Rebeccanyc Reads in 2010

Welcome to my 2010 thread! Thank you for visiting.

This post #1 lists the books I've read this year, with the most recent first. More detailed comments are in the posts below. An asterisk means it's one of my best books of the year. (I'm not using touchstones in this post because I'd have to correct them every time I add a new book and I'm too lazy to do that.)

49. Where There's a Will by Rex Stout
*48. The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor
*47 The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
46. Stepping-Stones: A Journey through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne by Christine Desdemaines-Hugon
45. The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
*44. Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre
43. Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar
*42. The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story by Mary-Kay Wilmers
41. Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson
*40. Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden
39. Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi
38. 2017 by Olga Slavnikova
37. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind by Barbara Strauch
36. Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest
*35. Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth
34. Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
33. The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State by Shane Phillips
32. The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth
*31. Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo
30. The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning
*29. The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
*28. Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig
27. At Home with the Marquis de Sade by Francine du Plessix Gray
26. Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and Why There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo
25. Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth
24. The Information Officer by Mark Mills
23. Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman
*22. The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning
21. Chateau d'Argol by Julian Gracq
20. Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
19. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. How to Escape from a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique
17. The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy
*16. Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
15. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer
14. Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel
13. Gregorius by Bengt Ohlsson
*12. The Straight and Narrow Path by Honor Tracy
11. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
10. The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
9. Georg Letham, Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss
8. Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
*7. The Siege by Helen Dunmore
6. A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
*5. Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg
*4. Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom
*3. Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
*2. In Search of a Lost Ladino by Marcel Cohen
1. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy

My favorite books of 2009 -- with no restrictions on how many I can include! Within categories, this are listed more or less with my most recent reads first. It was a great reading year, and I hope 2010 will be even better.

My 2009 thread is here, in case anyone wants to see why I liked these books so much.

Contemporary and Recent Fiction
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel
Homer and Langley by E. L. Doctorow
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
2666 by Roberto Bolaño

Older Fiction
The War at the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant (written a while ago but newly collected this year)
A Perfect Spy by John le Carré
Smiley's People by John le Carré
The Honourable Schoolboy by John le Carré
Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić
In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
The Emperor's Tomb by Joseph Roth
The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori

Nonfiction
The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Expedition by Susan Solomon
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy
The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith

I am currently reading two books that will probably make it onto this list if I finish them this year: Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman and How Markets Fail by John Cassidy.

Adding to the list above for favorites of 2009:

Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman (older fiction)
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy (nonfiction)
American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell (contemporary fiction, thanks Lois!)

For my first book of 2010, after browsing through the toppling TBR piles, I've selected The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, the recent translation of some of Tolstoy's shorter works by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Hi rebeccanyc;
Nice to "see" a familiar "face" here. Your 2009 list of favorites are going to affect my 2010 reading list, I am sure. Some very interesting works there.
Happy reading my dear.
belva

I'm especially interested in your review of Everything Flows. I have this book in my library but have not read it yet. Grossman's huge novel about Stalingrad Life and Fate is excellent. Have you read that?

Greetings and Happy New Year! I wanted to second tomcatMurr's recommendation for Life and Fate. It really is awesome and I found it hard to put it down!

Wow, that's weird. I thought I posted a response to Murr's recommendation right away, because Life and Fate is one of my favorite books of all time, and the reason I was so eager to read Everything Flows. I think it is an absolutely remarkable book. Either I am imagining things, or LT ate my earlier post!

#1. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy

This is a new translation of some of Tolstoy's shorter works by the noted translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and I snapped it up both because of my love for War and Peace and Anna Karenina and because I've admired the translators' previous work. I am glad I read it, and I really enjoyed some of the stories/novellas, especially "Hadji Murat" (which I'd read before), "the Forged Coupon," and "Master and Man." Some of the other stories I found fascinating, although difficult to relate to, for their intense depiction of sexual desire as a manifestation of the devil, and some written after Tolstoy "got religion" were just too religiously based for me. Nevertheless, as an admirer of Tolstoy, I was glad to get a broader picture of his work, although W&P and AK are certainly in another league than many of these stories.

ETA Reading "Hadji Murat" will tell you everything you need to know about Russia's continuing problems with Chechnya, and a lot about western problems in Muslim countries.

Touchstone problem, apparently.

*#2 In Search of a Lost Ladino: Letter to Antonio Saura by Marcel Cohen

I had never heard of this book until wandering_star praised it highly, and then it sounded so fascinating I ordered it. Ladino is the language that was spoken by the Jews of Spain before they were expelled in 1492, and then by their descendants who settled around the Mediterranean, most notably in Turkey where they were more warmly welcomed (at least most of the time) than in other countries. It is based on Spanish, but incorporates words derived from Turkish, Hebrew, French, and other languages too.

This slim dual-language book by Marcel Cohen, who was born in France but whose parents moved there from Turkey in the 1930s, takes the form of a series of "letters" to his friend, the Spanish artist Antonio Saura, but is really a poetic elegy not only for an almost-lost language but also for the lost world of these Ladino-speaking Jews who, as tradition has it, never lost their desire to return to Spain, or the keys to their homes there, despite 500 years in exile. He touches on the lives (and deaths) of Jews in Istanbul, Salonika, and elsewhere, but the book is really about language. One of the most interesting things for me was that in this English translation, as in Cohen's own translation of the original Ladino into French, many Ladino terms were left untranslated (there's a glossary at the end); this gave me a feel not only for the expressiveness and sounds of the language, but also for Cohen's sadness at its loss.

I'm glad you liked it!

Interesting reading, rebeccanyc. I'm tempted to return to some Russian lit but I think the 1990s was my Russian period. I might like to read some Russian women fiction writers sometime though...

I haven't read any Russian women writers that I can think of except Lara Vapnyar who is a Russian immigrant to the US and whose work is so-so, in my opinion. I'll be interested in any names you could provide . . .

I read The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya last year. She is the grand(great-grand?) niece of Leo Tolstoy. The Slynx is a dystopian novel set in the future after an apocalyptic event has leveled Moscow, and a primitive society is rebuilding itself. I liked it, but if you are not interested in this genre you may not care to read it.

Otherwise, I know she has a couple of books of short stories, but I have not read these.

rebecca,

Like you I've been inspired by wanderingstar to read the Ladino novel. I am however looking for the original translation into French so it might be a while before I order it. It'll be interesting to see though what differences pop up.

lilisin, The translator of the English edition I read translated the Ladino book from the French. He noted in his introduction that the French translation, made by the author himself, differed in certain respects from the Ladino original and discussed some reasons why that might be so. He also said he considered doing a dual translation into English, i.e., both the French version and the original Ladino, but decided it would be too unwieldy.

aruba, I've looked at The Slynx in bookstores as I'm an NYRB devotee, but I never bought it as I've never been a dystopian novel fan.

Edited to fix shockingly ungrammatical sentence!

I read Tatyana Tolstaya's collection of short stories The Golden Porch last year and was hugely impressed. She writes exquisite prose, and has an ability to create really believable characters. I'm going to look out for the Slynx.

#3 Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa

I have been eager to read this book, which I've owned for many years, since reading The War of the End of the World last year and since it has been highly praised here on LT, notably by Darryl/kidzdoc, but by others as well. The Cathedral is a run-down bar in Lima, Peru, where a 30-ish journalist, Santiago Zavala, who turned against his rich and well-connected family, and a desperately poor man who once worked for the family as a chauffeur, Ambrosio, reconnect. In the course of their afternoon over beers, their personal stories emerge, always in the context of the brutal dictatorship of General Odría and his scheming, ruthless, and nasty director of security, Don Cayo. This is a book about dictatorship, secrets, class, race, money, power and powerlessness, and love.

The beginning section of the novel is very dense and requires extremely careful reading and rereading because the conversation between Santiago and Zavala is interspersed with other conversations between a whole host of other characters, but they are often "conversations" in name only since one person will say something on one page and the response to it may be several pages later, with various other stories happening in between. Additionally, characters are known by multiple names, and it takes a while to figure out who is who. The later sections are more straightforward and easier to follow, and illuminate some of the mystifying aspects of the first part.

Although I found this novel compelling, fascinating, amazingly written, and moving, and although it is considered Vargas Llosa's masterpiece, which it well may be, I enjoyed The War of the End of the World more.

#4 Where the God of Love Hangs Out b Amy Bloom

In this book of short stories, which includes two sets of four connected stories as well as free-standing stories, Amy Bloom once again shows not only her deep psychological perceptiveness but also her even deeper humanity as she tells tales of love and loss, connection and alienation. She also is a wonderful writer, who can say in one sentence more than many authors can say in a whole paragraph. The two sets of connected stories show characters evolving over periods of many years, even decades in one, and have the fullness of much longer works. One thing I especially liked about this collection is that many of the characters are far from young, and yet Bloom depicts then as full human beings with all their desires and complications, not just as "old people."

Amy Bloom's short stories are wonderful. Come to Me remains one of my favorite books.

There seems to be a great many excellent short story writers out there; do you suppose they are getting the attention and rewards they deserve? (and perhaps here, I'm thinking of 'they" as a group). And I wonder, as JCO in that 2000 essay I mentioned on my thread, if there will be great short stories of this era which will enter the 'canon' much in the way they have in the 20th century. I sometimes wonder if we value the novel more highly these days.

#20 RidgewayGirl, One of the stories from Come to Me, "Sleepwalking," is the first story in one of the groups of four interconnected stories in Where the God of Love Hangs Out. The next three stories take the characters and their expanding families up to the present day.

#21 Lois, that's an interesting question that I haven't really thought about. I certainly found American Salvage, which you recommended, one of my favorite books of last year, and I loved this one too. I think it is something of a niche, and I have also read a lot of short stories that leave me cold, many, alas, in The New Yorker. Of course that's true of novels too. In some ways, I think it is harder to write a good short story than a good novel, not in terms of time invested of course, but in figuring out what can be said that's worth saying in a short space.

