rachbxl reads in 2020

Happy New Year!

I've been thinking about my reading recently, mainly about how whilst it still brings me pleasure, it's often quite lacklustre compared to how it was years ago. I generally blame motherhood, and that certainly leaves me with less reading time, but a read through old threads over the last few days made me think that the rot set in before that. I know that for now I won't get back to the volumes of reading that I used to enjoy, and I know many here will say that numbers don't matter anyway… and I agree, on their own, they don't. But reading lots of books means variety, means more opportunities to fall down rabbit holes, means more scope for exciting discoveries, and that's what I miss; my reading used to be much more adventurous than it is at the moment, and I want to get some of that back. I have therefore decided to set myself a few goals for this year, the first time I'll have had any kind of reading plan for several years, to see if it makes a difference:

1. I want to read some books off my TBR shelf. I need to have a think about whether to attach a figure here.

2. Going back over my old threads reminded me of all sorts of wonderful books I enjoyed, and promised myself to look out other things by the author...but never did. I’ve made myself a little list (actually a ridiculously long list) of these writers, and I want to read at least some books by them this year. (Again, I might decide to set myself a numerical goal here).

3. I’ve said this before, but I’d really like to revive my reading-around-the-world project. I used to track it primarily in the Reading Globally group, years ago, but I can’t keep up with 2 LT groups these days, so I will just use my CR thread.

4. Though I’ve shied away from numerical goals over the last few years, I’m going to set myself a target of 50 books for this year. In 2019 I read 46, continuing a gradual upward trend over the last few years, though still a long way from those heady early LT days (81 books in my first year on LT).

Books read in 2020:

1. Bury your Dead by Louise Penny (Canada)
2. La hija de la española by Karina Sainz Borgo (Venezuela, in Spanish)
3. The Lessons by Naomi Alderman (UK)
4. Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (Finland, translation)
5. L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante (Italy, in Italian)
6. Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler (USA)
7. The Eighth Life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili (Georgia, translation)
8. Your Blue-eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore (UK)
9. Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf (USA)
10. En attendant demain by Natacha Appanah (Mauritius/France, in French)
11. Un homme, ça ne pleure pas by Faïza Guène (France, in French)
12. Heidi by Johanna Spyri (Switzerland, in translation)
13. Le ciel par-dessus le toit by Nathacha Appanah (Mauritius/France, in French)
14. Old Yeller by Fred Gipson (USA)
15. Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson (Finland, translation)
16. Le pays des autres by Leila Slimani (Morocco/France, in French)
17. Léon and Louise by Alex Capus (Switzerland, translation)
18. Le dernier amour de Baba Dounia by Alina Bronsky (Russia/Germany, in French, translation)
19. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (USA)
20. The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai (Vietnam)
21. The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler (USA)
22. The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia/USA)
23. Police by Jo Nesbo (Norway, translation)
24. The Snakes by Sadie Jones (UK)
25. The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld (USA)
26. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet (USA)
27. The Sacrament by Olaf Olafsson (Iceland)
28. The Child Finder by Rene Delfeld (USA)
29. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (Canada)
30. In the Woods by Tana French (Ireland)
31. Little Gods by Meng Jin (China/USA)
32. Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler (USA)
33. The Royal Abduls by Ramiza Shamoun Koya (USA)
34. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (UK, USA)
35. Antéchrista by Amélie Nothomb (Belgium, in French)
36. Disappearing Earth by Julia Philips (USA)
37. Votes for Women! by Jenni Murray (UK, non-fiction)
38. Subduction by Kristen Millares Young (USA)
39. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (Canada)
40. All Adults Here by Emma Straub (USA)
41. Cross and Burn by Val McDermid (UK)
42. Writers & Lovers by Lily King (USA)
43. The Margot Affair by Sanae Lemoine
44. The Lola Quartet by Emily St John Mandel (Canada)
45. Severance by Ling Ma (China/USA)
46. Don't Look Back by Karin Fossum (Norway, translated)
47. The Railway Children by E. Nesbit (UK)
48. The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld (USA)
49. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (USA)
51. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (USA)
52. The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson (USA)
52. The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell (USA)
53. Circe by Madeline Miller (USA)
54. The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (Canada)
55. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Nigeria)
56. Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson (USA)
57. Queenie by Candace Carty-Williams (UK)
58. What is Mine by Anne Holt (Norway, translation)
59. Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin (Canada)
60. Luster by Raven Leilani (USA)
61. Back When We Were Grown-ups by Anne Tyler (USA)
62. The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary (UK)
63. In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (USA, non-fiction)

