A fifth year of wandering_

Hello everyone! I'm Margaret and this is my fifth year on Club Read and seventh on LT. I love to hang out on LT and talk with people about books - I've had some really great recommendations and gained insights into books from LT-mates.

I have a lot of TBR books (this is likely to get worse as I've just acquired a Kindle and there are so many tempting offers on ebooks), and I often choose what to pick off the shelf from the "75 Books" group's monthly Take It Or Leave It challenges - I like the combination of randomness and structure that brings. I'll also be taking part in the Reading Globally quarterly theme reads, starting with Central & Eastern European literature in the first quarter, and I'm leading the Southeast Asian theme in the second quarter so any recommendations gratefully received. There are lots of other theme reads around which I follow haphazardly.

Other than that, I only have one real reading plan for the year - I have about a shelf's worth of unread books that I'm pretty sure I've owned for over ten years - so I would like to get to them this year!

And here's my top ten reads of 2012, in no particular order:

Fiction:
Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel
A Visit From The Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan
The Song Of Achilles - Madeline Miller

Non-fiction:
Nothing To Envy - Barbara Demick (reportage, North Korea)
The Opium War - Julia Lovell (history)
Leviathan - Philip Hoare (whales)

Other:
Memorial - Alice Oswald - poetry, a semi-translation from the Iliad
Instead Of A Book - Diana Athill - letters (I like the fact that an earlier book of hers, Instead Of A Letter, appears further up this thread)
Watchmen - Alan Moore - a comic

Lifetime achievement award:
Reginald Hill, a writer of thrillers, whose books are always reliable and have twice got me out of reading slumps this year (the two books in question were the Austen-inflected Pictures Of Perfection and the all-in-one-day interwoven stories of Midnight Fugue)

"Do you recognise this feeling? A man is walking on a wet pavement and slips. his one leg collapses under him, and he starts to fall backwards. At the precise moment when I lose my balance, I am filled with a sudden ecstasy. Of course it lasts only a second, then I automatically jerk back my leg, recover my balance, and rejoice in the fact that I didn't fall. But that one moment! For just one moment I was suddenly released from the oppressive laws of equilibrium. I was free. I began to fly off into annihilating freedom... Do you recognise this feeling?"

My first thought on reading this was "not really". But then it occurred to me that this was a fairly good description of the vertiginous feeling of reading my first book of 2013, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight.

The plot - well, there is one, in which Mihály on his honeymoon runs into an old friend, is reminded of the wild days of his youth and semi-accidentally abandons his wife to seek his lost friends. It turns out that Mihály has spent fifteen years trying to adapt to an adult life of responsibility (culminating in his marriage) - but his teenage dread of a bourgeois existence is still lurking somewhere inside him, and once his memories are stirred up he can't suppress these feelings any longer.

But I'm not sure that the plot is really the point of the novel. Better simply to enjoy the witty writing, the baroque craziness - with characters including a Persian impresario who seems "like an imperfectly tamed tiger", a saintly priest who has converted from Judaism, a glamorous brother and sister who are half in love with each other but more in love with death - and the musings on the perverse attraction of oblivion and the deadening nature of everyday existence.

Congratulations on your first book of the year! Interesting comments about Szerb's writing. I have some of his other works on my TBR (The Queen's Necklace and Love in a Bottle) that I might get around to this year (especially for the Reading Globally read on 20th/21st century Central/Eastern European writing).

I saw your mention of Journey by Moonlight on the 'What are you reading - January' thread yesterday, and picked up my own TBR copy off the shelf opposite my sofa in the living room (which means it's meant to be a 'read soon'). I know I'll read it eventually, and hopefully will enjoy it too, I'm just not sure that I'm in the mood yet for anything other than straightforward writing that I don't have to think too much about. This perhaps explains my current lean towards non-fiction?

Looking forward to following your reading this year. I added many books to my wishlist last year from your reviews.

Thanks and hello everyone! Journey By Moonlight was a fairly quick read, and 1 January was a horrible, grey cold day, so it was a pleasure to lie on the sofa with it. However, Polaris you are right, I am not sure that it could really be described as straightforward - best to wait until you are in the mood for it!

Bring up the Bodies and Song of Achilles were two of my favorites from last year as well.

Nice review of Journey By Moonlight - I did enjoy the baroque craziness. Mihaly annoyed me a bit with his sponging off of everyone but I thought the end was just right.

Great review and I love that first quote. My micro-moments of that sort are filled with hyper-panic, I'm missing out. And posted 6 hours into 2013, impressive.

3 - Sounds wonderful to me, and I've added it to the wishlist.

Nice review of Journey By Moonlight; I'll add it to my wish list as well.

2. Enma The Immortal by Fumi Nakamura

1866. A young rebel samurai has been badly beaten by the hated Tokugawa shogunate police. When a passer-by finds him, he groans, "I don't want to die" - and by doing so he seals his fate, for the passer-by, Baikou, is a tattooist renowned for his powers to tattoo spirit charms. Usually, his customers want the charms to help them stop drinking or to forget a lost love - but as he nears his own death, Baikou has been drawn more and more strongly to the greatest taboo of the art - tattooing an immortality charm. The young man's words are just the encouragement he needs.

As well as giving him supernatural abilities to heal, Baikou passes on his skills to the young man, who takes the name of Enma, the lord and judge of the dead and the character who has been tattooed onto his palm. But immortality has its downsides - you have to move every few years before the neighbours get suspicious that you never age, and falling in love has no hope to lead to anything but heartbreak. Worse still, it turns out that Baikou's previous apprentice Yasha made himself immortal - and unlike Enma, he doesn't even bother to struggle with the demon inside him that's keeping him alive. When he discovers that he has a successor, he begins to taunt Enma and threaten those that he loves - at least partly because he knows that Enma is one of the few beings who would be able to kill him. Their struggle lasts through the decades, coming to a climax in the summer of 1945 as Japan burns around them.

I really enjoyed this book, although it's a little hard to put my finger on why. The writing is fairly functional, as are the glimpses of a changing Japan (they are interesting, but tend to be fairly bald - "It had been twenty years since the game called baseball had arrived in Japan"). The themes are a little bit repetitive. And yet, I liked Enma and enjoyed the depiction of his relationships with the few friends who know the truth about him. From a cultural viewpoint, I also thought that Enma's struggle not to kill Yasha was interesting, and something you would be less likely to find in a similar book with a Western background/setting.

"This thing? he muttered. "It's not a bruise and it won't wash off. What is it?" After seeing the gates of hell itself, he hadn't thought the new mark on his skin was very important and hadn't paid any attention to it. "What's it look like," the old man answered. "It's a tattoo. The Sanskrit character for Great King Enma, the lord and judge of the dead." Refilling his bucket with fresh water, he staggered back inside. Upon hearing it was a tattoo, Amane began rubbing it with his fingers, utterly dumbfounded. "But, how...? I don't remember ever getting this."

#10 - Dan, it's a time difference thing - my actual time of posting is 13 hours later than the time listed on the post! I'd love to be able to read that quickly (and need that little sleep...)

I enjoyed your review and will add Enma the Immortal to my wishlist. Thanks!

3. Delusions Of Gender: the real science behind sex differences by Cordelia Fine

Delusions Of Gender, in case you can't tell from the title, is a takedown of the pop-science idea that there are 'hardwired' differences between male and female brains, which can do anything from explaining why women continue to be under-represented in particular fields, to arguing that they ought to be focusing more on their caring, empathetic strengths.

Full disclosure, Fine is preaching to the choir here. I've long thought - and Fine explains much more articulately - that it's pretty suspicious that these follow on from a wide range of historical arguments that have been used to explain why women are not suited to participation in 'men's' fields. (At the same time, those fields have changed - and not just because women are moving into traditionally male fields. Fine points out that in the 1960s computer programming was seen as something particularly suited to women.)

But despite this, I was shocked by "the discrepancy between the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other". We all know about the problems with scientific research being translated into the media, but I hadn't expected the extent to which the pop science books actually misrepresent the research - in one typical example, a book describes an experiment testing for empathetic reactions and comments that women were particularly good at this. It turns out that the experiment referenced only used women. The science itself also seems pretty shoddy. In another empathy experiment, the ability to empathise was measured by subjects' response to questions like "I really enjoy caring for other people" ("a bit like testing mathematical ability with questions like "I can easily solve differential equations"", Fine comments acidly). Another experiment tested what kind of toys male and female monkeys preferred to play with - and included in the 'girlish' toys section a saucepan - how clever of the female monkeys to work out that this was intended for them.

Fine also challenges the idea that neuroscience is destiny, reminding us that our brains are influenced by our culture, surroundings and interactions. We are influenced by social expectations and may perform worse in situations where we are expected to perform worse (a phenomenon known as 'stereotype threat') - this is tested by, for example, offering mixed gender groups the same test, but telling one group that the test is looking for a skill perceived as 'female' and the other group that it's looking for a 'male' one.

There is also an interesting final section about how children absorb the many messages about appropriate behaviour, colours etc. for each gender, and how the presence of others also makes them more likely to behave in a way which is perceived as appropriate. This counters the frequently-told story of the parents who tried to raise their child in gender-neutral way and can't understand why the daughter still loves pink and tucks her toy truck into bed.

Despite the serious subject, Fine writes in a funny and accessible way. Much of the humour comes from righteous outrage - which I found myself sharing, whether because of the shoddily-written pseudoscience, its jaw-dropping assertions (working women need to do household chores to gain the hormone oxytocin which they would otherwise get from caring for their babies? male brains don't take in as much sensory data as female brains and therefore just don't notice when a house needs cleaning?) or the continued evidence of different treatment for women in a range of places.

However, the book is very wide-ranging. This means it contains a lot of interesting detail, but the overall argument is a little hard to follow. For example, after training us to be sceptical about reported scientific research, Fine then brings in similar-sounding research to support her own side. Because of this, I am not sure that this book would convert anyone who wasn't already sympathetic to Fine's arguments. But I enjoyed reading it - and I feel that it's opened my eyes just a little bit more - this morning, for example, I spotted a sign in my town advertising "Disney On Ice - Princesses & Heroes" which I think might have seemed fairly normal to me before reading this book!

Delusions of Gender sounds interesting! Thanks for your comments.

4. The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth

There is a whole section of the publishing industry, in the UK at least, devoted to books like this, which provide interesting factoids about language - including grammar (Eats, Shoots and Leaves), odd words in foreign languages (The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World), and the origins of common phrases (too many to mention).

This book, though, is one of the better ones.

Firstly, the structure is appealing - discussion of one word leads to another word and so on until we arrive back at the beginning. One good thing about this is that it allows words to have as much space as they merit - some get a chapter to themselves, others are clustered together with their cousins, such as in one chapter which is all about words which relate to the names of islands.

Secondly, I found a lot of the information new to me and actually interesting (and mostly it had the ring of truth - all of which is unlike the majority of these books). For example, I hadn't known that the opposite of pantheon is pandemonium (the place of all the gods/the place of all the demons). Gormless has come into common use because it features in Wuthering Heights. The Yorkshire servant who uses it would also have used the word 'gorm' (sense) - but that word never made it into the book and so it stayed in Yorkshire. And -le is a 'frequentative suffix' - if something looks as if it is sparking a lot, it sparkles; if you swathe something up a lot, you swaddle it; if something makes a lot of cracking noises, it crackles. Jostle apparently comes from 'joust', fondle from 'fond' (a medieval verb), snuggle from 'snug' ('to lie down together in order to keep warm'), nuzzle from 'nose', and so on.

And finally, while some of the humour is a little groanworthy, some of it did make me smile. I liked "Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology they were able to create vast explosions", or a chapter about the weaknesses of human nature laid bare by the changing meaning of words - 'soon' used to mean 'now' (as in 'I'll do it soon'?) and 'probable' used to mean 'provable'.

This was a very fun read which I enjoyed dipping into. It was a particular godsend when I was laid low recently by a stomach bug and had almost no energy for reading.

Your review of Delusions of Gender reminds me of a book I read a few years ago called Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot. She goes through many scientific studies on gender differences, or more often similarities, in babies. I remember her also pointing out how terribly represented or flat out misunderstood most of the studies are in popular baby books or child development books. It's an interesting topic. She seems to arrive at the conclusion (or at least she led me there) that there are minor genetic/hormonal differences between baby girls and boys and these slight tendencies are greatly magnified by expectations, culture, society, schools, etc.

Delusions of gender no harm in reading what you want to read.

Both of these books sound intriguing, although I did notice your caveat about "groanworthy" humor -- I have that problem with a lot of British humor. Sorry about the stomach bug -- no fun.

japaul - Delusions of Gender covers similar ground, but I think Fine's overarching point is that because stereotypes and social expectations also affect our brain and behaviour, believing in or promoting the idea of 'hardwired' differences can actually making things worse. I definitely think it's worth reading for anyone with an interest in the subject.

5. Red Dust by Gillian Slovo

Red Dust is set in a small town in South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is coming to town to hear an application for amnesty for the torture of Alex Mpondo, now an MP, by a former policeman Dirk Hendricks. But the town's crusading lawyer Ben Hoffman sees an opportunity to use Hendricks' testimony to discover the truth about the disappearance of young Steve Sizela many years before (believed to have died at the hands of another policeman Pieter Muller), and calls his protegee Sarah Barcant back home from her life as a New York prosecutor to work with him on the case.

I am very interested in post-conflict justice and particularly in the tensions between truth, justice and reconciliation, so easily linked together in the names of the various commissions and so hard to make compatible in practice. I had high hopes for this given Slovo's background (she is the daughter of Ruth First and Joe Slovo). But although the book did touch on these issues it didn't do so as deeply as I had hoped. It wasn't superficial - but it's essentially a thriller with an interesting setting and themes, rather than anything more.

At that moment, as the second workman shovelled the earth away, the crowd began to sing. Up went the pick and down again, and the lilting voices swelled, those words sung out, that incessant questioning: senzeni, why is this happening?, joined to praises to their God, the sound rising up like an endless flocking of downy birds, driving on the workmen, as one carved his pick into the ground, the sound followed almost immediately by the soft thumping of a spade, pick and spade, pick and spade.

I was interested in your review of Red Dust because I had mixed feelings about Slovo's Ice Road, which I read a few years ago. I felt in that book that her characterizations were weak and that there were endless passages of people thinking -- did you find any of that in this book?