>21 avaland: Interesting. I just read an essay about, among other things, the state of poetry in the journal, Poetry. The author quotes New Yorker critic James Wood as blaming poetry's low readership on "the big fat greedy monster of the novel, which sucks all the nutrition away for itself."

I'm so glad to see you liked Amy Bloom's new book as I have it sitting on my nightstand ready to be read. I loved her novel Away and also read her other collection Love Invents Us which was also enjoyable. I have to say I've never been big on short stories, too short to really develop characters and story lines, but I've been more open to them lately after reading some of Andrea Barrett's and Jhumpa Lahiri's collections.

>21 avaland: I definitely think the novel is more highly valued than short story collections. I think Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, although called a novel, was really a collection of short stories with a common character in each one. Did she call it a novel to garner increased support?

*#5 Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg

I read this book for the Reading Globally Sweden theme read. This grim but haunting and beautifully written book takes the form of the private thoughts/diary of a Swedish doctor at the turn of the last century who becomes obsessed with the problems of a young female patient who is disgusted by her husband and comes to contemplate murder. Written at at a time when pysychiatry was just becoming more widespread, this short novel, almost stream of consciousness, gives the reader deep insight into the narrator's mind, arguments with himself, and self-delusion. It was marred slightly for me by a few anti-Semitic remarks, which I took to be be (sadly) typical of the time and place.

#6 A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

What a dud! I read this book because I needed something lighter after my more serious reads. While the premise of the book is intriguing, the way Goolrick wrote the book ruined it, at least for me. Without giving away the plot twists, I can say that the book would have been much better if (1) there weren't endless repetitions of what the characters were thinking and (2) if the readers weren't told so much of the back story and characters' motivations, so that their actions would be as mysterious to us as they were to the other characters. Yes, I finished it, but I skimmed over a lot just so I could find out what eventually happened.

>23 theaelizabet: Personally, I think such a criticism echoes that of old Nate Hawthorne cursing "those damned scribbling women" for sucking all the nutrients out of the market in his time. If 'people' aren't reading and buying poetry it's probably because it doesn't speak to them anymore (it has been argued that music is the 'people's' poetry these days). I say this as someone who does read (and buy) contemporary poetry. But this is a whole other subject beyond short fiction, eh?

>22 rebeccanyc: I agree somewhat. Some collections are like buying an LP (I've just dated myself): there's a few really good songs and the rest are a bit meh. But, that is not always the case, is it? And it's certainly not everyone's best form.

>24 brenzi: I never read anywhere that Olive Kitteridge was referred to as novel but now that you have said that, I had to check. Here is what some dimwit wrote on wikipedia, "...is a novel by American author Elizabeth Strout. It is a collection of 13 connected short stories about a woman named Olive and her ..."
Well, that should create a healthy skepticism in us around wikipedia:-)

>27 avaland: "If 'people' aren't reading and buying poetry it's probably because it doesn't speak to them anymore (it has been argued that music is the 'people's' poetry these days). I say this as someone who does read (and buy) contemporary poetry. But this is a whole other subject beyond short fiction, eh?"

I hear ya!

>27 avaland: I have heard it referred to as a novel, more than once:

"Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories."
O: Oprah Magazine

"No matter how many times Ms. Strout has read aloud from her novel, she continues to find something fresh. ''I mix it up. I read different chapters at different readings,'' she said. ''I haven't gotten tired of Olive.'' from the NY Times, Jan. 22, 2010

I think that novel in stories moniker that someone (Strout?) gave it has created some confusion but when I read it back in March of 2009 I know it was referred to as a novel.

Wikipedia is what it is. When you let just about anyone write just about anything you get something that is not necessarily factual and you should take it with a grain of salt:)

>29 brenzi: Well, there's no doubt that novels sells waaaay better than short story collections generally and that may have been a marketing move. However, it's also possible that Strout planned to write a novel and it turned out more like this. I have relatively recently read several other collections of connected stories but they are not connected around a person in the way that Olive is.

Do you want your thread back, rebecca? :-)

I've read many novels which were clearly interconnected short stories. Some were fantastic, like Tom Perrotta's Bad Haircut, where the format served the book, but more often it seemed like the writer lacked the will/ability to tie things together in a more cohesive way or was writing in neat chunks as part of a writing workshop.

Rebeccanyc, I am now tremendously eager to read Where the God of Love Hangs Out. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

Rather than asking for my thread back, Lois, I'm glad you're all having such an interesting discussion. As far as connected stories go, a year or two ago I read and enjoyed Later at the Bar by Rebecca Barry, which was called "a novel in stories," but I really can't remember how much it felt like a novel and how much like stories. Conversely, even though the connected stories in Where the God of Love Hangs aren't, obviously since there are only four in each group, considered a novel, there is enough in them, both in terms of character and in terms of development of ideas, to at least be thought of as de facto novellas. As RidegewayGirl points out, I think it depends on the author's ability -- and I think a lot of contemporary novels kind of fade away in the last third or so as though the writer worked on the first parts over and over again in a writing workshop and then just decided to end the book somehow.

>26 rebeccanyc: I had to laugh (and appreciate) your review, because Reliable Wife is being pushed hard at the book stores.

Have you heard of Gregorius by Bengt Ohlsson? I haven't read it, but have it on my wish list. It's described as being the story of one of the characters from Doctor Glas (the priest?), which I also liked very much.

I am halfway through Gregorius. I highly recommend it. Yes, it is told from the minister's POV. Quite depressing though. Hardly surprising given the content of Doctor Glas.

What about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Would that qualify as interconnected short stories, or a novel?

#33, auntmarge, Glad I could help!

#34, 35, I remember your mentioning Gregorius and I am going to look for it. I have to confess I felt a wee bit sorry for the minister in Doctor Glas, so I will be interested to see what this author's take on him is.

A novel's chapters each develop an arc and some can be excerpted as short stories, so in a sense are all novels composed of linked stories? Going the other way, I consider linked stories to be a novel if they, together, develop an overall story arc. Let the Great World Spin did this and it hooked me.

There's an LT tag that's worth exploring.

#7 The Siege by Helen Dunmore

Even though I didn't like Dunmore's With Your Crooked Heart, I was convinced to read this book by some very enthusiastic recommendations here on LT. And am I glad I did! I almost literally couldn't put this book down, although it tells the devastating story of the first winter of the nearly 900-day siege of Leningrad, through the eyes of Anna, a 23-year-old who is responsible for her father and her 5-year-old brother. Solidly based in historical fact (there's a bibliography at the end), and yet beautifully and compellingly written, this novel shows the horror of starvation and temperatures well below zero, the fierce determination of the Russian people, and the power of love and of the will to survive despite the combined onslaught of "General Hunger" and "General Winter." Nonetheless, the novel ends in the spring of 1942, with nearly two years of the siege still to go. This book has added to my knowledge of and interest in what happened on the eastern front in World War II and the impact that had on the world we have been living in since then.

>39 rebeccanyc: Glad you liked The Siege. I picked up Gillian Slovo's The Ice Road the year it was on the Orange Prize longlist—it has the siege of Leningrad also as its subject matter— but I have yet to read it.

26 - Eh...sorry to hear about A Reliable Wife. I picked it up (for $1 fortunately) after seeing it floating around LT for a while. Just moved it to the top shelf.

Thanks for that review of The Siege. I had not heard of it, but it definitely went on the wish list.

More than 20 years ago I visited the Soviet Union (yes, it was still the Soviet Union). It was a rough trip, but our Intourist guide impressed us with her descriptions of the impact on her country of WWII. It was not something that we citizens of the U.S. had any real appreciation or knowledge of. We need more good books like The Siege, and I am looking forward to getting it soon.

Lisa, the one book that most vividly depicts what the Russians/Soviets went through in WWII is Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, one of the best books I've read. It centers on the battle of Stalingrad but covers much much more. During the war, Grossman was a journalist with the Red Army.

ETA That must have been a fascinating trip!

Life and Fate is on its way from Amazon based upon your and others review on LT. I will have to put it at the top of the pile.

And yes, it was a fascinating trip. Looking back, I am so glad we went before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even so, things had opened up a bit when we went. Three friends and I were actually able to spend a few days in Moscow before the beginning of the tour without being required to have a guide. It was amazing to travel around the city at will. I learned the cyrillic alphabet so we could read signs on the subway.

There were cooperative restaurants that actually had decent food and served wine from Georgia, which was pretty good. Actually, it is one of my more memorable trips in lots of ways--many stories came home with me. Thanks for the memories!

I second the recommendation for Life and Fate. A modern masterpiece.

Also, Europe Central by William T Vollman covers much of the same material but from a much wider perspective. He examines the relationship between Germany and Russia right the way through the 20th century, as well as their individual national histories, focussing on artists and writers such as Shostakovich, Akhmatova (who lived through the seige) and Kathe Kollowitz, as well as others. It's a masterpiece as well.

The Eastern Front was the most terrible front of the war: made all the other fronts look like tea parties in comparison. I recommend two books on it, both by Anthony Beevor, which focus more on the military aspect, but are superbly written for the general reader.

Stalingrad Germany attacks Russia
Berlin 1945 Russia attacks Germany

Also, you might want to check out Shostakovich's Symphony 7, dedicated to the city, written and first performed during the siege. Its first performance was broadcast live over the trenches to inspire the soldiers and terrify the enemy. Even in the darkest days, people still came together to make music. That's the Russians for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mx5B-UVQsw

Thanks for bringing The Siege to my attention. I will look out for it.

Murr, Thank you for the additional references. I have mostly read about the eastern front from the literary point of view, but am delighted to have this information about the historical/military and and musical perspectives. I have Europe Central and made a half-hearted effort to read it once, but will look at it again.

I am also looking forward to reading a book that has not yet been published, after reading an essay called "Holocaust: The Ignored Reality by its author in the New York Review of Books: Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. It is not just about the eastern front but about the millions and millions of people killed before and during the war in eastern Europe, from Stalinist atrocities through German atrocities (beyond the conventional meaning of the term "holocaust") and more. Some of this, the Soviet part, was covered in a literary fashion in Vassily Grossman's Everything Flows. A fascinating, horrifying, deeply influential, and not well known in the west period of history.