Reserved

Reading Globally:

77. Venezuela (La hija de la Espanola by Karina Sainz Borgo)
78. Italy (L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante)
79. Georgia (The Eighth Life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili)

Bury your Dead by Louise Penny

My last book of 2019 was the fifth Inspector Gamache novel, The Brutal Telling, and as I had this, the sixth, on my TBR shelves, I couldn't resist the temptation to go straight on to it. These novels don't work for me unless I'm able to slow down and enjoy them, and over Christmas I've been able to do that. I will pick up a Val McDermid, for instance, if life is hectic and I'm feeling frazzled and need a gripping read to distract me, but I can't do that with these novels, maybe because they are so charming, so gentle, that they cry out for a cosy sofa by the fire, the Christmas tree twinkling in the corner. As it turns out, it wasn't a bad idea to read books 5 and 6 back-to-back, as they are closely connected, with the crime in book 5 being revisited here, a few months on. In parallel, Inspector Gamache, on leave after a traumatic case, is visiting his old mentor in Quebec City, when a Cluedo-like murder takes place - a body is found in the basement of the (English) Literary and Historical Society. Gamache is powerless to act, as the Sûreté, the provincial police force, has no jurisdiction in cities (and in any case he's on sick leave), but he and his retired mentor can't resist a good investigation. As usual, the plot is gripping, the characters are larger than life, and the setting is vivid, but this time there is also a lot about the history of Quebec, which I found interesting. My one gripe is about the punctuation, the commas in particular; I had to re-read several sentences to make sense of them, because commas were missing. I noticed this in the previous novel too, and assumed it was a problem with the editing of the e-book I read, but this time it was a paperback, and the problem was the same. I haven't noticed it in earlier novels (and I would, I'm sure!)

>5 rachbxl: I’ve heard other people complain about Penny’s lack of punctuation. I’ve listened to most of them, so I wouldn’t notice that. I can understand how frustrating it can be, I do love these books though.

Happy New Year, Rachel! Looking forward to following your reading again this year. (Hmm, I thought I already posted here...)

Happy New Year! You've always found such intriguing books in your special little library so I can't wait to see what you find for your reading globally goal!

I always enjoy following your reading. I agree that it's hard to fit in reading with parenting young kids and working. I think your goals are attainable, though. I find that the more variety of reading I do, the more I make time for reading. I also completely broke the tv habit which helps me!

Whether or not you adjust your reading this year, I always enjoy your thread!

Happy New Year, Rachel! My goals for 2020 parallel yours, as I intend to read 40 books from my TBR pile, many of which have lived there for five years or longer, and I've set a goal of finishing 50 books as well.

Dropping off my star. Happy new year, Rachel!

Happy New Year, Rachel. I like your optimism and how you’re thinking through your goals. Reading time expands without babies and toddlers, no question. You have me wondering how reading changes over time. It seems it just gets less frivolous, somehow. Anyway, wish you a reasonable balance and that you enjoy the reading you find time for.

Happy new year, and I wish you a happy reading year as well, hoping that setting reading goals will help you gain more satisfaction in your reading.
I have found so many interesting books in your thread last year that I will be following closely how this develops this year!

Thanks for all the encouragement.

>6 NanaCC: I love them too, and I don’t want to have to stop reading them because of the punctuation, but it’s infuriating. I didn’t notice it in the earlier books (and I would!), and I don’t know why it isn’t corrected at the editing stage. Listening to them might be the way forward, even though I’m not great with audiobooks generally (my job as a conference interpreter involves permanent listening, and outside of that I switch off and my mind wanders).

La hija de la española by Karina Sainz Borgo
Available in English translation as It Would be Night in Caracas

A random find in my wonderful workplace library, this 2019 novel is by a Venezuelan journalist, born in 1982, who has lived in Spain for over 10 years.

Surrounded by chaos as her country falls apart, 37-year old Adelaida Falcón is left entirely alone when her mother dies. As Caracas riots and burns around her, Adelaida tries to survive at the most basic level, in a country where what little food there is is reserved for the wealthy and those close to the authorities. Returning home one day from a desperate excursion to find food, she finds that the locks have been changed, and her flat has been taken over by a group of women in red shirts, loyal to the authorities.

