flissp: I'm back again said Norah...

Hallo everybody! I've missed you all, so I'm back, even though I know that I'm extremely unlikely to keep up with both my own thread, and with other people's (I'm going to say right here and now that I'm not going to even try to catch up what I've missed to date).

Firstly, I challenge you all to finish the quote in my subject line...

Secondly, some 2014 lists:

TOP NEW READS OF 2014 (in the order I read them):
A Month in the Country: J. L. Carr (thanks for the recommendation Suzanne)
The Guts: Roddy Doyle
The Sleeper and the Spindle: Neil Gaiman
A Song For Issy Bradley: Carys Bray (both heart breaking & thought provoking)

Booby prize for worst book I've read in a VERY long time goes to: Allegiant: Veronica Roth (the final book in her Divergent trilogy). Second prize going to the middle book of the trilogy, Insurgent. I really don't know why I finished them, except that I am a slave to my need to finish series and I was in the middle of nowhere.

BEST THEATRE:
Definitely, without a doubt, this was The Crucible at The Old Vic. Truly chilling. There was a filmed production and I'd highly recommend trying to see it if it hasn't already been and gone.

So. Reading plans for the year. Well, I've decided not to do that this year, but I will continue to try to read more non fiction, which I'll list here:

i) The Music of Life: Denis Noble (Reading)
ii)
iii)
iv)
v)
vi)
vii)
viii)
ix)
x)

...and here is a "Tomes" list for books I want to read at some point in the not too distant future (I'm not going to restrict myself to this year!):

i) War and Peace: Leo Tolstoy
ii) The Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck
iii) Wolf Hall: Hilary Mantel

Here's my reading ticker:




...a map with the author origins of the books I read this year:


7 countries
map

...My Diana Wynne Jones in order of publication thread (continued from 2012) is here in the DWJ group. Although I finished my goal in 2013, I've still only commented on about half of her books, so I'll continue to do that. Maybe I should have a ticker for that too:




...and here are links to my previous threads:

Thread for 2014 (unfinished)
Thread for 2013 (unfinished)
Thread for 2012
Thread for 2011 pt2
Thread for 2011 pt1
Thread for 2010 pt4
Thread for 2010 pt3
Thread for 2010 pt2
Thread for 2010 pt1
Thread for 2009 pt2
Thread for 2009 pt1
Thread for 2008

...and edited to add a list of the books I'm reading with my book group. We've started meeting less frequently (as it's so hard to pin everyone down), but this also means that we'll occasionally be reading more than 1 book at a time:

26 February:
Elizabeth is Missing: Emma Healey (Msg 2)

06 May:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Richard Flanagan
The Iliad: Homer

29 June:
Bodies of Light: Sarah Moss

09 September:
To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee
Go Tell a Watchman: Harper Lee

...and here’s a quick overview of the books I’ve read so far this year:

1) Good Omens: Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (re-read)
The BBC dramatised this on the radio over Christmas and, while it wasn’t bad, it was also a little disappointing (there was some good casting and some not so good casting and it was only 6 episodes short episodes, so too much had to be cut). It remains my favourite book by both authors and it made me crave a re-read. Sadly prescient given Terry Pratchett’s recent death. Anyway, it’s a wonderfully funny book about an angel, a demon, 4 kids the apocalypse and the C17th witch who predicted it. My favourite line (makes me cackle out loud every time I read it): “They’d come here to spoon, and on one memorable occasion, fork”.

(In memory of TP, the BBC - I think that all the episodes are still available to listen to. TP & NG have a cameo in the first episode…)

2) The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Vladimir Nabokov
The “author” sets out on a mission to discover more about and write the biography of his semi-estranged half brother the renowned and recently deceased author Sebastian Knight, tearing shreds off a rival biography which failed to mention he even had a brother en route. Very witty. I really must read Lolita one of these days…

3) The Invisible Library: Genevieve Cogman
Librarians sent to track certain books in order to clamp down on the chaos in certain universes. I think this was an Amazon daily deal, at any rate, I enjoyed it very much - I’ll certainly look out for the sequels.

4) Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen (Book Group)
I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for re-reading this really, but I do think that it’s very underrated in general - affectionately satirising the popular gothic fiction of the day and those that read it.

5) Soulless: Gail Carriger
The Invisible Library left me wanting to read some more Steampunk and I remembered that I’d read this a few years ago, but never read the sequels. Set in an alternative Victorian era, revolving around a “soulless” spinister investigating mysterious happenings in the supernatural world. Silly fun, even if the rather pantomime version of Victorian England (and Scottish dialect) did occasionally grate (and may I say that one would never have a creamer as part of a tea service as one would NEVER put cream in tea - a milk jug maybe… ;o)).

6) Elizabeth is Missing: Emma Healey (Book Group)
I hadn’t intended to read this as I have a bit of a paranoia about Alzheimers, so a book written from the perspective of a sufferer wasn’t really up my street. However, as lots of our group wanted to read it, I did and, indeed, enjoyed it well enough (it’s a very quick read). I did read it while feeling all muzzy-headed due to cold, which was a little disconcerting as, written from the perspective of an Alzheimers sufferer, there is a lot of deliberate (believable) confusion. I did feel that there were a few too many coincidences towards the end of the book however.

7) Changeless: Gail Carriger
8) Blameless: Gail Carriger
9) Heartless: Gail Carriger
10) Timeless: Gail Carriger
More silly fun.

11) The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship that Sunk Twice: Mike Carey
12) The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity: Mike Carey
13) The Unwritten: Inside Man: Mike Carey
The prequel and first 2 volumes of a graphic novel series following Tommy Taylor a man whose life revolves around a Harry Potter-esq series of books his father wrote about a boy also named Tommy Taylor and for whom reality and fiction often seem to blur. The prequel sets up the premise, focusing on the birth and childhood of both Tommys. I picked this last up several years ago, but only just got round to reading it. Definitely gripped…

14) The Dead Zone: Stephen King (reread)
Someone at work was selling lots of Stephen King books very cheaply and it struck me as a very good book to read on a very long plane journey (to Australia last month for family stuff + holiday).

15) The Rosie Project: Graeme Simsion
I’ve picked this book up in bookshops umpteen times and always put it down after reading the blurb. However, I was staying in a hostel and wanting to exchange The Dead Zone for something else and there really wasn’t much choice, so I gave it a shot given that it’s set in Melbourne and I was there at the time. A professor with clearly undiagnosed Autism looks for a wife… Well, if you suspend your belief, it was readable enough. I probably shan’t read the sequel however.

16) The Dark Side of the Sun: Terry Pratchett
17) Pyramids: Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett died sadly young while I was in Australia and I felt I had to read something by him in memory. I was completely addicted to his stuff when I was growing up. After Good Omens, these two are my favourites (along with Mort and Reaper Man) and, although Pyramids does belong to the Discworld series, both are really stand alones. I may come back to describe them a bit later…

18) The Music of Chance: Paul Auster
A second-hand book shop purchase bought as I haven’t read any Paul Auster in a while and I do enjoy his writing. A man comes into a lot of money on the death of his long-estranged father and ends up quitting his job just to drive around America with no aim in mind, beyond the driving. When he picks up a young, beaten up man on the road, he changes the course of his life irrevocably for the second time. A very absorbing read.

19) The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Richard Flanegan (Book Group)
A case of Book Group tying in very nicely with my own plans (it’s been on my TBR pile for a little while and I was in Sydney when I started to read it, having recently left Tasmania and Adelaide - all places the central character stumbles through). Written about an Australian officer who was part of one of the teams building the Burma railway, beautifully summing up how someone can both be deeply flawed and also heroic.

20) The Islands of Chaldea: Diana Wynne Jones (finished by her sister Ursula)
I’ve put this off for so long (unlike me with a DWJ book). I was just really nervous of reading a book that was finished by someone other than DWJ, even if her sisters (to whom she would invent and read stories throughout their childhood) are certainly the best placed to do so. I shouldn’t have worried. While I think that DWJ would probably have introduced another twist, Ursula understands her sisters writing and her stories and took it in the right direction. Her brief afterword had me close to tears at the end (although that was probably partly as I was sitting in a park in the sunshine in Perth prior to heading to the airport and home!). I’m glad that this, rather than Earwig and the Witch was her final book (not that I’m panning Earwig and the Witch, just that it was a book for younger readers and doesn’t have quite the same depth.