Rebecca and Murr: Thanks loads, she says sarcastically. Had another one of those Borders coupons, and found Europe Central. They did not have any Dunmore on the shelf, so I will probably order that one. Just keep feeding the beast!

And Europe Central looks like it is not going to be a quick, easy read.

By the way, LT member avaland/Lois let me know that Dunmore is coming out later this year with "The Betrayal," a "sequel" to The Siege that shows some key characters from The Siege 10 years later.

Well, I always knew I had a book-buying problem, but it really hit home today when not one, not two, not three, but FOUR packages of books came in the mail: one from Amazon, one from the Book Depository, one from my Archipelago subscription, and one from an ABE dealer. And the worst part is that I bought every single one of these books because of recommendations here on LT. I don't know when I'll ever be able to read all these books; I guess I really am a book-buying addict!

Europe Central is hard. It is worth the effort, and not just after the fact. I took it as an examination of the characters of ordinary people thrown up against extraordinary circumstances and how extraordinary circumstances have their own authority. I haven't finished Life and Fate, but so far (maybe 300 pages) it is far easier reading.

Have fun,

Robert

#49: Which Archipelago book did you receive? I'm eagerly waiting for Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer.

>49 rebeccanyc: rebecca: Now I don't feel alone. Not only did I go to Borders and buy Europe Central and When We Were Orphans, I found Life and Fate and Infinite Jest in the mail box today. Yes, le salon sucked me in to trying to read Infinite Jest.

I think I am going to go with Life and Fate before Europe Central.

Darryl, that's the one I got, and I think I might read it right away; it just sounds so intriguing. Archipelago books only have to cross the East River from Brooklyn to get to me, so it probably takes a few days longer for them to reach Atlanta.

Mr. Durick, I may give Europe Central another try, but probably not in the near future -- too many other books to read.

Lisa, after my experience yesterday, i started feeling maybe I should cut back on book buying, but then I remembered I have a credit at my favorite book store . . .

#8. Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

I seem to have been reading a lot of short stories so far this year, and Alice Munro has been a favorite for quite a while. Nonetheless, I was very slightly disappointed in this collection, perhaps because I discovered that I had already read several of the stories in the New Yorker. I enjoyed reading them again, but they seemed to be among the best in the book, showing Munro at the peak of her ability to open a window into people's lives without telling us one word more than necessary. The long title story at the end of the book takes Munro away from her familiar Canadian territory to 19th century Russia, Paris, Germany, and Stockholm and a pioneering female mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky. Based on a real woman, the story took a while to pull me in, but in the end I was very moved by it and may even look up the biography Munro cites and recommends in her acknowledgments.

>55 rebeccanyc: Ah, this hovers in my TBR pile also so good to read your comments.

#9. Georg Letham, Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss

This book, the latest in my Archipelago Books subscription is remarkable: equal parts compelling and horrifying. In it, Georg Letham tells the stories of the murder of his wife, his father's struggles on an Arctic expedition, and his own transport to a tropical penal colony and his medical work there in the midst of yellow fever epidemics. Throughout it all, Ernst Weiss's amazingly vivid writing made me visualize these disparate worlds, the people in them, and Letham's unending obsessiveness and capacity for self-delusion. Some of the material, in fact, was so vivid, that I found it a little hard to stomach, in particular extensive sections involving rats and some of the medical horrors in the penal colony (I will be interested in what the doctors among us think of these sections -- Darryl?). Originally published in 1911, the book captures the expressionism and psychological interests of the era and really leaves me somewhat at a loss to describe what it is really "about" It was also slightly marred for me because the geography seemed a little confused and I found the narrator's occasional offhand racist comments more jarring than his other offensive behavior, perhaps because it seemed less an expression of his character and more a comment on prevalent attitudes at the time.

So, should we read it? I can feel your mixed emotions!

It is a remarkable book, Lisa, and the only reason I didn't mark it as one of my favorites is because I find the rat sections so difficult to take. I know that several other LTers got this from Archipelago (Darryl/kidzdoc and Karen/kiwidoc, among them) and so you may want to wait and hear what they have to say -- I am certainly interested in their thoughts, both as readers and as doctors. Caroline/cameling also mentioned she was going to be reading it.

#10. The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

I read this book, which I have owned for years (I found an airline ticket stub from 1992 in it) for the Reading Globally rainforest/jungle theme read. In it, Vargas Llosa's narrator, a Chilean writer visiting Florence, merges his story with his imagined story of a former classmate who apparently left behind his middle class urban existence and integrated himself so fully into the life of a tribe in the Amazonian jungle that he became a "hablador," a storyteller, who roamed the jungle recounting the stories and myths of the tribe. The most powerful parts of the book are these tales, which give a vivid and moving picture of the life of "primitive" people who frequently move from place to place and who are fully integrated with the fauna and flora of the jungle, much of it threatening. The novel also touches on the place of outsiders in society and the modern world and the nature of identity. Some of the non-jungle material was a little didactic and I found this distracting. This book doesn't have the breadth of scope of some of Vargas Llosa's larger works, but it was interesting and thought-provoking.

11. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

As part of my effort to learn more about finance and economics, I read this highly praised book which recently came out in paperback. It is basically a history that takes the reader from the invention of money to the creation of bonds, stocks, insurance, housing as an investment, and modern investment methods, with a brief look at the current situation. I ended up skimming a lot of it: Ferguson has some interesting tales to tell, and it was helpful to get a historical understanding of the development of finance, but it was maybe a little more than I wanted. Also, while I think, to the best of my ability to tell, that the book is written in a reasonably objective way, there were spots where it seemed a little bit more conservative than I am used to.

12. The Straight and Narrow Path by Honor Tracy

This is one of my all-time favorite books, and I reread it every few years when I feel the need for a comfort read. It is a very funny but nonetheless warm-hearted satire of human nature, as illustrated by the appearance of an English anthropologist turned unwilling journalist in an Irish village and the complications that ensue. Last year I broke down and bought another copy (used), since the paperback that belonged to my mother is falling apart; it is very sadly out of print. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Thanks for your comments about The Storyteller; I won't read it this month, but will get to it soon.

I thought that you had read The Ascent of Money last year, but I'm obviously mistaken. Which economic book did you read and recommend in 2009?

The Straight and Narrow Path sounds great; I've added it to my wish list.

I read several financial books last year that I liked, but I think the one you mean is How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy, which I found lucid, well written, and enlightening, if scary.

#13. Gregorius by Bengt Ohlsson

In this novel, which won prizes in Sweden, Ohlsson explores the unsavory character from the classic Doctor Glas (published in 1905 but very "modern"), Pastor Gregorius. I actually felt sorry for Gregorius when I read Doctor Glas, so I was interested in reading this contemporary work when urania (?) mentioned it. Ohlsson provides an intense, almost claustrophobic look into Gregorius's mind, heart, and soul (as a pastor, God is real to him), generally paralleling the story from Doctor Glas but adding in back story about his childhood and earlier friendship with his young wife's parents as well as other relationships and actions that Doctor Glas, the narrator of the earlier novel, could not have known about. I came away thinking of Gregorius as tormented, lonely, very perceptive but also self-centered, and far from the horrible person portrayed in Doctor Glas. In Sweden, I think most people have read Doctor Glas, so this book would resonate with them; here in the US, where it is not a common read, I don't know how Gregorius would stand on its own.

Yes, urania recommended Gregorius. When I started it, I did not realize it was a retelling of an earlier novel. I liked it quite well by itself; however, when I found out about Doctor Glas, I stopped mid-book because I simply had to read the original novel on which Gregorius was based.

Have you read Doctor Glas yet? I will be interested in what you think about both once you've read them.

#14. Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

The short stories in Hilary Mantel's slim collection, Learning to Talk are all about children growing up in the north of England in the 50s, much like Mantel herself. In fact, having read her chilling but wonderful memoir, Giving up the Ghost, I can see aspects of Mantel's childhood in these stories. As always, Mantel shows her deep psychological insight and her eye for the telling detail.

I was invited to list my top 10 favorite works of fiction on this thread. Of course, this is an impossible task, but I took a stab at it, with the caveat that the books were in no particular order and were just the ones that struck me at the moment. Then I added some runners-up, but I was castigated for that and so deleted them. So I decided to put the whole list here. I repeat, it is just what struck me at the moment and is heavily weighted towards reads of the past few years.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman
The Straight and Narrow Path by Honor Tracy
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Some runners-up

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
Troubles by J. G. Farrell
The Bridge on the Drina and Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andric
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Varieties of Exile by Mavis Gallant
A Perfect Spy by John le Carre
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa

And many more . . .

Thanks for this list, Rebecca! This will be my second Favorite Message, after Murr's Russian Literature post.

Thank you Darryl, but please don't consider it set in stone. I could add so many other favorites, especially if I look further back in my reading lif .

And also, you stimulated some of these reads . . .

#15 Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer

I bought this book after Darryl/kidzdoc mentioned it during a discussion of the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake and Dr. Paul Farmer, the author, who is the founder of Partners in Health as well as the subject of Mountains beyond Mountains.

It is powerful, moving, and difficult-to-read: difficult to read both because of the human suffering depicted in its pages and because parts of it are quite a slog and somewhat repetitive. Dr. Farmer's basic arguments in the book are that health is a human right, but has not been treated as such by traditional human rights organizations; that poor people experience "structural violence" which makes them more likely to be sick, injured, etc., than people with more money; that poor sick people are better able to describe their needs than "experts;" that, following liberation theology, there should be a positive preference towards the poor, rather than the wealthy; and that very often treatments that are known not to work (e.g., anti-TB drugs that don't work on patients with multiple drug-resistant TB) are used for poor people (e.g., in Russian prisons) because the drugs that would work are deemed "not cost-effective."