I found this quite slow to get going, but once it did (at about the point where her flat is taken over), I was won over by it, and I realised that the slow beginning had actually been some quite effective scene-setting. I particularly liked the way sections on the present alternate with sections on Adelaida’s childhood with her teacher mother; they weren’t rich, and there was nothing remarkable about their life together, making it stand in stark contrast to the miserable, terrifying present which Adelaida didn’t choose to be part of. Adelaida, à first person narrator, is dispassionate and detached (traumatised by all she has lived through?), and I found this an effective device too. She recounts even atrocious things in a straightforward manner, with few feelings to get in the way.

This isn’t a perfect novel; much of the plot hinges on an unexplained death, which I kept wondering about. This death leads to Adelaida obtaining a Spanish passport in the dead woman’s name, which gets her out of Venezuela, but I wondered about her decision to go the whole hog and take on the woman’s identity, go to Spain and pass herself off to family members as that woman rather than just disappearing to make a new life for herself.

This got me thinking about where dystopian fiction starts. We often say that the best dystopian fiction is good because it doesn’t take much of a leap of the imagination to see it actually happening. La hija de la española is explicitly set in contemporary Caracas, but, as Sainz Borgo makes clear in a note at the end, this is fiction, not a documentary, and to me it reads like a really very terrifying dystopian novel, because at least parts of it are real, and the rest is only too easy to imagine.

>15 rachbxl: Great review of La hija de la española, Rachel. I'll add it to my wish list.

>15 rachbxl: Really interesting. It was published in France at the beginning of the month, I might get a copy at some point!

I know what you mean about reading less. Family certainly gets in the way, but I can't use that excuse because my kids are launched. I find it puzzling that I don't actually even want to read that much anymore -- I have other activities that need my attention more than my book stacks. (And a full time job -- maybe I'll read when I retire?) Your goal of 50 books sounds like heaps to me -- I'm hoping for 25 this year. Anyway, good luck! I'm always interested in your comments about the books you choose.

>15 rachbxl: really terrific thoughtful review. Venezuela and it's situation is so strange to me. Is it a warning to the rest of the world? I would like to read more about it.

>18 Nickelini: sometimes less is more. I'm having a moment of doubt realizing maybe it's not my place to comment here...but, anyway, hopefully whatever reading you do is rewarding and whatever isn't rewarding you bail on And hopefully I'm not being obnoxious here...

>5 rachbxl: My one gripe is about the punctuation, the commas in particular; I had to re-read several sentences to make sense of them, because commas were missing.

I wonder if this is a Canadian issue. My son, who was educated in Canada, always tells me (educated in the UK), that I use too many commas. I've become conscious of the issue and re-read my material repeatedly but still disagree with him.

>16 kidzdoc: The first of no doubt many book bullets which will be flying in both directions this year!

>17 raton-liseur: Yes, I saw it in French in a bookshop today. Apparently translation rights were sold in about 20 languages even before it came out in Spanish (last year).

>18 Nickelini: 50 books might end up being heaps for me too! Last year I was almost there, but a couple of years ago I managed just 14 or 15. I’ve experienced what you describe, that feeling of not actually wanting to read that much any more, but right now I very much do want to read, so I’m making the most of it. Who knows how long it will last before life takes over. As for reading once retired, the other day I was asking a colleague who’s currently working half-time as he winds down to retirement in the autumn what he does with his free days. He said he was enjoying being able to read as much as he likes for the first time in years.

>19 dchaikin: I have a very superficial knowledge of recent and current events in Venezuela, Dan, as reading this made me realise. I had little idea where reality ended and fiction began, which didn’t affect my reading, but which did make me want to find out more. (And as for being obnoxious, I know you were talking to Joyce, not me, but when are you ever obnoxious?)

>20 VivienneR: Interesting! That would explain why the ‘mistakes’ haven’t been edited out. Nickelini (and any other Canadians), what do you think? Do use commas more sparingly than we do?

>21 rachbxl: Ha! Undoubtedly.

>21 rachbxl: hopefully never and it’s just my usual insecurities. If I was really worried I wouldn’t have posted it. But sometimes things can come across the wrong way.

>21 rachbxl:
I've never noticed a national comma style -- I find it varies more between writers. I used to be an editor too, so I would hope I would have noticed. ;-)

Rachel, I recently finished Tropic of Violence, so thanks again for pointing it out to me. It wasn't published in the US so I had to pick it up via the UK. Haven't reviewed it yet, but there is something in her writing (of the 3 books read) that goes right to my core.