6. Change (What Was Communism?) by Mo Yan

I need to put the series title in or no touchstone appears. It's a little bit misleading, though, since I'm not sure the book really answers the question 'what was Communism?' - nor indeed, since this is China we're talking about, whether the question shouldn't be 'what is' or 'what will be' Communism.

Setting that aside, this is a memoir/novella, in which Mo Yan remembers a couple of episodes from his childhood and then sketches out how his life developed, with a focus on the meetings and interactions he had with his childhood friends in later years. It's a slim volume, but the simplicity is deceptive, as Mo manages to touch on a great many features of life in China then (1960s) and now, what has changed, and what has stayed the same (notably, the need to have connections to get ahead).

It was also interesting to read this in the light of the Mo Yan Nobel Prize debate about his stance towards the CCP. From this book, I thought he came out better than his critics would suggest: you could not read this book and have a starry view of China either then or now, although he certainly treated the negative sides of life in a very matter-of-fact way.

The three of us also stood in line for two hours at a renowned dumpling shop next to Xidan Bazaar, and treated ourselves to a meal of machine-made dumplings that were filled with fatty pork that oozed grease when you bit into them. The machine spat the things out behind a waist-high counter for customers at the dozen or so tables up front. What a marvellous invention, I was thinking. The dough, water and meat went in one end and the finished dumplings popped out the other, right into a cauldron of boiling water. The product of a mad genius! What I reported this fantastic news to my mother, she refused to believe me.

A gripe about the book design - it uses that sort of fake-Cyrillic design in which Russian letters are substituted for the Roman letters that they look like - hence Yan is printed чди (the Russian letters for CH-D-I). I find this annoying at the best of times but particularly here when the book is not connected to Russia (and neither are many of the others in the series)!

Rebecca - I didn't notice that there were long passages of people thinking, but I would agree the characterisations are pretty weak - in particular the character of the New York-returned lawyer, who is little more than a brain in flash city clothing and inappropriate-to-dusty-small-town shoes.

I also remember thinking, when one of the ex-policeman was introduced as being ugly, fat and ginger-haired, I really hope he turns out to be a good guy, because otherwise it's just too clichéd. (He didn't).

#16

I was trying to bite my tongue because almost nothing depresses me so much as this topic. The disproportion between the laughable flimsiness of conclusions of this type of research and their sociological significance (as propaganda) makes me sick.

Still, adding another "aye" to the author's overall conclusions. I am regularly appalled by the shoddiness and shamelessness of this research (into gender differences specifically, and so-called "evolutionary" psychology in general), in fact, I think it is all absolutely worthless. Therefore, I'm inclined to look at everyone involved as the blackest of blackguards.

If there's one thing we've learned in the past 130 years of genetic research, it's that nature/nurture boundaries are difficult to delineate, and progressively more so the more complex the behaviour, phenotype or species considered. There are no words to explain how difficult it is to tease apart the genetic from environmental factors contributing to "differences" between men and women. Well, actually, there is one: impossible.

We are born in a slice of time and space preceded by an incomputable mass of biological and cultural history, and into complex "story" of our own, with innumerable uncontrollable factors contributing to our development. How does one isolate subjects for a proper scientific study of gender differences?

Even if we treated humans like mice, breeding them in cages, we couldn't control for the enormous impact of history, nor for the variety of environments involved.

And the biases are incredible. Because what I said is commonly known, some have tried researching "gender differences" in--babies. The idea that anyone's opinions of adult women's abilities and propensities may be based on what some psych twit "learns" from a four-month old doesn't strike enough people as monstrously silly. Moreover, these studies have shown bias in how the babies were handled, some of it unconscious. And that's without going into the assumptions of the studies, or their set-up, the bias for white Westerners, the small study groups, the irreproducibility of results (to date not a single one of those large, horribly expensive twin studies of genetic bases of behaviour has been confirmed).

And on this garbage some people still would judge women. Clearly there's a political need for the judgement. Previously religion, law and sheer physical force kept women subjugated. Religion is weakened, civil rights have been extended to women, therefore the need to establish "scientifically" female "difference" (always interpreted as inferiority of some kind) becomes more attractive, even pressing.

That's disappointing about Red Dust. You had me first intrigued, then ready to put the book on my wish list and then mentally erasing it from same, all in two paragraphs.

The Mo Yan book sounds interesting.

#24 I have a book in the What Was Communism? series, and I keep meaning to read it, but I haven't done so yet. It's Two Underdogs and a Cat by Slavenka Drakulic.

#26 I felt some of the characters in Ice Road were there just there to fill a role. Sounds like that was true in this book too.

Well said Lola! It is just so complicated. One of the obvious things that drive me crazy about some gender research is that the researchers often don't see their own design flaws. For example, they ask what color or what toys a three year old choose? Hello? It's a little late to ask THAT question? Three (or more) years of gender socialization have already influenced that. Sheesh before the baby is born the parents are painting their room the "appropriate" color! and on and on and on.

Thanks for the great review and discussion Margaret. I am enjoying the variety on your thread. This is my first year in this group and that is one of the things that influenced my decision to participate in this particular group. So much variety.

Lola and MK - sounds like you would enjoy a good conversation with Cordelia Fine! (and welcome to Club Read MK). As for me, knowing less about the subject than you, I would previously have felt troubled and defensive when this supposed science came up - now I can argue back righteously, which in itself is a very good reason to have read the book ;-)

Rebecca - yes, I would agree that was the case with Red Dust too.

Wandering- Thanks. Look forward to following your reading. :)

Catching up....so much good stuff here....

#13 Enma The Immortal - excellent review!

#18 The Etymologicon is on the wishlist. And I really want to use gorm in a sentence...

#24 Change - another terrific review. Love that quote.

#16/22/27 - I have thoughts...deciding whether to post them. It's maybe best left alone by me.

#16 Delusions Of Gender - I'm wondering whether she concludes anything about actual differences. Every time I read that the differences are exaggerated, and real existing ones are culturally exaggerated...ie. they are nurtured...I think OK but, what about the ones that aren't (and what about the nurtured gender differences that are inevitable such the ways girls and boys bond with and imitate mom vs dad...or things related to pregnancy/childbirth. )

I do completely agree that "believing in or promoting the idea of 'hardwired' differences can actually making things worse"(from #22)...but what if the alternate is deluding ourselves?

#27 Lola argues it's impossible to determine. Maybe true for adults. But, that's not accurate for young kids (ages 2-5). In general, girls are more socially aware and become more socially sophisticated at younger ages. In general, Boys are more socially indifferent, harder to communicate with and more spatially focused. This characterization is not on the edge. (A good that discusses this is The Way of Boys by Anthony Rao. Almost all parenting books on girls focus on ages over five, really about 9 and older. I haven't read any real research on this topic.) The books I have come across discuss this in the context of western culture. So, it's possible this doesn't cross cultures and is, hence, conditioned.

Once we reach adult stage, then it's conceivable that early differences do not mean anything, or at least that "impossible" applies.

#34

I don't know which gender differences you are talking about. I also don't know what's "inevitable" about bonding with parents. (For one thing, not everyone has two or even a single parent, or necessarily parents of opposite sexes.)

In general, girls are more socially aware and become more socially sophisticated at younger ages. In general, Boys are more socially indifferent, harder to communicate with and more spatially focused.

My beef here begins with your "in general", without going into the dubious content of the claim itself (and, it IS dubious--there is no objective research on gender differences AT ALL.) "In general" simply isn't good enough when it comes to discussing people--ought to be outlawed, in fact.

Only absolute differences, applying to 100% of gender-class members, are real differences. These are the presence or absence of primary sex characteristics. But, as it happens, individuals exist who prove that binary categories are insufficient, i.e. there are no absolute differences between genders in reality, even at that basic level. Moreover, we now recognise that sex and gender need not coincide, AND that gender construction has several key cultural aspects.

Once we reach adult stage, then it's conceivable that early differences do not mean anything, or at least that "impossible" applies.

Females and males begin to be treated differently from birth, or even before birth. (Consider Asian femicides, for instance.) And no one who doesn't grow up incommunicado in a desert alone with a robot nurse is free from the influence of the larger society.

The point is that no decent research is possible on the topic even theoretically, because 1) we cannot treat human subjects like we do lab animals; 2) even if we could, we still couldn't command the time and space required for controlled studies.

Psychology will never be an objective science; that's why the evo. psych. cranks lean so heavily on genetic studies, trying to appear "harder" than there's any warranty to do so.

What is clear is that there's always some bullshit floating around aimed at keeping the women down. The content changes a bit, the goal remains the same.

P.S. Wandering star, apologies for babbling on in your thread!

Only absolute differences, applying to 100% of gender-class members, are real differences.

OK.

But, when understanding my children, the "in general" helped me a lot. Their cognitive differences at ages 2-5 bothered me a lot. Turns out it wasn't just personality. One was girl-like per the (mythical?) girl, the other was boy-like per the (mythical?) boy. To put it simpler, one listened really carefully, the other not really. The difference was striking. Turns out they were both close to normal in that way...but not totally. It can be a big deal, knowing this.

36 - but again, by 2 and earlier the socialization has already happened, right?

22 wandering- re: post justice conflict- have you read one of my all time top ten favorites : Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog? It knocked me out! I loved it. Listed it as one of my best reads of 2012. It IS really the only thing I have read on that topic so I have nothing to compare it to.

#37 Of course, but that doesn't change the hard-wiring.

#36

So, you are talking about TWO children here, and your own at that (biases galore). Second, you are positing a "normal" that just happens to fit how you see them--a "normal" boy, a "normal" girl.

Now, while your children may indeed be the way you observe them (something no one else here can dispute), the "normal" you are invoking is a cultural construct, not a biological certainty.

Any opposite example to yours blows the idea apart. It doesn't even have to be drastically opposite. For instance, my niece is a girl who likes pink and ponies and pink ponies, but she's also the best in her class at math and will take part in a math Olympiad this spring. My nephew is all about Spiderman and motorbikes at the moment, but he's also a total social butterfly, a spontaneous charmer much more inclined to chat up strangers than my niece.

If your children are "normal", are my niece and nephew "abnormal"? Why? And why even think in these categories?

I suggest that you are needlessly shoehorning your children (and everyone else) into narrow artificial categories, whereas individuals express features lying on continuums, in highly complex combinations.

#39

Hard-wiring? LOL! The whole point of criticism raised by the book wandering_star discussed is that the research on "hard-wiring" of differences is bunkum!

#40 - My "normal" comes from the parenting & child psychology books, where "normal" means you don't need a child psychologist. I don't think your post really applies. Your niece and nephew are normal in the aspects described, even if the boy liked the pink and the girl liked Spiderman.

#41 - If the research is so bad, then why are there books on child psychology that have some accuracy? Sorry, the information is out there. Anyway, bad research doesn't have any meaning towards any argument.

Dan - The book argues that we totally underestimate the number of cues that children receive about the socially appropriate way for each gender to behave. Firstly, gender is one of the most obvious dividing lines in society (to a child) - everyone (and many things) are either 'he' or 'she', and people will explicitly divide up by gender ('it's time for the boys to go and wash their hands') in ways that they would not use for any other kind of difference. Second, kids are constantly looking at the world around them to work out clues about how they should behave - and they prefer having 'hard' categories to fluid boundaries (I've seen this in other contexts from the book eg having difficulty explaining to a child why someone who wasn't Christian celebrated Christmas - for the child it was a category error and she couldn't get her head around it). Therefore, kids are always trying to work out what the 'right' way for girls/boys to behave. Fine gives some examples of times when it's been worked out 'wrong', eg a child that believed that women drank coffee and men drank tea, because that's how it was in his family, and got confused by the sight of a man drinking coffee. Add to all this non-explicit priming the fact that boys and girls are often praised/criticised for different behaviours and you get an awful lot of messages about what behaviour is expected. Fine also quotes some studies suggesting that kids are more likely to play with gender-appropriate toys if there are other people present, especially kids of their own sex.

MK - I have Country Of My Skull but haven't got to it yet - thanks for the nudge!

Dan #2 - The writer has a blog, delightfully called the Inky Fool - you can get an idea of both style and content from this.

Thanks W_S, and sorry for the argument I stewed up.

And Lola, actually, thinking on it more, I now see your point in #40. I shouldn't have used anecdotal info regarding my kids. I was trying to explain my perspective and approach. I was in the wrong, apologies.

39 well except that some now believe it absolutely changes the hardwiring. Some of that info is based on brainwashing experiences from as long ago as the Korean War and some as current as info provided by mri. It is believed that playing with " boy" toys such as legos and tinkertoys develops the part of the brain that deals with spatial math more fully. Thus accounting for some differences in math abilities between genders. Its noted that these differences are growing smaller over time as education methods change. Isn't it just a fascinating topic? Especially so now that we have the technology to measure and see brain changes. Fascinating!

#45 "well except that some now believe it absolutely changes the hardwiring" : ) touche. I meant whatever is we start with, regardless of it's future malleability. Hardwiring was the wrong word. Yes, fascinating stuff.

#38 Country of My Skull sounds fascinating -- on to the wishlist it goes!

Dan - no need to apologise for triggering this conversation - it's always interesting to see a good discussion on a thread as long as it stays civil!

7. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

There was a story that someone had walked out of a screening of the recent film Drive, and demanded her ticket money back, because the trailer had promised an action thriller while the film itself was more slow-paced and arthouse. It's a little bit the same with Why be happy.... Not that I wanted to walk out or get my money back, far from it. But I had heard Winterson on so many book podcasts, all of which tended to quote the zingy one-liners, and this book is sadder, more profound and less polished than that focus would suggest.

This is a memoir, of what Winterson describes as the real life of which Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was a cover story. It also continues on into later life, and some of what happened in the 25 years since Oranges was published, including a little bit about Winterson making contact with her birth mother.

But the focus of the story is Mrs Winterson (as Jeanette calls her throughout the book), the adoptive mother and looming presence throughout Jeanette's childhood. As we know from Oranges, she was evangelically Christian, a strong and overbearing figure who treated the young Jeanette appallingly. She was also, as it turns out, profoundly depressed and in many ways trapped in her 1950s-style northern working-class life - and despite the mistreatment and pain, in some ways Winterson feels she owes much to her.

The one-liners, which are frequent, don't always fit well with the tone of the surrounding story. But often they are blackly comic, so you see the sadness after you stop laughing. And the book is clearly in Winterson's voice, personal, prone to tangents, and sometimes doubling back on itself. At one point there is the line: "I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For life-changing things, you must risk it." This is the sort of line which seems destined to end up on posters and magnets. But it's embedded in a more complex thought - Winterson is talking about her decision to leave home at sixteen, when the sensible option would have been to keep quiet and stay. And after the line quoted above, she says, the shock comes when you take the risk and you find yourself unhappy and confused.