The first part of the book, in which Farmer uses his experiences in Haiti, Chiapas, Guantanamo (this book was written pre-9/11 and the US prisons for suspected terrorists there, and deals with Haitians with AIDS who were imprisoned there, contrasted with AIDS treatment in Cuba), and Russia is the most compelling because Farmer is able to draw his principles from real experiences. The second part, which is more theoretical -- Farmer is both a doctor and an anthropologist -- is harder to read and for me less interesting.

This book certainly has led me to think differently about traditional foreign aid and the traditional way "donor nations" treat poorer countries. And, another outstanding aspect of the book is the many quotes from poets and other writers.

Nice review, Rebecca. I also found it to be a bit repetitive and depressing, but I thought it was a compelling and necessary addition to the fields of international public health and medical anthropology.

#16 Shadow Country by Peter Mattiessen

A remarkable, compelling, and complicated work about a remarkable, compelling, and complicated man and the world he lived in, Shadow Country is, as the author puts it, a one-volume 900+-page "retelling" of the Watson trilogy, edited, condensed, and concentrated from what was originally a 1500-page work published as three separate novels. (This work is divided into three "books," which correspond to the original three novels.) Much of the story takes place in the still-wild Thousand Island area of southwest Florida (the Everglades) in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the land and its wildlife, and their eventual desecration by development of various kinds, are as much a character in the story as the multitude of human characters.

The protagonist, Edgar J. Watson, was a legendary pioneer farmer and small businessman in this area, larger than life, haunted by his past and by stories about the violence of his past that may or may not be true, husband to three legal wives and two common-law wives, father of many, and lightening rod for his neighbors throughout the Thousand Islands and other parts of Florida. (He was a real person whose life was researched and fictionalized by Matthiesen.)

At the very beginning of the first "book," Watson is shot by a mob of his neighbors. The first book then proceeds to tell the story of Watson from the point of view of a dozen or more of his neighbors, relatives, and other people who knew him. For me, this was the most fascinating part of the work. The second book picks up the story of Watson as researched by his second and favorite son who, after Watson's death, seeks to clear his name. For me, this was the least strong part of the book (it is also the part Matthiessen cut the most from the original work). Finally, the third book is Watson's own story of his life -- totally compelling and un-put-downable because he was such an obsessive, compelling character.

Interwoven through the various tellings of Watson's life are the themes of race (this is the post-Reconstruction south, and there are still plenty of Native Americans around too), class, development, the destruction of the environment, and the violence of American life. Matthiessen captures the feeling of the time as well as the voices of people whose voices are not often heard.

Okay, Shadow Country has jumped a hundred or more spots on my TBR list after your wonderful review, Rebecca. Fortunately I own this book already .

Thanks, Darryl. I am resisting the urge (for the time being anyway) to buy the three original books, because this is one of those books that makes you want to start all over again after you finish it to pick up everything you missed the first time. But I have so many books on the TBR already, not to mention all the new books I want to get, that I can't really justify this, at least for now . . .

>72 rebeccanyc:. Sounds wonderful and it's available for the Kindle, a perfect candidate at that length. I've been resisting adding new books to my wishlist, but your review made me bend the rules.

I've read the three original ones -- and have Shadow Country beckoning to me at my right hand. Matthiessen is brilliant at portraying the life in the Ten Thousand Islands/Everglades of SW Florida -- and the ecology and politics at the turn of the 20th C with its hard scrabblers, robber barons, outlaws, Seminoles, and even tourists. This was/is one of America's last frontiers. It's my first summer book.

#17 The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy

In this lovely and perceptive novella, the beauty of the Caucasus region, where, the Russians are fighting with the Chechens -- its mountains, streams, forests, and wildlife -- jumps off the page. Tolstoy also portrays the wilder, "simpler" lives of the Cossacks who live there, lives that seem so attractive to his somewhat naive protagonist, a young Moscow aristocrat, Olenin, who joins the Russian army largely as a way to keep himself from gambling, running up debts, and leading a dissolute life. (This, in fact, mirrors some of Tolstoy's own experiences as a young man.) He meets some of the local people, goes hunting, and then falls in love, or so he thinks, with the daughter of his landlord, who is also loved by one of the young Cossacks. One of the beauties of the book is that the reader simultaneously sees the world through Olenin's eyes and through the more experienced eyes of the author.

Bravo!

Thank you -- but for what?

For your remarks on The Cossacks, for The Cossacks, for Tolstoy, for life in general, I don't know, just Bravo!

Great review of Shadow Country which moves to the top of my wishlist. (just catching up.)

#18 How to Escape from a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique

In this collection of short stories and a "novella" (or a long short story) and in deceptively simple language, Yanique, who is from the Virgin Islands, tells stories of people on various Caribbean islands who are in some way isolated, grieving, confused, uprooted, not (as one of her characters put it) at home-home, as opposed to the more simple home. Her characters and their situations stayed with me as I read through the stories, some of which, such as the title story, have elements of the fantastical. But . . . I have a quibble, and that is that after reading the whole collection I see Yanique using some of the same elements in story after story: coincidence, something from the beginning of a story "explained" at the end, exact repetitions of text to show how different people perceived the same event. It all works, in the context of individual stories, but I was disappointed to see it over and over again; as a reader, I then noticed what the writer was doing instead of being completely absorbed in the story. That said, I did enjoy and was moved by the stories and the characters, and I think Yanique is excellent at portraying the lives, concerns, and souls of people in a postcolonial, migratory world.

19. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez (1981, translated 1982)
20. Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez (2004, translation 2005)

I decided to read these two novellas by García Márquez back to back, first the earlier one and then the most recent one, and I'm glad I read them in that order.

I really enjoyed Chronicle of a Death Foretold which explores the life of a community, communal guilt, and the concept of family honor all with García Márquez's usual command of place, detail, and characters. I would call it "delightful" except that that is probably the wrong word to use for a tale in which the reader knows from the first sentence that someone is going to be murdered.

I cannot say the same for Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the reflections of a man who has never had sex with a woman he hasn't paid for who decides, for his 90th birthday, that he wants to sleep with a 14-year-old virgin. And sleep both of them do, no sex at all, and he falls in love for the first time in his life and thinks about on his past. I wanted to like this novella better, because I wanted to experience a 90-year-old reflecting on his life, but I ended up feeling, so what?

I enjoyed Chronicle of a Death Foretold, but not Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Then again, I'm not a huge GGM fan, as I still haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I meant to mention, Rebecca, that I've been enjoying your conversation with Colum McCann over on the chat. I've been following it, but I didn't want to pull him away (any more than my one post) from discussion of the one book (which I haven't yet read, and I will be inclined to read the other volume of his short fiction I picked up before I get to the award-winning novel). He is an amazing writer.

Thanks, Lois. When I read Let the Great World Spin, I deeply felt the resonance between the people looking up at the World Trade Center when Philippe Petit tightrope-walked/danced between the Towers (soon after they were built) and the never-mentioned people looking up at them when they were destroyed, and therefore the resonance between people in NYC at two different difficult times in our recent history. But I wondered whether people who were not New Yorkers and weren't here for 9/11 would feel the same way. It was wonderful to have a chance to ask Colum McCann about that and fascinating to learn that he meant the book to be "about" that.

Darryl, I used to be a big GGM fan. I especially liked Love in the Time of Cholera, more than One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I really enjoyed his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (and hope he writes subsequent volumes of it). But, even though it's apples and oranges, and you shouldn't compare writers, now that I have recently read more of Mario Vargas Llosa I am much more of a fan of his writing.

86 - I've wondered that as well about Let the Great World Spin. It is very high on my wishlist. I got here in 2005 and wonder how I will react.

#21. Chateau d'Argol by Julien Gracq

The more I read in this novella the more I didn't understand it.

Than I read a discussion of it on this thread and I realized that I didn't have the literary or philosophical background to understand it: references to Hegel, allusions to the Parsifal legend, symbolism galore, etc. It all went right by me.

What I did get was beautiful but totally overwrought pictures of a mysterious old castle in a deep forest and haunting landscape: sentences overloaded with descriptive details, adjectives piled up on adjectives, phrases piled up on phrases. Quite remarkable writing. But with the characters who are clearly symbols more than they are characters and an episodic structure in which it was not always clear (to me, anyway) what was going on, I was way way way out of my depth.

On Friday, I'm going to Arizona to visit my sister, which means I will have lots of airplane and airport reading time. So far, these are books I'm considering taking with me, but I think I'll have to narrow it down!

The Fortunes of War by Olivia Manning, a trilogy in one volume and a tome
The Information Officer by Mark Mills, recommended by Chatterbox/Suzanne
Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, also recommended by Chatterbox/Suzanne
Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiongo
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State by Shane Harris
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, an LT recommendation but I forget from whom

So hard to decide!

Ooh, what fun Rebecca! I don't know how you can narrow down that list. And I haven't read Fortunes of War, but I really enjoyed a dramatisation starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson some 20+ years ago.

Based solely on selfishness (wanting to hear your thoughts on them), the most interesting sounding to me are Dreams in Time of War, The Feast of the Goat, and The Watchers.

Rebecca, in terms of what I want to hear you report on, my pick for you is Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty.

I hope you have a great visit and a not too trying trip.

Robert

Thanks for all your thoughts. I am leaning towards Fortunes of War, because I think I need a long trip to really get into it, as well as Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty and one more.

I started Fortunes of War, years ago, but was too busy at the time to read it all the way through. I enjoyed it thoroughly and always wanted to go back to it. I will be interested to hear what you think of it.

and just to nudge you a little bit more in that direction, I found this on wikipedia:

Manning's best known works, the six books comprising Fortunes of War, have been described as "the most underrated novels of the twentieth century" and the author as "among the greatest practitioners of 20th-century roman-fleuve". ...

Manning seems to have had a most interesting life and been a rather fascinating person.