>24 Nickelini: thanks! Yes, I think you would have noticed!

>25 avaland: I’m glad you liked it. I think Appanah hit her stride with The Last Brother (I’ve read or at least tried to read her three earlier books, and they’re quite different, didn’t really speak to me), but her later books have something I find very special about them. Anyway, thank you: I was just looking up dates of publication, and realized that Waiting for Tomorrow is win fact NOT the only later novel that I haven’t read; there are three others, including one published last year, so you have indirectly added to my wishlist!

The Lessons by Naomi Alderman

Having been impressed with several excerpts by Alderman in Granta and the like, I'd been planning to read a novel of hers for several years. I really want to read The Power, but didn't want to start with it, and The Lessons struck me as as good a starting point as any other when I found it in the library before Christmas.

Beautiful loner James arrives at Oxford ready to take on the world, but struggles to adapt to being, suddenly, a small fish in a big pond full of brilliantly-coloured, dazzling fish. Having failed to make friends in his first term (hampered by a serious knee injury caused by a running accident soon after his arrival), he then falls in, quite unexpectedly, with a crowd who move in circles that James doesn't belong in, a crowd built around the unpredictable, upper class, sociable, wealthy, generous, dangerous Mark, who invites them all (nay, makes it very difficult for them not) to move out of college accomodation and into the rambling Oxford mansion he has inherited. Mark exerts a pull over James which will last well beyond their Oxford days.

I whizzed through this is 3 days, picking it up again whenever I got the chance. I was at Cambridge, not Oxford, but there are so many similarities between the two that a lot was recognisable to me (in fact, I have spent the last 3 days bombarding my best Cambridge friend with quotes), so for me this was a glorious wallow in nostalgia, especially as, although no dates are given, and there are no clear time markers, we (the characters and I) must have been at Oxbridge at more or less the same time. I enjoyed the reminders of visiting the mail room next to the porters' lodge, where we each had a small pigeonhole, and finding handwritten notes from tutors inviting me to their rooms for sherry (the pigeonholes later disappeared for a while, though my friend tells me that they now have HUGE pigeonholes, to accomodate the Amazon deliveries), and of once-a-week phone calls home, stuffing 20p pieces into the public phone in the basement, and of lots of other things, but you get the drift. Less comfortably, I was also reminded of the feelings of insecurity, of having a kind of impostor syndrome (these people are all brilliant, and it's only a matter of time before someone notices that I shouldn't really be here), and, yes, of the difficulties of going from a small pond in which I was a huge fish (my high school, my home town) to this ocean in which I was a minnow. So, I devoured it...but I do wonder what a non-Oxbridge graduate might make of it; I think it might be a bit too exclusive, maybe. Or maybe not, I don't know.

It wasn't just the nostalgia that I enjoyed, though. Alderman's writing lived up to my expectations, perhaps even exceeded them. As I said, I read this over 3 days, starting it on Sunday, finishing this morning, so not a long time, but I feel like I've been immersed in the world she created for ever...which can be a bad thing with some books, I know, but is definitely a good thing here. And her characters…! I can't say I loved them all, because I really didn't, but I had time for them all, because they are all so credible and complex, so human, I suppose.

It looks like I have another name on my list of authors to read more of.

I'll have to ask Rachael (FlossieT) about The Lessons the next time I see her in Cambridge or London, hopefully in March. She also read at Cambridge, and gave this book a 3 star rating. Your comment about the imposter syndrome is of special interest, as I and many of my closest friends in medical school experienced it on multiple occasions, often in dreams. My recurrent dream is that I was summoned to the Dean's office, and was told by her that a secretary in the admissions office had made a mistake: the acceptance letter was supposed to have been sent to someone with a similar name, and not to me! She told me that I would have to withdraw immediately and wished me well...at which point I would wake up, and stay awake for an hour or two. Every so often I have a similarly disturbing dream, in which I would be very close to completing my undergraduate degree, medical degree or pediatric residency, but some insurmountable barrier would keep me from doing so.

>27 rachbxl: enjoyed your review. The power doesn’t really appeal to me (hmm, hopefully not because of my Y chromosome), but this sounds really fun. For me a world I would not recognize.

>28 kidzdoc: Goodness, Darryl. Guess we’re hardest on ourselves, even subconsciously.

>26 rachbxl: All in French only, I bet. Sigh.