21) The Buried Giant: Kazuo Ishiguro
OK, I think I’m going to have to come back to comment on this one as I have quite a lot to say and I don’t really have time now. I will say that I do like that Ishiguro doesn’t feel bound by genre, and that I enjoyed reading it, however, I’ll also say that ultimately, it didn’t quite hit the spot. I’m not sure anything else he writes will live up to Remains of the Day for me.

22) The Unwritten: Dead Man’s Knock: Mike Carey
Next in the graphic novel series I mention above…

23) The Strange Case of James Kirkland Pilley: Randy Attwood
Saw this on Richard’s fb feed and it seemed right up my street - and it was!

....OK, I really need to get back to work now…!

Dropping back quickly to say that at the weekend there was a programme about/interviewing Ursula Le Guin on Radio 4 and it's still available to listen to. This is ahead of a dramatisation of Left Hand of Darkness that starts this weekend and, later in the month (a childhood favourite of mine) A Wizard of Earthsea...

Welcome back!

Welcome back too. Like you I'm a bit of a completist but decided after reading Insurgent that this was one to bend my rules on.
I read The music of chance a while back, it is good. Thanks for the Ursula Le Guin link.

Welcome back, Fliss! As you said, I'll have to get to Lolita, Pnin and Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory in the near future.

I think I'll pass on The Buried Giant. I'll read Never Let Me Go later this year, though.

Welcome back!!

There you are, Fliss!! I've been looking for you:) Nice to see you again.

Tricky one, that quote of yours, not from A Doll's House, is it? Won't try to finish it though, since I don't really have a clue:)

I'm halfway through Elizabeth is Missing, and since I have a grandmother with dementia (not Alzheimers), it is nice to be "reminded" how life is, or might be, for her.

I also received my first Diana Wynne Jones novel from the Secret Santa last year, so now I am halfway through Fire and Hemlock, too. Which is your favourite btw?

#4 Hi Jim, thanks!

#5 Hi Kerry! Yup, you were quite right not to finish that series, it was dreadful - I don't know what possessed me! I do enjoy Paul Auster - I've yet to find one I haven't liked.

#6 Hi Darryl! I very much enjoyed Pnin - definitely recommended. ...and I will get to Lolita one day, I just need to be in the right frame of mind I think.

Re Buried Giant, I didn't dislike it and it's a very easy read, it was just that I had such high expectations that it was a little disappointing. Never Let Me Go is a book I continue to feel very split about though, even after seeing Ishiguro discussing it (which made me rethink a little). I actively disliked the story (and it's not very original), however I thought his writing and the characterisation was convincing and excellent (it was actually the first Ishiguro I read and was what encouraged me to read more, despite disliking the book). The fact that the story is unoriginal in fact doesn't matter (and actually, given that you don't really read science fiction/fantasy, it probably will be more novel for you anyway) as really, although it's disturbing, in my opinion, it's not really the point of the book - the point is the characters and how they act and react - and in this (as in Remains of the Day - easily my favourite of his books I've read to date), it is wonderful.

#7 Hi Amber!

#8 Hi Bente - good to see you too!

Nope, not A Doll's House - think further back in your life - although actually, this book may not have made it to your part of the world - I've yet to meet many people who are not Canadian who have read it outside my own family (in which it is a classic...). I suspect I'm going to have to give the answer myself, but it's always interesting to me see who's read it and who hasn't!

Re Elizabeth is Missing - yes, I can certainly see how that would be interesting. I'm sorry about your grandmother.

Ooooooh - how did I not realise you hadn't read anything by Diana Wynne Jones yet?! Excellent - I hope you're enjoying it? That's one that I originally read too young, so I enjoyed it much more the 2nd time round. Hmmm. My favourite. Hmmm. I don't have one, but I have a top several (in no publication order so as not to bias you!):

The Magicians of Caprona (part of the Chrestomanci series, although it's works perfectly well as a stand alone (when I was little, the whole series was published as stand alones really)
The Homeward Bounders
Archer's Goon
Howl's Moving Castle (the rest of the series are nothing like as good)
The Lives of Christopher Chant (for this one, it is better if you've read Charmed Life first, but it's not essential)
Deep Secret

Honourable mentions also to:
Power of Three
The Spellcoats
Time of the Ghost (the most autobiographical really)
Fire and Hemlock

24) Foxglove Summer: Ben Aaronovitch
Next up in the Peter Grant series of books about a young PC/trainee wizard for the London Met. In this one, Peter is seconded to a village in Hereford where 2 girls have gone missing in mysterious circumstances. It's fluff, but it's fun and I'm enjoying the series more as it progresses.

Hi Fliss - nice to see you back!

#11 Hi Rhian!

Another Ursula Le Guin radio programme - this time interviewed very interestingly by China Mieville: You can find it here

25) The Lowland: Jhumpa Lahiri
Subhash and Udayan, born in Calcutta near the Lowland of the title (two lakes behind their house, flooded every wet season), are brothers who look and sound very similar, but couldn't have more different personalities. As they grow up, despite their closeness, they end up going in very different directions - the more reserved Subhash, absorbed by academia making the big step of travelling to the USA to study, the younger, more dynamic Udayan getting drawn into a dangerous movement towards revolution. But this is really the story of Subhash, his brother's wife Gauri and daughter Bela.

We read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth for book group a while back and, while I enjoyed her writing style and most of the stories, I wasn't blown away the way others were and I did feel that it was occasionally unnecessarily depressing (not that I'm averse to a sad story, but it felt a little overdone on occasion) - the final story in the book in particular. This is why it's taken a while to get round to reading The Lowland. Again, I enjoyed reading this book, but it didn't light a fire under me. The story drew me along, but I knew where it was going the whole time - it's really just an extension of the short stories - the themes remain the same.

26) Trigger Warning: Neil Gaiman
Gaiman's most recent collection of short stories. Actually I've already read a substantial proportion of these in various guises - his Calendar of Tales is online here, several have been published as beautifully illustrated individual books and several I've heard him reading aloud at events. However, there are enough new stories to make this worth the purchase, including a short story following on from The Monarch of the Glen (which in turn follows on from American Gods).

While I was a little disappointed that there weren't more new stories (but then I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, so actively chase all his random projects), I did very much enjoy this collection. Historically, I have always found Neil Gaiman's short stories a bit hit and miss, but actually I like the majority of stories collected here (there are one or two in "A Calendar of Tales" which are a bit meh - but I knew that already) - it's an eclectic mix and I think it may well end up my favourite of his short story collections.

27) The Unwritten: Leviathan: Mike Carey
Next in the series. I continue to enjoy these. I should probably write a brief plot summary of each volume at some point...

I'm simply stopping by to say hi. You are reading some great books. I'll revisit later and add some to the TBR pile. For now, I'm off to an accupressure appointment.

Have a great day!

>12 flissp: I share your impression of The Lowland, Fliss. It was a decent book, but a far from memorable one, which is quite overrated IMO.

#13 Hi Linda! Hope the accupressure appointment went well! Will be stopping by your thread at some point (as always, I struggle to keep up with everyone...)

#14 Yep, we agree on this one Darryl!

I finally got round to loading some of the photos I took in Australia on Flickr, so I thought I'd make you (and myself retrospectively) all jealous and post a few here ;o) :












...and because this was such a glorious sunset (in Watson Bay), I think it deserves to be a little bit bigger:

The last photo i s breath taking! Thanks for posting these wonderful images.

Wow - gorgeous photos! Well done!

Great photos, Fliss!

Thanks everyone - although I can't really take credit for that sunset - it was just amazing (and I was in the perfect spot, eating supper in a restaurant in the bay, having missed the last ferry back...).

In case anyone is interested, I'm rather enjoying the BBC's (radio) adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea + The Tombs of Atuan. Obviously, being a radio dramatisation, it's been severely edited, so we're racing through the story, but it's been done quite well I think (although half the actors don't really sound as I imagine their characters to sound). The episodes should be there (follow the link) for a bit less than a month and it's currently half way through.

Now I need to reread the books...!

28) The Murdstone Trilogy: Mal Peet
I'd never heard of Mal Peet until his recent death, but there was such an outpouring of tributes from authors I like that I thought I should investigate.

In The Murdstone Trilogy, Philip Murdstone, a flagging author of numerous books about various young boys overcoming the odds stacked against them is asked by his publisher to jump on the bandwagon and join all the popular authors in writing a fantasy book - even better, a fantasy trilogy. Philip baulks but despairingly agrees, knowing that he can't do it. However, alcohol, a local ring of standing stones and some rather strange characters combine to help him and from this point on his life starts to spin out of control.