So this is not an easy tale of triumph over adversity. The adversity had some benefits, and the triumph is partial and unfinished. But that, after all, is more like real life, and all the more moving for that.

At that moment a rival group of carol singers arrived at the front door - probably the Salvation Army, but Mrs W was having none of it. She opened the front door and shouted, "Jesus is here. Go away." "That was a bit harsh, Mum". "I have had a lot to put up with," she said, looking meaningfully at me. "I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day."

Good reviews (and conversation), especially the gender and language books. I enjoyed Jeanette Winterson's own voice on the audio of her memoir and want all the more to read Oranges.

Enjoyed your thoughts on Why be happy when you Could be Normal. I also enjoyed Dan tangling with Lola

Really enjoying your reviews, love your review on Winterson.

Bas - I've come out much worse...

I don't think this is going to develop into a theme for the whole year's reading, but 8. The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi is the second book this month to deal with Japanese tattoos, obsession and violent death. Instead of having two men tattooed with immortal charms duking it out, we have a seductive beauty with a snake-demon tattooed on her back, a tattoo collector with a Mephistophelean profile, a grisly locked-room murder and a Holmesian private detective who helps out the baffled police. I enjoyed it tremendously.

It was also interesting to read about the traditions and art of Japanese tattooing - and the book was originally published in 1948, so its references to rubble, black markets and GIs were not (as I originally thought) thrown in for historical flavour, but a contemporary view. I was quite surprised to find that out - I don't think any book published in the UK at that time would have been quite so explicit about the sensual aspects of the story.

"You may be a doctor," Kinue was saying, "but I'll bet you've never touched the skin of a tattooed woman." With a mysterious smile on her lips, she went on talking in a way guaranteed to inflame the passion of any man. "My skin is cold, you know," she murmured. "It's like the skin of a carp, or some cold-blooded reptile. Even in the heat of summer, it will chill you to the bone. Come, don't you want to touch it?"

Perhaps your looking for a tattoo for yourself, unconsciously? Very interesting, enjoyed your comments.

Hah! I did at one point want to get a tattoo but I couldn't come up with something which was personally meaningful enough. Having read this and looked online at lots of images of Japanese tattoos, I think if I did get one it would be a scatter of falling autumn leaves, partly because autumn is my favourite season and partly to symbolise the transience of life.

I liked The Tattoo Murder Case tremendously, which I read because I liked another book by the author -- Honeymoon to Nowhere. Was your copy put out by Soho Press? I've been impressed with the global reach of their title list.

Me too - and yes, it was. What others of theirs would you recommend? I have many of them on my wishlist but I think I've only actually read one of the Xiaolong Qiu books.

9. New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani

An injured man is found on a dockside in Trieste - he has no memory of anything, but as he's wearing a Finnish sailor's jacket, he's taken to a Finnish doctor who starts painstakingly reteaching him the language he believes to be his. With the name inside the jacket the only possible clue to who he is, the amnesiac throws himself into his studies in the desperate hope of recovering himself. But while a language has rules, life doesn't. Without memory, personal history or identity, and with a handicapped ability to communicate with other people, what will he be able to rebuild?

This book is beautifully written (and translated - fittingly, as the book itself is supposed to be a 'translation' by the doctor of the amnesiac's fragmentary and ungrammatical notes).

Since I live in a place where I'm not totally fluent in the local language, I especially enjoyed the passages about the man's struggles with Finnish:

That cavity which was my mouth, which seemed so small, would suddenly become immense. It seemed impossible to me that everything should be played out within those fractions of a millimetre, that a segment of muscle, if too tense, should alter a meaning completely, that one puff of air too much, or too little, should be enough to cause me to be mistaken for an Estonian or Ingrian, or indeed break off the thread of meaning entirely.

and

Sometimes a few letters were enough to tell me all I needed to know about a verb and then a whole line would dance before me, the words opening out one after another, letting the meaning shine through. But often whole sentences remained unclear, clouded by very little words, like so many padlocks obstructing the flow of meaning.

Although the author is Italian, the themes are rather Scandinavian - loss, the pain of life, and how humans can ever manage to deal with it. The man's favourite Finnish case is the absessive, "a declension for things we haven't got". But somehow the theme is dealt with lightly, so even though the book is rather sad it is a pleasure to read.

I can't resist quoting one more passage (out of the many where I've turned down the pages):

Finnish is a solid language, slightly rounded at the sides, with narrow slits for eyes, like the houses in Helsinki, the faces of our people. It is a language whose sounds are sweetish and soft, like the flesh of the perch and trout we cook on summer evenings on the shores of lakes whose depths are covered in red algae, the colour of the hunters' houses and the berries which bead from the bushes in summer. Finland is a cuttlefish bone, a great concave stone within whose sandy womb trees sprout like mould beneath the endless northern light.

I am already re-reading this.

What an interesting story about language (which seems a character itself in that novel).

btw - I saw a satirical image of a Japanese woman with English words tattooed on her. Not sure why but it was pretty funny. Just English words like air, water, etc.

New Finnish Grammar sounds a real find. Is some of the novel based in Trieste? I wonder as its one of the spookiest cities I have ever visited. The whole place feels like some sort of crossroads.

That's the third mention I've seen of New Finnish Grammar, now I'll have to read it. i can certainly relate to the living in a country without a complete mastery of the language thing -- and will dive back in come July.

As for the Soho Press books, I think that I first noticed them because they really are of a pleasing size and design. The margins and typefaces and paper are all well balanced and thoughtful. So, having bought one, I've been keeping an eye out for others and now have several. What is it about well put together books? Is it just that that is becoming a rarity? In any case, I've also discovered Gary Disher and Patricia Carlon, both Australian authors, and Matt Beynon Rees, who is British, but sets his novels in Palestine. The books can be uneven, though. I didn't like Cara Black.

Ridgeway - Seconding the Cara Black - just could't get into her books. I really wanted to like them but......

Catching up - it looks like you're going to be as good a source of recommendations as ever this year!

I loved your review of and quotes from New Finnish Grammar, Margaret. It's already on my wish list, so I'll look for it soon.

Rise - exactly! As I re-read (which I am trying to do slowly, at times when I can focus completely on the book) I am seeing much more references to the way that language is bound up not only with your own identity and history but to national identity and culture. I have been wondering why the author chose Finland. I think some of it has to do with the historical/political setting - the book takes place in 1943-44, when Finland was allied with Nazi Germany and fighting its former colonial power the Soviet Union. (I need to learn a bit more about the history of this time to think about the significance of this). But perhaps it also has to do with the language itself - I think anyone who likes learning languages takes a certain delight in the quirks and oddities that each language has, and Finnish seems to have plenty...

Barry - that's really interesting. As I was reading NFG, and having really enjoyed Jan Morris' Trieste and the meaning of nowhere which gives the impression that all the ups and downs of history have given Trieste a unique atmosphere, I was torn between really wanting to go and wondering whether as a casual visitor I would really notice this. From what you say, I would. I certainly think that it's significant that the book starts there, given Trieste's location at the junction of several cultures and the way that it's changed hands through time.

MK - that made me smile. But to be really accurate they should probably have been mis-spelt as well (There is a website, Hanzi Smatter, devoted to explaining dumb Chinese/Japanese character tattoos and similar - a sort of counterweight to engrish.com.) Personally I just don't understand how anyone could have words tattooed on them without being sure what they meant! But then, I think words are very important. That's one of the reasons I could never decide on a suitable tattoo - I kind of wanted words but I couldn't find something that was significant enough.

RidgewayGirl - I think it was Cara Black which I had tried and didn't like - I knew there was one of the Soho Crime authors. I have a Matt Beynon Rees on my shelves, and I'll also check out the other two you mention.

Rachel and Darryl - thanks! Just doing my best to return the favour...

65 well there went another hour of my day on the internet : hmmm is there an LT place to log that? Those tattoos? Now thats some funny stuff! SO much funnier than engrish!

10. I Was A Potato Oligarch by John Mole

Humorous travel books are not my usual reading, and from its cover - mock-Cyrillic lettering, and the fact that the author's written books about other countries with hilarious titles like It's All Greek To Me! - this looks like one of the worst kind, with lazy humour based on stereotypes and Foreigners Behaving Strangely, and insight-free. Never mind not picking it up in a shop, I wouldn't go near the section it's shelved in.

However, a good friend of mine who works as an analyst on business in Russia and the CIS particularly recommended it to me as a good glimpse of what things were like in Yeltsin's Russia, so I overcame my doubts and bought it.

Indeed, it does deliver a lot more than the cover seemed to promise. Firstly, Mole had a genuine purpose in being in Russia (he was trying to set up a small business) rather than going there with some silly quest with a view to getting a book out of it; and as someone who has previously written guides to doing business across cultures, he's got an interest in figuring out why things happen differently in Russia, rather than just pointing and laughing. Post-Communist Russia also seems to be one of those places where understanding how business works is very revealing about society as a whole - and the massive changes it's undergone. A lot of the humour, too, is based on his expectations being overturned - as when he is asked to give a lecture on cross-cultural business to the Moscow University business school. Thinking that these were kids who grew up under Communism, he pitches his lecture low, only to find out afterwards that several members of the audience have businesses which have made them dollar millionaires. Mole speaks some Russian, has an understanding of the culture and history, writes the Russians he meets as characters rather than caricatures, and comes across as a very likeable man.

On the other hand, this is still a humorous travel book so there are still various scenes of pratfalling, out-of-depth Englishman. I suppose what makes it different is that most of these do add to the picture which is gradually being built up, of a world in which the old certainties have been destroyed and only a small number of people have been quick enough to grasp and take advantage of the new capitalist rules - the others have been left adrift, or suspicious that the world will overturn again. There are definitely insights, although I am still a little surprised that this was the best book that my friend could find to recommend.

Thinking back, though, I remember that the last time I asked her to recommend me a book relating to her work, she gave me a thick tome on economics and globalisation which I never read! - perhaps she felt that this would be a bit more my speed...

He beamed a gold-glinting smile and seized my hand. "Very fine! We use your book in our training." "What? Where?" "In Russia." To my knowledge there was no Russian edition. "Who publishes it?" "Mr. Xerox." An honour. My work circulated in samizdat, clandestine copies of suppressed literature. In the old days it was Doctor Zhivago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich. Now it was books with titles like How To Read The Financial Pages and Principles Of Marketing. Nice for me, but I felt a pang of nostalgia. "Don't let my publisher hear that. He'll sue." "In Russia? Let him try."

11. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris

Jane Harris' first book, The Observations, made it on to my list of favourite reads of 2011 - even though the story fell apart a bit towards the end, I loved the voice of the narrator, a sassy Irish maid called Bessy, brought to life brilliantly for the audiobook by the author herself.

Gillespie and I also has a strong narrative voice, that of Harriet Baxter, a slightly pedantic "old maid" (she may not have been that old, but this was the Victorian era). The first half of the book tells the story of Harriet's friendship with the family of a handsome young artist; the second half gives us an alternate view of those same events.

It's hard to write much of a review of this book as all I really have to say is 'meh'... it's hard to be articulate about indifference. I think the problem was that there isn't anything to the book beyond the unreliable narrator (or is she?)-ness of it all; I wasn't wowed by the writing or the characters, and there were no counterpointing stories or underlying themes to get interested in. This meant that over the course of the first half of the book, I got a bit bored - which meant I found a lot of things irritating or unconvincing that just wouldn't have bothered me if I'd been more engaged by the story. The switchback of the second half was well-trailed in the first half, too, so I kept expecting some further big twist that never came.

In a nutshell: not good enough to be so long.

Oh well - onwards and upwards!

>68 wandering_star: There have been a number of (positive) reviews on this one, so I was interested to read your comments, wandering_star.

Yes, I'm definitely a major outlier compared to the other LT reviews!

Glad to find another "outlier". I went beyond indifference though and did a major rant about this book last year. I really, really did not like Harriet. I better stop before I start in again.

Oh dear Gillespie and I maybe this will annoy me too - sounds like it will.

These were fun new reviews.

"it's hard to be articulate about indifference" - I think this one line elegantly skewers G&I. : )

12. The Sword Cabinet by Robert Edric

Mitchell King comes from a long line of circus performers - famous, in the days when people flocked to that sort of entertainment, as The Mythical Kings - and infamous too, as Morgan King was once arrested on suspicion of being a serial murderer of young women in a case which was never concluded. Perhaps appropriately, Morgan's act was as an escapologist. Mitchell seems to have maintained both family traditions, but in smaller, tawdrier ways - he runs a failing end-of-the-pier show and his petty corruption is about to be uncovered. At the same time, he is trying to find out more about Morgan, and indirectly about his mother, who was Morgan's teenaged assistant.

Robert Edric is one of my favourite writers, but I found this book a little hard going to start with. The narrative interweaves four different - I was going to say storylines, but they are really more fragments of time. In one, Mitchell bickers with his wife as they prepare for their final performance before the law catches up with them. In another, he talks to Quinn, a King hanger-on who knew both his mother and Morgan, and who gives him scraps of Morgan's story from his own ambivalent perspective. The other two take place at the time of the killings - Morgan is interrogated by the police, and a press photographer takes pictures of the locations where the murdered women were found.

This last is a counterpoint to one of the themes of the book, of fame, celebrity and public prurience. Another theme seems to be decay and the whimpering ending of things, whether that's the decline of a glorious public career, human ageing into insignificance, or the faded glory of no-longer-popular entertainment. And of course, the nature of truth - at one point, Quinn says to Mitchell, "You still want to think you know what is and isn't real. You still think it matters to be able to make the distinction."

All this is familiar from other books of Edric's that I have read - always interesting and slightly uncomfortable reading. But somehow the events of this book are just too fragmentary - more like variations on a theme than a real story. Even more than half-way through the book, I was still wondering what the shape of the narrative would turn out to be. Having finished it, I'm not sure I can say. I do think, though, that it might all make more sense the next time I read it.

And again, before Mitchell could grasp it, history disintegrated and then reformed to tell another story, another story completely, and just like the disintegrating pattern of tiles in the hallway, the centre was lost and the scattered edges held the only clues to the vanished picture he was there to assemble.