>28 kidzdoc: Ouch, Darrryl! Your recurrent dream makes me shiver. For me it was nothing so specific, just a general feeling every now and then that I must have slipped in by mistake. I had it when I started work, too, and 20 years on I still keep expecting someone to rumble that I don't actually understand Italian (one of my working languages).

>29 dchaikin: I would love to see what you make of it, Dan. I'm really curious to see how it works for someone who doesn't recognise the world Alderman describes.

>30 avaland: Yes...for now.

Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson
translated from the Swedish by Thomas Warburton

If I included all the books I read to my daughter, I'd soon hit my target of 50, but that would be cheating. However, I've decided that every now and then I AM going to include one of her books, on a completely subjective basis, whenever it feels like a book that I might perfectly well have read for myself anyway.

This was our third foray into Moominland; we started in the autumn with The Moomins and the Great Flood, actually the first Moomin book Jansson wrote (1945), though only published in English in the last few years. I bought a beautiful edition on a work trip to Helsinki, where naturally it cost me far more than I'd have paid on Amazon, but Amazon doesn't supply the good memories attached to buying a book in a real bookshop (and what's more, a bookshop in the book's country of origin). We read it right away, and my little girl loved it, though admittedly it was shorter than the later Moomin novels, and therefore easier for her to follow. Next, we had Christmas Comes to Moominvalley, a recent adaptation of a Tove Jansson story about how the Moomins wake up in the middle of winter and are told that Christmas is coming, but have no idea what Christmas is. This one was part of the Advent calendar of books that I did for my daughter - I wrapped 24 Christmas books (in re-usable home-sewn giftbags!), and she chose one per day. I saw the idea on Pinterest, and it was the first time we'd done it; we both really enjoyed it, and will be doing it again. Moominland Midwinter was a Christmas present, which my daughter was keen for us to read as soon as we finished the book we were reading at the time. This is much longer than the other two, and, together with Alice in Wonderland, easily the longest book we have read together; I thought she would get bored, not just because of the length, but also because it's quite a lot more complicated than the others, and darker...but she kept asking for more, and her comments showed that she was following. In this one, Moomintroll wakes up unexpectedly in the middle of winter, and has to face the unfamiliar season without his family, who are all asleep; he is often lonely, often sad, frequently angry. These big emotions are handled beautifully, no moralising, no patronising children by hiding things from them; the emotions are what they are, and various small and not-so-small creatures help Moomintroll deal with them, in a very matter-of-fact way. We're having a break from the Moomins for now, but we have two more of the books, and my daughter has already asked if we can read them soon.

>32 rachbxl:

I bought a beautiful edition on a work trip to Helsinki, where naturally it cost me far more than I'd have paid on Amazon, but Amazon doesn't supply the good memories attached to buying a book in a real bookshop (and what's more, a bookshop in the book's country of origin).

Yes, yes, yes & yes! That's why I like to buy books when I travel -- even in Switzerland, which I'm sure is the most expensive place to buy books on the planet.

This one was part of the Advent calendar of books that I did for my daughter - I wrapped 24 Christmas books (in re-usable home-sewn giftbags!), and she chose one per day. I saw the idea on Pinterest, and it was the first time we'd done it; we both really enjoyed it, and will be doing it again.

What a gorgeous idea! I wish I could do that, but my girls are in their 20s now and it just wouldn't work. I'll enjoy vicariously through you.

In this one, Moomintroll wakes up unexpectedly in the middle of winter, and has to face the unfamiliar season without his family, who are all asleep; he is often lonely, often sad, frequently angry.

I remember that one from when I read it as a child. I adore the Moomins. Late last year I read Moominvalley in November and loved it. I think I might have to reread some Moomin books!

First visit to your thread this year and I've been forced to add two books to my wishlist -- It Would Be Night in Caracas and The Lessons.

>32 rachbxl: The most wonderful advent calendar I've ever heard of. Much better than chocolates! It's nice to see that both of you enjoyed it, what nice memories it will make, and how many hours of shared reading!

>33 Nickelini: Yes! And then I like looking over my bookshelves and remembering where I was when I bought certain books.
Aren't the Moomins wonderful? I am so pleased to have rediscovered them; so often when you go back as an adult to books you read as a child you're disappointed, but not here. Actually the opposite, in that I'm realising that there's a lot more to them.

>33 Nickelini: and >35 raton-liseur: I wasn't sure how the Advent calendar would go down with my daughter, who often has firm ideas about what she wants us to read when, but she got really into it and asked if we could do it again next year. I will do it again with almost exactly the same books, but there are maybe a couple I will replace.