This was one of those books about which I can't decide how I feel. I enjoyed reading it and I always felt impelled to continue reading, however, although I think that the idea behind the book is great, the story itself never quite grabbed me. On the other hand, this said, I very much enjoyed Mal Peet's writing style and I think I'll have to try something else by him. He writes rather beautifully and also wittily. There were a couple of phrases I've highlighted on my kindle - I'll have to transfer them here later...

I've read all Mal Peet's books apart from this one. I did start it but decided fairly quickly that it wasn't appealing. I felt a bit bad about that as this was just after he died.
I think you would like his Keeper or Tamar, even the story Cloud tea monkeys for younger readers which he co-wrote with his wife.

Oh dear, yet again, I flounder in keeping up to date and I haven't even looked at anyone else's threads in months! Ah well...

#20 It's interesting you say that Kerry - thanks for the recommendations, I will investigate.

So. I'm not going to write any comments just now, but I thought that I would update what I've been reading at least and come back to update later, so here we go...:

29) Outlander: Diana Gabaldon
30) Dragonfly in Amber: Diana Gabaldon
31) Voyager: Diana Gabaldon
32) Drums of Autumn: Diana Gabaldon
Not at all my usual kind of thing, but I surprised myself by getting completely hooked... ...until I didn't - the last 2 pushed my credulity just that little bit too far (particularly Voyager, which has so many coincidences I actually stated giggling every time a new one came up).
33) Valiant: Holly Black
34) Stranger Things Happen: Kelly Link
Kelly Link is a relatively recent discovery (well, last couple of years anyway) and I'm really enjoying her - it's very rare to come across someone this original.
35) The School for Good and Evil: Soman Chainani
36) Knight's Fee: Rosemary Sutcliff (reread)
37) Ready Player One: Ernest Cline
38) Emily of New Moon: L. M. Montgomery
39) When We Were Orphans: Kazuo Ishiguro
Much better than The Buried Giant, although still not quite up to Remains of the Day
40) Death of a Superhero: Anthony McCarten

Currently reading:

Bodies of Light: Sarah Moss (I'm not very far in yet, but I'm loving it so far)
Emma: Alexander McCall Smith

I'll be curious to get your take on Bodies of Light, Fliss. It was chosen for this year's Wellcome Book Prize shortlist, so I'll probably read it as well.

Hi Fliss! Somehow just found your thread. I read Bodies of Light earlier this year and thought it was a good book but I found the subject matter upset me to the extent that I didn't really enjoy the book. I hope you're able to appreciate it more than I did - it definitely deserves better than my grudging praise.

#22 Darryl, I'm only ~1/3 the way through, but I'm really enjoying it so far & I think you will too.

#23 That's interesting Heather - obviously, only being part of the way through the book, I can't really say how I'll feel about it by the time I finish, but I'm enjoying it very much at the moment. I do find the mother-daughter relationships quite distressing though, I have to admit. We will have to discuss when I've finished it!

I keep forgetting to post this link to the Kazuo Ishiguro event I went to at Hay-on-Wye a couple of weekends ago (it took a while to appear on the website). It was very interesting and I'm sure that some of you will appreciate it - Kazuo Ishiguro is one of those who actually always seems to give me a new perspective on the book being discussed when I see him speak.

It should be available worldwide and doesn't seem to have a time limit. It's part of a series of interviews that I hadn't come across before, but look like a pretty wide range of authors, so worth checking out.

Oh dear, it's been a while, hasn't it! I've been up for my annual Edinburgh Festival/Fringe trip in the interim, so lots to update on besides books.

However, I'm going to try to do a bit of a book update now:

29) - 32) First four Outlander books: Diana Gabaldon
A series of books about an English WWII nurse who, whilst on a second honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands with her husband at the end of the war, wanders into a remote stone circle and is transported back in to the time of Bonny Prince Charlie, where she gets embroiled in the life of a young Highlander, Jamie, hiding from the English.

I quite surprised myself with these. As I have said, they're not at all the kind of thing I'm usually interested in reading (although I do believe we should always try to challenge ourselves and our preconceptions), but I had watched the first few episodes of the Amazon Prime series and wanted to find out what happened next.

Well, they're quite silly, but mostly in a fun way, and they completely drew me in. To the extent that they brought me out of the rather lengthy reading drought I've been in the last year or two. It had been quite a while since I've been that absorbed by a new book, I don't know why - I think I just hadn't been picking things that carried me away. Nonetheless, they are very silly and they got sillier as the series progressed (book 3 may have broken a world record for the number of unlikely coincidences happing in a short space of time). I did enjoy reading them very much (particularly the first), but lost patience somewhere part way through the 4th (although I did finish it). I'll admit that this was partly because I didn't like the direction some of the plotlines were going in and preferred to leave them where I left them.

I've come to the conclusion that the reason I enjoyed these books so much was basically down to some very appealing characters - I wanted to find out what happened to them. This in itself is a very good reason to read a book.

I did worry a bit about what seemed to be a bit of an undercurrent of homophobia. I suppose this was a little bit to do with the time she was writing about, as well as one rather unpleasant (and pretty important) plotline. Certainly, there is a gay character introduced at some point in (I think) the 3rd book, who feels a little like he's been added to make sure we know that she's not homophobic. However, I was never entirely convinced by this and I feel a little bit like I was turning a blind eye, which definitely made me uncomfortable and was another factor in giving up on the series (although it's the first couple of books that are the worst in this respect).

Another aside. I was very amused by the amount of time spent having sex amongst the bracken. Diana Gabaldon is clearly someone who has never spent much time walking through it as she seems to think it's nice and soft - trust me, if they tried to do that in real life, they would have been cut to ribbons! (Bracken is a bit bizarre in its ability to shred legs - it is true that it doesn't look capable of it).

33) Valiant: Holly Black
Having seen Holly Black speaking at the World Fantasy Convention the year before last, I've been meaning to try one of her books for a while. This story turns the traditional fairytale path of princess rescued by prince on its head, modernising it and transporting the central character to an urban underworld where messed up street kids get pulled into a world they can't see or understand. Very enjoyable read.

34) Stranger Things Happen: Kelly Link
I don't have much to add to my comments above - just that Kelly Link is a very original author and a very welcome discovery. I'm taking my time over working my way through her short story collections.

35) The School for Good and Evil: Soman Chainani
One of those cheap Kindle purchases. I think it was trying to challenge us to thank about what "good" and "evil" really are, but honestly, it fell into exactly the same traps as the fairytales it was commenting on. As the one character becomes more evil, she becomes more ugly. As the other realises that she is not, she becomes more beautiful. That made me quite cross. Still, it was entertaining enough.

36) Knight's Fee: Rosemary Sutcliff
A comfort re-read. This, with Warrior Scarlet, is my favourite Rosemary Sutcliff. She's someone my mum introduced me too when I was small and I continue to love her books, even if the same themes crop up in nearly every single one (underdog makes a great friend and discovers himself, going through hardship to come out the other end).

This is set in the Norman era and focuses on a young orphan, who, through a life-changing chance of fate is taken from the hounds he has grown up amongst to be companion to a young Norman squire, grandson of a kind man.

Great stuff.

37) Ready Player One: Earnest Cline
I can't remember what made me pick this one up. I noticed not long ago that there's a film adaptation en route, so maybe the book was just being publicised a bit more...

An apocalyptic future in which everyone lives online as the world has been more or less destroyed. Fun read, not lifechanging.

38) Emily of New Moon: L. M. Montgomery
I noticed that this was on sale for Kindle at the same time as I was looking for an Anne of Green Gables anthology. Not a dissimilar setup, but I think I'll always prefer Anne (probably the time of life that I read them).

39) When We Were Orphans: Kazuo Ishiguro
Picked up partly as I had been disappointed by The Buried Giant and felt like giving one of his other books ago. Written from the POV of a (rather pompous) private detective who was sent to England from China in his teens, when his parents (ex-pats) go mysteriously missing (some time between WWI & WWII). As he grows older he becomes more and more obsessed with what happened to his parents and with the belief that he can still find them alive.

