Avaland's 2013 Literary Exploratorium

2013 READING:

NOW READING:



We are All Equally Far From Love by Adania Shibli (2012, Palestine)
Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila (2004, Nigerian)
That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott (2010, Australian, ON HOLD)
I Still Believe Anita Hill (2013, nonfiction, essays, still picking away at this)

NOVELS/NOVELLAS



Before the Poison by Peter Robinson (2011)
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (2013, Canadian, dystopian satire)
One Who Disappeared by David Herter (novel, 2011, US)
The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-Everett (2011, US)
Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer by Adam Roberts (2013, UK)
A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta (2013, Nigeria/US)
Fuse by Julianna Baggott (2013, US, science fiction)
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah (1992, Zanzibar/Tanzania)
Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto (2009, T 2012 Mozambique)
The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams (2011, US)
Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh (2012, Lebanon, Translated from the Arabic)
The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg (Danish, 2006, Translated 2007)

SHORT FICTION



Yellowcake: Stories by Margo Lanagan (2013, Australian)
Hitting Trees with Sticks by Jane Rogers (short stories, 2012, picking away)
News from Heaven: The Bakerton Stories by Jennifer Haigh (2013, US)
All My Friends by Marie Ndiaye (2013, France, translated, short fiction)

CRIME NOVELS

All the Colors of Darkness by Peter Robinson (crime novel)
Bad Boy by Peter Robinson (crime novel)
Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson (crime novel)
Piece of My Heart by Peter Robinson
Aftermath by Peter Robinson
Strange Affair by Peter Robinson
Past Reason Hated by Peter Robinson
A Necessary End by Peter Robinson (1989, Canadian)
The Vanishing Point by Val McDermid (2013)
Close to Home by Peter Robinson
Cold is the Grave by Peter Robinson (1990, Canadian, crime novel)
In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson (1999, Canadian, crime novel)
A Darker Domain by Val McDermid (2008, UK, crime novel)
Room Number 10 by Ake Edwardson (T. 2013, Swedish, crime novel)
Moonlight Downs by Adrian Hylund (2002, Australia, crime novel)
The Risk of Darkness by Susan Hill (crime novel, UK)
Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin (2013, UK, crime novel)
The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill (2005, UK, crime novel)
The Blind Goddess by Anne Holt (1993, Norwegian, reprinted 2013, crime novel)

POETRY



Under the Keel: Poems by Michael Crummey (2013, Canadian)
Selected Poetry of Amy Lowell (2002, US, early 20th century)
Selections from Collected Poems: Jane Kenyon (2007, US)
An Ordinary Day by Di Xue (Translated from the Chinese, 2002)
Selections from The Zoo in Winter by Polina Barskova (poetry, translated from the Russian, 2011)

NONFICTION



My Heart is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Mother, edited by Eva LaPlante (2013)
Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home; Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh, editors (2012)

MISCELLANEOUS ODDS & ENDS

Dial H, Vol. 1 by China Miéville (2013, comics)
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (2013)(Abandoned)
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LAST OF 2012 READING

Stars of the Long Night by Tanue Ojaide (Nigerian, 2012)
Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (2012, US)
Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell (US, 2012)
One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead by Clare Dudman (UK, 2003)
Night Dancer by Chika Unigwe (2012, Nigerian/Belgian)
Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexican, 2012)
The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon (Guatemalan, 2012)

Previous reading threads:

Club Read '12, '11, '10 & '09 and 75 Book Challenge 2008.

Looking back at my meager reading for 2012, I observe that:
--I continue my Joyce Carol Oates obsession with five more of her works read.
--I also seem to have been attracted to cold places, not just the Nordic crime writers but novels set in Greenland, Iceland, the Canadian arctic...etc. (ice, ice, baby!) It might have something to do with a few days stopover in Iceland at the end of 2010.
--I didn't read much the second half of the year. Stress and distractions has made reading difficult.
--I don't give myself challenges, I'm an entirely free-range reader these days.
--About 1/3 of my fiction reading was translated fiction. The other 2/3rds is equally divided between authors from the US/Canada and the UK/Australia.
--40% of my fiction reading have been books published or first published in English in 2012.
--60% of my fiction reading was written by women (the highest percentage ever for me! but, then again, Joyce Carol Oates and Val McDermid account for 10 books themselves)
--My poetry reading was all of women poets
--My nonfiction this year was mostly books about books, literature or some element of literature (i.e. tragedy)... or exploring design/art/quilting books

My "Best Books" of 2012 (based purely on enjoyment) as of 12/12/12

Novels/Short Fiction

Night Dancer by Chika Unigwe (2012, Nigerian/Belgian) Poignant story set in Nigeria of one woman's search to understand her recently deceased mother, also ultimately a feminist story.

One Day the Ice Will Reveal Its Dead by Clare Dudman (2003) Fictionalized story of German meterologist Alfred Wegener. Beautiflly written, infused with the wonder of scientific discovery ... and so much more. Set in Greenland and Europe.

The Polish Boxer by Eduardo Halfon (Guatemalan, 2012) Connected 'encounters', a bit of meta-fiction, but beautifully-written story of a search for self that stretches from the Mayan jungle to the music halls of the Balkans

On Black Sisters' Street by Chika Unigwe (2009, Nigeria/Belgium) Story of four prostitutes from Nigeria (one from Ghana?) in Belgium and how they got there. Somewhat written using the vernacular Nigerian English .

Children in Reindeer Woods by Kristin Omarsdottir (T 2012, Iceland) Oddly compelling modernist story of war and its victims, set in an unnamed country.

Icefields by Thomas Wharton (Canadian) Historical, atmospheric tale of a fictional Canadian scientist exploring the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies. It has a touch of that same 'wonder' as the Dudman book.

Heading Inland: Stories by Nicola Barker (1998, UK) Clever, often odd and funny stories. (I read her Wide Open because it was one of the few women-authored books to win the Impac Dublin Award and have since picked up more of her work)

Them by Joyce Carol Oates (1969) Fictional treatment of a real person's life (who shared her story with Oates), who lived poor in the urban Detroit area in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Climaxes at the Detroit riots of '67

The Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates (2003, US) Very thought-provoking book about a not-really-but-a-cultural Jew—a noted author—and a young, poor, abused woman who is anti-semite. Ultimately about the things we inherit and what we do with them. Disturbing in a thought-provoking way.

Open Secrets: Stories by Alice Munro (1995, Canadian) All around good collection of stories about the many kinds of secrets we have.

Favorite Crime Novels

A Place of Execution by Val McDermid A girl goes missing in a town where everyone knows everyone else (a bit inbred too) and no one is really being honest.
White Heat by M. J. McGrath (2011? crime/mystery, Ellesmere Island/Arctic) Excellent less for the crime part than the immersion into the Inuit culture.
The Distant Echo by Val McDermid (2003, Scotland) Excellent crime novel about the unintended victims of a crime investigation.
Whispering Death by Garry Disher (2011, Australia) Too complex to distill down to one line, but excellent as always.

Poetry

Selections from New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland (2009, Irish) I've only touched on this collection, but there's a lot here!
Selections from: The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich (1978, poetry) This is a classic feminist collection now, timelessly powerful.
Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (2010, Iranian) Interesting, evocation and sensual poetry from a pioneer who died very young.

Nonfiction

Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond by Jane Maas (2012, memoir, advertising) Just a bit o' fun that works as a companion to the fabulous "Mad Men" television series

Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction by John Sutherland (2007, nonfiction) A very British viewpoint, but interesting look into the phenomenon of 'bestsellers'

Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction by Adrian Poole Not sure I liked the organization of this little book, but some of the content was fabulous (especially if you read JCO or others who see tragedy as high art)

Hark! A Vagrant! by Kate Beaton (2011, comics) A collection of literate (and literary), intelligent and often very funny comics.

I love your best of 2012 list, much of which I have 'cut and paste' directly onto my wishlist. Thanks!

>4 Linda92007: Why thank you, Linda, I consider that a compliment. I really read about half of what I usually do in a year, but was still fortunate to have read some great books and oftentimes so very different from each other.

I went to add a couple of titles to my wishlist and realized they were already there. With the tag "rec by avaland". I need to get reading. Hopefully 2013 will be a quieter year for us both.

>6 labfs39: Hi labfs39, yes, let's hope so.

I'll have to give Val McDermid another try. I didn't enjoy the one I read, but that was a while ago and I always enjoy listening to her whenever she's on literary panels and discussions.

>8 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for popping in! I decided to avoid her series and just read the independent titles. The two on my 'best' list are particularly good, and I'd recommend trying those first.

Thanks for recently reposting your review of Dark Places.

HAvaland--I'm going to try to keep up with everyone in CR this year.

I finally got to Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates this year, after it languishing on my shelf forever. It was magnificent. Is Blonde one that you have read?

>11 arubabookwoman: Hi! Good luck with keeping up with everyone. I've never been completely successful at that. I have not read Blonde, nor We Were the Mulvaneys either, but perhaps I will get to them someday.

I really hope to settle down and write some short comments on my last six reads from 2012...all very good reads of one kind or another, and not books that everyone is talking about.

I was a naughty girl at the bookstore today. I said I'd cut back on books. Honest. I can stop at any time. It's amazing to have spent so much time going through hundreds of publisher cataloga and yet still enjoy a good browse through the fiction shelves. Bought:

Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, edited (something I ordered last June (!) after seeing it in the Interlink catalog—a new imprint: Olive Branch Press)

The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams. Of course, I had seen this in the catalogs prior to publications but sometimes one just needs to be in the right mental 'place', eh? I very much enjoyed her previous book, Harbor.

Understories by Tim Horvath. Found on the shelf (sometimes because of time constraints I overlook male writers when I'm working the catalogs for Belletrista). Intriguing and inventive short fiction, right up my alley. And it's published by Bellevue Literary Press, a small press who also published The Polish Boxer and Tinkers - both 5-star reads for me.

Love your thread title this year; it sounds like a world of wonders about to be revealed. Looking forward to it.

>14 SassyLassy: thanks. I hope circumstances do not prevent from keeping it going.

It's great to have you back Lois. You've already tempted me with a number of the the books listed in post #3...and all three in post 13.

I was a naughty girl at the bookstore today. I said I'd cut back on books. Honest. I can stop at any time.

Is this comment by the same person whose attitude adjustment surgery freed her from guilt about book purchases?

>16 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I'm still terrified every time I click into the group and see that, as usual, I'm 14 - 25 messages behind yet again. Not sure I can maintain my old activity level.

>17 kidzdoc: Yes, but I have an excuse - financial circumstances have drastically changed. So, being 'naughty' carries a less playful tone. :-) Wishlists are my friends.

Glad to see you back as well.

Re - a couple of books you mentioned -

I saw JCO last year at the Edinburgh Book Festival discussing Mudwoman but I'm still so traumatised by A Widow's Story that I don't when I'll get round to reading it.

Hoping to get to The Polish Boxer in the next week or so. (Picked up the ebook last week on your recommendation).

>19 Jargoneer: Good to see you back also, Turner. Seems there were quite a few of us who were 'away' for extended lengths of time. Oh, you read A Widow's Story! I chose not to, but I did hear an extensive NPR interview with her on it. Mudwoman is soooooo last year, Turner (ha ha). She's got two novels coming out this year: The Accursed and Carthage - the former is an historical novel, the latter allegedly has some connection to Mudwoman but I don't see what it is - yet.

Hey, I recently rediscovere, tucked behind some other books, that Postmodernism book, which started that discussion on the subject we had years ago. I thought it might be worth rereading at some point as I've read so much more since that time. Both the Polish Boxer and the Nigerian novel I recently read had me thinking about the subject.

I said I was going to try to comment on the last books of 2012. I'm finding it difficult to write extensive reviews these days, so I'll keep them short.


Black Dahlia and White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (2012, US)

This will not be my favorite JCO collection, but it's an interesting one nonetheless. The loose theme in this collection, as noted on the book, is one of menace or threat. While the title story deals with an obvious menace, a killer, most of the stories are about more subtle or internal threats. A young teen is taken to identify a body to determine whether it is her mother. A young man, sitting among graduates waiting to collect his diploma, contemplates revealing himself to his notable biological father, who is there on stage to receive an honorary degree (and has no clue that the son exists). A woman is called into her daughter's school because there seems to be evidence that her daughter is being abused by someone (this is told from the mother's viewpoint). A woman thinks she is seeing a spotted hyena or a man with fur lurking around her house. The taut strings under the surface of a marriage are plucked during a trip to Rome...

Oates succeeds in making us feel that sense of menace on one end or the other. We are often inside the narrator's head for these stories, along with their fears, both real and imagined. She's brilliant at that stuff.

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Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell (US, 2012)

This coming-of-age novel follows a year or two in the life of teenager Margo Crane, who sets off on her own after she shoots the tip of her uncle's penis off (she's a crack shot with a rifle) and her father is mistakenly killed because of it. She is remarkably self-sufficient in a backwoods sort of way, but is terribly naive generally, and she wanders in and out of situations along the river she loves accordingly. This is a compelling story, rich with descriptive detail, and both Margo and the river are interesting characters. Her name and at least one scene in the book reminded me of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. This novel comes out of a short story in Campbell's National Book Award nominated collection, American Salvage, and as much as I enjoyed this novel, I thought the short story packed more punch. Still, I will look forward to future writing by Campbell.

I liked the way Once Upon a River extended the story of Margo, and of course it is thanks to you that I'm a Bonnie Jo Campbell fan.

Thanks for your comments on Black Dahlia and White Rose; sounds like a collection I would enjoy.

>22 rebeccanyc: You're welcome. I must remember to go check your comments on this book. I remember when you were reading it. I think I have mentioned that I sense some similarities with some of JCO's work. Margo is the kind of character JCO would also take up in story, and the story might be similar, but the ending would be more tragic.

THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY BOOKS!!!!!! ARGGGGGGGHHHHH! There, I said it.

>23 LisaMorr: My husband read a few of the stories yesterday and like them, though he skipped the title story which is fairly gruesome, based on a true crime. Don't know if he'll continue with the collection though. If he creates his 2013 thread, he might comment on them (to him: hint, hint)

Dare I say it, I've never read JCO. In addition, I'm not usually a short story reader. This short story collection sounds really interesting though. Thanks for the enticing review.