I've never read a book by Robert Edric, so thanks for introducing him to me. The plot (plots? fragments?) sounds interesting enough, but I've also had problems with novels that are too disperse. Can't think of one right now, however.

Loved your reviews of The Tattoo Murder Case, New Finnish Grammar and I Was a Potato Oligarch.

My husband was telling me that when he was a competitive rower, he asked one of the Finnish rowers why the Finnish word for Finland (Suomi) wasn't on the back of their uniforms, like other countries (Norge, Espana, Italia, Deutschland, etc.). The Finnish rower said, "Because otherwise no one would know who we were." I visited Helsinki last year and really enjoyed everything - the people, the country and the food.

I may get involved in business with Russia in the next year or two and got a kick out of your comments on I Was a Potato Oligarch. I read your quote from the book aloud to my husband and we had a good laugh.

Several years ago I read Robert Edric's Book of the Heathen, which I bought on a whim in a bookstore. I had never heard of him, but it looked interesting. I wasn't disappointed and parts of the book still linger; as you say, always interesting and slightly uncomfortable reading. Glad to hear there is another one to think about out there. Love your affirmation it might all make more sense the next time I read it. If it's worth reading again, it's definitely a good book.

Dewald & SassyLassy - unfortunately I read a lot of Robert Edric's books pre-LibraryThing (including The Book Of The Heathen, so I can't remember them in much detail, but the best of the ones I have read recently is The Kingdom Of Ashes, about a British military interrogator working in postwar Germany - I'd certainly recommend that as a good place to start/carry on.

Lisa - good luck with the Russian business! Potato Oligarch is more about the Yeltsin years, I wonder how things have changed by now...

13. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Oh dear. So soon after Gillespie and I, I'm once again going to disagree with the vast mass of opinion on LT.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is about the unlikely blossoming of romance between an elderly British major, set in his ways and proud of his heritage, and the widowed Mrs Ali who runs the village's corner shop. As you might expect, there is opposition from both their families - will love conquer all or will they decide that at their age it's all too ridiculous?

The part of the story which deals with the romance is charming and delightful - I liked both the Major and Mrs Ali and wanted things to end happily. The subplots provided interesting counterpoints and parallels (unlike Gillespie). And it is unusual to see a book that's so cosy and gentle in style, but at the same time very sharp on the semi-latent racism that Mrs Ali and her family and friends encounter.

But in a book which is essentially supposed to be about seeing beyond stereotypes, it was a shame that so many of the supporting characters were so stereotypical themselves, and that there was such a degree of cultural snobbery. You first know the Major and Mrs Ali are meant to be together because they both read proper books and aren't happy with the blockbuster romances and thrillers in the village's mobile library. Many of the villagers start out one-dimensionally vulgar and later turn out to be racists, as if there is some automatic connection between the two things. It's true that some of the characters suddenly acquire depth as the story reaches its climax, but that was a couple of hundred pages too late for me.

As her little blue car pulled away, he had to resist the urge to run after it. He had held the promise of the ride home as if it were a small coal in his hand, to warm him in the dark press of the crowd.

I've heard quite a bit about Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, but it doesn't sound like a book I would find appealing. Especially after reading your comments concerning the stereotypical characters.

Nice review of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand; I wasn't interested in reading it before, and I'll definitely avoid it now.

What Darryl said. Even though I lot of people liked it on LT, I could tell it wasn't one that was going to appeal to me.

Adding my voice to a growing chorus and agreeing with dm, doc and rebecca.

Thanks, w_s for confirming my suspicions.

Interesting comments on Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. For some reason the publisher sent me a free copy, I don't know why. I had no feelings about the book one way or another but was heartened to hear most liked it. Oh well, it would be boring if we all had the same opinions. I suppose one day I'll get to it. Maybe.

Three only OK books in row? May your next one be wonderful.

Thanks Dan! I have two on the go at the moment, one of which is a bit of a slog (in fact the last couple of books were an attempt to distract me from the slog) but the other is excellent!

Thanks too for all the comments on Major Pettigrew. I've recently been clearing out my wishlist, with the help of the Kindle 'free first chapter' offerings. It made me realise that I probably add things to the wishlist too easily, as I ended up cutting out about a third of the books without too much trouble. Somehow, however interesting something seems in principle, as soon as I open to the first page I have a much better idea whether I would actually enjoy reading it! Now to do the same with the TBR pile...

14. Payback: debt and the shadow side of wealth by Margaret Atwood

This book is the text of a wide-ranging and witty lecture series given by Margaret Atwood, in which she muses on the concept of debt. As she says, when she was growing up in Canada, the three conversational taboos were sex, money and religion. But as her parents were biologists, there was no mystery attached to the first, so instead she became fascinated by the last two - which, as it turns out, have more links than you might at first think.

In the first lecture, "Ancient Balances" Atwood describes the "inner foundation stone" of human nature which allows the idea of debt to exist, namely the idea of fairness/reciprocity (that both good and bad deeds should attract a corresponding response), and demonstrates that many ancient civilisations linked the idea of justice to correct behaviour and the rightful order of things. When an Ancient Egyptian entered the underworld their heart was weighed against a feather from the goddess Ma'at, who represented the correct order of things (natural, social and temporal) and also the idea of truth. (Ma'at's defender, the goddess Sekhmet, represents both destruction and healing, war and protection from misfortune - apparently contradictory until you realise that her acts of destruction are "performed to avenge wrongs and to restore the rightful balance of things".

The second lecture, "Debt As Sin", is about the morality of both debt and credit, and touches on the history of pawnshops, pacts with the Devil, and Christ the Redeemer. The third, "Debt As Plot", makes the point that every debt is a story, and looks at a number of nineteenth-century novels through the prism of money and debt, including Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, Vanity Fair and The Mill On The Floss - as part of which Atwood examines the symbolism of mills, of millers, and of millers' daughters. The fourth lecture, "The Shadow Side", looks at the repayment of debts, and what happens when they can't be repaid.

I found these variations on a theme a delight to read, full of interesting information and fascinating connections between things. Even when a topic was something I already knew about, Atwood often threw in a new twist. For example, she refers to the famous experiment in which various computer simulations were tested against each other to find which behaviour patterns (playing fair or cheating) would get the best result over time. The winner was the one which started out playing fair and then always gave a like-for-like response, teaching us that reciprocity and fairness are the most productive behaviours. Atwood notes, before leaving the subject, that "None of the competing programs were allowed to have superior weapons systems: had one of the entrants been allowed an advantage such as the chariot, the double-recurved bow of Genghis Khan, or the atomic bomb, Tit For Tat would have failed, because the player with the technological advantage would have obliterated its opponents, enslaved them, or forced them to trade on disadvantageous terms". So, a very enjoyable read - this being Atwood, even the footnotes are witty!

I haven't mentioned the last lecture ("Payback") so far, because it doesn't fit the pattern. Most of this lecture is taken up with an updating of the Scrooge story, in which Scrooge represents a wealthy consumer in a modern, developed country, and the spirits show him images not about his miserliness and solitude but about the impact our consumption has on the resources of the earth and the lives of poorer people. Even though I have no ideological disagreement with this I found it unconvincing, with the satire not nearly so pointed as in the other lectures, and a rather jarring finish to what had been an excellent book up to that point.

Great review and sounds like a fun and interesting book!

Wow that sounds fascinating and perhaps easier to manage than the Graeber book on Debt the first 5,000 years that I have wanted to get to. Think I'll check it out. Anyone interested in the topic might also want to check out Graeber and there are a couple of interviews of him on BookTV.

Thanks wandering!

I've been looking at the Graeber book too in the bookstores, Merrikay, but it looks daunting!

and....in his interview on www.booktv.org Graeber does an excellent job. There are a couple of interviews and panels with him but the one focused on the Debt book is best. Ahh...all the books we won't have time to get to.....I love BookTV.

Yes, it's great fun, although I expect the Graeber book has a more coherent structure/argument.

15. Mother's Milk by Edward St Aubyn

Mother's Milk is the fourth book in the Patrick Melrose series. In the first, Never Mind, we see Patrick as a young boy with a sadistic, abusive father; in the second, Bad News, Patrick is a drug addict in his early twenties; the third, Some Hope, is set a few years further on, with Patrick getting clean and starting to come to terms with what happened to him in his childhood.

Mother's Milk takes place over four successive summer holidays in four successive Augusts. Patrick is, perhaps, in his forties, but feels over the hill - his metaphors for himself include that he is hanging half-devoured from the jaws of time, or one of Napoleon's shattered army on the retreat from Moscow. He is off the heroin and coke but relying on a combination of prescription drugs and alcohol to keep himself functioning through the day. And he is a father - with two sons, and a wife who is increasingly absorbed in the role of mother. He is trying hard not to let his own messed-up-ness affect the futures of his children. His own mother is also a significant figure in the story. Growing frail, wheelchair-bound and suffering from dementia, she is still compos mentis enough to give away the summer house in France where Never Mind takes place. Patrick is torn between his resentment of her past neglect, unavoidable compassion for her current state, resentment for that compassion and guilt for that resentment.

So far, so bleak. But like the previous books, the writing is remarkably good. It's this, and the sense of unblinking honesty, that stops this from being a misery memoir, or a self-indulgent story of unlikeable people who don't realise how privileged they are. The first summer is told from the viewpoint of Patrick's elder son, Robert, who is precociously thoughtful and sensitive to the feelings of the adults around him. (The second summer is told from Patrick's viewpoint, the third from his wife Mary's. In the fourth summer, they each get a chapter.) But Robert is still too young to understand the import of everything that he hears. So the final scene of that summer - a family visit to Patrick's mother in her nursing home, where all the complex emotions of the adults swirl to the surface in a way that we understand even if he doesn't - is a real tour de force.

Another passage that struck me was from Mary's point of view - bear in mind that in the previous section of the book we have felt Patrick's resentment that she is so totally absorbed by the younger son.

As she hoisted Thomas into her arms, she felt again the extent to which motherhood had destroyed her solitude. Mary had lived alone through most of her twenties and stubbornly kept her own flat until she was pregnant with Robert. She had such a strong need to distance herself from the flood of others. Now she was very rarely alone, and if she was, her thoughts were commandeered by her family obligations. Neglected meanings piled up like unopened letters. She knew they contained ever more threatening reminders that her life was unexamined.

So many contradictions. And understanding them does not help. Personality seemed to her at once absurd and compulsive: she remained trapped inside it even when she could see through it.

16. The Deep Dark Sleep by Craig Russell

This is the third book in the series of noir thrillers featuring Lennox, a Canadian PI working in grimy postwar Glasgow. In this one, human remains are dredged up from the river, believed to be those of 'Gentleman' Joe Strachan, a Glasgow crime kingpin who disappeared almost twenty years before. Lennox is hired by Strachan's daughters to find out if it really was their father - but there are plenty of people who don't want him to make even this simple enquiry.

I foolishly let a co-worker talk me into signing up for a half-marathon at the start of June, and this is the audiobook I've been listening to during training runs. It's really been the perfect choice, as reliably good as the previous two books in the series and once again brilliantly read by Sean Barrett. It had enough plot and wit to distract me from the blood pounding in my temples, while not needing the level of concentration that something more serious or unfamiliar would have.

The only question now: what next? There is a fourth Lennox book, the last so far, but that isn't going to take me up to June...

Hope the training runs go well and I hope your half marathon course is flat. Enjoying your reviews.

Enjoying your reviews. I actually wrote a post earlier today on this thread and hit "post message" but it doesn't seem to be here and I don't recall exactly what I posted...sigh...it was something about your river of Mother's Milk.

Flat - yes indeed, I hope so! - since the co-worker who talked me into it runs marathons up mountains:



Thanks for the good wishes. Plenty of time for the training... I keep telling myself...

I've been looking for Craig Russell for some time. I knew Lennox worked in Glasgow, which is why I have been looking for him, but didn't know he was Canadian. Odd that you can't find a Canadian character in Indigo or anywhere else I've looked.
I couldn't even find these books in Glasgow. May have to consider audiobooks. Does that lead to running?

Congrats on your running and hope you find another worthy companion.

I would definitely recommend these particular audiobooks. Although I can't guarantee that they won't lead to running...

17. The Beauty And The Sorrow by Peter Englund

This is the book I mentioned that I was finding a bit of a slog - I seem to have been reading it all month! The subtitle is "an intimate history of the First World War", and it takes us through the four years of war through the experiences of about twenty people, mostly soldiers and medical staff, but also a young German schoolgirl, a French civil servant and a couple of other civilians caught up in the war.

One of the things I really liked about the book is that it included a huge range of perspectives on the war. One of the characters is a Venezuelan who comes to Europe to join the fighting and ends up with the Ottoman army more or less by accident - it's the first one that agrees to take him. As well as the Western and Eastern fronts, we see fighting in Italy, the Balkans, the Middle East and East Africa (where "10,000 armed men are looking for each other in an area the size of western Europe"). Some of the soldiers burst with patriotism and enjoy the adrenaline of fighting; others are stuck away from the front lines and wish they were seeing action. Of course, there is plenty here of the grimness of war, too. Englund regularly finishes the report of a battle by commenting that the same tiny piece of land was fought over again soon after.

The book is entirely in chronological order, so you have a day in one character's life followed by another day in a different character's life, and so on. (This helps to give a bit of a sense of the arc of the war, from early apprehension mixed with excitement and the hope of an early victory, to the hopelessness, discontent and revolutionary feelings of 1917. And you see how this arc, and the emotions of the war, were very similar no matter what side you were on. Englund brings out certain themes throughout the book - the futility mentioned above, the sense that no-one in a battle actually has any idea what is happening, the idea that often, men were sent to fight for an objective which was more about getting good news reports than any real military value. Englund also has a thing about trains, and how logistics were often more of a deciding factor in battles than military prowess.)

However, the story of each day is generally not told in the person's own words, but in a sort of reported speech, with occasional quotations from their own writing. I suppose that Englund does this so he can fill us in on what has happened since we last saw them, and set the scene. But I found that it rather took away any distinctive voice that different characters might have. Some of the text, too, is clearly added by Englund, which meant that I couldn't always tell whether a line came from the person experiencing it or was editorial comment. (For instance: "The Austrian artillery fires on the town daily in a rather absent-minded way, as if doing it as a matter of principle rather than according to any plan.") And he speculates about the motives behind people's behaviour, in a very general and unsatisfying way. (One character doesn't mention the propagandistic reports of German atrocities - "Perhaps {he} is one of those people who have come to believe that it was all nothing but propaganda. Perhaps new and more tangible and personal sufferings have already replaced these second-hand horror stories. Or perhaps the adventure of it all has gained the upper hand.") I would also have liked to know where the texts came from - were they unedited diaries? memoirs written later and tidied up? letters to family which might have wanted to portray a certain image?