I enjoyed this. I actually think that it plays with memory and our perception of it better than The Buried Giant does and there are definitely shades of Stevens (The Remains of the Day) in Christopher Banks, the central character. It does, however, become a little surreal towards the end in a way I wasn't completely convinced by, but I don't think this was too much of a detractor.

40) Death of a Superhero: Anthony McCarten
This was actually an LT recommendation that I've had on my wishlist for years. If I say that it is sad but strangely uplifting, then I will sound cliched. This is, however, true. Centring around a teenage boy with cancer who, to escape his horrible reality, immerses himself in the telling & drawing of a brutally graphic comic, ignoring real life. Very absorbing - I'm glad I finally got to reading this.

OK. Enough to now, but I have the following to continue with:

41) Bodies of Light: Sarah Moss - loved it
42) Emma: Alexander McCall Smith - truly dreadful
43) The Children Act: Ian McEwan - interesting
44) End of Days: Jenny Erpenbeck - enjoyable, but not amazing
45) Wolf in White Van: John Darnielle - disappointing
46) Persuasion: Jane Austen - reread (off the back of the awful Emma)
47) Find Me: Laura Van Den Berg - I enjoyed it, but I've already forgotten it
48) After Me Comes the Flood: Sarah Perry - not quite what I expected
49) The Unwritten: On to Genesis: Mike Carey - continuing the series
50) Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen - reread (again, off the back of Emma)
51) The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of the Words: Mike Carey
52) The Unwritten: The Wound: Mike Carey - still enjoying this series
53) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: J. K. Rowling - had a sudden craving to re-read the series
54) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: J. K. Rowling
55) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: J. K. Rowling
56) Mr Gig: Nige Tassell - wonderful
57) The Gardener From Ochakov: Andrey Kurkov - disappointing
58) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: J. K. Rowling
59) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: J. K. Rowling
60) Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: J. K. Rowling
61) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: J. K. Rowling
62) Magic Shifts: Ilona Andrews - next in the extremely silly, but fun series
63) Eleanor: S. F. Burgess - random Kindle purchase. Meh.
64) Alys, Always: Harriet Lane - better than I was expecting (book was a gift)
65) The Seventh Miss Hatfield: Anna Caltabiano - random purchase, fun
66) The Strange Library: Haruki Murakami - bit disturbing!
67) The Spectre of Alexander Wolf: Gaito Gazdanov - interesting
68) Exiles of Colsec: Douglas Hill - very random re-read for long jouney
69) Deja Dead: Kathy Reichs - caved in and gave her a go
70) Death du Jour: Kathy Reichs
71) Deadly Decisions: Kathy Reichs
72) Fatal Voyage: Kathy Reichs
73) Grave Secrets: Kathy Reichs

...so clearly, I have managed to get sucked in to a lot of series' this year! The Kathy Reichs' are not my usual fare again, but I thought I'd give her a go and then got sucked in to my need-to-read-the-whole-series-OCD. I wouldn't say they were amazing, but I'd definitely class them with the Sharpe series!

So much for reading A Place of Greater Safety while I was in Edinburgh. Mind you, I do tend to read easy to read stuff when I'm up there as it fits in better with all the dashing around. I'm reading the next Kathy Reichs right now, but do intend to read the Hilary Mantel next (for book no. 75)....

Hope you're all well!

I'm laughing about the "sex in the bracken" comment. Lots of succinct comments. Thanks. The Ishiguro sounds good although I did love The Buried Giant

#27 BLBera :o) I just want to check that you've read The Remains of the Day if you enjoyed The Buried Giant - it remains my favourite of his books that I've read to date, by quite a long margin and is a book I unreservedly recommend to everyone.

I also really liked Death of a superhero. The film adaption was pretty good too with the animation coming to life.

#29 Hi Kerry - I can definitely see a film adaptation working well - I haven't got to it yet though. Will have to investigate. I think it may have been your review that made me pick the book up (it's a long time ago now though, so it would involve a lot of trawling to find out!).

Hi, Fliss! Well done on your most recent reads. I will bring Bodies of Light with me next week, if I don't read it before then, and I'll try to finish it before we meet in Cambridge. I liked When We Were Orphans, but as you said The Remains of the Day is far and away his best book, and it's one of the best novels I've ever read. I liked The Children Act, and I hope to get to The End of Days later this year.

#31 Hi Darryl. Glad to hear it! ;o) I think it's probably a book that you will enjoy (*crosses fingers in case she has now over-hyped it...*)

I'm going to zip around a lot in writing comments on the above books as it makes sense to block the series together, however, here's the first few...:

41) Bodies of Light: Sarah Moss (book group)
Set in Victorian Manchester and London, this book centres around a family of artists and social reformers, and in particular on the extremely difficult relationship between Elizabeth (an Evangelical Christian devoted to helping the poor) and her elder daughter Alethea (who is determined to become one of the first female doctors in Britain).

To say I enjoyed reading this is a little misleading. I did, but it was also frequently pretty distressing. Quite aside from an unsettling (and not wholly satisfactorily resolved) side story involving the younger daughter of the family (May) and a family friend (an artist, like the father), the relationship between Elizabeth and her own mother, as well as with Alethea is frequently extremely distressing. Both Elizabeth and Alethea are unflinchingly hard on themselves in different ways, largely influenced by their mothers. It would be very easy to villainize several of the characters, however Sarah Moss carefully allows us to see just what might have led them to act the way they do and, largely, if we can't really forgive them, we can certainly understand them. They are all products of the society of the time and of their upbringing.

This all sounds very grim, but really, it isn't entirely and there is certainly hope. I don't think that this book will be for everyone, but I heartily recommend it to anyone who thinks it sounds interesting. I'd be very interested in other people's thoughts - I don't want to go in to too much detail here as it would involve spoilers...

42) Emma: Alexander McCall Smith
Oh, where to start with this truly dreadful update of Jane Austen's Emma for The Austen Project? Seriously, it was horrendous. I suppose my biggest bugbear was that he clearly had absolutely no understanding of the characters at all. If he's read the book, he can't have done so with any perception as he completely missed the point of Emma herself in particular.

I continued to the end because I couldn't quite believe it wouldn't get better. I was wrong.

I will add a comment to say that I have never got on with Alexander McCall Smith's writing style, so this didn't help, but it wasn't the reason I struggled with it.

43) The Children Act: Ian McEwan
A family court judge whose life is starting to crack at the seams gets over-involved in the life of a 17 year old Jehova's Witness who needs a blood transfusion to live, but, due to his religion, does not want to accept it. As he is still a minor (just), the hospital treating him takes the issue to family court.

This was an interesting, but ultimately slightly frustrating read. I did have a little niggle at the back of my brain throughout, wondering just how accurate a portrayal of the family court system it was. Certainly, the judge doesn't completely stick to the script. I gather from my Mum that one of my Godmothers (who is a family court judge) has said that there were one or two things that aren't quite right - I'd really like to ask her what they were, but my Mum hadn't finished reading the book at the time they discussed it! I enjoyed the read more than I thought I might, but I did expect my beliefs to be a bit more challenged than they were, so it wasn't as stimulating as I was expecting it to be.

Bodies of Light does sound good, from your description and from others I had read previously.

Nice review of The Children Act. I should have reviewed it after I read it, so that I could remember more of the details about the family court system that you mentioned.

#33 Thanks Darryl. Actually, I read it several months ago (I'm very behind in my update), but I will say that, although I wasn't blown away by The Children Act, it was a fairly memorable story for me.

OK, next few sets of comments:

44) The End of Days: Jenny Erpenbeck
When I said enjoyable above, that's not really the best word to use to describe this book! Divided into five sections, each part taking the next stage in a young woman's life until her death, and that of her mother. Each section explores the possibility that somehow she avoided the death in the previous section.

It sounds a little like Life After Life, but it really isn't. Quite beside the fact that this is, in an odd way, a lot grittier than Life After Life, the progression of alternative lives feels a lot more natural. Daughter of a Jewish mother and Catholic father, born prior to WWII, she grows up more or less without religion, until she discovers communism.

This book is set across a very turbulent period of history and she has a hard life. It's pretty unrelenting, but worth the read, albeit not quite living up to what I expected of it.

45) Wolf in White Van: John Darnielle

A young man is badly disfigured in his teens and recedes into a life withdrawn from the outside world. Spending most of his life indoors, he sets up a mail order role-playing game business, a collection different, highly intricate quests, interacting with the players directly by mail as they decide what path to take on their quest. But he doesn't realise how invested some of his players are getting in the game, losing the difference between fiction and reality.