>25 labfs39: Oh, Lisa, you are not alone. I've attempted her before (maybe it was bad choices or I just wasn't in a receptive place) with no luck. It wasn't until about 2002 that I started to explore her work, and I started slowly. It has had its own momentum and it's been more intense in the last four or so years. Now, every book I read is part of a continuing 'study' of her work. It's like turning a crystal around to see the different facets.

It seems that you've become a real fan. Some of the works you've reviewed have sounded a little too grimly real for me to be able to read. I'm a wimp when it comes to abuse and torture or real crime. But this collection sounds like it may be an easier way in for me, if I skip the first story.

>27 labfs39: Yes, I sense that from what I know of your reading. I wouldn't say she writes any consolatory fiction. She looks deeply into the things we'd rather not look at, parts of society we'd rather not acknowledge, but also turns over the rock of our national myths, icons, ideals and obsessions to see what crawls out from underneath. And she's always rummaging around in people's heads. I find it wonderfully stimulating.

I would be more likely to recommend for you something like A Bloodsmoor Romance, which is part homage and spoof of Little Women...

I saw Black Dahlia and White Rose in passing and thought that maybe it was her take on that famous Hollywood murder. I may try that one -- JCO hasn't resonated with me, despite three attempts, but maybe in the short story form?

>21 avaland: I picked Once Upon a River up impulsively a while back. Every once in a while I look at it on the shelf and think, why did I buy that book? Your review has inspired me to move it up the list (just as soon as I finish these other 30 books that keep skipping line)!

>29 RidgewayGirl: It's told from the viewpoint of the dead woman, Elizabeth Short aka The Black Dahlia, who in the story is now beyond the pain of torture and a grisly death. She does write great short stories. Which books have you attempted? I'd have to study what you read in more detail before I could recommend one (I'm off to look at your last year's reading list...)

>30 _debbie_: It's a good read. I was looking for something straightforward and easy to read over the holidays and that did the trick.

>29 RidgewayGirl: RG, have you tried Mysteries of Winterthurn? Dismayed to not find my review on the book's page, I went back to Club Read 2009 to find it! Here are my comments as posted 9/26/09:

It had not seemed like an entirely quixotic plan to write a sequence of "genre" novels linked by political, cultural, and moral (especially "feminist") themes, set in a long-ago/mythic America intended to suggest contemporary times: a Gothic family saga, a nineteenth-century 'romance," a saga of Gothic horror . . . and a "novel of mystery and detection." It had not seemed quixotic — but then, it never does, for otherwise we would not have outsized and unclassifiable works of art, of any kind — to hope that there might be readers for such novels, that seek to transform what might be called psychological realism into "Gothic" elements . . . Joyce Carol Oates in the Author's Afterword for Mysteries of Winterthurn.

I include the excerpt above because the author herself does a fine job of describing this superb novel. Mysteries of Winterthurn is a collection of three inter-related stories - mysteries - cases 'solved' by the renowed American detective Xavier Kilgarven. Our narrator is a private collector of "Murder", as he puts it, an amateur expert, looking back upon the time of these 'cases' in the late 19th century. He tells the tales with a wonderful, heightened language and much omniscience (considering he is just a 'collector'). He leads the reader down a merry path (ok, 'merry' may not be the right word here) with many a short excursion hinter and yon. It's delightfully frustrating (of course, I know that is an oxymoron!) when the reader is anxious about the fate of our hero, or the verdict of a jury.

Winterthurn is a small city, full of large family estates with their pedigreed occupants (the Kilgarvens are but one of them), and all of the other things a bustling American city of the late 19th century might have (i.e. mills, millworkers, boarding houses, cottages, churches . . .). Xavier is a young man who has not yet left the city to find fame and fortune in Manhattan in the first tale, and middle-aged in the last. There is something that plagues him internally about these mysteries in his home town.

There is certainly a lot I could say about why I so enjoyed Winterthurn — in short, it is a wonderfully entertaining, thought-provoking novel. In the afterward, Oates talks briefly about why we are attracted to classic Gothic tales, a sort of acting out of an inner reality (my paraphrase). I find myself mulling that from time to time and really enjoying the mull when I do!

Strangely, I read this book over the course of about two months. I would read a chapter or two and then set it aside while I read something else. I'm not sure why I did that, it certainly was not out of disinterest, but I don't regret reading it in such a way. This is a not-for-everyone novel, I suppose, but it has become, I think, my favorite Oates work.

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Oates in that first quote is talking about her "American Gothics": Bellefleur (a Gothic family saga), A Bloodsmoor Romance (a nineteenth-century 'romance), My Heart Laid Bare ( a saga of Gothic horror . . .) and Mysteries of Winterthurn (a "novel of mystery and detection)

(Bloodsmoor has replaced Winterthurn as my favorite of the three here I have read).

I've read Man Crazy and A Fair Maiden. I think there was one more, A Bloodsmoor Romance (?), but read as a teenager and since utterly forgotten except for a hot air balloon scene, so I can't really count it. Man Crazy had one single utterly horrifyingly realistic scene and many scenes that didn't ring true, at least to me. I have a copy of The Female of the Species and will try her short stories, unless you think The Mysteries of Winterthurn would be better.

>33 RidgewayGirl: Yes, the balloon kidnapping scene is early in A Bloodsmoor Romance. Perhaps you were too young. It's a romp and the book has one of the funniest scenes in it that I have ever read in one of her books - involving a dressmaker's dummy.

I have not read Man Crazy and I probably wouldn't have recommended A Fair Maiden to you (which I thought interesting but not stellar). You might well like The Female of the Species, it's all mystery or suspense, except for one story that I would classify as horror. I have an extra copy of Winterthurn, if you would like it. It's a newish paperback (I could use the room as my JCO collection overfloweth!)

I have told myself that I can not go read any more threads until I finish commenting on my 2012 reads.



Down the Rabbit Hole: A Novel by Juan Pablo Villalobos (Mexican, 2010, translated from the Spanish, 2012)

This short novel (more of a novella or novelette really) is a dark comedy about the isolated life of a paranoid drug lord as told by his seven year old son. Tochti is a motherless kid with some odd interests: samurai, dictionaries and words, and hats, and he really wants a pygmy hippopotamus for his collection. He lives in isolation in a palatial estate, knowing only a few people. His tutor, the cook, the two bodyguards, his father's girlfriend. And Tochti is learning the lingo of the drug trade.

I thought the book an interesting and enjoyable read, a sad book because Tochti's innocence in being chipped away at before our eyes. Yet, it's darkly comic, taking something tragic and making it funny and often absurd. It's been highly praised and was short-listed for the Guardian first book prize, but I can't rave about it. Vilalobos is clearly a talented new writer and worth watching.

(I think I noticed later on Darryl's 2012 thread that he read it in October about the same time I did and it looks like our end rating is about the same).

#35 Interesting.

Night Dancer by Chika Unigwe (2012, Nigerian, Translated from the Dutch)

This novel is one of self-discovery, of feminism, of coming into one's own, and yet also very much a story of daughters and mothers. Our introduction to Mma, a young, educated Nigerian woman, is just after her mother's death when she is struggling with her feelings towards her. She really resented her mother and the sources of her resentment are a bit of mystery to the reader. Mma was brought up without a father and her single mother (very unusual in Nigeria) worked as a night dancer to support them in a reasonably comfortable lifestyle. Mma's resentment is off-putting, and to the reader it feels unjust. Slowly the book becomes one of discovery, as Mma reluctantly begins to learn about her mother and her mother's past, and discovers the family left behind.

While this novel doesn't pack the punch of Unigwe's first novel, On Black Sisters' Street, it still is a very good read. Both of Unigwe's novels are about the lives of women, and her stories are not overly complex. She is excellent at connecting readers with her characters (despite the fact that Mma is hard to like at the beginning of this book). The feminist aspect of this story is of a mother who made choices that bucked tradition. Readers of Adichie and other authors of the Nigerian diaspora will find Unigwe a welcome addition to their reading.

Stars of the Long Night by Tanure Ojaide (2012, Nigerian)

Stars of the Long Night is a storytelling dance. Instead of taking the straightest path, it dances round and round, in and out, taking the reader here and there, past and present, myth and reality, to create not just a narrative of a people who are first expecting, then planning and celebrating a festival, but a whole cultural education.

I'm not sure when this book is set, pre-colonial times, it seems. The Okpara people of this story live in the Niger Delta in the region of Agbon, a collection of smaller communities. It is expected that the people will be celebrating the Edjenu festival this year, a festival that only comes around once every 30 years or so. Indeed the festival is the riveting climax of the book. But along the way we are introduced to many interesting Okpara people but we are also taken on many storytelling excursions into history and myth.

I really enjoyed this book, which is so incredibly rich in cultural details. It's almost as if the author felt he needed to get this all down or the story of the Okpara people would be lost. The narrative "dance" is perfect for the story it has to tell, so much so, that when you finally get to the dancing at the festival you feel you have been practicing for it like everyone else. Like most, I'm accustomed to mostly straightforward, linear narratives, so the digressions (are they digressions?) made me impatient at times, but no more than with some of those infuriating Victorian narrators, or post-modern/modern narratives I've read (which got me thinking about traditional storytelling and the nonlinear narratives linked to post-modernism...but that's another topic). This is another book that readers of the Nigerian diaspora should not miss.

Note: I bought this book through The African Book Collective, which brings to the world books published by African publishers, in this case, Malthouse Press out of Lagos.

Both books sound interesting, Lois, and thans for the link to the African Book Collective. Very dangerous!

>39 rebeccanyc: There's not a lot of fiction in their offerings, but it's interesting to see what the UK and US publishers aren't picking up. kambrogi favorably reviewed Chasing the Leopard, Finding the Lion in the most recent issue of Belletrista and that was another book that I got from the collective.

One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead by Clare Dudman (UK, 2003)

I started this book early last year but had to set it aside because life got in the way. It is not a book to read while distracted or stressed. In fact, I started the book several times before I could settle into it, and even then I read it slowly. It is sometimes like reading poetry.

One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead is a first person account of the life of the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener. Wegener (1880-1930) is notable to us now for his pioneering arctic explorations and his theory of continental drift. Dudman researched from mostly German sources, there not being much available about Wegener in English. And she tells us she derived his voice from his many diaries. From he and his brother's early efforts to use weather balloons and also hot air balloon flights to enable research, to his death on his last polar exploratory trip in Greenland in 1930, the book chronicles his both his scientific and personal lives in a way, I think, no biography could do.

Beautifully written, this stunning novel is wonderfully descriptive:

The icicles dangle like the fringed edges of an Inuit's anorak. They pick out each ridge of the icy roof, layer after layer, as if they are hung from a hidden rope and the slightest wind would make them jangle. But they ping only if they are touched, snapping neatly into a fragile spike and a blunt partner. So we limbo-dance carefully under the low roof of the entrance, following the river under the glacier.

Even Bertelsen is speechless. We have emerged into a cathedral, blue-lit not from the sky, but from the sun shining through the ice: cerulean blue and turquoise glance off every face and illuminate every crevice. The sound of water mixes with its own echoes off the ceiling: gurglings and sudden rushes, quieter and then louder. A gasp from Koch is made into a whisper, as if there is someone listening and answering back.

It is Wegener's voice that carries us through this book, indeed, it is a baptismal immersion of a kind. Oftentimes it is infused with wonder, the joys of discovery, a reverence for the physical world that sometimes seems spiritual. Yet we also feel his frustrations and deep disappointments. We seem him in love, and we see him at war. We understand what drives him. One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead is a brilliant book, fascinating, often riveting, and wonderfully lyrical.

With those comments on the Dudman novel, I have finally finished up 2012's readings and will move on to 2013!

The Dudman novel sounds wonderful, Lois. Thank you for that enticing review.

>43 Linda92007: Thanks, Linda. I'm not sure I felt quite equal to the task.

That does sound fascinating -- and such a great title too.

Excellent review of One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead, Lois!

Wonderful review. Did this reading follow from Icefields?

Thanks.

>47 SassyLassy: It was more or less an interesting coincidence that I had both books acquired via different paths. I picked up the Wharton after reading his The Logogryph. I picked up the Dudman after Jeff and Ann VanderMeer raved about it (I made a habit of asking (authors I hosted at the store) what they had read lately. I think the Dudman is the more superior book, though the Wharton predates it.

Great review! I will add the Dudman book to my wishlist. I read Icefields and enjoyed it mainly because I'm familiar with the area and loved the historical aspect. It will be interesting to compare the two.

Enjoyed all your end-of-2012 comments...but that Dudman stands out. It's on the wishlist. I started Icefields on the way to Israel, in August - read 70 some-odd pages on the plane, and enjoyed them...and then never got back to it. Too many things happened. So, it's back on the TBR shelf.

>49 VivienneR: Thanks, Vivienne. It is indeed interesting to compare the two.

>50 dchaikin: I did think of you, Dan. I think you might like it.

>38 avaland: - that's an interesting site. I can't help wondering if the rise of ebooks will allow more African writers access beyond local markets. Naturally the problem will still remain about how to get them seen but having them made available is a start.

>41 avaland: - that is a great title and much better than the original Wegener's Jigsaw.

I caught most of a review by Maureen Corrigan on NPR on Gubar and Gilbert's 1979 volume of literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Apparently the National Book Critics' Circle has awarded the duo a lifetime achievement award (which I was damned pleased about). Made me want to haul the tome off the shelf and read it again.

HERE is the 8.5 minute piece on the book. I think most of you would find the review interesting.



I also have heard that the US poet Sharon Olds has won the T.S. Eliot prize for a collection she wrote after her husband left her for another woman. Congratulations to Ms. Olds.

I was a big Sharon Olds fan in the early 1990s. I began with The Gold Cell. Her confessional style was refreshing to me at the time, but after digesting five collections I felt the confessional style had begun to grate on me. Perhaps I had just moved on. That said, her skills as a poet are undisputed, certainly worthy of study, and it doesn't surprise me that personal details of her pain and loss are the subject of her latest work.

Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh (Lebanon, 2009, Translated from the Arabic 2012)

Always Coca-Cola is a deceptively simple tale of three college-age women in contemporary Lebanon. Abeer Ward has been brought up in a traditional Muslim family, she navigates the modern world tentatively, and with much naivete. Her name which means "Fragrant Rose" in Arabic is also the name of her father's flower shop. Her friend Yasmine lives on her own in an apartment, and attends university with Abeer. Because of a German mother, she is light-skinned and is teasingly called "milk" by Yana. She has an unusual penchant for boxing. Yana originally came from Romania with her Lebanese ex-husband. After her divorce she found work as a model and her oversized image, in a red bikini, hovers over the city on a Coca-Cola billboard. We are introduced to the threesome in the middle of a crisis: Yana thinks she is pregnant.

This engaging story is told from Abeer's viewpoint, which is laced with a interesting mix of edgy humor and naivete. She is trying to navigate the modern world in the space between her conservative family and her street savvy friends - and it's a world of constant discovery and challenges. Just a trip to the drug store with her friends becomes a daring escapade (what if a relative sees her!). I think it's always a good sign when at the end of the book, the reader wishes there were more.

The book apparently caused "a storm" in Lebanon a few years ago. The translator's notes reveal the difficulty of translating the elaborate wordplay and specificity of things that Chreiteh uses in the book. And apparently the author also used formal (literary) Arabic to express things not normally expressed in it. All very interesting.

----------
Abeer's whole family gathers at her grandmother's house for lunch every Friday after prayers (the population of a small village crammed in a three room apartment, she says). Her description of the whole event is hilarious. Here's a small part of the event:

At that moment, my mother came into the bedroom to tell us that she had seen the men returning from the mosque and that we should prepare some coffee for them. Hala took on this task and so I went to open the door for my father, brothers, Uncle Khalid, Uncle Ahmad, and his son, who had not yet entered the house but were standing outside waiting for the end of the hijab-putting-on-process in the living room. This hijab-putting-on-process at first glance seems simple and easy, but it actually involves a complicated computational process: every woman must calculate her relative relationship with each one of the men, and as quickly as possible, to deduce whether she must put on the hijab to hide her charms from him, even if she has no charms.

The women used their tried and true expertise to finish these calculations with the speed of a new computer. As they covered their hair, they looked to me like women warriors putting on their helmets to prepare for a battle that they might have to rush into at any second. When they were at last ready for this battle, the men came into the living room, greeted the women and then evicted the children from the sofas, occupying them themselves.

eta to fix typos

One more for the lists. Good review.

Always coca-cola sounds a fascinating read.

>55 RidgewayGirl:, 56 Thanks, Kay and Barry.

------------



The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg (Denmark, 2006, Translated from the Danish 2007)

This complex, philosophical, literary thriller with a musical, famous circus clown as its action hero is a dizzying, but riveting read. I'm not sure I've read anything quite like it. Sometimes I felt I was being used as a pin in a juggling act.

Kasper Krone, the clown, is being pursued by the Danish government for his gambling debts and tax evasion, and will face deportation if they catch him. Kasper is 42, brilliant, and possesses an unusual sense of hearing; he can sense a "world of sounds" behind physical sound, including the music within each of us. This special ability has a variety of uses, one of which involves helping children. An unusual young girl is briefly brought to him for help. She has a certain 'silence' that captures Kasper's attention and he knows he must find her. Turns out she and a group of children have been kidnapped. He sets out and is soon being pursued by almost everyone for one reason or another. Circus people have some interesting resources and abilities. His de-facto 'sidekick' is a a former race car driver who now is a legless, for-hire driver. The number of players in this book can be confusing - the ministry, the scientists, the corporation, the doctor, the police, the circus contacts, and family members and ex-girlfriends. Oh, and the nuns (are they really nuns?).

Alternating between action sequences and back story, The Quiet Girl is beautifully written with a wry humor, and is both fascinating and strangely thoughtful. Kasper's musings on sound, music and silence are philosophical and often mystical. It's a challenging read and might not be for everyone, but I found it thoroughly invigorating.

------
Excerpt. In a back story segment, Kasper has told his lover, Stina, how he came to have his unusual hearing and she has asked him what keeps the rest of us from hearing what he hears:

It took him a long time to reply. Only once before had he spoken about this to another person.

In order to live in this world we need to keep an orchestra playing. Way in the foreground. It's a small dance orchestra. It always plays its own melody. It plays the golden oldie 'Kasper Krone.' Which has a series of refrains that are repeated over and over. Again and again it plays our bank account numbers, our childhood memories, our PIN numbers, the sound of our mother's and father's voices. The pale-green strophes we hope will be the future. The black noise we have good reason to suppose will be our actual reality. It plays continuously, like a heartbeat. But when the other sound begins to come through, you discover that you've been standing with your back to the true concert hall the whole time. We live in a sort of lobby. Where we can faintly hear the great orchestra. And that sound, just the embouchure to a sound from the real concert hall, makes the Mass in B-Minor disappear. Like a whisper in windy weather. It's a sound that sweeps away the din of war. It drowns the music of the spheres. It takes away all the sounds of reality. And at the same time as you vaguely hear the great orchestra, you vaguely sense the price of the ticket. When the door to the real concert hall begins to open you discover that perhaps you were mistaken. That Kasper Krone exists only because your ears continue to isolate the same little refrain from the collected mass of sound. That in order to preserve Kasper and Stina we've turned down the input from other channels to pianissimo. But that's about to change. And you can feel it. If you want to go inside, it will be the most expensive concert tickets anyone has ever bought. It will cost you the sound of your own self.

OK, I just read the other LT reviews of The Quiet Girl and am surprised to find so many readers who just didn't get this book. There is a lot going on in this book. It is dizzying and there might be a temptation to put it down, but it's such an odd story and Kasper is such a different sort of action hero... If you are looking for a straightforward thriller, this book is probably not for you. While it has some great action sequences and chase scenes, they are mixed with a lot back story (if you couldn't get through Middlemarch because of Eliot's forays into art, science and philosophy, you probably won't like this book...). It probably has some weaknesses, but it's a bloody brilliant and clever piece of writing.

Note: That said, I know some wonderful readers here in CR who very likely would not like it.

Taking mental note of Hoeg. The thriller aspects actually turn me off a bit, but sounds terrific.

Fabulous review of The Quiet Girl, Lois. I suppose I'll have to read it to find out which camp I fall into, so I'll add it to my wish list.

ETA: The reviews of this book on Amazon are highly variable, with eleven 5 star ratings and nine 1 star ratings.

The Quiet Girl really divides the critics on LT; people seem to love it or hate it and I can see why from your review. It sounds great to me.

>59 dchaikin: Dan, I'm not much of a thriller fan; in fact, even in the police procedurals I read I get a little irritated with thriller elements that are thrown in (they like to call every crime novel a thriller these days, but they aren't). The oddity of the story (clown as action hero, children and clown with special abilities) and the alternating between thoughtfulness and action makes it digestible. Did I say some geophysics is involved?

>60 kidzdoc: Darryl, to be honest, I don't think you would like it. The reviews on LT are just as variable (oops, I see Barry has noted this). I remember we differed on a few books in the past and it strikes me as one of those type of books we disagree on.

>61 baswood: Barry, I don't have a deep enough sense of your reading to recommend either way. A delightfully odd read, for sure. And did I mention the detail? I don't know how authors can do that - put so much detail about so many different things.

You've convinced me to give The Quiet Girl a go; just about every element you mentioned has some interest, so putting them all together is intriguing.

>62 avaland: Thanks, Lois. After I posted my message and read some of the widely disparate reviews on Amazon, so I suspected that I might not like The Quiet Girl.

The Room and the Chair by Lorraine Adams (2011, US)

I very much enjoyed Adams' previous novel, Harbor, a story of Algerians who stowaway on ship to the US and what becomes of them. Her latest novel brings us the story behind what could be headlines on any given day.

A pilot ejects from her F16 Viper just before it crashes in the Potomac River at night, the lights of the Watergate Hotel twinkling in the distance. The pilot is Captain Mary "Extra" Goodwin and it is her story that is the anchor line in this complex literary thriller.

The "room" of the book's title is the newsroom of a prominent D.C. newspaper, always a flurry of activity, but now scrambling to sort fact from rumor about the crash, and as fast as they can. We see how the newsroom works in fascinating detail.

The "chair" of the book's title is Will Holmes, former soldier and spook now running a secretive agency—the one responsible for the crash—which was testing a remote way to control a plane without the pilot knowing it, a way to stop suicide pilots—without Capt. Goodwin's knowledge.

The narrative moves In alternating segments between several plotlines, following numerous characters (some more prominent than others), in an elaborate, sometimes dizzying dance from D.C. to Iran and Afghanistan, as the author brings it all her pieces together. Her characters are wonderfully done, credible and fascinating each in their own way. I'm not sure I expected to be so totally mesmerized by this book, but the author carries us along, voyeurs to things usually unseen, and witnesses to the lives affected . It's hard to turn away. And yet, there were some places where I got a bit lost, and there is something I can't quite identify that keeps me just short of raving about the book (but please, don't let that stop you from reading it).

Not a book I would picked up based on the plot. But, if I were going to try a thriller, this sounds like one I might like.

Lovely reviews.

>67 amandameale: Thanks.



The Blind Goddess by Anne Holt (1993, Norwegian, reprinted 2013)

A solid police procedural, The Blind Goddess is the first in the Detective Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen series, of which there are now a total of eight books. The most recent in the series is 1222, which I read in 2011. In that novel, which was clearly an homage to Agatha Christie, Hanne is retired and in a wheelchair, so it was interesting to go back to the beginning of the series and see the younger (and less hardened) woman.

Holt was among the early wave of Scandinavian crime writers, along with other like Mankell and Fossum, writing in the 1990s well before the Scandi-crime craze hit. I should also note that this series, featuring a female detective inspector as primary character comes just a year or two after the airing of Lynda Laplante's "Prime Suspect," which featured, at the time, one of the most credible portrayals of a woman working in the law enforcement field. It remains to be seen whether Hanne will wrestle with the kinds of challenges DCI Jane Tennison did (but I'll let you know).

On an Oslo street, a lawyer comes across a badly disfigured body, which is deemed a drug-related killing according to police. A suspect is soon brought in and confesses, but asks for the lawyer who found the body to represent him. Why? This begins a complicated and satisfying onion-peeling plot, which doesn't even quite end with it's tense, thriller-like climax. Holt's characters are interesting and credible, so it's easy to get engrossed in the book and lose track of what you were supposed to be doing...if you know what I mean.

I've read Holt's Vik/Stubo series, which is why I picked up 1222 when it came out.

A well written crime novel is a satisfying thing. I'm reading an ER book right now, written by a man, with a female detective as the protagonist, only she's really an action/adventure man inside a hot lady's body. It's not uncommon, but it's jarring in a world of literature that has well written and credible female law enforcement personnel.

>69 RidgewayGirl: And she was probably wearing heels too! Same was true of the Scottoline lawyer thrillers I used to listen to on audio during my old commute. Well, as you know, some authors are not gifted in the character development department, and often some stories, particularly thrillers, don't really require much. Note: You and I both know that real women superheroes wear flat shoes (for running) and sports bras! (and are more likely resemble Olympic athletes than buxom babes)

I see you're back on top book-pushing form ;-)

>25 labfs39:, 26 re JCO. I think she's definitely a writer you've got to find the right way in with (and not every reader's going to have the same way in). I was at my mum's over Christmas and fell upon a copy of The Falls with glee (I brought it back with me). I couldn't remember ever having seen it before but my mum assured me I left it there several years ago, having been unable to get more than a chapter or two into it. Now, a few years on, and with several JCOs under my belt (largely thanks to you, Lois!), I can't wait to try it again.

>71 rachbxl: I agree wholeheartedly. And not just "the right way in" but perhaps the right time also. The Falls is one I haven't read. I've just started My Heart Laid Bare.

The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill (2006, UK)

The Pure in Heart is the second installment of Susan Hill's crime series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler. I read her first book back in 2005 and this second book has been sitting on my shelf since 2006. One might ask why and I would not have an answer for them. Since obtaining this 2nd book though, I have read five or six other works by Hill, who seems to be drawn more often than not to the psychological, and often dark, including Gothic and ghost stories.

I think it's safe to say that Susan Hill doesn't write the typical police procedural. She's exploring something somewhat different than the average crime writer. What I remember of the first installment is that she choose to unveil her detective to the reader through the viewpoints of three women in his life, and that she has no qualms killing off someone we as readers might have developed an attachment to.

I had never thought of writing crime novels because to me those had always meant ‘detective stories’ and although I enjoyed reading them, I knew I would be no good at the problem-solving sort of story with a series of dropped clues and a surprise ending. But the crime novel has become a serious literary genre over the last few decades and I realised that it presented the sort of challenge I wanted.

My aim was to look at issues in the world around me and contemporary life – which I have not done in my novels before. I also wanted to know not ‘who dunnit’ but much more importantly, WHY ? What motivates a criminal ? Why does someone murder and perhaps not only once ? (excerpt, read the rest here)

I also think it's safe to say that one should expect Hill to muck about with formula, and mess with the reader's head a bit. I remember the first installment being a satisfying crime novel, intriguingly different and yet, I also felt I'd been run over by small truck. After this second book it felt like I had been not only watching, but performing in some sort of emotional circus. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy it.

Simon is the only policeman in a family of doctors. He's a sensitive sort, an artist in his spare time (reminiscent of P.D.James's poet detective, Adam Dalgleish), but incredibly screwed up when it comes to women. So, yes, he's still a bachelor, but not a loner because he has a close family (he is one of triplets, btw). The personal and the professional have to be juggled at the same time when Simon is called home from his Venice holiday because his younger sister, who has the mind of an infant, is dying. She rallies just as Simon is called in to work when a young boy goes missing. I think I'll leave the synopsis at that. Enjoy the ride.

PS: I, of course, ran out and picked up the 3rd installment but I may wait a while to read it, though maybe not six years.
PSS: I really intended to only write a paragraph or two...