This book definitely provided some very vivid images of life during wartime. With one young woman, we hear the front getting closer, and have to decide whether it's time to become a refugee. With a British humanitarian worker we find that "to behave like a well-bred woman" helps us deal with the war better than religion or patriotism can. We walk through a forest looking for orphaned children who need help, enjoy testing the edge of our new bayonets, speak passionately at public meetings to urge people to gather round the flag and not be distracted by "strikes and quarrels and the class struggle" (this is in the UK, by the way). We see the aftermath of the massacre of the Armenians, and sail through the wreckage of the Lusitania. In October 1914 in France, the newspaper kiosks are still festooned with early August illustrated papers. At Passchendaele, Chinese labourers dig graves for soldiers. A Hungarian is demoralised by the sight of well-fed and well-dressed US PoWs.

So I can see why it has been such a popular and well-reviewed book. But for me I think that perhaps it could have been even better, if Englund had held back on telling us his views so much, and allowed his characters to speak for themselves.

And so I will let one do just that:

"With each batch of the wounded, disabled creatures who are carried in, one feels inclined to repeat in wonder, "Can one man be responsible for all this? Is it for one man's lunatic vanity that men are putting lumps of lead into each other's hearts and lungs, and boys are lying with their heads blown off, or with their insides beside them on the ground?" Yet there is a splendid freedom about being in the midst of death - a certain glory in it, which one can't explain." (Sarah Macnaughtan, 49-year-old Scottish aid worker, October 1914)

I meant to mention that this was a book that would definitely work better as a real book than on the Kindle - it would have been good to have been able to flip back and forth, to things like the chronology of each year, maps and photos, and previous entries by the same person.

18. Portrait Of The Mother As A Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius

In Portrait Of The Mother, a young pregnant woman walks through Rome, on her way to a concert in a church. She is German, and it's January 1943. She is waiting in Rome for her husband to return from duty on the African front, and as she walks through the city her thoughts circle around in the way that they do when one is walking - new thoughts are sparked by the things you see or by memories linked to the place you're in, and old preoccupations return. The whole book is told in one long sentence, but with paragraph breaks, so it felt almost that I was reading at walking pace, with one paragraph per breath.

She's quite a naive young woman, self-conscious about the fact that she doesn't really understand anything about Italy, its history or culture, and wary of the Catholic/Mediterranean goings-on - as a result, she lives in a little bit of a bubble. Steeped in both her strong religious faith and all the wartime propaganda, she tries not to think about difficult things like food shortages, her possibly traitorous thoughts about wanting her husband to be with her, or indeed the hints that she's heard from both her father and husband that they don't truly support the Fuhrer. Instead she seeks out places which remind her of her husband or her faith, "little islands of reassurance" in "the dangerous sea of the hospitable and harsh, beautiful and uncanny city".

Despite her naivety, somehow she becomes a sympathetic character as we spend the morning with her. And the impact of the war is very well conveyed in small details - the espresso bar, tightly shuttered since coffee became unavailable except for those with connections; "the daily death announcements Fallen in action, which were printed ever smaller". The climax of the book - the concert - is an incredibly beautiful summation of all the emotions that have built up to this point.

I didn't realise when I started this book that it would echo the previous read in its theme of ordinary people in wartime. Indeed, her father-in-law was a submarine captain in World War I, like one of the characters in The Beauty And The Sorrow. I think the contrast highlights some of my dissatisfaction with The Beauty And The Sorrow. That was probably the longest book on my Kindle, Portrait Of The Mother is the shortest, but I had a much stronger emotional reaction to this, and I think I will remember it much longer too.

and once again, before she continued on her way, she looked to the left of the twin churches into Via del Babuino, down which she had already walked four times this week, Monday and Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, the street of letters and packages, the street of the signs of life she hoped for, the street of happiness, from where she had returned yesterday with two letters from Gert, received at the Wehrmacht headquarters, full of gratitude after a first glance at his lines and the silent, short prayer: He's alive! Thank you, O benevolent God!, and this is why, of the three streets which ran radially between the domed churches towards the obelisk, she knew Babuino best of all, her street of happiness and gratitude,

Two excellent reviews and two books for my wish list. Will you post them on the books' pages?

oooh the Portrait of the Mother sounds interesting!

Thanks RG - done!

The Beauty and the sorrow sounds like it wants to pack all the experiences of World War I into one book. No wonder you felt like you were reading it for ever. Excellent review.

What a great way to read these two books, back to back. I love it when it works out like that, sort of like synergy so that you get more out of each. Great reviews.

Very good way of putting it, Barry! And thanks Sassy, it is nice when it works out like that, totally coincidentally.

19. Love Your Enemies by Nicola Barker

In this book of ten short stories, a girl's desire for a nose job is interpreted as a castration complex, a man builds himself a coffin in the shape of a Warholesque soup can, a woman starts to cook meals which represent the personalities of her family members.

Little Fiona noticed first. One week she said, 'Mummy, this lemon meringue pie seems to be angry. It tastes very bitter and the frosty bit is too sugary and full of air.' Grandad blew smoke rings at her and said that she was a smart girl. He said, 'The whole point of this kind of dish is its contrasts; sweet and sour, creaminess and fluffiness. In many ways this pie is like a fine woman.' Little Fiona stared at him with beguiling eyes and said, 'No, it's not just like anybody, it's like Mummy.'

My favourites were Skin, in which a young woman tries to tell her friend about a life-changing experience but can't get through to her, and A Necessary Truth, in which a woman receives prank phone calls from someone who wants to teach her philosophy. The funniest was probably Dual Balls, a story involving a rather unkind prank, a sex toy, and village gossip.

This is Nicola Barker's first published work. I didn't know that until I looked it up just now, but it makes sense - the stories have Barker's sideways-on, slightly macabre worldview, but are not as bafflingly offbeat as some of her later early work. At the same time, though, they lack the experimental and exuberant language which is one of the things that I love most about her writing.

This makes Love Your Enemies one of her most accessible works, but it also feels like someone else could have written it. As I was reading it, I originally thought it might serve as a good introduction to Barker, for anyone intimidated by the idea of the experimentation. But actually I think anyone who's interested in reading Barker shouldn't look for something accessible but dive straight in to Darkmans, her best work, or Burley Cross Postbox Theft which is less deep but still has the exuberance.

Three excellent reviews. I'm very intrigued by Portrait of The Mother as a Young Women.

I am very late to the party! re: post#16+ I have had Delusions of Gender since it came out but have not read it yet, so I was very interested to read your comments and the subsequent discussion.

20. Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

Budai falls asleep during a plane journey on his way to a conference, and groggily makes his way into the city on arrival. But it turns out that the city is not Helsinki, nor indeed anywhere recognisable. Even though Budai speaks bits of dozens of languages, no-one he finds can understand any of them, and there is nothing familiar in the language that he hears around him. Everywhere is crowded, people are too busy to let him try and communicate with them, and the flows of people are such that he can't always get to where he is trying to go. Even his hotel room is hard to find: "He met no one in the corridor as he searched for his room, wandering to and fro, counting forward and back in the attempt to locate room 921. There was always a doorway or a junction that broke the sequence and he could not pick it up again".

What would you do in this situation? Try and find an information counter, or a travel agent, or an embassy - someone with whom you might find a means of communicating. "But how was he to locate any of these agencies? Who was there to ask in the dreadful whirl of traffic where no one had the time to address his problems but left him muttering idiotically to himself? They must speak other languages in banks and financial institutions and, possibly, in various public offices, but where to find such places, how to identify them among the mass of buildings, when he couldn't make the slightest sense of the notices on them?"

This is a brilliant portrayal of a nightmarish situation. The long, run-on sentences drop us right inside Budai's head as he wonders desperately what he can do (but are broken up enough with short, clear sentences so that they don't become overwhelming), and so we can understand his twisted logic as he looks for ever more hopeless ways out - dialling various combinations of telephone numbers which "might be public lines", leaving notes in different languages scattered around the hotel, even trying to work out the local language from a close reading of the phone book or a newspaper. All the time he is striving to hang on to the fact that he does not belong in this city. Because the only way to survive in such an uncaring and hostile society is not to get used to it, not to lose hope, to hang on to your own mental acuity and your individual desires, and to continue to resist, however futile it may seem.

That said, one of the most chilling moments in the book is when Budai finds a tiny scrap of hope - a split-second encounter with another Hungarian - which is then torn away from him. And for a long time Budai does lose his hope, giving up trying to talk to anyone, turning to drink and formless rage. But yet another incomprehensible occurrence in this city of incomprehensibilities reminds him that people need to stay greedy for life.

The book is pitched precisely at the point where the absurdity of the situation is both funny and terrible. For example, there is a running joke about the fact that even with the one person who is prepared to try and communicate with Budai, he is unable to figure out her name, because the sound seems to change each time she says it - so each time he thinks about her she has a slightly different name. This is funny, but at the same time such a stark indicator of his isolation.

I really enjoyed this book (except for a slight dip in interest in the middle, as Budai's situation didn't seem to be evolving). As I was reaching the end my mind was full of possibilities for how the author would be able to bring the narrative to a satisfactory conclusion, none of which seemed entirely satisfying. And indeed, the ending was none of them. I thought it was perfect.

Excellent review. I've added it to my wishlist.

Thanks! BTW, anyone in the UK can currently get the Kindle version of this for £1.19, which is what made it jump from my wishlist onto the reader...

Oh my! That makes my head hurt! It sounds like reading it would be agony. I may have to check it out.

Nice review!

Metropole sounds good. A mystery with literary overtones? Definitely a situation that most of us would be able to relate to

Echoing everyone about good review and interesting book!

Metropole sounds fascinating. Reminds me a little of the confusion I enjoyed in The Silent Land so I may pick this up before getting to another by Graham Joyce.

Great review of Metropole; I loved(?) it as well.

I have to add it sounds it little too much like some of my nightmares for me to read it!

As it happens I was reading it while travelling, and got to one check-in to find that I had been randomly and without notice reassigned to a different flight. I think the fact that my mental space was in this nightmarish environment made the whole process much more confusing and disorienting than it would have been otherwise!

Slightly sublime-to-ridiculous with my next read, 21. Rivers Of London by Ben Aaronovitch. I bought this entirely on the basis of the cover - unfortunately I can't find any images of it which are high-res enough to see the detail, but here's what it looks like:



The black-and-white part is a word-based map of London, in the same style as this one (don't know if it's the same artist):



So, I liked the design, and I liked the title. I genuinely didn't know until I started reading it that it was about a rather hapless young constable who more-or-less accidentally gets recruited as an apprentice to DCI Nightingale, the only policeman in the Met with the responsibility of investigating magical crimes (although there is quite a network of people tasked with keeping the existence of magic covered up, such as the Fire Service liaison officer who can explain away the result of a fight with vampires as due to a gas explosion).

Nightingale teaches Constable Grant a bit of magic but more importantly explains the secret mystical life of the city around him. Together, they have to track down the source of mysterious outbreaks of murderous rage around the city, while brokering a peace deal between Old Man Thames and Mother Thames - the first a Pan-like bucolic figure who controls the upstream, the second a Nigerian woman who runs the river in the City of London herself, along with all her daughters who each represent one of London's underground rivers.

Although the quality of the writing was fairly bad, I loved this, I think mainly because it did such a good job of giving real life so many different aspects of London, from the city's historical palimpsest to its vibrant, bustling and diverse modernity. I also really liked the way that the magic was woven into reality. I'll definitely be reading the second in the series.

I was going to thumb your review of Metropole but saw you didn't post on the book's page.

Agree that it's a wonderful design, not sure if the magical aspects intrigue me.

Thanks Deebee, I have added it (although there are already nine other reviews, most of them pretty long!)

22. Decline And Fall: Diaries 2005-2010, the second volume of Chris Mullin's diaries. The first volume, A View From The Foothills, covered his time as a junior minister in the Blair government - this one covers the five years following, between the 2005 and 2010 elections. I didn't find it as interesting as A View From The Foothills, which had as its leitmotif Mullin's struggles with his decision to give up a position of actual power (as the chair of a parliamentary subcommittee, with the ability to hold the executive to account) for a junior ministerial role with very little significant influence and was therefore an insight into an area of British politics I'd never really thought about (ie the workings of parliament). This one has some of that, but the main story is the long-drawn out decline of the Labour government. As I read the many attempts by the party to tear itself apart, I couldn't help wondering if there's someone in the current administration keeping notes on similar infighting.

Thursday, 7 January, 2010: Much vitriolic email traffic re Hoon/Hewitt as colleagues vie to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. One can't help noticing, however, that many waited until it was clear that the coup had failed before registering their upsetness. This morning's crop of loyalist emails was brought to an end by Eric Joyce, who wrote: 'Thanks, all. That's enough expressions of outrage. Especially those with insane punctuation.'

23. Luka And The Fire Of Life by Salman Rushdie

This is a children's book and follow-up to Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, written in 1990. Coming out so soon after the fatwa, Haroun could be read by adults as an allegory of freedom of speech, as well as being an engaging and lively fairy tale for children. This one tries to do something similar, but the targets of the satire/allegory are broader and for me less effective.

Essentially it's a quest story. Young Luka's father, Rashid Khalifa, falls ill, and Luka accidentally steps into a magic world and finds his father's death waiting outside the house. To save his father, he has to travel into the land of magic and find the Fire of Life, and he embarks on this quest with the aid of various strange companions. The journey is structured like a computer game - with levels and lives to store up and then lose. I couldn't really see the point of this apart from to show that Rushdie was down with the kids (shades of Niall Ferguson's HORRIBLE 'killer apps' of prosperity). But more seriously, I didn't find the quest narrative very exciting because there was little sense of danger conveyed, and there were only a couple of occasions where Luka used his ingenuity to get out of a tight spot - the rest of the time one of his companions used their special powers to get them through. The jokes too I found a little bit lame - there was some of the Rushdie exhuberance with language, but all too often I found myself being reminded of The Phantom Tollbooth or American Gods and then wishing I was reading those instead.

I may be being too harsh on this - it is after all a book for children, and there are some lovely bits of writing. But I was rather disappointed.