This was an interesting concept and I really wanted to enjoy it more than I did. Somehow, however, it never quite clicked for me. Writing this a couple of months later, I have only a very hazy memory of the resolution, which isn't the best sign. It did keep the mystery going enough to want ot keep reading however. Probably if you're a fan of The Mountain Goats you should read it, but otherwise, there are better books out there.

46) Persuasion: Jane Austen
I should probably review this properly one of these days, but I'm not going to do it now. This is probably my favourite Jane Austen - which is showing my soppy side, because it's actually less satirical and witty than most of her other books, focusing more on the love story.

I read this to get rid of the nasty taste the Alexander McCall Smith Emma left in my mouth and cheer me up after a succession of pretty depressing books. It worked!

Next few...:

47) Find Me: Laura Van Den Berg
A virus has ravaged the US - slowly, people begin to lose their memories, eventually becoming completely empty of thought and dying. In the midst of this, a young, insular woman who has slipped through the cracks of society, finds that, for once, she is one of the unique. Trapped in a hospital for the potentially immune, she watches and lets life pass her by as she did outside. But at some point, she's going to have to make some choices for herself and take control over her life.

This didn't quite go where I expected it to, but it was an interesting coming of age book nonetheless - frequently dreamlike in its telling. I'm not sure I was wholly convinced by the direction the book took. In fact, writing this a couple of months after reading it, I can't quite remember how the story resolved, although I remember much of the climax. I don't think this is the best sign in the world!

48) After Me Comes the Flood: Sarah Perry
Well this was an odd one. A random purchase, largely because I love the title for some reason (I know its French origins, but I always think of the Regina Spektor song when I read the title!). This was another book that wasn't quite what I expected it to be. I should point out that this is not necessarily a negative.

It's an unbelievably hot summer and it seems like the heatwave will never end and that everyone has shut up shop and left the city. So the central character decides to do the same - close his bookshop and go to join his brother and family on the coast. En route, his car breaks down and when, looking for help, he stumbles on a large house full of people who seem to have been expecting him. He's tired, he has a pounding headache, the whole thing seems a bit dreamlike, so he just goes with the flow and falls in with this unusual group of mismatches who accept him for who he is. But obviously there is more to the setup than meets the eye.

While this won't be on my list of significant books I've read this year, I did enjoy it. There's an odd, dream-like quality and the oppressive weather truly does suffuse the book with a very claustrophobic atmosphere that, well, it just works well.

49) The Unwritten: On to Genesis: Mike Carey
51) The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of the Words: Mike Carey
52) The Unwritten: The Wound: Mike Carey
Grouped together as they are the continuation of the same series of graphic novels. I should really describe them individually, but basically, it's a continuation of the story that I list in my second post. I continue to enjoy these very much - I'm never quite sure where the story will go next, which is always a good thing.

So glad to see you here - don't worry about keeping up with me!

Let me see, it's good to see A Month in the Country on your best list. I am trying to locate the movie, without a lot of success.

Ah The Crucible . Now there's a play.

Interesting that you read Nabo this year too. I read The Gift earlier this summer and also the Schiff bio of Vera. He really was an astonishingly good writer. I found with The Gift that the reading of it was uneven as far as me being absorbed in it, but that when I came to write my review I began to realize how brilliantly it was all put together.
-I feel the same way about The Rosie Project. Enjoyable but I won't go on.
-Hmm might have to wl the Auster. I have mixed feelings about his work, but he's never dull.
-Here's a ridiculous thing, somehow the spousal unit lost my copy of Foxglove Summer (naturally he doesn't remember having it either) so I am stuck there, waiting for the book to magically reappear. Which it hasn't. Grr.
-I read a short story culled from the Lahiri, and feel, from your review that maybe that was the central 'moment' of the novel.
-We have The Murdstone Trilogy - my daughter stopped reading it in a fit about something that happened in it that offended her but wouldn't tell us what it was, so there it sits on the shelf of our 'Christmas' books from last year. I must get to it and see if I can figure out what set her off. A hint would be that she is 19 and also believes that the use of gender classification should be done away with.
-Found Outlander unreadable
-I appreciate Kelly Link too.
-Adore Rosemary Sutcliffe since forever
-Wasn't as wild about Ready Player One as some folks are, but it was a quick read.

And that's pretty much all I can comment on . . . Enjoying your round-up!

#36 Hi Lucy!

It was a particularly good production of The Crucible - actually, it was filmed, so you can rent/buy it at Digital Theatre, if you're interested.

I know what you mean about Paul Auster - I definitely reckon he's worth keeping trying with though. I enjoyed this one.

How annoying re Foxglove Summer - I hope you manage to find it! I would offer to bookmooch it to you, but I've moved to getting series books like that on my Kindle rather than in the flesh (it's alieving my bookshelves considerably)...

Re The Murdstone Trilogy - hmmm. I'm not sure what that could be. Although I have to admit that I've largely forgotten it already. I'm pretty much with her on the use of gender classification ;o) May have to flick through it again!

Next few:

50) Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen
My other favourite Austen, as with Persausion, read to purge the horrible Emma (I'm not going to link to it again).

53) Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone: J. K. Rowling
54) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: J. K. Rowling
55) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: J. K. Rowling
58) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: J. K. Rowling
59) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: J. K. Rowling
60) Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: J. K. Rowling
61) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: J. K. Rowling
Grouped together for obvious reasons. If you haven't heard of Harry Potter, I don't know where you've been the last decade, but basically, boy discovers he's a wizard and goes to wizard school. Boy discovers he has mortal enemy evil wizard. Boy fights evil wizard with best friends at same time as going through the usual teenaged anxt.

The Unwritten gives quite a hefty nod to Harry Potter (before turning everything about it on it's head) and gave me a bit of a craving to re-read these, so, as it's been a little while, I thought why not?

56) Mr Gig: Nige Tassell
Oh I so enjoyed this. One of those wonderful on-a-whim purchases that make browsing random bookshops such a joy.

It's probably a bit of a niche book - Nige Tassell has been a roadie, an events manager, a manager, a DJ and, most recently, a reviewer of non-classical music. But most importantly, he is a gig-goer. When I say "is", well actually, since settling down with his family, this has receded substantially. For something that was a massive part of his life (as it is for me - although not on such a grand scale), he had got to the stage where he hadn't even been to a gig in the past year. So, perhaps fielding a bit of a mid-life crisis, and with the OK from his (clearly very understanding) wife, he set out to reclaim his gig-going, working his way around a succession of very different festivals and gigs.

This man writes well and he writes about music well. This is harder than it sounds I think - there are only 2 other people I've come across who haven't annoyed me with their pomposity or fussiness when writing about music (Nick Hornby in the excellent 31 Songs and the late, very great and much lamented John Peel - the latter a bit of a hero of mine). I do keep trying. The key, I think, is that all of these people write about what the music evokes in them and by doing so, they describe the atmosphere and the music much better than a description of the actual music itself. Anyway, it works for me - all 3 have introduced me to bands and songs I wouldn't have come across/listened to otherwise and that makes me very happy.

OK, so Nige Tassell has the big advantage in that he is part of the music industry and thus can get in to gigs and festivals much more easily and cheaply than I can - so reading this, I was not a little envious. I would love to go to more gigs than I go to (I still go to quite a few, but my gig going has waned substantially in recent years), but I just can't afford to (ticket prices, booking fees, transport - everything's gone up and it all adds up). I suppose there's also the sleep debt ;o) Anyway, point is, a large part of me would love to be involved in the industry, so this wasn't an insignificant contributor to my love of this book. I'm definitely in his target audience - we don't conmpletely overlap in music taste, but we definitely overlap in gig going tastes (the smaller and moshier the better, too much commercialism in most festivals...). However, in all seriousness, his enthusiasm for live music just comes through and infects you.

Highly recommended for anyone who loves live music.

57) The Gardener From Ochakov: Andrey Kurkov
I keep trying with Andrey Kurkov. I loved Death and the Penguin so much when I read it way back in 2003 (I can pinpoint it as I read it on a felucca floating, very slowly, down the Nile - bliss) and I keep hoping that he'll match that again. He never has. Penguin Lost was the closest he's got to it, but I'm afraid I've been just a little disappointed in everything I've read since then. This was no exception - although I did wonder a little bit with this one (which I haven't before), if it was partially that something was lost in translation. The text just felt a bit flat.