>34 RidgewayGirl: 'forced'??? That made me giggle.

Hi Rachel! I'm on LT for the first time in ages today (definitely before the new year) and I started with your last thread. I left a comment, forgetting that the thread is now defunct. Sorry! I've copied it here:

>159 RidgewayGirl: rachbxl: I was intrigued by your description of Fever Dream and went to the work page to add it to my wishlist. I paused, however, when I saw that one of the most frequent tags is "horror." Would you categorize aspects of it as such?

>168 rachbxl: rachbxl: Oh, my! How did I forget to return to Knausgaard? I read the first book and, like you, was expecting to be bored. And like you, found it anything but. I didn't have the second volume at hand and drifted off to other things. I am going to go order a copy right now. Thanks for the reminder

>1 rachbxl: I relate to your struggles to reconcile my decline in both number and quality of the books I read. I loved your explanation about why numbers do, in a way, matter: "But reading lots of books means variety, means more opportunities to fall down rabbit holes, means more scope for exciting discoveries, and that's what I miss..."

>32 rachbxl: My sister saw the same or similar Pintrest post and did a book countdown as well. She didn't buy many new books, but wrapped up some favorites, and simply the novelty made it fun for her three year old. I miss reading a book a night with my daughter. Now the books are simply too long to be at all practical.

>37 labfs39: Hi Lisa! I don’t know what to make of those ‘horror’ tags. Sure, I sometimes felt horror on reading Fever Dream, together with various other uncomfortable feelings, but it wouldn’t occur to me to use ‘horror’ as a tag.

>38 labfs39: No, I didn’t buy many new ones either, as we already had nearly enough - and rediscovering old favourites was part of the charm. I had fun deciding what to buy to fill in the couple of gaps we had.

L’amica geniale by Elena Ferrante
Available in English translation as My Brilliant Friend

Proof that books have to be read at the right time, when the reader is in the mood for them. Exactly 2 years ago I bought this book for myself in Italian and for a friend in English; she read it immediately and raved about it, whereas I started and abandoned it 4 or 5 times. I was finally shamed into picking it up again 2 weeks ago, when I realised that in the 12 or so years I’ve been on LT I haven’t read a book in Italian, which wouldn’t matter, except that Italian is one of my working languages. And this time, I started reading, and couldn’t stop, whilst wanting it never to end. In fact, it took me days to read the last 50 pages, because I couldn’t bear to finish it, even though I knew there are 3 more books in the quartet.

I took it with me on a work trip last week, and on the flight there one colleague saw it and said that she’d read it, but hadn’t wanted to read the others in the quartet, because ‘it wasn’t going anywhere’ (personally I can’t wait to read on, because I really need to know what happens next). The next day, on the flight back, another colleague saw it and commented on what a page-turner it was. Just as well we don’t all like the same things! I’m with the second colleague, in case my love of this book isn’t quite coming across (this colleague also told me that I was lucky, because I still had the rest of the quartet ahead of me).

ETA that this book ties in with 2 of my stated reading objectives for this year (though I’m thinking about tweaking my objectives): it was on my TBR shelves, and it adds a country to my round-the-world trip.

Admiring your persistence, but I’m so so happy you enjoyed this and had a good experience with it. It’s a special book and series. (I find it’s a type of book that leaves me surprised when some readers don’t like it, yet at the same time leaves me unable to express to them what I liked.)

>40 rachbxl: I was hesitant to buy My Brilliant Friend, as I am leery of books whose hype seems like hyperbole. It has been languishing on my shelf for eons. But your and Dan's endorsements have convinced me to pack it for my upcoming trip. I'll let you know if this proves to be the "right time" for me.

>41 dchaikin: Even I am surprised by my persistence! I would give up on a book much sooner normally. I think in part I persevered because it was in Italian; had it been in English I’d have given up without a second thought, but as Italian and I have quite a difficult (though long-term) relationship, I couldn’t let it get the better of me. And then in part I think it was because of you, Dan. I know we don’t often read the same books, but I was really struck by how much you enjoyed this one, and I wanted to know why.

>42 labfs39: I think the hype is another reason I wasn’t that keen on it at first, Lisa. I’ll be interested to see what you think. You know, I was thinking about Knausgaard while I read it, as My Brilliant Friend is another book which could so easily have been deadly boring but really isn’t. You might have noticed that my comments on it didn’t include anything about what it’s actually about, because what to say? It’s about a girl growing up in the 1950s in a poor neighbourhood in Naples, and her friend Lila...so what? But it draws you in and doesn’t let you go (I just got the second one from the library at lunchtime!)