Water is never silent when it moves. Brooks babble, streams burble, and a larger, slower river has deeper, more complicated things to say. Great rivers speak at low frequencies, too low for human ears to hear, too low even for dogs' ears to pick up their words; and the River of Time told its tales at the lowest frequencies of all, and only elephants' ears could listen to its songs.

Wow, your cover for Rivers of London was quite different than the cover of the US book (called Midnight Riot). I generally liked the book, too, even though I agree the writing was not the best. :)

Beautiful passage in 124.

Hmm, I seem to have been away for ages, and don't have too many reviews to add this time around.

24. Fen Country by Edmund Crispin

I haven't read any Edmund Crispin for several years, but remember liking his surreal/witty brand of cosy mysteries very much. Fen Country is a collection of very short stories, essentially exercises in writing 'mysteries' with minimal information but one telling clue. The solutions were clever enough, although sometimes relied on some information not likely to be known by the average reader (what happens to a gun a day after it's been fired, or how a diamond reacts to light). More seriously, the minimalist approach meant that it soon became relatively easy to spot the clue. In a longer book there would have been more diversions, but here we are regularly told that a particular piece of information is definitely true - "if you're thinking that perhaps she didn't lock up properly afterward you can put that out of your mind". Overall, a rather unsatisfying read.

25. Tigers In Red Weather by Liza Klaussmann

Nick and Helena are cousins, and as this book opens they are about to leave the house they've shared in New England and head south, Helena to get married and Nick to reunite with her husband who has been away in Europe fighting World War Two. We meet them again, at intervals, through the next decades, as their marriages fail to live up to those early hopes.

For almost the first half of this book, I wasn't sure if it was going to turn out to be a great book or an indifferent one. The trope of the frustrated and unhappy 1950s housewife is such a well-worn one, and I wasn't sure if Tigers In Red Weather was cleverly making use of this, like Japanese 'borrowed scenery', so that it didn't have to give us all the information because we could fill in the details for ourselves. Anyway, a little before the half-way point the narrative carefully explained to us in flashback something which had been mentioned before and really didn't need spelling out. A few pages later, it did the same again. At that point I had the answer - and the rest of the book confirmed this. I thought it was essentially a mashup of several different cliched stories, with some heavy-handed period detail; and all the elements which were original were not very good.

I still like the title, though - which turns out to come from a Wallace Stevens poem:

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

Sample: The way he had taken her through the rooms - touched the door frames and spread his arms wide in the kitchen to show her where the counter would be - she had known he was buying a place to put her in. A place for her to be perfect in, where all her strangeness would be sucked out of her, or at least hidden. She had been sick with the thought of it.

26. No Orchids For Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

Miss Blandish is a wealthy heiress, kidnapped by two small-time thugs who quickly get out of their depth, and have to turn her over to a bigger gang. After the police give up, her father hires a private eye to follow the trail.

No Orchids For Miss Blandish is supposedly a classic piece of pulp, although it turns out to have been written by a Brit who had never visited the US but still managed to produce lines like "He was a leg man for a society rag that ran blackmail on the side." I would have said that I'd read a fair bit of pulp, but having read this I realise that I've only really read lesbian pulp fiction from the period (like The Girls In 3-B) and modern pastiches. I know that a lot of the point of pulp was to titillate, and given the period it was written I can cope with the fact that in No Orchids, no shapely behind is left un-slapped. But titillation which comes from hinting at terrible sexual violence? Not for me, thanks.

I seem to be two-thirds of the way through half a dozen books at the moment. I blame the Kindle - it's all too easy to turn to something else even if I'm out of the house, and there's no physical book sitting by your bed or the coffee machine to remind you to pick it up. So I thought I'd try and break the pattern with a physical book which would be a pleasure to handle as well as to read, and went for my small hardback copy of 27. Hand-grenade Practice In Peking by Frances Wood.

This is a memoir of Frances Wood's year studying in Peking in 1975-6, at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. As well as hand-grenade practice, she is sent for periodic weeks of manual labour to learn from the peasants; struggles with how to stretch her ration coupons to buy both a warm coat and souvenirs; and takes notes on the 'big-character posters' on the university campus to pass on to diplomats and observers who aren't allowed to see them for themselves.

She notes at the start that the book was based on the letters she'd written home at the time, and indeed the tone of the book is tremendously larky. Wood apologises for this, saying she had no idea what had been happening to 'intellectuals' and other people who crossed the Party and Red Guards. To be honest, a bigger problem for me was that some of the stories, while worthy of a letter home, weren't necessarily interesting enough to be included in a book written forty years later.

But that is a rather curmudgeonly approach. Wood's experience is one that few people shared, and she writes about it engagingly - I did find myself laughing with her once I got used to the overall tone. She also has good context to set it in, having continued her contacts with China (she's curator of Chinese collections at the British Library). But I would still file it with the funny travel books rather than the China memoirs...

Sample: I made progress with the library. Armed with chitties guaranteeing my urgent need to read bad books, I was issued with the works of Chen Duxiu, the first General Secretary of the Communist Party who became a Trotskyist and a fierce opponent of Mao. The books were stamped 'Negative Teaching Material' and 'To Be Used In Criticism'. You could only get books by Zhou Yang, the main spokesman for culture and the arts until 1966, if you made it quite clear that you were aware of his position as a 'Counter-revolutionary Double-dealer'.

Very interesting.

Hmm. I have been away for ages, and only have a few - rather grumpy - reviews to contribute now that I'm here. Still, I am finally reading something quite promising, so I hope the next time I post it will be with some more positive words....

28. Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks

A book about hallucinations by the famous neurologist, ranging from aural hallucinations of well-known pieces of music to migraine-induced lights and flashes to visions of objects or scenes. I guess I had imagined that this would use the existence of hallucinations to reach or propose certain insights into the way the brain works, and the first chapter (which looks at how certain visual and aural hallucinations may be linked to the brain 'filling in' for hearing or visual loss) certainly does this. However, for the rest of the book there is much less about the possible causes/influences for hallucinations. This means that it winds up being a long list of odd things that have happened to people, which lost my interest after a while. And some of the examples seem questionable - if you think you see someone you know on the street, I imagine that is more to do with recognising something about their shape or gait which reminds you of your friend, rather than a real hallucination. Although I did laugh at Sacks' description of one drug-induced trip in which he hallucinated the battle of Agincourt taking place, in miniature, on the sleeve of his dressing gown - for 12 hours!

Time was immensely distended. The elevator descended, "passing a floor every hundred years. Back in the room, I swim through the remaining centuries of the day. Every five eons or so a nurse arrives (in the aspect of a cougar, a differential equation, or a clock radio) and takes my blood pressure." (NB: this is a quote from one of the in/famous psilocybin experiments in the 1960s)

29. The Tent by Margaret Atwood

A collection of short-short stories and the odd essay. Several of the stories are playful updates of classical tales or other well-known stories (Chicken Licken becomes someone who is concerned about the impact of climate change). I liked a few of these stories - probably my favourite was 'Gateway', a dreamlike description of turning up at the gates of heaven to find that everything is unexpected - and you're not asked whether you were good but what your favourite colour is and whether you loved your cat. But overall I found the collection less than the sum of its parts. Part of the problem was that many of the stories were written in an arch, knowing way which implied the author knew you agreed with her - something which always annoys me even when in principle, I do agree! Also, the same themes came up repeatedly, reducing their impact overall. Disappointing.

Everyone believed him of course, but you always know with Salome that if anyone's head was going to roll it wouldn't be hers. She accused the poor jerk of sexual assault, and since she was technically a minor - and of course her banker stepdad threw his weight around - she made it stick. Last seen, the guy was panhandling in the subway stations, down there in Toronto; grown a beard, looks like Jesus, crazy as a bedbug.

30. Hardball by Sara Paretsky

I think I may have read one VI Warshawski book before, but if so it was long enough ago that I don't remember anything about it. In Hardball, VIW gets involved in a decades-old missing persons case, which turns out to implicate a number of people who are now important, and don't want their past misdeeds to be reopened. At the same time, it seems to implicate VIW's own father in some of the corruption - how much does she really want to find out? I found the whole thing rather pat - the supposed hardbitten-ness was achieved through descriptions of physical threat rather than any difficult narrative decisions.

These were such strange times we were living through, the Age of Fear, with endless war around the world, never knowing who we could trust, with our bank accounts and our e-mails an open book to any garden-variety hacker. Even though I use the Web constantly, I'm an old-fashioned detective. I do better on foot and in person than through the ether.

31. Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer

This was definitely the most interesting of these four books. It's a collection of stories, translated by Ursula K. LeGuin, about an imaginary empire, which lasted over millennia through different dynasties (apparently "Kalpa" is Sanskrit for an era of time encompassing 4 billion years). Although the stories share the setting and themes (of which more later), they can't really be called interlinked stories as they don't refer to each other - for all we know there could be centuries or more between them.

The themes include the rise and fall of historical forces, from the end of dynasties to the development of new arts and the invention of technologies, or the way that the emotional centre of an empire can move around over time. Storytellers feature heavily, often narrating the story but sometimes appearing as informal advisors to rulers who want to learn from their predecessors' mistakes, and always highlighting the themes of (a) what is truth - what actually happened? in whose eyes? or what is now remembered, through history or story?; and (b) the idea that truth is a challenge to power and power is a challenge to truth. Disguises, too, frequently appear, perhaps a nod to the constant reversals of fortune.

I really enjoyed some of these stories. However, I often struggle with fabulist stories because the abstractedness means it's much harder to get a sense of individuals as people, their personalities and reactions; and there was a long period in the middle of the book which I found very hard to get through - far too many sentences like "One evening he heard someone singing, another evening he saw a hanged man".

Overall, though, I think I'm glad I read it.

Do any of you have the honour of being acquainted with a gardener? They are admirable people, believe me, but they don't go around making comments on their own or other people's mental condition. They stay close to the ground, and know many names in different languages, and nothing in this world impresses them much, since they see life in the right way, as it should be seen, from below looking up, and in concentric circles.

Enjoying your update -- such a variety of interesting books!

one drug-induced trip in which he hallucinated the battle of Agincourt taking place, in miniature, on the sleeve of his dressing gown - for 12 hours!
That's too funny!

Some interesting recent reviews.

One of the books I have on the pile, We Always Treat Women Too Well, is supposedly a parody of No Orchids for Miss Blandish but from the sounds of it, I don't want to read the latter. I did read In a Lonely Place recently - another classic pulp - and really enjoyed it. The company that published it has reissued various pulp novels by women writers and The Girls in 3-B was on the list. What did you think of that one? Was it worth reading?

I read an excerpt from the Sacks book in The New Yorker and really liked it (it was the section about Monteverdi and the color violet) but the reviews I've seen on LT have been mixed. Will probably read another of his books first.

Avidmom - he writes a great description of it too!

Within a minute or so {of injecting himself with morphine}, my attention was drawn to a sort of commotion on the sleeve of my dressing gown, which hung on the door. I gazed intently at this, and as I did so, it resolved itself into a miniature but microscopically detailed battle scene. I could see silken tents of different colors, the largest of which was flying a royal pennant. There were gaily caparisoned horses, soldiers on horseback, their armor glinting in the sun, and men with longbows. I saw pipers with long silver pipes, raising these to their mouths, and then, very faintly, I heard their piping, too.

However, he was so shocked when he realised he'd been tripping for over 12 hours that he never took morphine again.

Fledermaus - thanks. I read The Girls in 3-B ages ago, so I don't remember it too well, but I think I found it an interesting read given the time and storyline, but not as pulpy as I had expected.

I am delighted that I can finally post a very positive review!

32. Banana Heart Summer by Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is a poet, and this book - a young girl's description of her street and neighbours in a small town in the Philippines - is a very poetic one.

It's full of symbolism - the street itself is described more than once as sitting between a church and a volcano, "between two gods. The smoking peak and the soaring cross faced each other in a perpetual stand-off, as if blocked for a duel".

If the volcano represents uncontrollable human passions, for most of the book you might think that it's not much of a competition. A young man elopes with his mother's greatest rival. The beauty of the street breaks several hearts. Nining (our narrator) nurses a crush on the son of the street's wealthiest family. "None of us could move before the perfect teeth at the other side. His preening and our ogling crossed and recrossed the road, and better sense was ambushed by hormones."

But the church is represented in smaller, darker ways, such as the shame the narrator's mother feels towards her first-born, the symbol of her romance with a labourer which got her thrown out of her wealthy family's house.

Nining gets a job as a maid and cook in a neighbour's house, and the majority of the book's symbolism is around food. Nearly every chapter heading is the name of a dish which features in the chapter, and nearly every person's story is told through references to food. Lovers give each other sweets, poor families argue over the price of a basic dish, a recluse lives self-sufficiently on the vegetables from his garden.

I know that this food-oriented magical-realist approach has been done many times before, and occasionally the symbolism was a little too obvious (when the handsome boy puts his hand on Nining's arm, she thinks, "Perhaps this is how fruit awakens to its ripening"). But I enjoyed the book a lot - and after all, it explains clearly how in a culture like the Philippines', food is tremendously symbolic of social relations and family circumstances; so why not make use of that with some mouth-watering writing?

My only real criticism is that although the book plays a lot with the idea of the contrast between heart and spleen (which medically is supposed to clean the blood, but symbolically represents anger), the writing is so lovely and charming that it's hard to realise the genuine pain in the relationship between Nining and her mother, until a rather shocking scene part-way through the book. But maybe next time I read the book it will come through more clearly.

A fiesta is a gustatory tour. It is a lesson in eating your fill through strategic moderation. You do not feast in only one house, but tour the tables of the whole street, sometimes eating multiple breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and taking home wrapped portions of the feast, forced on you by generous hosts. Best to have only a modest helping in every house, or perhaps just the best dishes, in order to accommodate everyone's generosity. And space these feastings, making sure your stomach settles down after a meal in one house before you proceed to the next.

Oh that went RIGHT on the list!

>re: Hallucinations: it winds up being a long list of odd things that have happened to people
I agree completely. I'm glad I have what seems to be his best, An Anthropologist on Mars, still in my TBRs.

Enjoyed your review of Banana Heart Summer

Great review of Banana Heart Summer, Margaret!

Thanks everyone! It was just so nice to be able to write a glowing review after a long gap.

The next one, too, is very positive: 33. Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan.