62) Magic Shifts: Ilona Andrews
Oh this series is silly! Post apocalyptic Atlanta in which "tech" and magic phases come and go and swords for hire fight a lot of big baddies and people are beautiful, have dark secrets and are strong for each other. I really enjoy them - it is beyond me why, but I do. Possibly it's just because they make me giggle quite a lot (not always unintentionally).

63) Eleanor: S. F. Burgess
A dying girl is pulled through to a parallel world to help join a quest. Yup.

A cheapo Kindle purchase. Ah, what to say? Clunky writing - particularly the dialgue. The characters aren't very cohesive or consistent and there's a lot of emotional flip-flopping. I think it's trying to be some sort of moral fable/epic, but if it is, it's making a pretty poor, muddled job of it. They do terrible things, but feel really guilgy about it, so that's OK (hmmm). All this said, it's an intriguing story with enough of an original angle to keep me reading. I'm unlikely to read any of the sequels, but it was fun enough as long as I didn't examine it too hard...

64) Alys, Always: Harriet Lane
First thing I'll say is that if you pick up this book, don't read the blurb. It's not a catastrophic spoiler, but there's spoiler enough...

So. A witness to an accident gets pulled into the lives of the family of the women she saw die.

This was a birthday gift from a friend who said it was the best book she'd read in a long time. Thing is, it just didn't appeal much to me. However... When I'd got over myself enough to give it a go (you kind of do have to read books people give you, don't you?), I actually did end up enjoying it, although it took a while. Not what I expected, but better for that.

65) The Seventh Miss Hatfield: Anna Caltabiano
I can't remember why I picked this up. I've a sneaking suspicion it was because it's a pretty book (*blushes in shame*). The author was ridiculously young (in her teens) when she wrote this and it tells a little, but not nearly as much as you might expect it to.

It begins when a girl, growing up the '60s (I think it was the '60s, can't completely remember now as I read it a while back...) takes a misdelivered parcel across the road to deliver it to te rightful owner, Miss Hatfield. What happens when she does so changes her life forever in a way I can't describe without introducing spoilers! There is time travel and a mystery involved however.

As I say, unsurprisingly, it is a bit clunky, with the occasional plot hole & cliche, but it does settle in and I enjoyed this more than I expected to after the first couple of chapters - I'll probably even read the sequel at some point. I think that the biggest tell of the age of the author is that she doesn't really reflect the emotional fallout of what happens to the central characters. Perhaps this will develop as the series progresses, but the girl at the centre of the story, the 7th Miss Hatfield, effectively misses out on her teenage years and goes straight from being a child to an adult and leaving her family behind. This would be a pretty traumatic experience and she doesn't really deal with this at all. She avoids the issue of a child's emotions in an adult body by having the aging process just shift her in time as though she had actually grown up (hmmm, suppose that works), but this wouldn't negate the trauma involved in my opinion and it's all swept under the carpet a bit as she gets on with following the wishes of the 6th Miss Hatfield.. Anyway, as long as you're happy to read it as a bit of fluff and ignore the deeper issues, that's fine.

Also, a little niggle, but something that irritates me a little bit. People, there is no such thing as a "British" accent. Scottish, Irish, Welsh, English, but not British. That would be like saying there's an Australasian accent (Australia and New Zealand lumped into one) or a North American accent (the US and Canada lumped into one). They sound very different.

66) The Strange Library: Haruki Murakami
This I definitely did pick up because it's a rather beautifully illustrated and put together little book. But also because it's Murakami and he's someone I'll always give a go, even if he doesn't always work for me.

A boy goes into a library to request a book or two about a rather obscure topic and is drawn, by one of the librarians, into a very unusual and sinister reading room.

Rather a disturbing short story. Not sure what I think of it really.

Just a note to say everyone was quite right in urging me to read Saga! I am now annoyed that I've now got to wait for the next instalment. Bah!

67) The Spectre of Alexander Wolf: Gaito Gazdanov
From the now, very sadly, closed "Watermark Books" at King's X station. I am very cross about the closure of this shop. Particularly given that it was actually a very profitable shop, but was closed because the rest of the (French) chain wasn't doing so well. Grrr. Now we're left with WHSmith, which is appalling for books. Watermark Books was a great place to while away 20mins when you'd just missed your train. Sigh.

Anyway, the book...! The narrator, (like Gazdanov,) a Russian émigré who fought on the side of the White Army in the Russian Civil war has spent his life haunted by his murder of a dashing soldier riding a magnificent white horse. Whilst the murder was committed in self-defence and in a time of war, at a time when he was close to collapse from exhaustion, he has never managed to forget it and it has coloured his life and his opinion of himself ever since. Much later in life, he chances across a short story by the (fictional) author Alexander Wolf, which seems to him to be a retelling of the murder. This leads to him becoming consumed with finding the mysterious Alexander Wolf, who seems to have been there to witness his darkest deed.

I'm coming perilously close to a spoiler here, so I won't go further. However, I heartily enjoyed this novelette, (even if, occasionally, I was rather exasperated by the narrator's outlook on life). I would definitely recommend it.

68) Exiles of Colsec: Douglas Hill
Set in a dystopian future, a bunch of teenage convicts are sent by ColSec (Colonization Sector of the powers that be) to colonise the mysterious planet of Klydor (rather than to a penal colony in Antarctica as they had expected).

I don't know why I suddenly felt like reading this. It's a children's book I first picked up in a library sale when I was at a school. It's not a classic, it's full of clichés, but still, there's something fun about it.

Very nearly up to date now (although still in August reading...!)

Hi all

Not sure how much traffic I'm getting to my thread these days due to my general absence ;o) ...however, thought I'd see if any of you know Baltimore at all?

I'm going to a conference there in a couple of weeks and am looking for recommendations for places to eat. We'll be staying in the Inner Harbour area, which is also where the conference is, so preferably places around there...

I'm reading your thread but can't help with Baltimore. Ooh I hate it when a good bookshop disappears like that. Here we have Whitcoulls which is a WH Smith clone and with the new owners from a couple of years back the chain has gone from bad to very terrible. I think the worse thing is that the branch stores have no autonomy, all decisions on stock and ordering are made by head office, no ability for local tastes or stocking extra books by local authors.

I can't remember if you are a rugby fan or not but you might like this skit & song made here in NZ promoting the AllBlacks and a CureKids donation promo. The song is at the end, and it's quite amusing listening to all the suggestions put forward by the children. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcwuPTlQSxI

> Ooh, you like Saga!

I don't really know Baltimore particularly but there is a very good Aquarium and also a museum devoted to eccentric art, or rather, art by odd and eccentric people, I forget what it calls itself but is totally worth a visit if you have time. (probably has "folk" or "vernacular" in the title to indicate that it is not "high" art). I have no idea where you should eat though.

I live outside Baltimore, and we're in the Inner Harbor rather frequently. The National Aquarium is a lot of fun, and it's right there in the middle of the area, though a bit pricey. The Maryland Science Museum is there as well, but more oriented for kids. If you want to get out of the IH, the Mount Vernon neighborhood is fun, and it's got the Walters Art Gallery and Peabody Conservatory (renowned school of music) with a cool library and tour. You could also check to see if the Orioles are playing while you're here. Camden Yards is a really good ball park.

There are lots of restaurants in the Inner Harbor area, mostly national chains, but with some good exceptions. Phillips Seafood is a more local chain with decent crab cakes and other seafood. Or for a more local feel, Little Italy is jsut to the east of the Inner Harbor, and there are many good family-owned Italian places there. Fells Point is further away, but easily a cab ride. It's a bit more funky and eclectic there - lots of local bars and eateries. I'd ask for recommendations at your hotel.

I don't know when you'll be here, but 25-27 September is the Baltimore Book Festival in the Inner Harbor and Baltimore Comicon at the convention center just off the Inner Harbor. The fest is free and will have booths and events set up by local bookstores - i usually come away with quite a haul of books.

If you'd like, we could try for a meetup while you're here!

>45 sibylline: American Visionary Art Museum, and I'd second the recommendation.

#45 - #47 Excellent, Thank you people! Sadly, I'm not really likely to have time to do any sightseeing unless I play hookey. We fly in the evening before the conference starts, out the evening it ends and they tend to be pretty long days with networky stuff in the evenings. The trouble with working for a place with charity status is that we can't tack holiday on to the end of work trips unless you pay for your own flight home (which I can't afford) - they've really cracked down on it the last few years. I may be able to get away with a couple of hours on the day we fly out though - I haven't looked at the programme yet - in which case I'll definitely try to get to the American Visionary Art Museum!

