect that for some of you, reading Plutarch in translation qualifies as literary indulgence.

Ha!

Going back up the thread to Caravaggio, has anyone seen Saint Derek Jarman's film, Caravaggio? it's Jarman's masterpiece, and worth checking out.

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman is a fictionalized account of the infamous Scottsboro trial of 1933. Alice Whittier is a journalist working in New York for a Communist newspaper when she hears about nine black men pulled off of a train in Alabama for fighting with white men and then accused of rape by the two white women found riding the rails. Ruby Bates is one of the two women, an unemployed mill worker and sometime prostitute whose conscience eventually is awakened to what she did. The book follows the two women, focusing on Alice, through the multiple trials and American political life during the Great Depression. It is well told, the research flawlessly folded into an intriguing story.

After reading The Worst Hard Time and Obscene in the Extreme, I've been fascinated with the Great Depression and especially the brief flowering of the American Communist Party. As a new resident of the South, I'm learning about what life was like for African Americans under Jim Crow, which seems to me to be far more shocking than slavery, which is far enough in the past to have become history. Jim Crow laws are well within the living memory of people living here today and elements remain embedded in Southern culture, especially in the more rural areas. So this book pushed all my buttons. It makes my personal list of best books of the year.

I agree 100%. (message 42) Carlos Ruiz Zafon is an amazing writer.

Interesting comments, and I will look for Scottsboro. There must be some interesting nonfiction accounts, too.

Yes, there are a few books on the "Scottsboro boys" that look interesting. I'm getting stuck in the 1930s, which is not exactly a laugh riot, but there are parallels to today. I'm now eying Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.

Have you read Only Yesterday? It is a fascinating look at the 1920s, written in the 1930s, and I found it particularly interesting that many of the innovations of the 20s are the origin of what we experience today. Another interesting book, although also about the time just before the 30s, is The Great Crash 1929. Both of these are extremely well written, as well. I read them both early this year, and they will be among my (many) best reads of 2009. And finally, another of my best reads of the year is Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945, a lengthy but extremely readable and extremely well researched history.

I've added Freedom from Fear to my wishlist.

The Bookseller of Kabul was excellent and I don't know why it took me so long to pick it up. While I was somewhat aware of the difficulty of life of women in Afghanistan, the actual details and the specific circumstances of the women in the relatively wealthy Khan family were a revelation. Seierstad lived with Sultan Khan and his extended family for three months, but she is entirely absent from the narrative.

I'm now looking forward to reading another book by Seierstad about Chechnya, called The Angel of Grozny.

Interesting books and discussion, RidgewayGirl! Did you pick up P D James' new book on the mystery genre? Also glad to hear you liked the Ron Rash. I read his second book, Saints at the River and enjoyed it. I've been meaning to take a look at some of his poetry...

re: Hemingway and Fitzgerald. At one time I might have been a Fitzgerald, or swung slightly in that direction. Now, I would claim, "None of the Above" or toss them both for Edna St. Vincent Millay (I know, apples and oranges....)

I thought the end of the year would bring lots of time for reading, but with two elementary school age children, house guests before Christmas, and a trip to visit the in-laws tomorrow, there hasn't been time or available brain cells for anything. I'm planning on bringing non-fiction and short stories with me on the trip, but don't anticipate finishing anything.

But it was a wonderful year of reading, the first year where I tracked what I read and attempted to write something about most of it. I look forward to next year with great anticipation. See you all over at the Club Read 2010 forum.