#22 Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

I brought this wonderful book on a long trip and could barely put it down once I reached my destination, despite its 900+ pages. Olivia Manning tells the story of a reserved young woman, Harriet, who follows her very new and much more gregarious husband, Guy, to Bucharest, where he works for a British cultural agency, at the beginning of World War II. In these complex novels, Manning depicts countries (first Romania, then Greece) on the eve of their invasion by the Germans -- the refugees, the long-time residents, the soldiers, the British ex-pats, etc. -- as well as the marriage of two very young people who wed after knowing each other for only three weeks. Manning has a remarkable ability to describe places and people, including a variety of memorable characters, so they spring to the mind's eye, and to show us their varied psychologies and relationships. The settings and undoubtedly some of the people mirror Manning's own experiences during the period, but she has transformed them into a truly absorbing picture of a world as it was being utterly changed. One of the things that struck me the most was how very very young (early 20s) Guy and Harriet were when they were thrown into one of the greatest upheavals of the 20th century.

I have only scratched the surface of this remarkable book in these brief notes, but perhaps the best comment I can make is that I have already ordered its sequel, The Levant Trilogy.

#24 The Information Officer by Mark Mills

(Yes, I know 23 comes after 22 but I am waiting to comment on my #23, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, until I finish another book I'm reading, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and Why There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo so I can discuss them together.)

I read this book because I wanted something lighter and because it was recommended here on LT. But it didn't work for me. Mills tries to write a World War II novel (the critical role of Malta and its massive daily bombardments by both the Germans and the Italians), a serial killer novel (with interludes of the killer's thoughts), a spy story, a romance, and a Malta travelogue. Alas, none of them really works. Also, I have been spoiled by good writing recently and Mills's writing is much too tell-all and clunky, even for a work that doesn't have literary pretensions. I skimmed through to the end to find out who was the killer, but all in all, my reaction was OK, now I can move on.

Yes, I had much the same reaction to The Information Officer; too much plot so that it all had to be skimmed over lightly. I did like the setting and enjoyed learning a little about Malta during WWII, but in the end, that wasn't enough to make the book worthwhile.

Fortress Malta by James Holland is a pretty good historical account of WW2 on the island. I picked that one up on the recommendations of Maltese friends and really enjoyed it.

Shame the Information Officer can't follow through on the promise though; thanks for the review/ warning.

#96 - Thanks for the nice review, I hadn't heard of this before (outside this thread).

Golly, you did read that fast! lol

Have you read V by Thomas Pynchon? Large parts of it are set in Malta during WWII.

Murr, I spent about 14 hours in the air and 6 hours in airports, so I had plenty of reading time! (If you're talking about The Balkan Trilogy. that is. I zipped through The Information Officer in a day because I was skimming.)

I read V when I was about 16 -- that was a VERY long time ago, and I remember almost nothing about it. With everything else I want to read, I probably will never reread it.

CARO, thanks for the Malta recommendation.

#25 Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth

I have been a Joseph Roth fan since reading The Radetzky March several years ago. Obviously a novella cannot encompass the breadth and depth of such a complex novel, but this book is a multilayered look at the life and ultimate downfall of a man who leaves the army so he can marry, becomes an inspector of weights and measures in a remote region of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, and has to confront his feelings of loneliness, loss of purpose, and lust/love in an area that is home to smugglers and cheaters of all varieties. The natural world is vividly portrayed as well.

#96 - You sold me on Fortunes of War. Unfortunately our library doesn't have it, so I put a different book by Olive Manning on hold for now. The library did have Weights and Measures, which sounds good as well.

The Manning does sound good...very tempting.

solla, The trilogies were published first The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy -- did you look for them under those names. Also, a check of the Olivia Manning page shows the individual volumes were first published separately (and you can tell reading the trilogy that they were, because Manning quickly brings the reader up to speed at the beginning of each of the second two novels in the trilogy): for The Balkan Trilogy, the individual novels are The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes.

Thanks for the into Rebecca. The library does have the Great Fortune and The Spoilt City. I can probably get the last the third via interlibrary load.

Definitely read them in order!

#23 Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman

#26 Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

These two books express outrage and offer solutions to two parallel issues (lots of food and lots of starving people, lots of aid to Africa and no apparent benefit), but do so in very different ways,

Enough takes a journalistic look at both the problems with our food aid system (e.g., how, with the lobbying of the agricultural industry AND nonprofit food development organizations, it subsidizes US farmers to dump food in Africa instead of supporting African farmers and helping them produce and distribute more) and existing projects that could become solutions (e.g., bringing distributors of seeds, fertilizer, and harvested food closer to the farmers; changing water distribution systems; developing local commodities exchanges). The authors' depiction of the status quo is damning, and their point that for hungry people, food is the most important development issue, and connects to health, education, and productivity, compelling. Thank you, Suzanne/Chatterbox, for recommending this book to me; I encourage you all to read her review on the work page.

In Dead Aid, Moyo takes a polemic approach and makes a convincing case that more than $2 trillion of aid to Africa in the past 50 years has actually made Africa less self-sufficient and productive than it was before, pointing to resulting corruption and the incentive to default and just get more aid, among other results of aid. In the second section, she touts free market techniques (the bond market, direct investment in African countries, trade -- as with China, and microlending, among others) as the solution to Africa's problems, bringing with them transparency, incentives against corruption, and support of small and medium business development within African countries. While her arguments sound logical, I do not have the background to evaluate whether they are sufficient, given other problems Africa faces. But the book paints a valuable picture, at least for me, of the business development that is already taking place in Africa and the huge investments China is making there.

On my 75 Book Challenge thread Darryl/kidzdoc asked me what books I had taken with me this weekend on a little long weekend getaway. Here's what I wrote.

I brought way too many books with me. But better too many than not enough!

I put At Home with the Marquis de Sade by Francine du Plessix Gray aside to read some other books, but hope to finish it. It was recommended by TomcatMurr when I was looking for other books about the French Revolution after reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety.

I've also brought:

Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, which I know you're planning to read this weekend
The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah -- can't remember who recommended this
Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig -- a novella, as I'm continuing Read-a-Novella month into April
Niki: The Story of a Dog by Tibor Dery, another novella
The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth, continuing on my Joseph Roth reads

As you can see, my biggest problem will be deciding what to read!

109 - Interesting. I've been avoiding books on this subject because I always fear they will conclude with 'pull yourself up by your bootstrap' type rhetoric. These, particularly Enough sound good though.

#27. At Home with the Marquis de Sade by Francine du Plessix Gray

I read this because I mentioned after I read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety that I was interested in reading more about the French Revolution and TomcatMurr recommended this book, and also because I enjoyed du Plessix Gray's memoir about her parents, Them, so much. This is an impeccably researched biography that focuses as much on de Sade's relationships with his long-suffering but amazingly devoted wife and his cunning and implacable mother-in-law as it does on his almost entirely self-centered life and writings. Some of the descriptions of his writings can be a little hard to take, but what I found most fascinating about de Sade, perhaps because this seems to fascinate the author as well, is de Sade's complete lack of social inhibition. He strove to do exactly what he wanted at all times, regardless of social convention, or the need to make compromises to get by, or the concerns of people he holds dear.

As du Plessix Gray says in her epilogue, "Few men would have been more reluctant than de Sade to admit that the central program of civilization is to repress instinct and replace the power of the individual with the power of community." Throughout his life, and his struggles over family and money, his unrestrained choreography of his sexual fantasies and his chronicling of the baser desires of humanity, his furious letter-writing while jailed for much of his adult life, and his roles in the tumultuous revolutionary era, he comes across as an adult child who still thinks he should get what he wants just because he wants it.

#28 Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

This novella tells the story of a 12-year-old boy who goes to a spa with his mother sometime in the very early 1900s, is befriended by a mysterious baron who sees the boy as the way to get to know the mother, who he wants to seduce, and who then goes through a torrent of emotions as he begins to comprehend that he was used and that adults, including his mother, lie and have secrets, including one very big mystery. Zweig's writing takes us inside the minds of all three characters, and the psychological drama propels the novella along as the boy comes to recognize that he is leaving childhood behind. As a modern reader, I had to suspend disbelief that a 12-year-old could be as naive as this one was, but I am perfectly ready to believe that could be true of someone from his upper middle class background at that time.

I'm glad you enjoyed the Sade book, rebecca.

#29 The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah

I can't remember who on LT recommended this beautiful novel, but thank you, whoever you are. In it, a 70-year-old Mauritian looks back at a particularly tormented time in his childhood: after a terrible tragedy, he comes to meet a Jewish boy his own age (around 10) who has been "interned"/imprisoned as part of a little known World War 2 episode in which a group of refugee Jews who attempted to land by ship in British-run Haifa were turned away and held on Mauritius, then a British colony. The descriptions of the forest, the often drastic weather, and the ways a boy explores and comes to know this natural environment inside out are breath-taking, and the psychological insight into loss, despair, memory, and hope compelling. I read this book in almost one sitting.

Coincidentally, as I sat down at the computer this morning to look up Mauritius (it's a very small island off the coast of the much bigger Madagascar that was uninhabited until colonized by first the Dutch, then the French, and finally the British), I found that the New York Times home page was featuring a travel section article about it!

#20: I think Rachel (rachbxl) is the one to thank, as she reviewed it at the end of last year:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/30666#1678381

She also wrote a review of it in the first issue of Belletrista:

http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue4/reviews_1.php

I bought it from The Book Depository in early February, and I'll put it at the top of my TBR list.

I'm working my way through the Sunday New York Times, and just pulled out the Travel section. The pictures on the front page (which is entirely dedicated to Mauritius) are gorgeous!

Thanks, Darryl. I think you're right because that's about the time I bought it. You are a wizard at finding old threads. I tried to find it from the Conversation link on the work page, but for some reason it was only showing 2010 threads.

The reason I had to see the Mauritius article online and didn't see it in the Times itself (and I would have seen it yesterday because a lot of the Sunday sections, including Travel, are delivered with the Saturday paper) is because I'm up in the mountains and have to drive 5 miles to get the paper (and because the store where I buy it is closed for Easter). But it should be waiting for me when we get home tonight.

I just started The Balkan Trilogy. I second Rachel's recommendation.