Good review of the Susan Hill book, avaland. I find it interesting to read Hill's comments on crime fiction, which is probably the only "genre" that I don't often read, because of what seems to me the intrinsic flaw in the genre of stringing the reader along with clues and assorted crimes. I also dislike the focus on a "quirky" or "interesting" detective/sleuth/mentalist/whoever. who is either a troubled genius, an everyman with some exceptional skills, or an alcoholic. I know I'm generalising, as Hill's book indicates, but so much of the genre consists of enjoyable-yet-shallow stories that I've pretty much given up on it. Maybe I'll try Hill, and see whether she changes my mind.

Wow, 4 book bullets here! I'll take Always Coca-Cola, The Quiet Girl, The Room and the Chair and Blind Goddess.

I first came across Susan Hill while browsing in a Heathrow bookstore where I picked up The Small Hand which I thought was well-done. Not sure when exactly or why, but I then picked up The Risk of Darkness and The Pure in Heart but haven't read either yet. And with your review now I know I will really like them and I need to get the first in the series!

Catching up on your thread, Lois -- Always Coca-Cola sounds interesting; I'm intrigued by women's lives in the Middle East. I've recently picked up a copy of The Quiet Girl as I loved Smilla's Sense of Snow -- it's at the top of my TBR list -- though I'm determined to finish some of the half-read books I have sitting around before I start anything new.

Great distinction of the "why?" versus "who?" Enjoyed the review and now I have to contemplate another series.

>74 dmsteyn: Might or might not. The first book is The Various Haunts of Men. I think now I understand why crime novelists prefer 'loners.'

>75 LisaMorr: Sorry. I didn't realize I was so dangerous :-) Yes, I too read The Small Hand, but also The Woman in Black, The Beacon, The Man in the Picture, Mrs DeWinter and the one about male friendship during the war...I forget the title now...possibly others, but those are the titles that come to mind. I have a few others in the TBR pile.

>76 janeajones: I don't remember Smilla's being so complex and detailed (how is an author able to stuff so much into a book, on such an array of topics?) Hmm. I think you might like it. It's such an odd, circus of a book. It's also one of those books that one either loves it or hates.

>77 SassyLassy: It wasn't out in the US when I read the first and bought the second, but I did notice there are 6 or more on the shelf now.

I have finished the latest Ian Rankin, and will eventually jot down some succinct (notice I'm saying succinct) notes on three poetry collections I've been wandering through.

Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin (2013, UK: Scottish)

It's a great pleasure to settle into a book where one is visiting an old friend. Rebus is back, sort of. Retired from the force, he has been working as a civilian on cold cases. A phone call regarding an old case—a missing teenaged girl—catches his attention, and before you know it—after he's made a very tentative connection between his cold case and a fresh one—he's back in the game, sort of, but definitely underfoot around the precinct headquarters. Rebus is delightfully punchy, far less morose and cynical these days, still drinking and smoking too much, and he seems to now enjoy being an irritant to others. Policing and technology has moved on in the years since Rebus retired, and he is even more a dinosaur now than before.

It seems Siobhan has also moved on since her days with Rebus and his temporary 'return' could threaten her career....so says Malcolm Fox of the "Complaints" department, who has been keeping more than a casual eye on Rebus—mostly because there is a chance Rebus might apply to rejoin the force (retirement age was raised and retirees are being allowed to reapply). Fox is very interested in Rebus's regular pub meetings with big Ger Cafferty, still one of the biggest crime lords in the region.

So, for me, this book was: old friends, new faces, an interesting and complex case (cases, actually), the old ways vs modernity...etc., a nice tie-in to Rankin's other, new series—a deliciously entertaining read.

Ian Rankin has been on my "I should try this" list for quite a while. I love a good mystery. P.D. James is one of my favorites. Are these in a similar vein?

>80 NanaCC: hi, Nana. No, I wouldn't compare Rankin with James at all. These days, P.D. James's work, which has been longtime favorites, seems like it comes from a different world, certainly a different era. She has as much said so herself in her book about the mystery genre. There are things about the Susan Hill series that reminds me of the Dalgleish novels, but Rankin's Rebus novels are grittier and more cynical. I'd have to know more about the series you have already read to recommend other series to you (there's the old bookseller coming in me!)

I love Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. But I also like Karin Fossum and Henning Mankell. And for fun Jacqueline Winspear. I think Rankin has been mentioned in Alexander McCall Smith's Scotland series (not my favorite of his series), and I think that is what prompted the interest. Also, I love the Bryant and May series by Christopher Fowler.

Good to see what you thought of the latest Rankin novel. I like Malcolm Fox quite a bit (maybe in part because he is so different from Rebus) and was worried that Rankin was abandoning him in favor of returning to Rebus.

I like Rebus too and would feel similarly to you, when you say it's like visiting an old friend. It's good to see there is life in the old copper yet.

>82 NanaCC: I've read Sayers and Mankell, some Fossum and Christie. First, I would recommend Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge series to you. It's set post WWI, features a police detective, a war veteran, whose sidekick is the voice in his head (a Scot he shot for desertion during the war). The first is a Test of Wills.

You might like the Rankin...Rebus is a loner like Wallander (as is also Icelandic author Indridason's Erlunder), but Rebus is less cerebral and morose, more feet-to-the-pavement and cynical. All you can do is try one and see. I'm pretty sure all of his are in print these days.

You might also like Australian Garry Disher's Hal Challis/Ellen Destry series available in the states from Soho Crime. Pamelad recommended this to me a few years ago and when I read it, I was hooked immediately. Not excessively gritty or gratuitous, but complex cases and nicely character-driven.

>83 RidgewayGirl: I did like the Malcolm Fox too, but not as much as Rebus. I thought Fox improved in my mind when placed against Rebus in the same book. An intriguing juxtaposition (so will Siobhan go to work for The Complaints?)

>84 baswood: You'll enjoy it, Barry.

Thanks very much for the recommendations. I will put them on my list.

Poetry. Since the first of the year I've meandered through three volumes of poetry, here are some meager thoughts on two of them.



1. An Ordinary Day by Xue Di (Chinese, translated, 2002)

A native of Beijing, Xue Di left China after taking part in the 1989 demonstrations in
Tian'anmen Square. He has been in the US ever since and is associated with Brown University.

The 23 poems in this collection range in length from 18 to 100 lines. The mix of images is often hard to make of sense of—at least for me and at this time—and most of what I came away with was a sense of exile and loneliness (which is good because that is what the back of the book suggested I should be getting out of it!). Perhaps it is this odd mixing of images that creates that this sense than the images themselves. I wanted to get more from this collection. I thought his voice certainly worth hearing, but I came away somewhat dissatisfied with my experience of it.

Here is an excerpt from "Homing"

As I walk homeward
dusk surrounding
in groups behind me wanderers
sing out their songs of labor
carrying their hands as they would carry money
carefree, never asking where they're headed
Since I left young behind
I see my days each day in strangers. Once I
sang from waywardness
happy in my passion. Each day
a line of poetry. For all the things
I see and for those I curse

(I love that line: "...Each day/a line of poetry.")



2. The Zoo in Winter: Collected Poems by Polina Barskova (Russian, translated, 2010)

Barskova, born 1976 in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, is a well known contemporary Russian poet, the best of her generation, they say. Here collected and translated are 79 poems from her 7 collections. I am thankful to the publishers for including end notes explaining her various allusions to Russian persons, literature and culture. Playful is a good descriptor of some of the poems I liked, but again, I had a hard time connecting to them. I think her poetry would make a good study, though I am not in a place in my life where such study is either possible or desired. Here is one of her poems I enjoyed:

Cemetery at Komarovo
(not far from the grave of Akhmatova)

The bass strings of red pines.
The Chinese eyes of a dazed squirrel.
Far-off, a shuttlecock flies up
an acrobatic underskirt.
A children's bedroom. Little beds
and night-lights.
A tombstone, through the feathered forelock
Of gray moss, looks upon the others.
Warm needles, made of copper, steel —
Mosquitoes with a long and vicious stinger.
Smells of an outhouse, of decay, of fire.
Next to the honored corpse another's death has faded.
I tear the pantleg and mash up the glass.
Away with you, portrayal of an inglorious interior!
A squirrel's pink flare, the righteous ire of a terrier.
Don't trust your secrets to your journals or to children.
You will offend the proud dead with these acts.
Do not chase down the poison pill with juice,
One living in a cemetery is ashamed and lonely.

End note: Komarovo: a municipal settlement and resort near St. Petersburg, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland . Beginning in the 1940s Komarovo became a colony for leading Russian writers, artists, composers, and intellectuals. Its historic cemetery houses the graves of many of these individuals, most notably that of the poet anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), née Gorenko.

Enjoyed your thoughts on the poetry collections and the examples you posted. I think it can be rather daunting to pick up a collection from a poet little known to you personally. It's almost inevitable that you are not going to like or understand every thing you read especially if there are cultural differences as well. For me it is enough if I enjoy a couple or even a handful of poems, it makes the reading experience worthwhile.

>88 baswood: Thanks, Barry. I can make connections with most poets writing in English, but with translations I often feel that I am missing so much because I don't know the culture.

Dukedom and I have just purged our large poetry collection by about 25%. It was very difficult, a little sad.

I have so much trouble with English language poetry, translated poetry from another culture seems daunting. But that is a beautiful poem by Barskova. Wondering on "portrayal of an inglorious interior"

>90 dchaikin: I think these are a series of images within sight of Ahkmatova's grave, but in her playfulness, I find some of them indecipherable (i.e. 'acrobatic underskirt').

Enjoyed the poetry. Sometimes the indecipherable (especially in translated poetry) just lends an air of mystery that can be inviting.

>92 janeajones: Thanks, Jane.

I've been reading poetry by Jane Kenyon since the first of the year. Her poetry is rural, rhythmic, often "domestic" and very accessible, both literally and emotionally. Kenyon makes connections with the ordinary things around her, and for me, more specifically things a part of the New England landscape and a more rural way of life.

Kenyon died of leukemia in 1995, when she was in her 40s. Her poem, "Let Evening Come," was read by Cameron Diaz in the movie "In Her Shoes" - though I can't remember the context. She was the wife of poet Donald Hall, a US poet laureate.

I've been reading from her Collected Poems, which was published about ten years after her death. Kenyon also translated Akhmatova and this volume contains 20 Akhamatova poems translated by her.

You can watch the Bill Moyers interview with she and Donald Hall from 1993, "A Life Together" here. (I'm not terribly fond of the way Hall reads his own poetry in this interview).

Wash

All day the blanket snapped and swelled
on the line, roused by a hot spring wind. . . .
From there it witnessed the first sparrow,
early flies lifting their sticky feet,
and a green haze on the south-sloping hills.
Clouds rode over the mountain. . . . At dusk
I took the blanket in, and we slept,
restless, under its fragrant weight.

The Suitor

We lie back to back. Curtains
lift and fall,
like the chest of someone sleeping.
Wind moves the leaves of the box elder;
they show their light undersides,
turning all at once
like a school of fish.
Suddenly I understand that I am happy.
For months this feeling
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor.

Peonies at Dusk

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what its coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

Lovely examples of Kenyon's poetry! Thanks for sharing them with us. I am not familiar with her, but will now look for her work.

>94 Linda92007: Linda, I suspect it might be more difficult to find her work these days. I hope she had not been forgotten.

btw, for those interested in poetry, this is the time of year when new poetry collections and anthology are being published (in the US) in advance of April, which has been deemed poetry month.

#93 Sad about Kenyon, who I hadn't heard of. Love the poems...the rhythms in Wash...the image of oversize stars of peonies in the backyard in the last poem.

#95 nice little note to remember, thanks.

>96 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan.

Margaret Atwood's FaceBook feed posted that ShortList magazine (UK men's zine) chose The Handmaid's Tale as one of 30 of the scariest books ever written. HERE is the full list. What do you think of the books listed?

I have 5 copies of Handmaid's Tale (though it seems I should let go of 2), and it is one of the most influential books in my life precisely because it is all too possible...and yes, that's scary.

Coraline, really? I read Rebecca after seeing the movie, so I'm probably not the best judge on that (but then, I thought there were parts of Jane Eyre were scary when I first read it).

Maybe we need to distinguish between "scary" and "disturbing." We Need to Talk About Kevin is disturbing, but is it scary?

Interesting and fun list! I'm not one who really scares in books or movies, but I have had my moments. Actually, Coraline was pretty scary, and well-done. Have you read it? There were several parts that were pretty freaky, but the scene in the closet was right up there.

Rebecca - wasn't scary when I was 13, wasn't scary in my 30s
Dracula - had a couple of moments, but overall, not scary.
Blindness - too stupid to be scary (sorry, hated that book. It made me angry)
The Witches - really? I remember it being funny
Frankenstein - that was just weird

Lord of the Flies, Handmaid's Tale, The Trial, Disgrace - disturbing, not scary

Pet Semetary - not King's scariest.

Silence of the Lambs - read it, remember liking it. I think it was pretty scary, although I saw the movie first, and that WAS scary.

You know what book was really scary? Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. If it wasn't for the "survival" in the title, I wouldn't have made it through.

Of the ones I've on that list (e.g. Rebecca, H M Tale, Frankenstein, Disgrace) are disturbing rather than scary.

My ratings follow Nickelini's pretty closely. Most of those were distrubing, not scary, and some not all that disturbing, though I suppose it depends on if we look at them through standards at the time they were written or now. When The Exorcist came out, especially with the movie, horror was different than now and the movie terrified people. We watch it now and by today's standards it seems far milder than it did to me at the time.

I picked up The Handmaid's Tale when we were staying at the Ronald McDonald House in Salt Lake City and had a hard time putting it down.

Selected Poems of Amy Lowell, edited by Melissa Bradshaw and Adrienne Munich (2002, US)

Amy Lowell (1874 - 1925), in brief, was an early 20th century American poet, who was part of the Imagist movement in poetry ("A Brief Guide to Imagism" via poets.org. "Imagism" via wikipedia).