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Why I thought I needed another book on the go the last couple of weeks, I don’t know, as if the 900+ pages of The Eighth Life plus My Brilliant Friend weren’t enough. The Eighth Life and My Brilliant Friend are both so good, among the very best books I have read in a long time, that any other book would have struggled alongside, and that’s what happened with Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler’s modern-day take on The Taming of the Shrew. This is Anne Tyler, so the writing is good, the characters credible and lifelike, and this was certainly an enjoyable read...but I don’t think it’s Tyler at her best. I’m never quite sure where other Tyler novels are going to go, because they seem to take on a life of their own (this is a good thing), whereas here, Tyler is restricted by the framework provided by The Taming of the Shrew. So, not my favorite of Tyler’s novels, but I did like her take on Shakespeare, and what she did with it. What if ‘taming’ doesn’t mean ‘gagging’, ‘bringing into line’, ‘breaking the spirit’? Kate’s family assume she is doomed to spinsterhood (she sees herself as happily single) until Pyotr (all the names line up), her scientist father’s lab assistant, finds himself about to be expelled from the USA unless he finds a solution to his visa issue. Kate, surprisingly, agrees to marry him - but what if there’s something in it for them both? What if they both live happily ever after, without Kate’s cooking ever getting any better, and without Pyotr’s being great either? What if they both learn to give and take? Modern takes often seem to end up with, for example, it being kick-ass Kate that tames Pyotr, and I like the way Tyler avoids that.

ETA that whilst this was a library book, it satisfies my goal of reading more by authors I already admire.

>43 rachbxl: thanks. Glad to know I provided encouragement - and for an actual good thing. It’s my favorite contemporary book on a while. (I liked Lost Children Archive a lot too.) I read your comment to Lisa, which reminds me I should give My Struggle a try. I do want to.

>44 rachbxl: Interesting about Anne Tyler and how she comes across in this kind of scenario. I want to read her, but no Hogarth for me... (assuming that’s what this is). (Although in Litsy people were recommending Hag-seed just yesterday or the day before)

>43 rachbxl: If My Brilliant Friend is as surprisingly captivating as My Struggle, I'm sold. I have already packed my fiction in translation (I'm moving in two weeks), but I will open the box and dig it out!

Found it!



(I can delete this message after you read it, if you don't want pictures clogging your thread. Lmk.)

>40 rachbxl: Oh dear! I've had that half-read on my Kobo for even longer (since 2015, by the look of it!). Mainly because I was finding the Italian hard work and moved over to something easier. I should get back to it.

>46 labfs39: Moving? Hope it goes well. Locally? My copy of My Brilliant Friend has the same cover - it was used for several different language versions - and now that I’ve read the book, I wonder why... (No need to delete the photo, but thanks for the thought).

>48 thorold: A colleague (not a native Italian speaker) told me last week that she’d recently attended a talk by an Italian literary critic, who said that whilst Ferrante tells a great story, she does so in language that is sometimes more complicated than it needs to be. He said her target readership is educated, professional, and he felt she tries to flatter them by using a high register that only they will understand.

>49 rachbxl: That probably explains a lot. Interesting, too that when we read The days of abandonment in our book-club about ten years ago, the people who read it in Italian all commented that she was getting her effect by using language that was shockingly direct and coarse for a middle-class female narrator (it wasn’t so obvious in translation).

>44 rachbxl: Interesting thoughts on the Anne Tyler. I read her religiously years (maybe decades) ago, all of them up to The Ladder of Years and then, I'm not sure why I drifted away. Life changed perhaps. Or I found other obsessions. Glad to be able to follow her fiction in a somewhat lesser way through you & other readers:-)

>49 rachbxl: that aspect of Ferrante’s language definitely does not come across in translation.