Yes, The Last Brother was me; I'm so glad you liked it! It was a random pick off a shelf in a Paris station bookshop on a miserable day just before Christmas - everyone was trying to get out of Paris and there were huge delays because of the snow, but that book took me right away from it all.

I read Fortunes of War as a (young, probably too young) teenager, just as the Branagh/Thompson adaptation was screened in the UK, and I loved it. I bought it a while ago with a view to re-reading (something I almost never do), and your comments have made me want to get on with it right away.

>115 rebeccanyc:, 116: oh, Mauritius is beautiful. We spent a week there several years ago, when we were living in the UK and it was "only" a 12-hour flight away. Although the differences between resort and "real" living were stark and unsettling, the natural beauty, a wild pony ride on the beach, and a day-trip on a chartered catamaran made it one of our most memorable family holidays.

The differences between the lives described in The Last Brother (albeit 60+ years ago) and the lovely images in the NY Times article are also stark.

#30. The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning

I couldn't wait to read this sequel to Manning's The Balkan Trilogy because I was so enthralled both by the story of Harriet and Guy Pringle and their life at the edge of the beginning of the second world war and by Manning's excellent and psychologically insightful writing. Alas, although many reviewers seem to consider The Levant Trilogy superior to the Balkan, I have the opposite opinion.

In The Levant Trilogy, Manning broadens her view to consider another protagonist, Simon Boulderstone, a young officer posted to Egypt at the time when the Germans are 50 miles from Alexandria, and the war in the desert in general. His story is alternated with that of Harriet and Guy, who have landed in Cairo, having escaped from Greece just ahead of the Nazis at the end of The Balkan Trilogy. Diluting the concentration of the focus on Guy and Harriet and their immediate circle, and expanding the view to the war itself in addition to its impact on the everyday life of civilians, reduced the intensity of the story. The peripheral characters seemed less carefully drawn, and were on the whole less interesting than those in the previous trilogy, and Harriet's trips to Luxor and then to Syria and Jerusalem seem almost designed to provide a travelogue, and minimally to advance the plot and her psychological development.

I did enjoy the book, and it did once again provide an interesting look at life at the edge of war, as well, this time, at the war itself, but I missed the intensity of Manning's focus on the place and the psychology of her characters and their relationships, including Harriet and Guy's marriage, in the first trilogy.

#31 Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo

Because Ngũgĩ is such a brilliant writer, this memoir of his childhood is so much more than the tale of a boy moving from an almost traditional village to the best high school, a boarding school, in Kenya. It is a portrait of a world that clings to some of the customs in the past while being changed both by colonialism and by modernity, an introduction to the history and culture of the Gikuyu and an indictment of British exploitation and oppression, a demonstration of the power and beauty of storytelling and oral history, a loving tribute to family, and a testament to courage and determination and the power, for the modern era, of education.

As an aside, Wangari Matthai's autobiography, Unbowed, also paints a lovely picture of village life in rural Kenya, but she is not the writer Ngũgĩ is.

>123 rebeccanyc:: Rebecca, I was underwhelmed by Unbowed (her story is fascinating, it was the writing I had problems with). Dreams in a Time of War sounds much better.

I've just downloaded an interview with Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo about Dreams In A Time Of War from the Free Library podcast. It sounds very interesting!

I was underwhelmed by Unbowed too, for the very reasons you give, Laura: she's a terrific environmental activist and community organizer, but a terrible writer. However, I had had the opportunity to hear her speak and she herself is fascinating.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned her book in the same post as Dreams in a Time of War. The only similarity is that I recalled her descriptions of her early childhood in a rural Kenyan village because the environment was similar to the village Ngugi lived in. That's all!

Edited to fix touchstone.

Having a little free time, I decided to join the review-posting crowd, so I'm gradually adding the comments I post on my thread to the reviews on the work pages. I realize they aren't usually "full" reviews, but I noticed that not everybody posts long reviews so thought I'd add my thoughts.

Great, Rebecca -- I think the reviews on the book pages are meant to give browsers and those interested in a particular book some idea about what other LTers think about the book -- I don't seen any reason why they have to be a particular length. Sometimes I write a sentence or two -- sometimes what amounts to a page or two.

#32. The Tale of the 1002nd Night by Joseph Roth

Maybe I wasn't in the right mood for this book, since I've enjoyed everything else by Joseph Roth I've read, but it just didn't grab me: I kept putting it down, forgetting who the characters were, etc. It tells the tale of what happens after the Shah makes a visit to the Emperor in Vienna in the 1800s, spends the night with a prostitute masquerading as a countess he fancies, and through his Chief Eunuch gives her a valuable string of pearls. The consequences then unfold over the course of several years for a variety of characters, who are said to paint a picture of life in Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its decline. Roth has some really wonderful turns of phrase, and acidic insight into the empty-headedness and greed of some of his characters, but I never got into the story. I would hazard a guess that Roth was trying to make a larger point about history and the consequences of actions and the decline from grandeur to almost farce, but that didn't make a big impact on me either.

Finally, I note that the translator is the much commented-on Michael Hoffman. Not only did he write what for me was an annoying introduction, but there was one place where the translation itself irritated me: there is a low-life character who doesn't speak good German, and Hoffman renders his speech in a contemporary and late 20th century street slang -- it was jarring to me. I'm sure there's a way of showing that someone is speaking that way without jumping over 100 years into the future.

127 - I actually prefer shorter reviews when I'm looking at the work page. I like to be able to quickly skim a lot of opinions.

I gently pipe in in a hopefully non-hijaking way that while short reviews are really helpful for quick spoiler-free reference - it's really nice to have some longer, thoughtful reviews, especially by names I recognize. Point being Thanks - re #127.

Hijacking is welcome, but I don't consider #131 hijacking. Thanks, all of you.

Just speaking up to say that I like short reviews too!

>127 rebeccanyc: Oh, I'm glad you are doing that, because I recently went looking for your comments on something I knew you had read and discovered that there wasn't a "review" on the work page. I remember to make comments on my thread here and sometimes forget to cross post on the work page; eventually I catch up. I think the term "reviews" should be used loosely on LT...

#33. The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State by Shane Harris

This is not the book I thought it was going to be -- a serious history with analysis of how "America's surveillance state" came to be, with perhaps a look at what might happen in the future. Instead, it is a "you are there" journalistic look at key figures in the development of surveillance technologies; the reader sees them as they came up with ideas, discussed them with others, argued about others, got involved in Washington politics, etc. The author writes in bite-sized paragraphs that I found choppy and heoften uses irritating metaphors and images, e.g., "As far as Washington horsetrading went, that was the nuclear option." Also, because most of the people he interviewed, starting with the "hero" of the tale, John Poindexter, were intimately involved in surveillance and intelligence, the book comes out somewhat one-sided. I did read/skim the whole thing, and I guess I learned a little, but it's not what I was hoping for.

#34 Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

I was in the mood for something lighter after my recent serious and gloomy reads, and Gods Behaving Badly turned out to be a fun choice. Picture the Olympian gods as a dysfunctional family living in a run-down London home, maintaining their traditional individual roles but, with eternity for their life span, their power has run down a little and they have a lot of time on their hands for mischief, revenge, plots against each other, etc. Then, a rather ordinary mortal comes into their lives and, unknowingly, sets off an unsettling series of events that could result in the end of the world. Phillips has a light touch, but a wicked sense of humor, and keeps the plot and the characterizations bubbling along. Her portrait of the underworld is a high spot.

I must add this to my wish list, after reading your comments and several other reviews of it last year. Thanks, Rebecca!

#35. Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth

In this early (1924) Roth novella, the narrator, who has been released from a Russian WWI POW camp, has found his way back to the very eastern edges of the former Austro-Hungarian empire and takes a room on the next-to-the-top floor of the Hotel Savoy (the higher the floor, the poorer the hotel guests). Over the course of his stay, he meets a huge variety of of strange, sometimes surreal characters, including the long-awaited Bloomfield, a local man who has achieved wealth in America and who, it is hoped, will solve everyone's problems. With unending streams of released prisoners, striking workers, would-be revolutionaries, debauched industrialists, an aging and mysterious lift-boy, and charlatans of all stripes, the Hotel Savoy and its fate are a prescient allegory of post-war Europe.

Edited to fix grammatical error.

#36. Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest

This was a difficult book to read. First, and most importantly, because of the horror of the subject it covers: the death by starvation of millions of people, primarily in the Ukraine, in the early 1930s, due to a famine deliberately caused by and then enforced by the Soviet leadership. I learned about this in a completely chilling chapter in Vassily Grossman's Everything Flows, and wanted to learn more about it: the introduction and notes to the NYRB edition I read of the Grossman book heavily cited the Conquest, and so I bought it.

The second reason it was difficult to read is because it is a scholarly book. I simply did not have the deep background in Soviet politics to understand the ins and outs of the first half or more of the book, which deals with the policies of farm collectivization and the suppression of Ukrainian nationalism, and so I skimmed those chapters. I have no basis for evaluating the author's point of view on those policies, and I gather there is some matter for debate about the degree to which Stalin himself was involved, although I, as a non-scholar, certainly find it difficult to believe that any major policy could be carried out without his blessing. However, it was the famine itself that interested me, and while I learned some more from this book nothing can hold a candle to the chapter in Everything Flows for depicting the full terror and horror of the terror-famine.

Edited to fix typo.

#37. The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind by Barbara Strauch

After hearing the author interviewed on the NPR show, Fresh Air, I was glad my middle-aged mind remembered enough of it when I got home to buy this book. Unfortunately, it didn't add enough to what I heard on the car radio. In a breezy style, Strauch, a science writer for the New York Times, covers the talents of the middle-aged brain (able to see the big picture and handle multiple complex problems at the same time without stressing out, calmer and happier, etc.), discusses some of the research that shows what's going on in our brains, and identifies some techniques that may help us retain brain power as we age. A quick, reassuring read, but nothing earth-shattering.