Amy is a fascinating character. In poetry circles, I suspect, she is best known for her feud with Ezra Pound (touched on in the wiki article linked above) and her posthumous 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Amy was a Boston heiress*, a lesbian who loved cigars and Keats, and a tireless champion of the modern poetry she was a part of. Her poetry readings were theatrical events and she was immensely popular with audiences. "Her theatricality, along with the forcefulness of her sweeping pronouncements about the state of contemporary poetry, earned her a devoted, almost cult following of fans who mobbed train stations to get her autograph (thus necessitating police escorts) and who packed auditoriums to standing-room-only capacity in order to hear speak."

Amy was also willing to use her money to publish modern poets and she moved to London at one point, and began to fund anthologies which allowed the poets represented to chose his or her best work, rather than be chosen editorially by Pound.

This collection of Lowell's poetry is a great introduction to the poet and her work. It has just the right amount of biography and commentary on her verse, and good representation of her often 'exuberant' work. It also includes her poetry inspired by, and her translations from, Chinese poetry.

Two of my personal favorites:

OPAL

You are ice and fire,
The touch of you burns my hands like snow.
You are cold and flame.
You are the crimson of amaryllis,
The silver of moon-touched magnolias.
When I am with you,
My heart is a frozen pond
Gleaming with agitated torches.

(The Independent, August 1918)

SEPTEMBER, 1918

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through
sunlight;
The trees glittered with the tumbling leaves;
The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,
And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open
windows.
Under a tree in the park,
Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,
Were carefully gathering red berries
To put in a pasteboard box.
Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
and note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.
To-day I can only gather it
And put it into my lunch-box,
For I have time for nothing
But the endeavour to balance myself
Upon a broken world.

(Pictures of the Floating World, September 1919)

*for bragan I note that Amy's brother was the astronomer Percival Lowell.

I have more catching up to do here...

I do love your poetry reviews, avaland. Nice choices that you have shared. Amy Lowell sounds like a fascinating person and poet.

Thanks, Linda. It's really not much of a review. Poetry is such a subjective thing.

Lovely review of Selected Poems of Amy Lowell and September 1918 is a great poem, with a marvellous first line.

>104 baswood: Thanks, Barry. That is a great first line, isn't it?!

I love the two poems you selected to share. Thank you.

Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home, edited by Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh (2013)

This book is a collection of fifteen pieces of memoir or "creative nonfiction" (including poetry) by Palestinians, who reflect—as noted in the subtitle—on home or exile. I saw this collection in Interlink's catalog, and was drawn to it for a number of reasons, one of which is that I recognized several of the contributors. The reason I bought the book was because of a real desire to hear the voices of Palestinians beyond the news media or even novels, and the question asked of these novelists, poets, critics and essayists for this book seemed a good way to do so. I was not disappointed for, although it took me quite a while to read through all the essays (through no fault of the book), it gave me the feeling I was an invisible guest at a family dinner of some sort, caught in a conversation.

The book, with its amazing variety of pieces, has an overall pervasive sense of rootlessness, a feeling of "unrequited homesickness." While I could tell you about each piece, it's better for you to read them yourself, but let me tell you about a few of my favorites. Bear in mind that my one line author bios don't do justice to the varied and extensive careers of these contributors, so I've linked their names to more proper biographical synopses.

Rema Hammami " 'Home and Exile' in East Jerusalem". Hammami is a professor of anthropology at Birzeit University and in her fascinating essay she chronicles the changes in her East Jerusalem neighborhood from her arrival in 1989 to present. She describes the neighborhood—the buildings, the people, the sounds and smells—and tells us stories of some of the things that happened during that time, such as when her neighbor came to her in a panic when his yard filled with soldiers and policemen.

Susan Abulhawa. "Memories of an Un-Palestinian Story, in a Can of Tuna"
Abulhawa is the author of Mornings in Jenin, which was a book featured in Belletrista. Abulhawa's riveting essay begins with her as a child stealing a can of tuna while at an orphanage in East Jerusalem, and trying to open that can without a proper can-opener (and making a mess of it), before being called into the headmistress's office on something unrelated. As the essay continues we are amazed to learn that she is not an orphan at all, and the backstory behind her residency there is equally riveting.

Lila Abu-Lughod "Pushing the Door: My Father's Political Education and Mine" Abu-Lughod is an anthropolgist and author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, a book I read seemingly ages ago. I also have her first work, thanks to a fellow LTer, but have not read it yet. Abu-Lugod writes about her father Ibrahim, who was 19 in 1948 and became one of the many Palestinian refugees from that time. Her father was "was a Palestinian (later American) academic, characterised by Edward Said as 'Palestine's foremost academic and intellectual.'(wikipedia). His daughter talks about his life as part of a movement, and his return to Palestine. She also talks about what she has inherited from him as his daughter, and this reminded me a little of Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter.

Adania Shibli "Of Place, Time and Language." Shibli is the author of several novels, two of which have recently been translated into English, Touch and We Are All Equally Far From Love. Her contribution is, as her title suggests, three vignettes, each taking a thing or incident as a launch into memory. The first tells the story of going to the Jenin refugee camp for a reading and how she was affected by a group of feisty little girls who, outside the door of the theater, demanded to attend but, because of their age, were not allowed. The second is about her watch and a trip in and out of Palestine with its various checkpoints and challenges: "My little watch is the first to sense the change, going into and out of Palestine." The third talks about the acute sense of exile she felt upon looking at a familiar painting on the wall of her Seoul apartment.

Mourid Barghouti in "The Driver Mahmoud" writes, in a piece that flows like a novel, about a ride in a very crowded yellow taxi from Ramallah to Jericho, agiving us a fascinating portrait of the clever driver on the way. Barghouti is a poet and author living in Egypt. He is married to the author Radwa Ashour.

Finally, I offer a short poem, one of several poems in the book by Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American physician and poet. Note: the second line should be indented.

MIMESIS

My daughter
wouldn't hurt a spider
That had nested
Between her bicycle handles
For two weeks
She waited
Until it left on its own accord.

If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn't a place to call home
And you'd get to go biking

She said that's how others
Become refugees isn't it?

--------

(You know, I can't believe I am the only LTer with this book!)

>106 NanaCC: Thanks, Nana. And thanks for stopping by.

Wow - that sounds fantastic. Was there a lot of variety of style between the stories? I ask because I am interested in reading fiction from the Middle East but often find that I have difficulty with the style which often seems to be quite stream-of-consciousness.

>107 avaland: That little poem rings so true. Isn't it amazing what just a few words can convey.

>109 wandering_star: Well, for something that is not fiction, I thought it very readable, and, it seems they all approach the question of "home or exile" in different ways. You comment about a stream-of-consciousness is interesting. I hadn't noticed it in the fiction I have read. I guess much depends on the literary traditions the authors have been influenced by. I don't profess to be any kind of expert on the subject :-).

It took me a long time to read the collection because I have been sorting through stuff in the house, particularly the stuff I saved for my kids or things that belonged to my parents...etc and it was hard to read some of these pieces while doing that.

>110 NanaCC: I think that is why I liked this poem.

Still thinking of that poem. It occurs to me as a lurker on one of your other threads, that you could translate it into another medium. It would be beautiful.

>107 avaland: I love that poem, Lois. I suspect you won't be the only LTer with the book for long.

>112 SassyLassy: Oh, a mystery...hmmm.



All My Friends by Marie NDiaye (2013, translated from the French by Jordan Stump)

I have waited too long to comment on these five stories, my recollections are vague. And I have not first read NDiaye's recently translated novel, Three Strong Women, so I cannot make any connections. Perhaps this will be a poor attempt at review.

I enjoyed these stories, which are all subtly unsettling in one way or another. Clearly NDiaye is talented writer. In the synopsis of the book, the stories are said to showcast "characters who are both robustly real and emotionally unfathomable." I'm uncertain about the "robustly" bit, but I can agree with the "emotionally unfathomable."

In the first story, a retired schoolteacher and elderly patriarch has hired a former pupil as his housekeeper (who he is clearly besotted with) and attempts to convince her to leave her husband (another former pupil, rather low achieving), for one of his protegeés. Kind of creepy. In "Revelation", a mother takes her mentally-challenged son on a one way bus ride. And we spend some time in the head of a woman who is clearly losing her grip on sanity in "Brulard's Day."

In my favorite story, "The Boys," an impoverished young boy seeks to change his life by becoming a sex slave, after he sees, but doesn't quite understand, the wealthy transformation of the boy next door. There is an acute powerlessness that the reader experiences as this story progresses, much like watching a train derail.

Wonderful poems here - Amy Lowell's September, 1918. ("To-day I can only gather it/ And put it into my lunch-box," ) and Fady Joudah's Mimesis are both memorable.

#107 (You know, I can't believe I am the only LTer with this book!) - well, it's now on my wishlist. I've read Raja Shehadeh & (thanks to you) Adania Shibli, both rewarding.

#114 - Potent little comments on NDiaye

>115 dchaikin: Be careful what you wish for, I might just send it to you, Dan :-)

Oh sure, just after I read Bragan review on hoarders... But, I really do hope to read it. It's not an idle wishlist entry for me.

I just got my copy of Seeking Palestine in the mail today. Had to have it when Amazon said only one in stock. I think I'm going to put everything else on a temp. hold to read this. Thanks for the review avaland.

>119 avaland: You're welcome!

Have taken up Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto to read in addition to the crime novel I'm creeping through. I am sometimes intrigued by the serendipitous connections between books. This one, at least as I begin it, makes be think back to both The Quiet Girl and Down the Rabbit Hole, for different reasons, both of which I've read in the last few months. Last year, there were connections around ice and cold, this year it seems to be sound and isolation.

Fabulous review of Seeking Palestine, avaland. I am definitely going to look for it. I attended a NYS Writers Institute event last year with two Palestinian poets, Fady Joudah and Gassan Zaqtan, and posted a summary on my thread. Joudah was technically there as Zaqtan's translator, but went far beyond that in his remarks. It is amazing to me how he can balance his work as an emergency room physician and participant in Doctors Without Borders, with that of a translator (he has also translated several collections by Mahmoud Darwish) and a poet in his own right. Joudah also has a new collection coming out in May: Alight, being published by Copper Canyon Press.

I'll be interested in what you think of the Mia Couto; I found his Sleepwalking Land haunting but difficult to understand.

Nice review of All My Friends, Lois. I look forward to reading this and comparing it to Three Strong Women.

>120 Linda92007: Thanks.
>121 rebeccanyc: I know what you mean. Under the Frangipani was an easier read. Will let you know.
>122 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. I'll mail it out this week.

I will definitely be on the lookout for both Seeking Palestine and All My Friends thanks to your enticing comments. I don't usually read a lot of short fiction, but these both look great.

A good review of All My Friends - would you consider putting it on the work page? No other reviews.

Catching up on your thread, Lois. Loved the Lowell and I'm definitely going to find Seeking Palestine -- as you noted, we so rarely hear Palestinian voices unfiltered through the media.

>125 DieFledermaus: Die, I usually do but I felt I hadn't put much effort into the comments. But. I'll do it anyway.

>124 labfs39: Your comment brought my thread up closer to the top of the forum, and when I searched for it I couldn't find it. It's been languishing down near the bottom of the page for a good 10 days.

I do have three books to comment on, but I seem to be having trouble motivating myself to do so. Nonetheless, Paradise by Gurnah, Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto, and Moonlight Downs by Adrian Hyland are all great reads. I will get to some comments, really.

Moonlight Downs by Adrian Hyland (2006, Australia; first published under the title "Diamond Dove")

Moonlight Downs is the first in the Emily Tempest series of crime novels, set in Australia's rough Northern Territory somewhere between Alice Springs and Darwin. Emily is half white, half aboriginal and moves with varying degrees of comfort between the 'whitefella' and 'blackfella' communities.

Emily, who lives up to her surname, left the area years ago to go south and get an education—several, it seems—but then traveled the world somewhat restlessly before returning to the rough country of her origins. She no sooner arrives when an old friend and elder/leader of the local aboriginal community of Moonlight Downs is viciously murdered.

Moonlight Downs opens a window into a rough and fascinating world. It is well written with respect and wit, and has echoes of an American western, but it also strangely has an urban feel to it. Because of the cultural initiation, it took me about 100 pages to really settle into the book, which has two glossaries, one for aboriginal terms, the other for Australian terms (it assumes one knows the more common Australian terms). Emily first comes across as somewhat genderless, which in itself is intriguing, and her character unfolds over the course of this first book.

As with other crime novels where the protagonist is not the law, Emily must find ways to get her information, and she proves intelligent and clever, making full use of all her personal resources in this satisfying mystery. My one teeny, tiny complaint is that the book has what I call a "thriller ending," which is to say that when Emily is on the precipice of uncovered 'whodunnit', circumstances take over and actually reveal the murderer.

If you like a cultural experience with your crime, you'll enjoy this book. It reminds me of other reading experiences like White Heat by M. J. McGrath (Inuit/Ellesmere Island) and Bangkok 8 by John Burdett (Buddhist detective/Bangkok).

Moonlight Downs sounds intriguing. I will have to add that to my pile.

Great review of Moonlight Downs, Lois. Hyland's Kinglake-350 also looks very interesting.

The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto (2009, Mozambique, translated from the Portuguese)

The Tuner of Silences is the coming-of-age story of Mwanito, a young boy, who lives on an abandoned game reserve, with only his father, his brother, and a former soldier now servant. His father, who is mentally ill, either organically or from grief or guilt, moved the family here—which he calls Jezoosalem—after the death of his wife. It is a strange and isolated life they live, interrupted only by periodic visits from Mwanito's uncle Aproximado, who brings them supplies. The father has renamed them all, and told the boys that the rest of the world is dead. He says they will wait there for an apology from God. Mwanito is eleven years old when he sees a woman for the first time, a Portuguese tourist seeking a reclusive few weeks holiday.

Eventually, circumstances will lead the family out of their park after years of isolation, and back to the city, where the world opens up and offers itself to the adolescent Mwanito, and where the mystery of his mother's tragic death is slowly revealed.

This excellent novel is beautifully written, and tells us the stories of all of its characters, who live and breath on the pages. It has a dreamlike quality about it, told by the young man, Mwanito, looking back at his life at the game reserve, before he moves the story into the present. Dialog, which is not in quotes, but in italics, lends itself also to this dreamlike perception. Here's an especially poignant excerpt that illustrates this and is also a nice note to end on.