That's 3 recommendations I've had for Phillip's now - am going to suggest it for our team meal... ...particularly given the fish cakes!

#46 Bah, I'm going to just miss the book festival - I arrive on the 5th and fly out on the 10th Oct. Not sure if I'll be able, but would be lovely to meet up if it fits. I need to have a look at the programme next week...

#44 Thank you for the Watermark closing sympathy - it's still annoying me 2 months later - Bah! ;0)

BIG rugby fan, although no longer as obsessive about it as I was in my late teens/early twenties (largely the effect of not nearly enough of it being shown on the free TV channels, so I lost touch a bit). Still sad that I didn't get to a match when I was in NZ but I definitely plan to go back one day... Have just been watching the world cup opener (England vs Fiji) - satisfactory win, but not good enough - am now feeling not at all confident we'll make it beyond pool A... I shall now trundle off to watch the clip...

Re Saga - well you're one of those that convinced me I needed to read it! How long do we have to wait for the next installment?!

Briefly coming out of my haitus to let people know that Black Swan Green, Number9Dream and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet are all available on UK Amazon Kindle for 99p today...

Have a lovely holiday, Fliss

Thank you Paul - and (very belatedly), I hope you also had a lovely holiday!

OK, clearly I let the side down somewhat towards the end of the year (hem, most of the year)... It was a bit of a mixed one (lots of good stuff, but also a fair bit of stress/down bits), so I'm going to leave this thread here (after a mostly very quick summary of the rest of the books I read - I'd already written partial summaries of a few, but hadn't got round to updating them yet - I'm not going to write anything extra now, as I should really be working and probably everyone has left the 2015 threads anyway...) and leave it there, ready for a shiny new thread/year!

So, without further ado, here's the rest of the stuff I read last year (towards the end of the year was pretty much all comfort reading!):

69) Deja Dead: Kathy Reichs
70) Death du Jour: Kathy Reichs
71) Deadly Decisions: Kathy Reichs
72) Fatal Voyage: Kathy Reichs
73) Grave Secrets: Kathy Reichs
74) Bare Bones: Kathy Reichs
I finally caved to give these a go. Not sure why, except they seemed like good Edinburgh reading. They're fun. Not amazing, but fun. If occasionally a bit gruesome. I'm probably Kathy Reichsed out for the time being now though!

Some notes I made as I read them (that I'm not now going to prettify): She has an awful lot of "unformed thoughts" and pounding headaches/temples. Also a lot of not so unrelated after all coincidences. Plots a little cliched but coming at it from a different angle. Plus I like the characters. Descriptions a little lacking in general (somehow don't conjure up the images I suspect they're meant to). Convincingly upsetting about cat death - I'm usually anti the amped up animal deaths when there have been horrible human deaths too - seems crass. Not really in this one - poss because although sad, also obviously a catalyst for tears.
Also big on cliffhangers at the end of chapters. Too many. I've never read an American author with whom so many of the cultural references pass me by before - odd, because she's writing about the period in which I grew up. Poss because she's my mum's generation (so I recognized the NYPD Blue ref because M was a big fan). A lot of melodramatic language, eg "the next two hours revealed a world that few will ever know. That glimpse sent a shudder through my body and a chill into my soul" (she shudders a lot). Odd penchant for describing all her driving routes.

75)The Rest of Us Just Live Here: Patrick Ness
Oh I SO enjoyed this one. His last two (The Crane wife and More than This) weren't bad, but weren't quite up to A Monster Calls, Topics About Which I Know Nothing or the Chaos Walking trilogy. This one definitely was.

Usually, we read about the heros and heroines in a fantasy novel, here, the "story" is all in the background (in the hilarious chapter heading footnotes eg: "Chapter the second, in which indie kid Satchel writes a poem, and her Mom an Dad give her loving space to just feel what she needs to; then an indie kid called Dylan arrives at her house, terrified, to say a mysterious glowing girl has informed him of the death of indie kid Finn; Satchel and Dylan comfort each other, platonically."). The real story focuses around a brother and sister and their respective best friends - normal kids, none of whom are particularly involved in the action. It's just brilliant. And very funny.

76) The Chimes: Anna Smaill
The Booker longlist nomination that appealed to me the most, I held up buing this until I was in Edinburgh this August as I Anna Smaill was doing an event at the Book Festival.

Set in a dystopian future (I seem to have been on a bit of a role with these!) in a world revolving around music. The general populace lacks nearly all long-term memory, relying on muscle memory and momentos to remind them of past events (where they are able). This is an interesting idea. The central character, Simon, while also suffering from a lack of long-term memory has a different type of memory to most (I tailed off here - clearly I got distracted!)...

Anyway, I very much enjoyed this - it's my favourite Booker nominee in a while (yes, including A History of Seven Killings - I'm still struggling with that - it just lacks momentum for me.

77) Uprooted: Naomi Novik
On recommendation! I enjoyed this - good escapist fun.

78) Saga: volume 1: Brian K. Vaughan
79) Saga: volume 2: Brian K. Vaughan
80) Saga: Volume 3: Brian K. Vaughan
81) Saga: Volume 4: Brian K. Vaughan
82) Saga: Volume 5: Brian K. Vaughan
I've had the first 2 volumes of this as e-books for ages (part of a Humble Bundle a while back), but never seemed to get to them (which is probably a symptom of my stubbornness as practically the whole world has been going on about how wonderful they are in the interim...).

Very much enjoyed these and now have itchy fingers for the next volume (which I think is quite some way off?).

83) Mad About the Boy: Helen Fielding
Read more for completeness than anything. This picks up Bridget Jones' story at age of 51, now a widow of 4 years with 2 young kids. Well, it wasn't bad I suppose (although I did find myself cringing occasionally at each predictable plot "twist") - it did at least make me giggle on occasion, and even tear up once.

84) A Sorcerer's Treason: Sarah Zettel
This was another recommendation, but I really did find it hard work I'm afraid. I was just completely uninterested in most of the characters and it takes a seriously long time to get going...

85) Hexwood: Diana Wynne Jones
The above gave me a bit of a hankering to re-read this. One of DWJ's deceptively dark novels in my opinion - she wasn't just about the happy endings - there are some real moral conundrums here. I'll link back to my "DWJ in order" at some point (I can't remember if I've written the review for this one yet or not...)

86) 7 Miles Out: Carol Morley
Carol Morley's father commited suicide when she was growing up and this is a semi-autobiographical book describing her teens and early twenties as she slowly went off the rails. An interesting and distressing read.

87) Briar Rose: Jane Yolen
Modern take on the Briar Rose fairy tale. In this case, a grandmother (a refugee from WWII with a mysterious past) tells the Briar Rose story to her 3 granddaughers over and over as they grow up - a different version from that of their friends, but always told the same and always describing herself as Briar Rose. On her death, years later, she leaves a box of papers and photos and one of her granddaughters, herself feeling lost, decides to find out more about the mysterious past of her grandmother.

Well told and an interesting take.

88) The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins
89) Catching Fire: Suzanne Collins
90) Mockingjay: Suzanne Collins
Not sure why I felt like re-reading these so soon after the last time, except that they're quite good escapist reading for me. I do like that nothing is straight forward and that Katniss isn't a typical hero. She's prickly, she doesn't always do the right thing, she falls apart - and she's so much more convincing for that. She doesn't want to be a hero, but she is catapaulted into a situation where she has no choice. Re-reading the trilogy for the 3rd time, the flaws, particularly in the middle & final books are more obvious, but it still holds up.

91) Beauty: Alex Flinn
Another re-read - a fun retelling of Beauty & the Beast.

92) The Glass Lake: Maeve Binchy
And another one (although it's a very long time since I read this one...). I was well into my comfort reading streak by this point! Not going to go into the plot line - I'm sure it's been read by enough people to have been reviewed elsewhere. Quite fun, but less so than I had remembered.

93) Dragonflight: Anne McCaffrey
94) Dragonquest: Anne McCaffrey
95) Dragonsong: Anne McCaffrey
96) Dragonsinger: Anne McCaffrey
97) Dragondrums: Anne McCaffrey
More re-reading (again of books read a very long time ago). Reading them in succession as an adult, it was quite interesting to see how the characters and the roles of the women particularly change throughout the series (the first was written in 1968, the last in 1979 - it definitely tells). I discover I care less about dragons than I remembered, but just as much about the music... Fun and undemanding anyway.