#38. 2017 by Olga Slavnikova

I almost put this novel down many times, despite my high hopes for it. Set in 2017, 100 years after the Russian Revolution, it won the "Russian Booker" prize and was translated by one of the most noted Russian translators, Marian Schwartz. I wish I liked it better. The themes of the destruction of the natural environment, the "inauthenticity" and greed of post-Soviet Russia, and the lack of a sense of history are all fascinating, but the plot is hard to follow, the mixture of reality, myth, and science fiction not to my taste, the writing dense and often overloaded with adjectives and analogies, and the characterizations not psychologically believable. The parts I most enjoyed were the depictions of the vastness, beauty and wildness of the Russian landscape, something that links Slavnikova to earlier Russian authors.

#140 I heard that NPR interview - NPR is my morning alarm clock, so it came on between 6 and 6:45 AM Pacific time. Now I know I don't need to read the book. I wish there was more, though. That morning I recounted the interview to the person who shares my office. He was highly skeptical and seems to think his brain is going, despite only being in his early forties.

Well, the book does effectively demolish the idea that just because we don't remember names, etc., our minds aren't going. In fact, Strauch may point that out a few times too often. But she convinced me -- at least until the next time I forget that I left the water boiling on the stove!

#39 Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi

I found this novel, by turns, charming, satiric, and a little bit horrifying in its depiction of an extremely provincial town in Hungary at the end of the 19th century, in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian empire, focusing an aging couple and what they do when their ugly and somewhat stupid 35-ish daughter, Skylark, goes to stay with relatives "in the country" for a week. Kosztolányi has a telling eye for the descriptive detail and for the hypocrisy of many of the residents of the town, and the turnaround of the parents cleaning up the evidence of what they did while their child was away is quite funny. But it is a sad book too, and I can't help but find a little bit of a political edge in it as well.

>140 rebeccanyc: I did the same thing you did - bought the book after hearing her interview with Terry Gross. And, although I'm not finished with it yet, I am a bit disappointed that there isn't much more than what I heard. Still, it's a great comfort for those days when I find I put the "bananas in the laundry basket."

>141 rebeccanyc: Did you read The Slynx? There is an article on dystopian literature by women in the current Belletrista that includes it. I didn't get a copy of 2017 to her in time to include it but she'll review it for next issue. It might be my imagination but it seems women write more dystopian satire (which is what I understand 2017 is). I will read this book eventually, I'd like to see how it compares to both other dystopias and also other satirists, like Victor Pelevin.

Lois, maybe because I'm not a big reader of dystopian literature, I didn't see 2017 as a dystopian novel. I saw it more as a political commentary on post-Soviet Russia disguised by a somewhat incomprehensible story line with a twist of myth and science fiction. I'll be interested in seeing if my perspective changes after I read the Belletrista article, and of course I'll look forward to your thoughts on 2017 when you read it.

>146 rebeccanyc: It was my understanding that it was a dystopian satire which is why I was attracted to it. Well, I'll be interested to see if you think it fits with the other novels presented in the dystopia article.

Well, it is dystopian in the sense that it isn't a world that I would want to live in, but since it is set only slightly in the future I saw it more as a projection of and to some extent a satire about current trends of materialism, environmental destruction, and the loss of individuality. It didn't seem out of the realm of possibility to me, aside from the fantastical elements, of course. I was attracted to it because I thought it was going to be more of a political take on the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution, and I guess it was, but I wasn't entranced by it for the reasons I gave in #141.

avaland,

If you want to read good dystopian/political commentary, read The Undesirables by Mary C. Smith. I haven't run into anyone else who has read it.

#40. Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields by Charles Bowden

In hypnotic prose that is both poetic and intentionally somewhat repetitive, Bowden takes the reader inside the horror of Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, where the number of murders reached 1607 in 2008 and topped 2400 in 2009, making it the most murderous city in the world. The structure of the book takes a little figuring out, but it is essentially a spiral in which Bowden revisits topics and themes as the violence of 2008 expands throughout the year, as well as following several people whose stories unfold as the book progresses: a provincial beauty queen destroyed by gang rape by police, a former criminal/addict who runs a home in the desert for people made crazy by the violence, a reporter fleeing for the border with his son because he once wrote the wrong story for the newspaper, and -- most chillingly -- a professional killer. Throughout, Bowden illustrates with great compassion both why people turn to working for the drug cartels and why they turn the other way when people are killed in front of them. He makes the case that the situation in Ciudad Juárez is the result of the war for drugs, not the war against them or a war between rival drug cartels, that the killers include the army and the police, as well as people working for cartels, and that the corruption that enables the drug business is alive and well on both sides of the border.

When I say "makes the case," I do not mean to suggest that Murder City is either a logically analyzed or journalistically orderly book, although the author expressed logical journalistic ideas when I heard him interviewed on NPR. Instead, it is a rigorous but deeply emotional and personal journey into what really could be called the heart of darkness.

#41 Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson

I'm afraid the best thing I can say about this collection of five stories and one long novella by noted critic Edmund Wilson is that I bought it at a remaindered price. The narrator for all the stories is a 30- or 40 something art historian who lives both in New York City and the fictional Hecate County, presumably a Connecticut suburb, in the 1920s and early 1930s. Although this was certainly a lively time, most of the stories present intellectual arguments about art, publishing, music, or politics, rather than introducing interesting characters in interesting situations; some even have supernatural touches. The novella, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," is notorious, because it got the book banned when it was published in 1946 due to what now seem tame descriptions of female anatomy; it is better than the stories in its presentation of characters from various walks of life but, unfortunately, they all seem designed to be symbolic, rather than real people, and i couldn't work up any sympathy for any of them, including the rather obtuse narrator. I ended up skimming the final two stories after the novella.

This is one of the very few NYRB books I have read that was a real disappointment.

#150 - Rebeccca - I just saw this post. I'm not sure I could read that book, but I'm glad you did, and wrote that review. Scary stuff, and very sad.

#42. The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story by Mary-Kay Wilmers

This fascinating book tells the story both of several members of the author's remarkable extended family and of a big chunk of the twentieth century's less than savory history. Wilmers's mother was an Eitingon, and that family included Leonid, a Stalinist secret agent whose "special tasks" included organizing the murder of Trotsky; Max, a pioneering psychoanalyst who was one of Freud's closest colleagues; and Motty, a wildly successful (for a time) New York fur importer. Through post-Soviet interviews with some of her Russian relatives, research that included reading some of the Soviet files, and her general curiosity, intelligence, and engaging writing, Wilmers, who is the editor of the London Review of Books, explores the lives of these men, their women, and the connections they may or may not have had with each other. The story focuses more on Leonid, who is both the most obscure and the most compelling, and his work, including the intricate lead-up to Trotsky's killing, is both fascinating and horrifying. Wilmers is willing to speculate where she can't find out what happened, but she plays fair and tells the readers what she's doing. This book called to me from the shelves of a bookstore, and I'm glad I bought it.

Edited to fix italics.

42> Sounds fascinating. Is the Rivera/Kahlo connection with Trotsky explored at all since he lived with them when he first went to Mexico?

It is fascinating, but it only mentions Rivera/Kahlo in passing in the context of Mexican supporters of the Russian revolution. The book focuses on Leonid Eitingon's role and activities, and discusses Trotsky mostly with respect to why he got under Stalin's skin so, and how he tried to protect himself through his own agents and security measures.

#43. Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar

This deeply unsettling novel takes us inside the head of a woman who is become quite insane -- albeit in a most, for her, happy way. Rachel Waring, a woman in her late 40s in a dead-end, boring London job with a boring and somewhat mean roommate, unexpectedly inherits her great-aunt's house in Bristol and decides to quit her job, move into the house, and fix it up. There she meets some of the local population who may or may not have her best interests at heart and becomes obsessed with a prior owner of the house, an anti-slavery activist who died young.

As Rachel increasingly becomes engaged in increasingly odd activities, and increasingly says -- or maybe only thinks (we can't tell, and neither can she) -- increasingly inappropriate things, the reader sees everything completely from her perspective. And yet . . . there's that little voice inside the reader's head that says, "watch out, Rachel, trouble ahead." At times I felt this closeness to Rachel's very disturbed and delusional mind claustrophobic, but this novel is a remarkable achievement for a writer.

I've been debating buying this book for a couple of weeks - they've had it the window of my local bookshop pending a visit by the author to their book club - I might succumb now given your review. I read When I was Otherwise by the same author a few weeks ago and enjoyed that and this sounds an intriging book.

#156 - what a coincidence, I just bought this from a remaindered bookshop - picked it up because it was an NYRB, took it home because it looked interesting. Glad I did, now.

(I also found The Last Brother and The Letters Of Eliza Fay in the same shop, both of which were LT-inspired purchases).

>157 SandDune:,
Wish Her Safe at Home is fabulous.

#158, waqndering_star, I really enjoyed The Last Brother -- hope you do too.

#149, Urania, it's been sitting on the TBR but your comments, among others, spurred me to read it now.

#44. Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre

I owe my reading of this fun and fascinating book to Chris/cabegley, who introduced me to Ben Macintyre's earlier Agent Zigzag and to Suzanne/chatterbox who told me about this new work.

I was broadly familiar with the story of how the British deceived the Nazis into thinking their assault on southern Europe would be in Greece rather than in Sicily, by floating a body holding a briefcase with false top-secret documents about the planned invasion onto the beaches of southern Spain, from the movie based on the book The Man Who Never Was. That book was written by Ewen Montagu, one of the two main creators of the plot, called Operation Mincemeat, but deliberately obscured some of its most interesting aspects. For this book, Macintyre had access to Montagu's records of the operation, which somewhat astoundingly he was allowed to keep, and also interviewed dozens of people, including the children of some of the people directly involved.

What makes this book so fascinating is not just the details of the deception, but Macintyre's ability to bring characters -- all sorts of spies, real and imaginary, as well as military officers and "ordinary" civilians -- to life, while creating a great deal of the suspense and tension that the planners and others felt at the time. He provides insight into the progress of the war itself, and the young people who went off to fight in it, as well as a feeling for spy-infested southern Spain. He also has a sly sense of humor. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and learned a lot too.