"Family, school, other people, they all elect some spark of promise in us, some area in which we may shine. Some are born to sing, others to dance, others are born merely to be someone else. I was born to keep quiet. My only vocation is silence. It was my father who explained this to me: I have an inclination to remain speechless, a talent for perfecting silences. I've written that deliberately , silences in the plural. Yes, because there isn't one sole silence. Every silence contains music in a state of gestation...."

—Come here, son, come and help me be quiet

"At the end of the day, the old man would sit back in his chair on the veranda. It was like that every night: I would sit at his feet, gazing at the stars high up in the darkness. My father would close his eyes, his head swaying this way and that, as if his tranquility were driven by some inner rhythm. Then, he would take a deep breath and say:"

—That was the prettiest silence I've ever heard. Thank you, Mwanito.

And yet another lovely review! You find the most beautiful books...

>129 NanaCC:, 130 Thanks, Linda and Nana. It takes a while before one recognizes the crime novel in it, because there is so much cultural stuff to absorb. I may go looking for the 2nd novel.

Great reviews, Lois -- I've put Moonlight Downs on the list of books to send to my mother who loves cultural mysteries, and added The Tuner of Silences to my wishlist.

Great review of Tuner of Silences, Lois; I'll look for it this weekend.

>134 janeajones: It's a tough book, is she up for that?
>135 kidzdoc: I think you might like it, Darryl. I just picked up Couto's The Blind Fisherman yesterday.

Latest acquisitions (the tax refund binge, hope it holds me for a while!):

1. The Blind Fisherman by Mia Couto. More Couto to explore.

2. A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta Intrigued after reading the excerpt in Belletrista.

3. I Still Believe Anita Hill: Three Generations Discuss the Legacies of Speaking Truth to Power, edited by Amy Richards and Cynthia Greenberg. Hill's testimony and later her book, Speaking Truth to Power has had a profound affect on me. I also listened to Hill's book on audio, read by the author - which made it all the more poignant.

4. Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law governs evolution in biology, physics, technology, and social organizations by Adian Bejan and J. Peder Zane. I took an interdisciplinary class in '07 or '08 around design in nature, and looking through the book, I know there will be some redundancy in content, but this book pulls the content in another direction. We'll see how it goes, hopefully it won't be over my head.

Beautiful review of Tuner of Silences, Lois. Unfortunately my library doesn't have it, but I am hoping I can order a copy.

>137 labfs39: Thanks, the publisher, Biblioasis, is out of Canada but has distribution in the U.S.

Moonlight Downs is on my wish list.

>139 RidgewayGirl: thanks for stopping, RG!

I was thinking about short fiction while I wait for my washer or dryer to finish. Looking back over my threads (2008 - present), it seems I have read a lot more short fiction than I ever realized, all of it interesting, of course, but some of it is worth noting. So, here is a list of my best reads over the last 5 years:

Anthologies:

Short Stories by Latin American Women, edited by Celia Correas De Zapata
Speaking for Myself: an Anthology of Asian Women's Writing, edited by by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Malashri Lal
The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, edited by Sarah Eyre
Loud Sparrows: Contemporary Chinese Short Shorts, edited by Howard Goldblatt

Collections



Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe* by Doreen Baingana (Uganda)
Flesh & Blood* by Michael Crummey (Newfoundland, Canada)
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders* by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Pakistan)
Open Secrets by Alice Munroe (Canada)
Heading Inland by Nicola Barker (UK, quirky)
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson (US, quirky)
Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millett (US, quirky)
American Salvage* by Bonnie Jo Campbell (US, Michigan)
A Taste of Honey: Stories* by Jabari Asim (US, midwest setting)
Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann (Irish)
The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry by Assia Djebar (Algeria)
Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman (UK, quirky)
Olive Kitteridge* by Elizabeth Strout (US, Maine)
Why the Devil Chose New England for his Work* by Jason Brown (US, Maine).

*short stories are linked, either closely or loosely, by narrow geographical area, town or character/s. I don't go looking for "linked" stories but I know some of you are particularly fond of them. I can be more specific, if you like.

I would also add the following Joyce Carol Oates collections:

By the North Gate*, Sourland, The Female of the Species, and Dear Husband.

Added a few of the covers to liven up the post a bit.

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah (1994, Tanzania/Zanibar)

Set in Tanzania in the very late 19th century, Paradise is the coming-of-age story of Yusuf, who is sold by his father to his uncle for repayment of debts. Yusuf is not brought into the house as a member of the family however, but works and sleeps in the family store with one of his uncle's employees. Uncle Aziz is a trader and often leaves on long journeys to trade with villages in the interior. When the handsome, bright and likable Aziz is 16, he is finally asked to accompany his uncle on such a journey, and that fascinating journey is chronicled in this book. Aziz is a more mature young man when he returns, and while his uncle is away on another journey, he makes contact with the women in the family home, and is immediately smitten by his uncle's younger wife, sister to the shop employee. Can that end well?

I have read four other Gurnah novels, and have found them all interesting and well-written. My favorite has been the first I read: By the Sea (2001), but Paradise falls in neatly just behind that. The former is a novel of a more mature writer, but both novels betray the author's talent for storytelling.

And this novel is terrific storytelling. I blew through this book, riveted by the tale of young Yuself. In the process of his coming-of-age story, the reader gets a kind of an oral history of the region from the time of Arab settlement and the Arab slave trade forward, and also gets a portrait of life at the end of the 19th century just as the Germans are beginning to make their presence known. The book is full of vibrant settings, and interesting characters, in a world where indigenous black Africans must coexist with those of Arab and Indian descent, Christian missionaries, European farmers and others.

Hmm, another good one from Africa for the list.

Glad to hear Paradise is next after By the Sea, and thanks for the list of short fiction.

So you know, I'm really enjoying Seeking Palestine...well, the first four entries that I've read. It's bringing up a very conflicted responses from me, and partly because the essays are really bring me in.

Great review of Paradise. BY the Sea has collected a lot of dust, I really should pick it up.

Glad you posted the collections/anthologies lists.

>144 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. And I'm glad you are enjoying Seeking Palestine. Conflict isn't always a bad thing :-)

Nice review of Paradise, Lois. I liked it as much as you did, and I completely agree with you that it's my second favorite novel by Gurnah, after By the Sea. I read Paradise last weekend, so I'll write a review of it in the next day or two.

>146 kidzdoc: Thanks for giving me the heads up, Darryl. I'll keep my eye out for your comments.

Fuse by Julianna Baggott (2013, US, science fiction)

I have been disappointed with trilogies in the past. Trilogies are particularly common in the science fiction field, and in my experience, when the first book has been very good or excellent, the second book is somewhat less so, and the third book is...well... There have been rare exceptions but I've not been a fan of trilogies.

But Fuse does not seem to suffer as 'less than' its predecessor. It is as interesting, clever and action-packed as Pure, the first book, and seamlessly continues the story of Pressia, Partridge, Lyra, Bradwell, El Captain and his brother Helmet (who is fused to his back), and a whole host of others.

I can't write too much about this book without letting on what happens, and I'd rather not spoil the fun for those who want to read Pure, so I have re-posted below my original comments on the first book to set up the series for you.
---------
---------
Pure is a dystopian tale with a post nuclear apocalyptic setting in which some people were saved and sheltered by a dome built in anticipation of the nuclear attack, but most weren't. Outside the dome, most people who survived are either maimed in some way and or fused to whatever they were near at the time of the explosions. Pressia, a young girl on the outside, has a plastic doll's head where her right hand should be. Her friend, has living birds fused into his back. {the author's creations here are wonderfully Miéville-eske!)

To both sets of people, the other is just that 'other', neither really knows the other - only what they have heard, or been taught. Outside the dome it's a rough world and survival is the story; inside the Dome life is comfortable and controlled. When Partridge, a young man in the Dome, learns his mother might still be alive on the outside, he finds a way to escape. Eventually, as one might expect, he connects up with Pressia and the two join forces in what become common cause. They are joined by others.
---------
--------
Fuse and Pure are what I would call YA-Adult crossover novels. The characters are all teens, and the book comes with the concerns of adolescents, some of which we as adults share, and some we don't. Adolescents have some advantages that adult do not, they don't carry the baggage we do, but on the hand, they don't have the depth of life experience that comes with that baggage. Baggott's characters have had a variety of life experiences, from the coddling in the dome to the need to survive outside of it, and she does a great job of making them credible and interesting to all readers. And what I also find intriguing, perhaps comforting, is that there is an equality of the sexes when it comes to action and heroism.

I've read all of Baggott's poetry and novels (written under her own name) over the years and she is a fine (and witty) writer and I'm impressed with her move into not only YA lit, but science fiction. I'll eagerly look forward to the final installment.

In the continuing purge of our library, I have set free a couple dozen African novels (and one memoir). I have them roughly divided into two piles: North and East Africa, and West and South Africa. If anyone here in the states is interested in exploring African fiction, I'd be happy to send them off. I'm afraid I've kept most of my favorites, but there are titles by Galgut, Gurnah, Jelloun, Emecheta, Achebe, Okri, Head, Van Etienne, Couto...etc. The collection has a fair number of female authors.

I'd prefer to send them out in bulk, rather than list titles and send out individually. I offer them here because I know they would sadly languish unnoticed on my local library's library sale tables.

I'd be happy to take some off your hands, if you're OK to send to the UK. I know it can be really pricey. North and East would be my preference. Thanks!!

Thanks, Lois. I think I have enough with the ones you already sent me!

I know my profile says Belgium, but I have a US address also, I'd be thrilled to have some! Africa is actually an area I've been looking to bulk up my (very slim pickings of) reading on, and not really sure where to start, so that'd be insanely perfect, actually...

I'd love some of the women if you want to send them my way. How do you manage to cull your collection? I think I have a hoarder gene when it comes to books (nothing else though).

>150 charbutton: Char, international postage rates just went up precipitously here in the states, so I probably can't ship overseas. Sorry.

>151 rebeccanyc: ha! I just sent you a package (a small one)

>152 .Monkey.: PM, leave me your US address on my profile page.

>153 janeajones: Jane, I have your address.

We have a combined library of about 6,000 books and we will be moving in 2014 to likely smaller digs, so I'm 'thinning' my books. I've already calculated that it will take 200 boxes (35 lbs of books per box) to pack them up! I've taken about 30% out of fiction, poetry and women's studies (just did the latter). Basically, I'm trying to be realistic - am I going to reread that? am I ever going to get to that unread book? It's tough because our books identify us - if you know what I mean (of course you do!). But having LT helps a lot. And having bookish friends helps too!

I have saved out the translations (I think—if I haven't accidentally taken them to the library) for the same reason I saved out the African fiction, and will offer those at a later date.

Someone left me a note on my profile page, so between the three of you, I think they will have a home.

No problem, I thought there had been a recent price hike.

It costs a veritable fortune to mail overseas from the US. Even not so large ones cost in excess of $60. It's insane.

Browsed my wishlist today and saw several recents tagged “avaland” (incl Always Coca-Cola and One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead -- all the more interesting since I later read about Alfred Wegener in The Universe Within) so of course came over to catch up here and add more.

Loving the poetry. Must try Jane Kenyon and am interested in Amy Lowell as another take on Ezra Pound, who I’m familiar with only through Hemingway’s characterization of him as such a nice guy ... probably Lowell and Hemingway would clash, too :)

Seeking Palestine also goes on my wishlist particularly due to Adania Shibli (like Dan, thanks to you) and Fady Joudah (his poem in >107 avaland: and thanks to Linda’s thread last year; yay re her comments in >120 Linda92007:).

Thanks for the luscious lists of short fiction and the * notations!

>157 detailmuse: hey, DM, thanks for stopping by. I have Dudman's other book in the TBR pile and I see from her blog (http://keeperofthesnails.blogspot.com/) that's she is working on another book that has grown to over 500 pages.

Amy Lowell must have been a real "pip" - bet she was a real thorn in the side of ol' Pound. Well, you know what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said, "well-behaved women rarely make history."

Sometimes I have a real urge to hear the 'voices' and not the noise generated by politics and the media, you know? And I suspect that is the intent of Seeking Palestine - to let the voices speak for themselves.

My book reading is moving slowly, but I did read some of the current issue of WLT:



World Music | Contemporary Inuit Music from Arctic Canada is a short one-page piece on two groups of performers, one the sister team that comprises Nukariik, the other is a solo singer, tanya Tagaq Gillis. I heard the Kettler sisters perform at the Lowell Folk Festival two years ago, and we have their album. "The Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic share an ancient form of music called katajjait (throat singing). Often improvised, women perform katajjait in pairs standing face to face, trading off rhythmic, guttural souns through vocal manipulation and breathing techniques, creating rhythms that reach 240 beats per minute pr more. Katajjait texts include comprehensible words, words that have lost their meanings, vocables (non-lexical syllables), and mimicking of nature sounds. I can tell you that it's an oddly mesmerizing kind of music.

The Missing Picture: A Novelist Reflects on Writing the Story of a Photograph Purports to Tell and, Sometimes the One it Doesn't by Kamila Shamsie. This is an excellent piece fusing photography and literature. Shamsie grew up in Karachi during the dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq and has a couple official images of him imprinted on her mind. Media was of course censored, but, she tells the story of the photograph/s of women's activism and the attacks on them by police from the early 1980s, and how it affected her writing, particularly her Broken Verses.

Travels in History and Geography: An Interview with William Dalrymple This is a fascinating and extensive interview with the Scottish travel writer, historian and journalist, and discusses the evolution of his work, his subject matter, and how his travel writing affects his history books.

========
In the special Photography section:

Lifetimes Under Apartheid by Nadine Gordimer and David Goldplatt. "In these excerpts from their collaborative work, Nadine Gordimer's words and David Goldblatt's photos tell the story of apatheid's 'indelible stain.' I'm not sure if this piece was just too short (only 3 photos), but I expected it to be more powerful than it was.

Photographing from the Frontlines of Slavery by Lisa Kristine. "Illegal gold mines, sex-trafficking fronts, and slave-labor fishing operations: a photographer works to shine a light on those enslaved and, by doing so, send their images into the world to bear witness." Kristine, the US photographer, wrote this piece herself, and while there may be better writers on earth, I found this piece and its photographs riveting.