Clay is a web designer, left unemployed by the end of the dot.com boom. On an increasingly desperate search for work, he finally stumbles onto a job as that most retro of things, a bookshop assistant. But this, of course, is no ordinary bookshop - well off the main path and stuck next to an alley strip-club, it nevertheless has a core clientele of readers who rush in excitedly at any hour of the day or night returning the previous book they borrowed and demanding the next one by name. These borrowed books come from the cavernous back room of the bookshop - they are leatherbound, don't appear on any online catalogues and (when Clay finally breaks the owner's ban on looking into them) turn out to be written in code.

If you're already intrigued by this premise, you'll probably like the book. In fact, if you get a shock of recognition from the following sentence, you'll definitely like the book:

"Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. it means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf."

Who hasn't?

Neel is an old schoolfriend of Clay's, by the way, part of the nerdy (in the best way) gang who bring their assorted talents together to solve the puzzles, rescue a friend and - maybe? - discover the secret of life itself.

So, this book was GREAT FUN. I also found it very charming and with its heart in exactly the right place. The nicest thing about it was that it dismissed neither the old and dusty nor the new and shiny. To solve the problem, you could be obsessively enthusiastic about the possibilities of a digital future, about handcrafting meticulously detailed art projects, about cracking a code hidden in a library of books chained to their lecterns, or about discovering the story behind the events you had set in train - just as long as you were obsessively enthusiastic about something. And that sounds like a good world to me.

Mat's intention is completely over-the-top, obsessive, and maybe impossible. In other words: it's perfect for this place.

34. Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle is a cartoonist whose wife's work for a humanitarian agency has taken them to many far-flung destinations - as well as this journal of their time in Burma, he's written about Pyongyang, Shenzhen in Southern China and Jerusalem.

The drawing style is simple but you get a sense of what the place looks like, and there are some interesting details. The journal does touch on the grimness of life in Burma but in general it's a fairly light read, an interesting glimpse into the life of an expat who is perhaps slightly conflicted about being one.

Great review of Hand-grenade Practice In Peking; I'll look for that on my next trip to the bookstore.

Studying in China during the last years of the Cultural Revolution was not as exclusive as most writers claim it to be, although limited in absolute numbers. The claim to exclusivity is probably a ploy to boost sales of the book.

Nonetheless, such memoirs are almost always interesting reading material.

There are plenty of favourable reviews for Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore and I think that you have discovered why it is so popular with other readers on LT: perhaps it is because we admire/like other obsessives.

Edwin - I don't think Frances Wood laid any claims to exclusivity, it was my review that said that. In fact, she is studying with a group of other foreigners, and she writes about them, too. I'll stand by my comment that relatively few outsiders were there at the time though. Perhaps a disproportionate number of them have written about the experience.

Barry - good point! (goes and looks at several years' worth of unread books on my shelves)

A Poppy by Peter Howard

We went into a village where violets had just broken out.
Snipers were exchanging samphire,
and there were scenes of carnation everywhere.
I saw someone running with a bunch of live geraniums.
Suddenly there was a burst of chrysanthemum,
and honeysuckle crackled along the hedgerows.
Children were covered in crocus and bluebells;
there were old men waving ancient ivy.
Those unable to arm themselves with daffodils
made do with tulips, cyclamen, anything they could lay their hands on.
Then we heard that a buttercup had landed on the hospital.
We rushed to the scene: patients were emerging, dahlia and lilac,
some with periwinkle or lesser celandine.
It was jasmine. All I could think was "Is there no myrtle?
When will common hawthorn prevail?"
But there was nothing we could do but willow and broom.
By the end of the day there were hundreds lying on makeshift beds of roses.

Lamium,
Pyracantha, Euphorbia gorgonis,
Viola tricolor, Aconitum napellus,
Amaranthus caudatus,
Yucca aloifolia, Yucca gloriosa,
Salix babylonica,
Artemisia.*

And afterwards the generals awarded themselves petals.

* Deadnettle, Firethorn, Gorgon's head, Heartsease, Helmet flower, Love-lies-bleeding, Spanish bayonet, Spanish dagger, Weeping willow, Wormwood

That's nice. It must be spring.

Yes! I like that as well. Especially the last part - something about the rhythm maybe that appeals for one thing. (That and that I've always been a bit of an anorak for scientific names of plants and trees...)

>147 wandering_star: Love it!

143 Thank for writing about The Burma Chronicles. I just finished reading it and enjoyed it a lot and will be reading more of his.

>142 wandering_star: - I agree with you on Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hr Bookstore - that was a lot of fun! Also liked the mix of the dusty-bookstore-and-academics-solving-mysteries with nerdy-computer-geeks-save-the-day. My sister's boyfriend gave it to me for Christmas which I thought was funny because they both work for Microsoft and the book was very pro-Google!

#147 - that was fun.

Is it really five weeks since I last wrote a review? I have been reading a bit less recently, partly because the Instapaper app for Android means I've finally been able to make a dent in my backlog of 'saved for later' articles, and partly because I've been gradually packing up for a move. So I don't have too many books to add.

35. Temeraire by Naomi Novik

Perhaps there are many people who could resist a book which was billed as the Napoleonic Wars with dragons. Not me! In Temeraire (published as His Majesty's Dragon in the US), a young naval officer captures a strange prize from a French vessel - a dragon's egg. This will bring him great glory as the dragon's firepower will be a significant military asset. But unexpectedly, once hatched the dragon chooses him as its master - which means he has to leave the Royal Navy for a semi-outcast life.

This was a reading experience of two halves. I loved the world-building and the descriptions of dragon-handling, aerial warfare and so forth (although the regular comparison of dragons to wives and mistresses was a little much). But once I had got that, the story itself was a little flat and uninspired. So I enjoyed the second half of the book much less than the first.

I might still be tempted to pick up another in the series if I found it cheap somewhere, though.

An easterly wind was carrying the salt air in from the harbour, mingled with the coppery smell of the warm dragons, already familiar and hardly noticed.

36. Germinal by Émile Zola

I read this because of a recommendation from rebeccanyc, and I'm very glad I did. Essentially, Germinal is about the incredibly bleak and brutal life in a mining village, although the story arc includes a strike, eventually broken up with violence. I don't really have anything intelligent to add to rebecca's review, so I'll just recommend that. But I was very conscious while reading it that similarly grim conditions exist even today for miners in many places around the world.

I thought the Roger Pearson translation was excellent; it rarely drew attention to itself so it was easy to forget you were reading a translated work.

37. Locke & Key Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez

This is another LT recommendation, this time from bragan. After their father is brutally murdered, Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode move - with their mother - across the US to live with their uncle in the house where their father grew up. It's a strange house, Gothic and turreted, and hiding even stranger secrets, such as a door which turns you into a ghost (reversibly) if you go through it, and a wellhouse with an echo which doesn't always echo what you say.

This is not my usual reading but I really enjoyed it - the story was complicated and interesting, the drawing style a little gory for my tastes but also very eye-catching.

However, it seemed to end mid-narrative, and ridiculously, only volumes 1 and 5 are available for Kindle. I don't think I can manage to spend £10 on a hard copy of vol 2, so that might be it for me. (And yes, I know that comics are expensive to produce, but that just doesn't feel like value for what will only be another part of the story and won't complete the narrative).

38. The Man Who Walked Through Walls by Marcel Aymé

Now this is a recommendation from the always interesting Nicholas Lezard's Guardian column. A book of short stories, most of which are about a fantastical intrusion into a very ordinary world.

In the first story, a civil servant, "uninterested in adventure and resistant towards the seductions of his imagination", suddenly realises that he is able to walk through walls. In the second, a perfectly ordinary young woman has the gift of being able to multiply herself and send her other bodies anywhere in the world. Both of them, regrettably, eventually get carried away by the possibilities their strange powers give them.

Other stories play around with time. A government at war (many of the stories are set during WWII) decides to deal with shortages by rationing time - the more useful you are, the more days per month you can exist, and when your ration tickets run out you wink out of existence until the first day of the next month. But soon a black market develops, with unexpected results. In another, a government advances the clocks seventeen years so that the country can move out of conflict.

In the midst of this there are a few naturalistic stories, made all the more poignant in contrast. I really enjoyed the whole collection.

Uncle Victor was a glamorous figure: handsome, brave, generous, strong, had passed every school exam, killed a man most weeks and played the harmonica superbly.

Here's a picture of a sculpture in Paris featuring the man from the title story.

The Man Who Walked Through Walls sounds like a great collection, and that's a fine sculpture captured in that photo! Wishlisting that one - thanks!

Great picture

I'm glad you liked Locke & Key, or at least what you've read of it so far. Less glad that you can't get the next volume on your Kindle. It does kind of leave you wondering what on Earth the publisher was thinking.

The Man Who Walked Through Walls sounds interesting and may make it onto my wishlist, too.

Glad you enjoyed Germinal, and The Man Who Walked through Walls sounds fascinating!

The Man Who Walked through Walls is going on the wishlist! Love that photo of the sculpture.

Great reviews, well worth waiting for! and thanks for posting that pic!

Lovely reviews, Margaret. The Man Who Walked Through Walls is added to my wish list, and Uncle Victor becomes my latest role model.

Love it Darryl! and I'm glad I've added The Man Who Walked Through Walls to so many wishlists.

39. The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

At the start of The Enchantress Of Florence, a young man arrives in the fabulous imperial city of Fatehpur Sikri. He has a message for Emperor Akbar, a message we are told is so secret that if he tells it to anyone other than the Emperor, they will die. Eventually the Emperor (and the readers) hear his story, within which are nested many other storytellers and their tales. His story is set in Florence, and there are many deliberate echoes and mirrors between this story and the events taking place at Akbar's court. This is a book about storytelling, and about the power of art to create reality; as well as more worldly powers and how they are used for creation or destruction.

I really enjoyed the writing in this book, which is both lush and witty. The story, though, felt a little light - closer to Rushdie's children's books than the best of his novels for adults. Partly this is because Akbar, self-questioning despite his tremendous power, is the most interesting character in the book and so the interest flags when the story is in Florence; but also the storyteller's tale of Florence doesn't really seem to justify his travels all the way to India. Still, a fairly quick and enjoyable read.

She braided her long golden tresses at her window and it was as if Marco the Fool of Love were an invisible man, because Alessandra had long ago perfected the art of seeing only what she wanted to see, which was an essential accomplishment if you wanted to be one of the world's masters and not its victim.

Tempting review of The Man Who Walked Through Walls - I'm going to have to add that to the list. I liked the sculpture also.

Agree with you about The Enchantress of Florence which I didn't feel was up to a lot of Rushdie's other work, but like you, I did enjoy it as a lovely fairytale. The Florence contingent with their friend Machiavelli was an interesting sideline.

I have the book The enchantress of Florence I will get to it soon, but I have been warned by your slightly negative review.

Nice review of The Enchantress of Florence, Margaret. I enjoyed it when I read it, but I can't remember a thing about it, even after looking at your review, so it didn't have much of an impact upon me.

40. The Party: the secret world of China's Communist rulers by Richard McGregor

If the Chinese Communist Party's Central Organisation Department had an analogue in Washington, it would "oversee the appointment of the entire US cabinet, state governors and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all federal regulatory agencies, the chief executives of GE, ExxonMobil, Wal-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices on the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the bosses of the TV networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-thanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation."

This readable book argues that a lot of analysis of China today completely misses out the importance of the Party, partly because outsiders find it hard to imagine the reach of the Party through society, partly because we have nothing in our own systems to compare it to. (Estimates of the size of the private sector in China range from below 30% of GDP to over 70%, because of this lack of clarity about the Party's role.)

Through separate chapters dealing with the Party and different aspects of Chinese society (state, business, military etc), McGregor gives us a picture of how the Party ensures control - especially through its power to hire and fire, and its ability to transmit its messages down through the system so everyone knows the official line and the priorities that they need to deliver.

Unlike too much stuff written about China, this is nuanced: McGregor has a sense of the historical changes over the last decades and explains how the Party has drawn back from the involvement it had in private lives, to a situation where it controls only what it needs to control. He also shows how some of the things the Party promotes leave it increasingly open to challenge: the desire for economic growth leads to a more international and professional approach to management of state enterprises, but managers may then see themselves more as businesspeople and prioritise their bottom line, rather than the party line. A more professional and effective army gradually becomes more of a national army than the Party's army. And the Party uses regional competition to drive economic growth; but the Party's own power and the high priority given to development mean that local officials, whose writ is law, pursue economic growth so strongly that they trigger popular resistance (eg over land rights or polluting factories).

Finally, McGregor points out that it's very easy to imagine scenarios in which the Chinese system collapses or loses power. But in reality… the 2008 economic crisis demonstrated China's strength, not its weakness; Chinese people are aspirational in the face of inequality, like Americans; the growing middle class is a conservative bulwark of Party rule; and the Party has managed to develop in responsive ways, ruling less by terror, improving services, getting out of private lives, getting better at preventative policing and settling protests quietly and peacefully, allowing some negative news as a safety valve. He quotes Yang Jisheng (the author of Tombstone): "The system is decaying and the system is evolving. The system is decaying while it is evolving. It is not clear which side might come out on top in the end." I welcome this refusal to come down on one side or the other - how can we possibly be confident about the future of China?

In conclusion, perhaps his argument was a little overstated, but I agree with McGregor that the role of the Party should receive more attention. I would have liked to see the book talk a little about ideology, which I do think remains important, although it's not always easy to know exactly how. But overall this book was nuanced, interesting and readable. Perhaps it's not exactly for the general reader but I would recommend it for anyone with an interest in China.

41. Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin

Intended as light relief after finishing the book above. London, the late 1940s. A starlet's suicide is made mysterious by the fact that immediately after she did it, someone broke into her rented flat and destroyed anything which could be a clue to her real identity. And then people that she worked with begin to die one after another...

I used to read a lot of Edmund Crispin and the similar Michael Innes; but that was a decade or two ago. Coming back after such a long break, I found the humour rather laborious - and Crispin not only makes far too much use of coincidences, but tries to explain each one away, which only has the effect of highlighting them.

Fen is exigent in the matter of sympathy for his afflictions, but he knew that at the moment it was Humbleby who deserved commiseration, and he did not, therefore, as in minor discomforts he normally does, adopt the air and hollow tones of a man precariously convalescing after a several operation.

Interesting review of the book about China; I do need to learn more about China, and you've pointed me to one possibility.

Great review of The Party, Margaret; I'll add it to my wish list.

Thanks for your review of The Party. I've got this one on my wishlist so I appreciate your thoughts.

Well considered review of The Party and a good caveat about the lack of discussion on ideology. I will have to read this.
Too bad about the Crispin. It can be difficult going back. Sounds like a good premise though.