Thanks for the review of Operation Mincemeat, Rebecca--I'm looking forward to reading this one!

#45. The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

I found this book mostly charming and intriguing, but occasionally irritating. The author, an anthropologist by profession, closely observed white-tailed deer on her New Hampshire farm after she started feeding them corn during a winter in which the oaks had not dropped any acorns. First they seemed to just be an undifferentiated mass, but then she was able to identify consistent family groupings. Marshall uses this as a springboard into learning and writing about deer behavior and social interactions, all of which I found fascinating as someone who has been looking at deer all my life. She branches off into hunting traditions and the lives of people who have passed on ancestral wisdom for centuries, and eventually into the value of close observation of all living things, plants included.

Although Marshall is rigorous in her observations, and generally in her respect for science, what I found irritating was the way she sometimes verged into anthropomorphism. She in fact discusses this very issue late in the book, arguing that the "extreme caution" of scientists and editors about anything that seems anthropomorphic is really a fear of acknowledging that we are more similar to other species than we would like to think. I found this thought-provoking, but am not completely convinced.

So is it that she ascribing human traits to the deer? I doubt I would be convinced either.

Well, she's assigning mammalian traits which presumably we and deer can share; that didn't bother me so much when she stuck to very careful observation, but occasionally she slipped over the line, although I guess the line varies from person to person.

#46 Stepping-Stones: A Journey through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne by Christine Desdemaines-Hugon

I picked up this book because I became interested in cave art after reading the marvelous and inspiring The Cave Painters by Gregory Curtis a few years ago. The author, a scholar of so-called "portable" cave art and a long-time guide to many of the French caves, takes the reader on a tour of five major caves and several smaller sites, interspersing detailed descriptions of the art in the sites and background on the history and development of ice-age humans. While the details were too much for me to master, the word pictures Desdemaines-Hugon paints of the drawings and engravings are compelling and her respect and admiration for the skills of the artists shine through.

She describes how with a few lines the artists capture the essence of the animals they depict, reflecting close observation, how each animal appears to be an individual, how the artists used the rocks and the shapes of the cave walls not only as part of the art but also to direct the eye and create groupings of animals, and how the artists understood how to create a sense of perspective in a way that didn't reappear in the west until the Renaissance, and she notes that while we will never know what the art meant to the people who created it, especially since much of it may have been viewed by only a few people, we can certainly see that it was deeply meaningful to them and that it is deeply moving to us.

She writes: "Being so close to those simple lines, I could identify with the hand, the gesture, the expert at work. The intelligence behind it. The sense of beauty guiding the hand."

Nice review, Rebecca. I may have to look for this one...

My box of sale books from the Dalkey Archive summer sale arrived today -- 10 books for $65. I won't have time to enter them into LT for another day or two, and I have no idea where I'm going to put them, much less when I'm going to read them!

OK, here is my Dalkey Archive summer sale haul"

Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante
Annihilation by Piotr Szewc
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf
Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso
The City Builder by George Konrad
Juan the Landless by Juan Goytisolo
Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley
Best European Fiction 2010 edited by Aleksandar Hemon

Sales are wonderful things!

#47. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

In this novel, which explores how dictatorship twists the minds, hearts, and souls of those who are made or seduced to depend on the dictator for their livelihood, prestige, and power, Vargas Llosa interweaves the fictionalized history of the last weeks of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic with the story of the plotters who aim to assassinate Trujillo and the tale of Uranita, the daughter of a disgraced Trujillo associate, who left the DR suddenly at the age of 14, right before the assassination, and who returns 35 years later, after no contact with her family, to her dying father's bedside.

The plot and the structure of the book unfold slowly at the start, but the tension builds as the novel progresses: we know Trujillo will be killed, but then what will happen, and why is Uranita so bitter? At the end, I could barely put the book down. Vargas Llosa is a master at creating the varied characters of the Trujillo hangers-on and at bringing the readers into the horror of the regime and its aftermath, some of it truly sickening and requiring a strong stomach.

About half way through the novel, one of the characters reflects that he has lost his free will; Vargas Llosa's genius is that he makes the reader think about this too.

Note: I read this book, which has been on my shelves for some time, for the Reading Globally June Theme Read on dictators.

I have spent some time on the twentieth century totalitarian societies in Germany and the Soviet Union. I think I ought to give some of the others some attention. From your review here I think this might be a good place to start.

Thank you,

Robert

Robert, sorry to hear about your experiences in Germany and the Soviet Union. I will be interested to hear how you think the Trujillo dictatorship compares, if you read The Feast of the Goat. I also highly recommend Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiongo which is about a dictatorship in a "fictional" African country. I also would be interested in your thoughts on when a dictatorship becomes totalitarian.

In his Club Read thread, Darryl/kidzdoc mentioned the current New Yorker fiction issue, which selected 20 US writers under the age of 40 who the editors think we'll be reading well into the future. This issue includes stories by eight of them, and the others will have stories in forthcoming issues.

I've now read all of them and I must confess to being underwhelmed by most. Have any of the others of you read them? Darryl? Any thoughts? I can be more specific about individual writers but I don't want to prejudice anyone in advance.

I haven't read anything in this issue yet, Rebecca, but I'll get started on it later today, and give you my thoughts by mid week.

I picked up that issue of The New Yorker on Friday, thanks to kidzdoc's mention earlier. I've only read the first story, the one by Joshua Ferris and I liked it. I was already a big fan of his writing (Then We Came to the End did interesting new things, I thought), so maybe I was not unbiased. I wanted all the authors' stories immediately, but will have to content myself with eight for now.

edited for grammatical issues that I would rather not explain in detail.

Interesting. I was so not interested in the protagonist of "The Pilot," and I found the ending silly. So I guess I'm just not a Ferris fan.

>174 rebeccanyc:: I just picked up that issue in the bookstore yesterday. Haven't read any yet though!

Rebecca, 173 just confirms Norbert Wiener's notion that all transmissions are garbled. When I said that I had spent some time on the ... I meant in literature. I sometimes think I have suffered in life, but never that much, thank God.

I will be putting The Wizard of the Crow on my wishlist.

So far my distinction between dictatorship and totalitarianism has pretty much been on a 'you know it when you see it' basis, but it is pretty much colored by the 'total' part of totalitarianism. It seems, too, that the totalitarian societies of which I have read have operated not just on the will of the totalitarian but on the totalitarian's caprice, and that may actually be a defining characteristic. I'm wondering as I write this whether there can be small totalitarian societies in, say, families or work environments.

It will be awhile before I actually get to the two books you have tipped me off to, but I look forward to them.

Robert

Robert

Well, I'm relieved to hear that! I assume that if you've read a lot about the Soviet Union, you've probably read Life and Fate and Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman and The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years by Victor Serge; Life and Fate, in particular, is a masterpiece. And for Germany, Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone.

I just asked about totalitarianism, because the Trujillo dictatorship, as depicted in The Feast of the Goat, didn't seem totalitarian to me. But I think it is one of those you know it when you see it things.

Rebecca - I'm curious, in light of your review of The Feast of the Goat, have you read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? They might be interesting books to compare. Junot Díaz assassinates Trujillo is his own caustic way.

Great minds! I was thinking the same thing since it's been on my TBR for several years. If I can dig it out, I may read it next.

I've favorited your 180. I've read Life and Fate and have Every Man Dies Alone. I've read non-fiction as well about the Soviet Union, and World War II Germany often takes in the Soviets especially at Stalingrad. The key novel for me on the two big powers is Europe Central.

I seem to have two specific interests in the totalitarian milieu. The more recent is man's capacity for inhumanity to man; the longer standing is the reaction of a man of ordinary good virtue to that kind of malevolence.

Thanks,

Robert

#48. The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor

A delightful, exciting, beautifully written, and yet somewhat dated tale, this novella may(?) be the only fiction written by the wonderful Patrick Leigh Fermor whose amazing books about his walk across Europe just before World War II, A Time of Gifts and From the Woods to the Water, are among my all-time favorites.

The Violins of Saint-Jacques tells the story of life on a fictional island in the Caribbean at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was still a French colony albeit, in this tale, benevolently ruled. It focuses mostly on the French plantation owners, whose life of leisure and pleasure relies on the services of the descendants of enslaved Africans. Because this was written in 1953, there are a few phrases that seem odd and perhaps inappropriate to contemporary readers, but Leigh Fermor has a sly and ironic way of writing that makes me think he was slipping a much more modern and enlightened way of thinking under the surface of what his mid-century audience might expect.

The tale of intrigue and ill-fated romance is told by a narrator who hears it from an elderly French woman who had lived on the island at the time of the story, which concludes with its catastrophic destruction by the volcano which created it in the first place. (This is not a spoiler; it is alluded to at the beginning of the novella.) It is a little confection.

#184 - Rebecca, I'm adding the two non-fiction books to my wishlist. :) I hadn't heard of them before.

Rebecca, The Violins of Saint-Jacques looks like something I'd enjoy. Thanks for the recommendation! (I also liked your review and gave it a thumb)

#49. Where There's a Will by Rex Stout

A quick reread of this Nero Wolfe mystery, enjoyable for all the usual reasons, because I needed to read something light and there was a copy lying around up here in the mountains.

Robert--have you read Europe Central? I tried a while ago, but was unable to get into it. Now that I've read The Kindly Ones, I plan to try again shortly.

ETA--Didn't mean to ignore you Rebecca. Hope you are having a great time in the mountains, and that it's cooler there than NYC has been.

I have read Europe Central. I found it difficult but excellent. Cliff over in Literary Snobs somewhere didn't think it too difficult.

Robert

Thanks for stopping by and for the thoughts of cool breezes. I've been back for a week and it's been plenty steamy here in the city. But we're going back up for the 4th of July. And I coming down the home stretch with the mammoth Terra Nostra, so hope to have some book comments to post soon.

In honor of my 50th book and the impending start of the second half of the year, I have started a new thread,