Disrupting the Odalisque by Lalla A. Essaydi. "Through a camera's lens, a Moroccan photographer reveals how Arab women in henna represent a small feminist movement. Using family acquaintances as models, Essaydi applies henna as calligraphy to the clothing and background, and sometimes to the skin of her subjects. Her piece is hard to summarize and best read in its entirety, I think. Her website is here: http://lallaessaydi.com/1.html



That's as far as I gotten through this double issue, those articles and all the book reviews, of course.

I'm listening to Nukariik now. I'm feeling out of breath.

>160 RidgewayGirl: yes! I like some of their pieces more than others.

That sounds like a fascinating magazine, Lois, but I fear subscribing to any more that I don't get around to reading!

Excellent images on Lalla A. Essaydi's web site

Tuner of Silences, Moonlight Downs go on the list. What great reviews. Thanks also for the picture posting.

>162 rebeccanyc: If truth be told, I don't get through it very often. And I barely scratched the surface of this issue.

>163 baswood: Yes, there are, aren't there? Fascinating.

>163 baswood: Thanks, MK. I've been very lucky with my book choices.

128 - Started Moonlight Downs and loving it so far. Thanks for the review.

>166 mkboylan: You're certainly welcome, MK. i wonder how the second book reads, once the culture shock is over with the first book.

That's a great point/question!

Lois - i'm bumping your thread back to the top. Very curious as to what you are reading...

All caught up now with a superb thread - thank you for so many fascinating reviews. I've added Lila Abu-Lughod's Bedouin Stories, All My Friends, and A Taste of Honey: Stories. Looking forward to following the rest of your Club Read now!

>169 dchaikin: I'm in a bit of a reading funk, Dan, thanks for asking. i actually lost interest in Americanah and set it aside. Now I'm trying to revive some interest in reading by trying a crime novel. We'll see how that goes.

I do still have to write something about A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta when I finished a few weeks ago.

I've also been spending quite a bit of time entering some of Dukedom's books into LT (he's just enough older than I to have some very trippy late 60s nonfiction) - I've done about 500 with 600 - 800 to go. After they are entered he is deciding whether to keep them or not (we continue our purges). We are shuffling lots of books around these days)

>170 Polaris-: Polaris, I saw you had a new user name. Send me your address and i'll send you All My Friends as the publisher just sent me yet another copy of it. :-)

Commiserations! :) If you're struggling with Adichie...

Not to worry, I'm in a reading funk, too. I have about 5 (or more) books going at the moment. A couple I could probably have finished in one sitting. Oi!

Still, love your thread.

That's extremely kind of you, but I think I read elsewhere on your thread that postage costs overseas from the USA have become pretty extortionate - and I live in Wales! Too bad for me!

>173 Polaris-: Oh, I forgot about that. Yes, postage has really increased. So sad, really.

Oh, it has been ages since I have been in here. Will I ever catch up? That's a very good question.

Don't even try to catch up! Start where you are now.

Good to see you back. As rebecca says, start from now.

Where on earth have you been?

Just was on the hunt to find you. I have missed seeing your posts round & about. I hope all is well with you Lois. Good to 'see' you.

Welcome back, Lois -- don't disappear again.

What Jane said...

Sorry, I keep trying to return, but I'm very preoccupied these days, and I have a need to be focused elsewhere, and thus not very book-focused. I am reading, but I just can't seem to get my mind in a place to report on the books. Perhaps if I just wrote only a line or two... I appreciate everyone stopping in.

Oh, don't worry about reviews, or even commenting on the books you're reading if that's not where your heart is. it's not like we don't all have a backlog based on your earlier reviews.

LOL Excellent point Ridgeway!

>183 RidgewayGirl: !!! (thank you, that made me laugh!)

Well, I keep trying to return in some form without much luck. But, once again, I will make an attempt. Life has been—shall we say—interesting.

So, my plan is to write short notes of what I've read since March. The problem, of course, is memory, but we'll see how it goes. I may link to an outside review I think says all that I might say.


A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta (2013)

It's taking me longer to get through a book these days, and I strolled through Atta's latest novel back in April. It's a subtle, spare and thoughtful book, with some ironic wit, and ultimately, a very satisfying story. And a better book, I thought, than Adichie's latest (which I shall come to) considering they cover some of the same ground.

For synopsis and an excellent review, I shall point you to one in "VerityLA," but here is a few lines from it to whet your appetite....

In a few sentences, through the wry observations of its main character, we see the complexity of the portrayal of Africa to the world: the status of women; the investments of power; the uses and abuses of charity; image and reality; tradition and change. These are just some of the novel’s themes.


Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)

Having been a fan of Adichie since the beginning, I was giddy to have been given a reader's copy of this latest. Now, it could have been the demands of life at the moment, but I read about half of it before, disappointed, I put it away. Perhaps, I will pick it up again at some later time, I thought. I haven't.

Adichie is a great storyteller with an easy style, and I liked her character Ifemelu immediately. The first thing I noticed was how two dimensional the Americans were in the story - the woman who hired her as an au pere (and the woman's sister), and the rich guy she has a relationship with. OK, I thought, perhaps there's a message there; she's turning the tables around (let's do the white Americans in 2D and see how you like it). I read on. While the story is engaging, I found it too "in-my-face" and felt myself being overtly manipulated. As I set the book aside (and even now), I ask myself why I may not have liked it:

Was it the mood I was in?
Was it because I couldn't identify with the Americans she cast?
Was it because I had just read the much more subtle Atta novel?
Was it because there is more 'telling' than 'showing' because of the blog?
Was it because it came across as a much more "commercial" book?
Was it because I was offended in some way by the things she is saying?

Possible answers: Maybe, possibly, possibly, possibly, likely not, and then there's the last question. No, I was not offended by the things Ifemelu (or the author) was saying, as much as how she was saying it. I wondered was I really her intended audience, or was her overt approach intended for a less cosmopolitan reader? I work really hard to read broadly and see myself and my world as others might see me/it, and I didn't appreciate being hit over the head.

Anyway, there it is.

Very interesting about Americanah (and the Atta).

Interesting how differently your reacted to the two books. I dislike being hit over the head with things, no matter what the message is.

I have an aversion to being preached to, even when I whole-heartedly agree.

I'm just impressed that you put it away when half way through it!

Very thoughtful review of Americanah. It's odd how books that we ask lots of questions of are often books that frustrate us like that.

Hitting Trees with Sticks seems a rare find. Looking forward to the review of that.

Generally, some interesting stuff here, mainly / mostly books not to be found in the mainstream.

>187 rebeccanyc: - 192 Thanks for stopping by!

>189 RidgewayGirl: Well, I wouldn't exactly call it 'preached to,' but the character eventually starts a blog and her entries are included...that may be where it gets to be overt. Maybe I didn't like the mix.

>190 mkboylan: MK, there is usually one or two books a year I don't finish. Life is too short and there are too many books.

>192 edwinbcn: I've been a Jane Rogers fan for a long time, and I also watch what comes out of Comma Press.

The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-Everett (2011, US)

When I began this short, action-packed novel, I thought to myself with a sigh, "Is there anything new that can be said about people with extraordinary powers?" The set-up for this book brought to mind X-Men, the television show "Heroes" and any number of books.

Turns out, that while the premise isn't terribly original, the voice is, and it is a bit reminiscent of some Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series.

Taggert can heal (and conversely, can hurt) by manipulating others at a cellular level. When we meet him, he is in Morocco working for a drug lord in what is thought to be a lifetime position. But a desperate phone call from a former lover brings him to London where survival, love and family cause him some serious soul-searching.

Told in the first person, Taggert has a urban, urgent voice, and a narrative that moves quickly through the book's 190 pages. Taggert is an interesting character, not exactly likable, more anti-hero than hero certainly, but circumstances will exploit the chinks in that armor. He's very three-dimensional, and the fact that he is black brings a refreshing dimension to the usual themes of the ethical use of power...etc.

Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer by Adam Roberts (2012, UK)

How can one resist a book that bills itself as a Golden Age SF meets classic murder mystery? I could not, nevermind that Adam Roberts is an author I have enjoyed since I discovered his first book Salt back in 2000 (and wouldn't you also find the idea of an English prof at the Univ. of London—whose expertise is in Robert Browning—who writes science fiction irresistible?). He, like China Mieville, is always trying something different with his fiction.

This book is a wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable romp through space (though you might call me a liar while you're reading the first part). My memory of the details are hazy, so I will point you to this short review here on LT that says everything I might say—without giving too much away. Here's a snippet from the reviewer: I found this novel hard to put down, as it fires on all cylinders in its rich blend of genre fictions. If you have not read anything yet by this author yet, try this novel.

I agree! I'm glad to see that Victor Gollancz has found distribution here in the US, because now Roberts' books can be found easily on the shelves here.

Under the Keel: Poems by Michael Crummey (2013, Canadian, Newfoundland)

This is the latest collection of poetry—the first in a decade—for Canada's Michael Crummey, who is perhaps best known outside the country as a writer of fiction. I picked up his earlier collection, Salvage, and found kinship with his spare style and Atlantic roots.

This collection, in five sections, has poetry on a vast variety of topics. So, there's something for everyone. I think, if I had to pick right now, my favorites were in the first section, titled from the poem "Through a Glass Darkly," most about growing up in a mining town on Newfoundland. Of course, if you ask me next week my answer may be different. As a favorite example, I offer:

"Boys"
by Michael Crummey (©2013, from Under the Keel: Poems)

Not old enough to pay for our trouble,
or even name it, we wandered the town

after dark like dogs, half-tamed at best.
We set small fires and hurled rocks and pissed

against school doors, nosing the margin
of the disallowed, the out of bounds.

We ranged as far as the train trestle,
sniffing underbrush and the long grass

for anything dead or lost or unusual,
broke into empty buildings for the thrill

of stealing through forbidden spaces,
of standing at darkened windows, invisible

while the innocent traffic drove past.
We perched at the lip of change, we knew it,

through in our eyes time itself stood still,
we couldn't imagine ourselves at thirty

or married or living other places—
what we wanted was to see the world undress,

to lie down naked somewhere dirty
and fuck, to do all the unspeakable

things our green minds could only intuit,
a communal urge we suffered alone.

Half-grown, we were living our lives by halves,
our dreams were vacant rooms we didn't own

and roamed in silence, shadows behind dark glass.
our mute hearts a mystery to ourselves.

Speechless.

Thanks for posting the Michael Crummey poem. I can see those boys in my mind. Crummey is one of my favourite authors, but this book seems to have fallen below the promotion radar, in my part of the world at least. I think he is one of the best authors in Canada. It is too bad he is so little known outside his region.

Do you subscribe to Quill and Quire? Just wondering how you found this book.

things our green minds could only intuit,
a communal urge we suffered alone.

I love this

>198 SassyLassy: That's exactly why I like it! I think, at some point, I went looking to see if he had any more poetry out (or, it's possible I saw it while skimming the House of Anansi catalog for Belletrista last year).

>199 labfs39: Yes!

>196 avaland: Thanks for sharing that! Beautiful poem, raw, honest and gritty, but gorgeous.

Wonderful poem!, and I'll have to put Adam Roberts on my wishlist.

I am in total agreement. A wonderful poem and a writer whose poetry should be better known.

So nice to have your posts to read again. Very interesting about Adichie. I saw her read to a big audience once and was struck by what I interpreted as a dislike of the audience...and i could have been dead wrong, it was a huge auditorium in Houston. But it would be consistent with her writing a book blasting Americans in some manner. Maybe she has things to get out of her system (should it be published?)

Love the poem and the notes on Adam Roberts, and I'm just always interested in what you are reading.

Your reviews and poetry selections are always so good.

What an excellent new "set" of reviews. I always like reading poems that people pick out from collections and "Boys" is a good one. The Liminal People and Jack Glass: The Story of a murderer both sound well worth following up.

Glad you've jumped in! ;)

>192 edwinbcn:/193

I'm also looking forward to your review of the Jane Rogers' short stories. The title of the collection you're reading at the moment Hitting Trees With Sticks was enough to intrigue me to check out an author I was unfamiliar with, and now I've added Promised Lands to my wishlist as I like the look of it. I love how LibraryThing works like that, and I'm glad I'm following your Club Read too!

Lois, my copy of Americanah just arrived at the library, so I'll be interested to see what I think of it. We'll see . . .

Happy to see you here Lois! I loved Adichie's Purple Hibiscus though it felt simple, and thought Half of a Yellow Sun much better written but off-puttingly "M"essage-y. Perhaps I gave up on her too soon. I haven't pursued Americanah but maybe should go back and read her collection of short stories.

I loved Half of a Yellow Sun when I read it (although it is perhaps "message-y), and I thought Purple Hibiscus was great for a first novel, but I didn't warm to Adichie's short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck and I've been waiting to read Americanah until it comes out in paperback because it hasn't really called to me yet.

Great to see you back here, Lois -- always enjoy your eclectic reviews.

Wow, what a wonderful collection of posts awaiting my return from a long weekend away with the hubby.

>201 avidmom:, 202, 203 thank you, yes indeed!

>204 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I wouldn't dismiss her just yet, and I'd like to think that maybe it's just something she needed to get out of her system. And maybe I just had higher expectations...

>205 NanaCC: thank you!

>206 baswood: I would hesitate to call them "reviews." Just a few comments. I have more to write if I am to catch up.

>207 akeela: Come on in, the water's fine!

>208 Polaris-: I've only read two stories, the first was quite powerful, the second somewhat less so. It's the book I carry around in the car, so I don't pick it up that often, but I'm hoping to finish up these loose ends over the next few weeks. I have read quite a lot of Jane Rogers over the years, some of her work has a Gothic feel. Mr. Wroe's Virgins is creepy in its own way (there was a movie made of it), and it did not surprise me when she drifted into dystopian lit with The Testament of Jessie Lamb.