98) Midnight Crossroad: Charlaine Harris
Terrible. Just terrible. I quite enjoyed the Sookie Stackhouse books, so I thought this would be more of the same. Maybe I was just feeling more forgiving when I read those, I don't know, but the stereotypes in this are just apalling! The writing was clunky, the plot was shakey and the central character was just plain annoying. I won't be reading any more of these (or by Charlaine Harris).

99) East: Edith Pattou
Another reread of a revamped fairy tale (in this case, one of my favourites, "East of the Sun, West of the Moon"). Still lovely.

)100) The Last Kingdom: Bernard Cornwell
104) The Pale Horseman: Bernard Cornwell
105) The Lords of the North: Bernard Cornwell
107) Sword Song: Bernard Cornwell
There was a TV dramatisation of the first 2 books in this series over the autumn, which, although pretty grusome in parts, was also good fun and dragged me in (in much the same way that Sharpe did!).

Set during the lifetime of Alfred the Great (he hasn't got to "the Great" part yet, just the King of Wessex part), focusing around the (fictional) Saxon Uhtred, son to a Northumbrian Ealdorman, kidnapped and largely brought up by Danish invaders and thus identifying more with the Danes than your average Saxon...

Well, I'm enjoying these and will continue to read the rest of the series after a bit of a break (I've really got to stop getting sucked into all these series - I end up reading a lot less expansively than I like to). They're even more gruesome than the TV series and pretty distressing in parts (mostly the probably historically accurate parts). The televisation has improved on the women (Bernard Cornwell really isn't very good at women - although they're mostly better in this series than they were in the Sharpe books). It has to be said though, the books are almost certainly more accurate about the roles women would have had than the TV series (a modern audience probably wouldn't accept that it was commonplace for girls to be married at 13/14 - they've definitely glossed over that aspect, as they have over the fact that Uhtred is a man at 14). Anyway, unusually, the books and the TV series complement each other quite well. Obviously, the books are more detailed, but sometimes this drags a bit. It's a period of history I know relatively little about anyway, so it's interesting from that perspective if nothing else (I think he's not too bad in his research, but haven't checked up on him too much) and he does know how to tell a story!

101) The Immortal Circus: Act Two: A. R. Kahler
103) The Immortal Circus: Final Act: A. R. Kahler
More silly nonsense - I read the First Act last year I think (when I was in Sweden anyway) and have only just got round to finishing the trilogy. The title says it all really - the central characters are all circus performers, held to contracts they have signed with Mab, Queen of the Winter Court. Mab, of course, is in constant battle with Oberon, King of the Summer Court. I probably should have left it with the first one. The final 2 books, while readable, weren't really satisfying and I was unimpressed by the resolution. I think it was all meant to be rather sinister, but it didn't really work for me.

102) Burn For Me: Ilona Andrews
More escapist nonsense from Ilona Andrews. Fun to read anyway as they're usually quite witty, even if everyone is impossibly hansome/beautiful/talented/tortured.

106) Slade House: David Mitchell
An extension of the Twitter thingy he did last year (I think I mentioned it in my thread?). A companion piece to The Bone Clocks - I very much enjoyed it.

108) Shadowland: Peter Straub
Bought while I was a the Edinburgh Fringe this year. I may come back to describe this, but it requires thought, so I'm not going to do it now... Enjoyable enough, but not quite as good as I was expecting.

109) Morning Glories: Vol 1: Nick Spencer
Another Humble Bundle graphic novel/comic. Several teens, all with the same birthday, start at a rather strange public school, which swiftly turns into a bit of a nightmare. Started slowly, but it had got me into it by the end - I'll have to investigate the next one to see if I continue with the series.

110) The Masked City: Genevieve Cogman
A set of worlds kept in balance between Chaos (encouraged by the fae) and Order (encouraged by the Dragons) by the mysterious Library (separate from everything else). This is second in a fun steampunk-ish series. This time the action moves to a Venice (the masked city of the title), towards the chaotic, fae end following the kidnap of an apprentice librarian.

111) Stormdancer: Jay Kristoff
One of the authors at the World Fantasy Convention I went to in Brighton a couple of years ago, so I thought I'd buy one of his books as it was cheap on Kindle at the time. ...and then never got round to reading it.

Again, quite steampunk-ish. Set in what is clearly an alternative Japan, currently not so slowly being destroyed by a corrupt and slightly insane Shogun and the mysterious Guild, regulators of "blood lotus" a crop that can be used for anything and everything, but that is draining the life from the earth and the country.

I very much enjoyed this (and indeed, the rest of the trilogy, which I have just finished since the new year). A different setting to most of the fantasy I have read with, consequently, a different mythology. Good plot, good characters. Although pretty much everyone dies (not a spoiler - it's not all of them).

Also begun, but unfinished:

Musicophilia: Oliver Sacks (a Book Group read - unfinished mostly because I lost interest - it's a bit too case study-y and repetitive for me, although the topic is interesting. I probably won't return to it given that I didn't even finish it for Book Club, but you never know).
The Music of Life: Denis Noble (comparing DNA with music, talking about the importance of seeing DNA as part of a bigger picture, it started well enough, but, although I do agree with the premise, I'm getting slowly less and less convinced by his arguments. I probably will finish this one - it's my field and it's a pretty short book).
A Brief History of Seven Killings: Marlon James (as I mentioned above, I'm really struggling with this one. Not because of the dialect, although it does require a little bit of work as I'm not quite tuned in yet, but just because there doesn't seem to be any momentum to me. I realise I'm probably appalling everyone here by saying this. I'm still only ~1/3 of the way through and I was feeling like I'd been reading it forever, so I've been taking a break - maybe when I come back to it in the new year, I'll get along with it better).
A Place of Greater Safety: Hilary Mantel (set during the French Revolution. I started reading this while I was volunteering for the Cambridge Film Festival - this in the evenings and at the weekend, following normal work during the day, so I didn't have a lot of free time and I just felt I wasn't really concentrating on it well enough, and then I went through a bit of a slump that left me only really wanting to read escapist fiction. I'll definitely come back to it this coming year though).

Hmmm. The touchstones all seem to be up the creek. I'll have to come back to update them at some point!

I've just realised that I also failed to list the audiobooks I "read" last year, so (mostly for my own reference), here they are. I'm not going to give descriptions right now, but all are worth a listen except the first:

A1) Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: Susanna Clarke
Read by Simon Prebble not particularly well to my mind (mostly because he just wasn't particularly exciting, but if you're going to record an audiobook and aren't sure how a word is pronounced, you should find out! He mispronounced sidhe the WHOLE way through and as it cropped up quite often, it really bugged me).
This was a "re-read" in advance of the TV series at the start of the year.

A2) Neverwhere: Neil Gaiman
BBC Radio 4 dramatisation. A repeat listen to a very good production with an excellent cast.

A3) The Night Circus: Erin Morgenstern
Read by Jim Dale. Another "re-read" - I loved the book and I thought an audiobook would be a good way to revisit it, while I was doing something that didn't require too much attention.

A4) The BBC Short Story Award
Mostly from the 2015 award, but some are from previous years - I would have to go back to double check which, which I'm not going to do right now. They were all very well read and I particularly enjoyed Broderie Anglaise and Bunny (both of which were from 2015).

a) Briar Road: Jonathan Buckley, read by Maxine Peake (v good reading)
b) Bunny: Mark Haddon, read by Colin Buchanan
c) Broderie Anglaise: Frances Leviston, read by Kate O'Flynne
d) The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Hilary Mantel, read by Rebekah Staton
e) Do It Now, Jump The Table: Jeremy Page, read by Blake Ritson
f) The Dead Roads: D. W. Wilson, read by Trevor White
g) Tea at the Midland: David Constantine, read by Sian Thomas
h) The Not-Dead and the Saved: Kate Clanchy, read by Penelope Wilton
i) The Numbers: Claire Wigfall

Great set of reviews, Fliss. I'm glad to see that you enjoyed The Chimes, which I'll read soon (as I want to finish last year's Booker Prize longlist before the new longlist is released), and The Slade House, which I hope to read this summer. I hope that A History of Seven Killings and A Place of Greater Safety prove to be good reads for you.

I'll probably start reading Bodies of Light next week.