Great review of The Party; the secret world of China's communist rulers. This should appeal to all China watchers

Thanks all - hope you enjoy it.

42. Absolution by Patrick Flanery

Absolution is about the relationship between a celebrated South African writer, Clare, and the journalist who is writing her biography, another South African recently returned from New York, Sam - and the relationship between each of them and their pasts, as well as with the truth.

It switches between four narratives - Sam narrating his present (interviews with Clare, rediscovering his country); Sam remembering events which happened in 1989 when he was a child; Clare in the present, talking to her daughter (disappeared in 1989, presumed dead); and extracts from the book that Clare is writing, which may be fiction or may be a memoir of her earlier life.

The themes of the book are guilt and complicity - particularly by those who benefit from an unequal system, whether that is the apartheid years or the economic inequality of the modern South Africa; the impossibility of true innocence?; and deceit, of others and ourselves.

Interesting themes, but rather too heavily-handedly done. For me the book was self-consciously a novel of ideas, with lengthy and rather portentous discussions between its characters - believable when an academic is interviewing his subject, perhaps, less so when a woman is talking to her son. I also felt that the book tried to be very literary by introducing extremely long descriptions of things - perhaps Clare's manicured garden is symbolic of her privilege but I felt like the reader could have been trusted to work that out in about a third of the time actually given to the subject...

I should say I am not sure that I have given this book a really fair go. I am in the process of moving house (job, life) and so have been a bit too mentally distracted for something like this; and I've been reading it on the Kindle which somehow doesn't seem as well-suited for close, thoughtful reading. But its flaws (especially obviousness) are ones which always particularly bother me.

What does this pool say to the garden, what is its dialogue? I ask it and myself. What do the woodland, the perennial borders, the indigenous specimens, the exotic interlopers, and my own aggressive vegetable plot, carved rectilinearly into the fluid forms, irrupting into formal life, say to each other when I pause to listen?

That quote certainly isn't going to lead me to read this....Too bad the book didn't work for you. Good luck with the life changes.

Nice review of Absolution, Margaret. I thought about reading this, and almost bought it last week, but I'll pass on it for now.

ETA: That quotation is cringe-worthy.

Yes, there was quite a lot of that.

My reaction cycle when reading this went: interesting/confused/this is rubbish/maybe I should give it the benefit of the doubt/no, it really is rubbish.

43. The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman (audiobook, read by author)

Any new Neil Gaiman usually ends up somewhere on my wishlist, but it was bragan's enthusiastic review that got me to pick this one up so soon after it came out. I'm glad I did.

In The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, a man returning home for the funeral of one of his parents has a sudden flashback to a strange story from his childhood - how could he have forgotten it for so long? At first he remembers only the eccentric family - three generations of women - who lived in the farmhouse nearby (and had a pond which the daughter, Lettie, always insisted was an ocean); but gradually the full sequence of events is revealed, a tear in the fabric between worlds and the need to battle a monstrous creature who has escaped into our world and who is bewitching the adults.

I loved the world-building in this, the Hempstock women and their powers, and especially a wonderful sequence in which Lettie Hempstock dowses her way to the edges of their universe to find what creature is causing the disturbances. Gaiman's voice is also perfect for the mood and tone of the book - simple but fantastical at the same time.

It is a sort of mythic/archetypal story, so I found the ending a little simple and predictable, and that's why I'd call this more of a children's book - despite the framing story. But a very enjoyable read.

The epigraph is a quote from an interview with Maurice Sendak which sets up the story perfectly: "I remember my own childhood vividly ... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them."

44. White Heat by MJ McGrath

Edie Kiglatuk, half-white and half-Inuit, is a hunting guide in the High Arctic. One day she is guiding a particularly clueless couple of southerners when one is mysteriously shot dead. When the local council of elders cover up the murder, she assumes it's because they're worried about the impact on local tourism; she doesn't like it, but the elders are powerful and it was only a hunting accident anyway, right? But then the survivor returns, with a different partner, and even worse things begin to unfold. Plucky Edie needs all her skills and wit to figure out what is going on in her community.

Essentially, this was a by-the-numbers thriller set in a very interesting location. McGrath has written a non-fiction book about this same community, and created a vivid and believable world. It's a shame the characterisation and storyline were cliched in comparison.

The moment she reached the steps up to the snow-porch door, she knew Joe was already inside waiting for her. In the same way that a frozen ptarmigan would gradually revive when put beside the radiator, it was as if the house gradually came to life when Joe was there.

45. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

This is the first book by Gillian Flynn, whose most recent book Gone Girl has been a runaway success. I've been in two minds about all the hype, so when I saw Sharp Objects going cheap I thought it was a good opportunity to give her writing a go.

Camille is a journalist on a failing Chicago paper. When a girl is killed, and a second girl goes missing, in her home town, her editor sends her down to report on the story, hopeful of some good local colour and perhaps a Pulitzer. But when Camille arrives, it's obvious pretty quickly that the small town has some strange dynamics going on - and that her relationship with her family makes her very ill-suited to do any objective reporting.

Reading this right after White Heat helped me realise why I'd found the previous thriller unsatisfying. The underlying assumptions in that book (spoiler alert for White Heat) were 'big oil companies are bad' and 'foreigners despoil the Arctic'.

No underlying assumptions in Sharp Objects are anywhere near that simple - the book raises challenging and uncomfortable ideas about female sexuality, different male and female moralities, and the way that women's physical appearances are used to define them. It's a dark world, not too pleasant to spend a lot of time in, and I don't think I agree with some of what Flynn was saying. But it really made me think about, and challenge myself on, these bigger issues at the same time as being a really gripping read.

Mimi draped herself over a chocolate-leather couch. A dazzling adolescent, her looks didn't translate into adulthood. No-one seemed to notice. Everyone still referred to her as 'the hot one'.

I also have Neil Gaiman's new book on my list thanks to bragan. I'm glad to see another positive review. I have Sharp Objects on my iPod. I don't remember buying it, but there it is. You have prompted me to give it a go the next time I am looking for something different. I really enjoyed Gone Girl, so I am not surprised to hear that it seems to be well done. Thank you.

w_s, I had the same mixed reaction to White Heat when I read it last year; excellent portrayal of a northern community with all its problems, but ho hum mystery.

I haven't read any Gaiman or Flynn yet, although I am tempted.

Simple ending notwithstanding -- and I suppose I can't really argue with that point, even though it certainly worked for me -- I'm glad I didn't oversell The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and that you liked it, too. :)

And I'm glad you found Sharp Objects worthwhile. I just recently picked up a copy of that, myself, based on how much I liked Gone Girl.

Thanks everyone - I'll have to get to Gone Girl sooner rather than later.

46. The Civil Servant's Notebook by Wang Xiaofang

In some ways this is a fictional counterpart to The Party. Set within a Chinese provincial government office, the corruption, links with big business, rivalry and powerplay are all here. The notebook of the title is a document forged at the behest of a vice-mayor as part of his campaign against another vice-mayor. But when the anti-corruption department starts its investigation, many people can fall into its net.

The book is narrated in turn by different individuals within the story, each of whom have their own self-justification and take away their own moral from the events. Interspersed with this in the first part of the book are a few chapters narrated by items of office furniture, who like the humans believe that they are the really important items that represent the office: a pen says "The world might be conquered with the barrel of a gun, but it is ruled with the barrel of a pen", while a stapler opines, "You may only be a thin bit of wire, but actually you're a perfect symbol of the civil servant. Your clean silver colour is just like an official's uniform, you all look exactly alike, and when you're put together with me, your leader, you all fall into line. No matter how I bend and squash you, you don't complain; you're made to be shaped and used."

This was an interesting read. It took some time to get going, and the characters weren't very well-rounded as individuals. (But actually this is a problem I always have with modern Chinese fiction; and it mattered less here because there was a real narrative moving the story forward.) There are also quite a lot of explicit references to the theme, with different characters talking about the nature of public service, and much cynicism about how one gets ahead. But it was also a good insight into the back-stabbing and arse-covering within an office where everyone is trying to ally themselves with a future leader.

After I finished the book, I found out that the author himself had once been a secretary to a mayor who was investigated and executed for corruption, and he has written thirteen books on this theme (The Civil Servant's Notebook is the only one translated into English). In fact, there is a whole genre of 'officialdom fiction' in China - with a readership made up half of people interested in current affairs who are looking for the roman à clef elements, and half of would-be civil servants looking for tips to get ahead!

I didn't like Gone Girl much but am going to get Sharp Objects after reading your review.

Think I'll get to Wang Xiaofang before Flynn now that I've read your review.

I read two great short stories last year on Chinese officialdom: "The Great Wall" by Ismail Kadare, which made sense given previous Albanian/Chinese ties, in Granta 91 and an old anonymous story, "An Injustice Revealed", which was quite funny, in Alberto Manguel's Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature ( a great collection)

Enjoyed your review of the Civil Servant's notebook and fascinated to read there are as yet so many untranslated books by the author on the same theme.

Thanks for the tips sassy! I'd never heard of this genre before.

47. The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino

Most of these charmingly surreal stories follow the same format: a few sentences explaining a scientific theory about the world, which triggers a reminiscence in our narrator Qfwfq - after all, he has been around for thousands of millenia, sometimes an atom or particle, a dinosaur, or one of the first creatures to leave the water and start living on land, so he has a lot of stories to tell.

I loved reading these. The writing is lyrically beautiful, but there is also a lot of humour in the stories, which somehow often manage to reflect a facet of human nature - the first fish to move onto the land, for example, are tremendously snobbish about their achievement but also afraid of falling back into the old ways.

My very favourite story, The Meteorites, starts from the premise that this Earth was once a tiny planet, but space dust and other objects keep falling onto it, and eventually rather than throwing them back out Qfwfq and his wife start to brush the dust over the surface of the earth. Soon the planet grows too big for one woman to keep clean; Qfwfq neglects his duties on the other side of the planet, marvelling instead at the objects which land there - until one day, a woman has fallen to earth, not one like his wife who wants cleanliness and order but one who takes each new-fallen item as it comes.

I couldn't find that online but one of the stories from the collection is here.

This is called The Complete Cosmicomics because it collects these stories together (they were originally published in several different books). With the exception of a few algebra-based stories (which didn't grip me so much), this is very highly recommended.

In one way or another, the great revolution had taken place: all of a sudden, around us, eyes were opening, and corneas and irises and pupils: the swollen, colourless eye of polyps and cuttlefish, the dazed and gelatinous eyes of bream and mullet, the protruding and peduncled eyes of crayfish and lobsters, the bulging and faceted eyes of flies and ants. A seal now comes forward, black and shiny, winking little eyes like pinheads. A snail extends ball-like eyes at the end of long antennae. The inexpressive eyes of the gull examine the surface of the water.

I really have to get to Calvino, one of these days.

Great and very useful review of McGregor's book on the CPC.

48. The Devotion Of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

In the first two chapters of this book, a woman kills her abusive ex-husband, and her slightly stalkerish neighbour offers to help her dispose of the body. I had a couple of ideas at this point for how the story would pan out - neither of which turned out to be right. So, indeed, it's not predictable - but although the twist was a clever one, I didn't find the process of getting there very interesting. Perhaps it was because we didn't get enough information about the process of detecting - just a lot of sequences of people looking like they're thinking hard - so it was not possible for the reader to try and work out the solution. Or perhaps it was just so clever it passed me by! In any case, a quick read but a rather disappointing one.

'You talk to your neighbour much?' Yukawa asked. Ishigami's brain went into overdrive. Judging from the tone of his voice, Yukawa didn't suspect anything. That wasn't why he was asking questions. Simply brushing him off was an option here. But Yukawa knew the detective - he had to consider that. Yukawa might mention his visit here. Ishigami had to answer.

49. Emma by Jane Austen

It's quite a lot of years since I read any Austen, and I don't think I have read Emma before, although I remember my father reading it to the family at a time when I was really too young to understand what was going on. I have, however, seen Clueless a lot, so I knew the broad framework of the story.

As always, it's quite hard to review the "classics" so I will just say I found this a delightful read, which had me chuckling out loud many times. I particularly enjoyed the bit where Emma daydreams about Frank Churchill declaring his love for her - and being turned down. How unlike most heroines of romantic fiction!

...though thinking of him so much, and, as she sat drawing or working, forming a thousand amusing schemes for the progress and close of their attachment, fancying interesting dialogues, and inventing elegant letters; the conclusion of every imaginary declaration on his side was that she refused him. Their affection was always to subside into friendship.

Oh, darn. I have that one on my TBR pile waiting to be read.

You mean Suspect X? I must say most other LTers liked it a whole lot more than I did...

Hey star! Enjoyed your review of The Complete Cosmicomics a lot. Adding that collection.

I am with Paul, an excellent review of The Complete Cosmicomics definitely one for the wish list

Yes! The Complete Cosmicomics is definitely a reading highlight of the year so far.

I may, possibly, have reached the low-light with my latest read, Lord Byron's Novel by John Crowley (not giving this one a number as I skimmed the majority of it).

Lord Byron's Novel contains three interweaving sections, one a novel which (as the title suggests) might be Byron's lost novel - an epigraph tells us that Byron wrote one but burnt it because it kept coming too close to real life. Another section consists of glosses on the novel's text, written by Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace; and the last is made up of emails telling the story of a young woman who is working on a website about Ada, but comes upon some papers which need decoding.

This book has excellent LT reviews (an average star rating of 3.9) but I found the writing style annoying and the themes clumsily handled. I generally have a bit of a problem with long passages of historical pastiche, unless those are very well done (I did read, and liked, the long Victorian poems in Possession). I was already skimming the Byronic sections but coming upon the following line led me to start to skip them:

"he fed his son on a pilaw, flavoured with a lemon he pluckt from the tree that overhung their table, and a pair of grilled eight-legged fish called octopodes, which he would not suffer his son to send away."

I persevered because of the high rating, and there was some narrative movement in the story of the discovery, despite a lot of exposition about Byron's life and relationships. But most of the weight of the 'discovery' section rests on its echoes of the Byron/Ada story (another difficult father-daughter relationship, another father with a bad reputation which is perhaps undeserved), and I found this rather heavy-handed.

Perhaps if I'd given this book some more time and concentration I would have come to enjoy it; and I know it's harsh to review on the basis of reading about a third of the text. On the other hand, most books that annoy me this much don't even get skimmed! - so I've done more than I needed to.

Onwards and upwards, with my next thread.