>209 markon:, 210, 211 I will be interested in what others think (be sure to leave me a note in case I don't get around to all the threads! Still trying to catch up). I have her short stories, but haven't read them. Some writers of novels are also terrific short story writers, but certainly not all. I don't hold that against them :-)

We could have a whole discussion on African literature (particularly black African lit), and what expectations we bring to it. And what are the UK and US publishers looking for from it, what gets published and what doesn't. Certainly we tend to want everything to read like an English novel of one kind or another, if for no other reason than it is easier for us to read.

>212 janeajones: Jane! Thanks for stopping by.

----------

Michael and I were away for a quiet weekend of strolling, loitering, eating well, lounging and reading. He read Iain Banks's Quarry, I read Atwood's MaddAddam (more on that later). While in the mountains north of here, we visited the "Castle in the Clouds" aka the Lucknow estate, built in 1914 in the Arts and Crafts style by then shoe magnate Thomas Plant. The estate is modest compared with the palatial homes in Newport, of course, but the architecture is interesting, and the owner included all the bells and whistles available at that time.

Here's a few links to photos taken there and a few taken in Meredith, New Hampshire, where we stayed.

The slideshow has some titles but not the descriptions:

http://s208.photobucket.com/user/avaland_photos/slideshow/Castle%20and%20More

The album view will have both titles and the descriptions of what you are seeing. Click on the first photo and then navigate forward using your arrow keys.

http://s208.photobucket.com/user/avaland_photos/library/Castle%20and%20More

And a link to the "Castle in the Clouds" website.

Hopefully, these will both work for you, if you are interested in the diversion.

Still catching up here....

Dial H: Volume 1: Into You by China Miéville, illustrated by Mateus Santolouco (2013)

Comics. Not my usual thing, but being a Miéville fan, I had to check this out. And, as expected, Miéville turns the whole superhero thing (franchise?) on its head. His superhero is a down-and-out, unemployed, overweight guy, who becomes a different hero each time he dials H-E-R-O on an old rotary dial payphone. And the 'heroes' are clever creations - Iron Snail, Capt. Lachrymose, Boy Chimney...to name a few. He eventually runs into another equally unlikely superhero who assists him, but I don't want to give too much away.

It being comics, I found myself yearning for more text, but Dial H (collection of comics 1-6) was a quick, wryly humorous, action-packed romp.



During 2013, in an effort to keep reading even when one's concentration is on other things, I read no less than 12 crime novels by Peter Robinson. Clearly, I was hooked. There is no use trying to separate them at this point, as they seems to blend into one long narrative now, though some were better or more interesting than others, as one might expect.

I skipped a few of the earlier ones, and read a few out of order, but Robinson is a terrific writer of the standard police procedural. Having fled a career in London, Alan Banks has taken up his career in the communities around Yorkshire, where—and it should be no surprise—murders do happen.

Robinson spends time with his character and with his descriptions, so the books are not spare as with, say, Indridason's procedurals. The detective Banks is very fond of all kinds of music, and thus music is threaded throughout the story, more so than Rankin's Rebus. Banks and the novels in general remind me most of Garry Disher's Hal Challis series, perhaps because Banks seems about the same age as, and has a demeanor much like, Challis.

The mysteries are complex and interesting, and the crimes do not seem gratuitously gory or sexually bizarre (as many crime novels seem to fall into these days), and includes adequate and believable suspense and action, without it tweaked up to "thriller" levels.

I'd say readers of Hal Challis, Alex Winter, Kurt Wallander,, Erlendur and Rebus might like these, depending on how spare you like your crime novels (sorry, that Disher, Edwardson, Mankell, Indridason and Rankin).

Lois, I am a fan of Wallender/Mankell and have started the Rankin/Rebus series this year based upon LT recommendations. Have been enjoying those too, so it sounds like I need to add this series to my list of authors to try. I also find these types of books get me out of a reading desert.

I enjoy the Peter Robinson crime novels and the TV show is excellent.

>216 baswood: Barry, I think I caught one episode once (and there was one book in which I seemed to know who the murderer was early on, so that might have been the episode). I may have to chase down the others.

I'm still trying to catch up, so...



My Heart is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Mother, edited by Eva LaPlante (2013)

We've moved a lot of books this year, about thousand out of the house (mostly donated), and packed up another couple thousand, leaving a few more to pack up...which is all a prelude to say that I can't find this book now! It's not in the usual Alcott places. I had wanted to post some excerpts from the book.

I have read much on the Alcotts over the last 10 years or so. I live very near Concord (where they lived, and are buried), and Michael & I even got married at Fruitlands, the site of Bronson Alcott's failed utopia by the same name. While not an obsession, they are an area of interest.

My Heart is Boundless is an excellent, chronological collection of Abigail (or, Abba) Alcott's writings, of what can be found. Much of her diary was destroyed after her death by Bronson or edited by Louisa, so the collection is more letters than journal entries, but it gives the reader a good sense of this remarkable (and long suffering) woman in her own words (do I need to mention she was the inspiration for 'Marmee' in Little Women?. LaPlante adds biographical tidbits throughout.

The only other book on Abba is The Transcendental Wife by Cynthia Barton, a book not widely published, but an invaluable contribution to the collection of lit on the Alcotts.

Abba is hardly the ideal 'Marmee' but she worked hard to get more education than what was common for young women at that time (with the help of her older brother Samuel). She was passionate about causes such as abolition, but marriage to Bronson and the resulting domestic duties dimmed this somewhat. She was, as women were once, constantly pregnant, and Bronson's idealism and eccentricity often kept them poor and moving fairly frequently (a current thought now is that Bronson was bi-polar). She was long-suffering and loyal, and loved her children; she was prone to depression (whether organic or situational, one can only guess), but continued to read and work for causes as she could. One cannot help but wonder what a powerhouse this woman would have been had she not married.

One Who Disappeared by David Herter (novel, 2011, US)

This is the conclusion to Herter's Czech trilogy, which includes On the Overgrown Path and The Luminous Depths. The books were published in the UK, and sadly have no US distribution, and because of it they remain a bit underappreciated, in my opinion—though I do see that they are now available as e-books.

Here are my comments on On the Overgrown Path:

The composer Janacek is stuck in a small village near the mountains when his train leaves without him. The villagers are very accommodating and he decides to make the best of his time by investigating some folk music he heard but strange and mysterious things begin to happen. Set in the early 1920s in Slovakia (or near the border), this delightful novella manages to still give the feeling of a folkloric wooded winter setting, with just a dash of Gothic. Janacek is an intriguing character to be placed in the middle of it.

And my comments on The Luminous Depths:

This second book begins in the early 1920s with the arrival of Dr. Brod and Franz Kafka at Janacek home. There Kafka is introduced and he produces a mysteries "stave flower" - a folded parchment with many points covered in what seems to be tiny musical notations. Kafka tells him that it fell from the sky and hit him in the chest. With it came an ominous vision of the future, he claimed.

Now forward ahead to 1930. Composer Pavel Haas, a former student of Janacek is working with Karel and Josef Capek on a revival of their play, R.U.R or Rossum's Universal Robots. After an evening of camaraderie with the Capeks at a local restaurant, Pavel is on his way home when what looks like a paper star flower floats down from the sky and hits him in the chest. He pockets it. Later the next day, when during the play rehearsal he unfolds it, the theater goes dark. . . .

What begins now is a gripping fantastical tale that I would prefer not to spoil for you. Herter is actually quite a fine writer (one of the better ones in the field of genre literature, imo). He has created a sense of place and character and atmosphere rich with period details, musical details, historical details. You are there in the theater with Haas, the Capeks, the other costumed actors. You are there when the lights go out, and you are there for what comes after...

=====

Without giving too much away, the third book begins in 1949 with Pavel Haas, his brother and their families comfortably ensconced in Hollywood, yet haunted by things past. A mysterious telegram arrives, and a subsequent meeting, (and with the help of a "stave flower") sends Pavel back to 1929, where the maestro, the Capek brothers and others are unaware of the impending war. Running against the clock, can Pavel enlist their help and change history?

What I said about previous book: He {Herter} has created a sense of place and character and atmosphere rich with period details, musical details, historical details... still holds true for this "gripping, fantastical" installment, which is more complex than the previous two. Again, one is drawn and immersed in this story with its whirlwind setting and pervading atmosphere of urgency. And music seems to pervade it all, so that even the earth itself is moved by it.

Things mysterious in the previous two installments are understood fully in this third, but when I finished it, I still found myself wanting to go back and start the whole trilogy over again.

Much of my year has been one of distraction, and yet, with the reading I have managed to complete, I can still see various threads in my reading list.

Nonfiction is collected essay or other short pieces form. Fiction is mostly familiar authors (only four new-to-me authors on the list this year. Tsk. tsk.), and the stories are rarely ones of strict realism. Well, all fiction is fantasy, as they say, but I've drifted a bit more than usual off the realism road this year (my gawd, there is not one Oates work on my list! Can that be?!!?!) We are in an age of fantasy, they say currently, but I didn't imagine that I would be "going with the flow" (in my own particular way).

I do seem to be holding up my usual percentage of translated books, probably a slightly larger percentage of short fiction and poetry—all relative, of course, to the total number read. And, I've happily overdosed on crime novels (my go-to comfort reads).

I have another four books left to comment on before I am caught up: the Atwood novel, and the collections by Rogers, Haigh and Lanagan.

Lois, I think I might like My Heart is Boundless. Little Women remains a favorite memory from my childhood. Several years ago, I read March by Geraldine Brooks, mainly because of its link to Little Women.

The David Herter trilogy also sounds intriguing.

Going with the flow is not where I expect you, but... is that really an accurate characterization of your reading? Enjoying catching up with you.

Great to catch up with your reading, Lois.

>222 dchaikin: Well, Dan, I am reading a lot that could qualify as fantasy of one kind or another, but if I was going with the flow properly, I guess I'd be reading something with vampires, zombies or dragons in it. I suppose I am doing my usual thing: wandering through the literary forest, pulling leaves from interesting trees, turning over rocks, and dragging sticks behind me for the fun of it (and not leaving a bread crumb trail to find my way back).

I was trying to remember where I read that "we are in an era of fantasy" (interestingly, I remember Angela Carter being discussed as having been ahead of her time because she was writing fantasy in an era of realism - the 1960s). I'm sure it was in some review somewhere, of course, in my search for it, I found an excerpt of a piece written in the 1980s about being in the "age of commodified fantasticism" —an intriguing few paragraphs, but not what I was looking for :-) (certainly, at this point, the 1980s seem like a dream to me!)

>221 NanaCC: Nanacc, I think I still have an extra copy of the first book, if I send it to Chris will you get it? (Or, if you want to leave your address on my profile page, I'll send it to you if I can find it. I may have packed it up already).

>223 rebeccanyc: Always good to see you, r!

"age of commodified fantasticism" is hardly a compliment.

>225 dchaikin: True. The writer started out on the cultural level and then brought to topic down to literature, and then I believe to children's literature (but I didn't get to read this latter part). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chq/summary/v009/9.4.zipes.html

>219 avaland: - I remember you recommending David Herter before so when PS Publishing put it on special offer I purchased the complete trilogy. Saving it until I feel able to commit to it (this year has seen a serious lack of commitment).

Re Fantasy - it is interesting that we have traditionally taught children using fantasy, i.e., fairy tales, but there is an expectation that it should be left behind when they become adults. One of the issues is that the label 'fantasy' has come to represent a narrow base of work, often populist - Tolkien and his followers, paranormal action/romance, etc. Look beyond that and there are plenty of great 'fantasy' novels and short stories out there.

>224 avaland: - I wonder if that comment by Angela Carter partially refers to the initial burst of magic realism in English language works in the early 1980s. I have just finished Graham Swift's Waterland and in a new introduction he mentions the influence of magic realism at the time and how it led him to incorporate events in the novel that could be construed as supernatural.

>227 Jargoneer: Agree with your comments regarding fantasy.

The comment was about Carter's writing in the 60s, I believe, but I don't remember now who said that (I'm sure I read that when I was having my Angela Carter jag) The quote there about commodified fantasticism was from a writer named Jack Zipes (if I remember correctly)

... wandering through the literary forest, pulling leaves from interesting trees, turning over rocks, and dragging sticks behind me for the fun of it (and not leaving a bread crumb trail to find my way back)

What a fabulous way to put it! Looked at like that, it doesn't matter if you find your way back; there'll always be something better somewhere along the trail. At least that's how George MacDonald, my idea of a fantasy writer,(Victorian of course) would frame it in one of his works.

>229 SassyLassy: thank you! Nice note on MacDonald's thinking (read MacDonald in the later 70s mostly {Phantastes!}, though my oldest daughter had a nice edition of The Princess and the Goblin in the 80s).

Every time I click on your page and see the Anita Hill cover at the top it makes me happy and hopeful.

>229 SassyLassy:/230 - I would take MacDonald's Lilith as one of my desert island books. I recognise that it has a few faults but the oddness and sheer vision of it overcome all of those.

I wonder how much Abigail lived vicariously through Louisa. Is it true that Louisa supported Abigail financially for a long time and protected her to some extent (even if only with emotional support) from Bronson? I find it interesting how often people read more about the Alcott's looking for more Little Women and end up disappointed, when I think the truth was so much more fascinating; not to say that I don't enjoy watching Katherine Hepburn play Jo. :-)

David Herter is a Czech author with whom I am not familiar. I see he lives here in Seattle. Interesting. His blog has some interesting pictures: I love the cover of On the Overgrown Path. It says that his books are available at Third Place Books, but I can't find a publisher listed. Odd.

>231 mkboylan: MK, I'm still working through it. It brings up a lot of memories, and it gets me to thinking about how things have changed—or not. So, the going is much slower than I expected.

>232 Jargoneer: I think I may have read that one, but it was so long ago I can't honestly remember.

>233 labfs39: Herter is American, but fascinated with that part of the world. http://davidherter.blogspot.com/

re: the Alcotts. Louisa supported the family when she became successful, and she certainly tried to make her mother's life easier. I think they were a lot alike. And both were prone to depression, though I have wondered if Abba's was more a situational depression rather than organic. Eva LaPlante, who edited, this collection of her writings, recently wrote a book about Louisa and her mother.

Louisa wrote Little Women from her upstairs bedroom in Orchard House in Concord (looking out the front window), where I think the Alcotts were the happiest.