>49 rachbxl:, >50 thorold:, >52 dchaikin: I think it’s worth mentioning that the talk by the literary critic was given to a group of my colleagues (non-native speakers of Italian, all with an excellent understanding of Italian as, like me, they all work from it). I think some of them must have said that they’d given up on the Neapolitan novels because they were too difficult, and this was his response. So whilst there may be truth in the idea that Ferrante wants to flatter her middle-class readership, it may also have been a case of the speaker flattering his audience. I personally struggled with My Brilliant Friend at first, and that was one reason I kept stopping and starting, but once I really got started I sailed through it. That said, because of the haphazard way I learnt Italian, literary and high-register I can do; everyday, and even worse, colloquial, I am lost. (I learnt my Italian in Turin, where I shared a flat with an eccentric assistant professor in Italian literature. He made it his pet project to help me learn Italian, but he made it clear that if I wanted his help, we would do it his way. So out went my textbooks and bilingual dictionaries, and in came Torquato Tasso (16th century poet). I went along with it because it seemed like a great adventure (it was), but my Italian remains a strange creature!)

>51 avaland: Fear not, I expect I’ll be giving you another vicarious dose of Anne Tyler before long. She really speaks to me at the moment.

How interesting that you learned Italian through Tasso.

It maybe makes sense that the Italian would be more high end to emphasize the difference between the narrator’s (Elena’s) education and Lina’s lack of education.

>41 dchaikin: I find it’s a type of book that leaves me surprised when some readers don’t like it, yet at the same time leaves me unable to express to them what I liked.)

You've nailed it, Dan. When I think back to the series I wonder why I was so hooked as it's subject matter feels quite pedestrian, but it totally drew me in. I was surprised that some of the haters of the series in CR were the very people I thought would love it based on their usual reading tastes. Likewise, I would have said this wouldn't be a series for you based on your normal reading tastes.

Rachel - delighted you're in the fan camp of this series. Savour and enjoy the other three. I went back to My Books to remind myself what I thought of this series and got completely confused as I couldn't find the 4th book anywhere. Bizarrely I seemed to completely forget to add it to my collection and to record my review at the time, so I've very belatedly added my review from my thread to the page now (better late than never). My order of preference was 2-1-4-3, so you're in for a treat with the next one.

>55 AlisonY:

When I think back to the series I wonder why I was so hooked as it's subject matter feels quite pedestrian, but it totally drew me in. I was surprised that some of the haters of the series in CR were the very people I thought would love it based on their usual reading tastes.

I think you're still talking about My Brilliant Friend etc? Yep, count me among those who didn't like it (only read the first one, not continuing with the rest) and I really thought I would. I was still looking for an Italian copy to give to my mother-in-law, but maybe not if the Italian is very literary. She was all excited to show me the books she got from the library at the Italian Cultural Centre, and they were all Danielle Steele. Not sure My Brilliant Friend is going to work for her now.

>55 AlisonY: book 2 was my favorite too (but when I tell myself why, it doesn’t sound convincing.)

>55 AlisonY:, >57 dchaikin: I’m only 50 pages into book 2, but really looking forward to reading it on our ski trip next week. I’ll report back!

The Eighth Life (for Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin

900+ pages of sprawling family saga spanning the whole of the twentieth century in Russia and, in particular, Georgia. The author is Georgian but wrote this in German (she says she needed the distance provided by a foreign language; she’s lived in Germany for several years); it was a huge success in Germany, and the English translation came out late last year (and what a translation! Charlotte Collins is always good, but this, done jointly with Ruth Martin, is an amazing feat; I was rarely aware that I wasn’t reading the original).

I read a review of The Eighth Life recently which said something like ‘to find a novel which is so completely immersive, which gets right under your skin in this way, you have to go back to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels’ - quite a coincidence, then, that I was reading them both at once. I have had the most glorious reading experience for the last 6 weeks or so, totally lost in these two different worlds. When one of the characters in The Eighth Life died, it affected me in a way I don’t remember since Beth died in Good Wives. And it’s not just the characters; there’s the history too, but what makes this book really special is that at long last it’s the history of totalitarianism seen through non-Western eyes, which changes the focus. I hadn’t heard of the book when a friend gave it to me at New Year, but once I started it, I couldn’t put it down, and that didn’t fade over the 900 pages.

This is one of those books that I feel bereft having finished (I could have finished it several days earlier, but couldn’t bear to). Thanks goodness I have the second Neapolitan novel to console me.

ETA Georgia was a new reading destination for me; this takes me to 79 countries on my round-the-world trip.

>59 rachbxl: You are hard core taking on a book of that size when the Neopolitan novels are chunky enough if I remember rightly! Sounds great, although daunting in size. I want to read the last Knausgaard novel this year which is also a whopper - perhaps this will be the year of the large tomes.

>59 rachbxl: This book sounds fantastic! I really should get round to reading it sooner rather than later. Georgia is missing from *my* round-the-world trip... I was planning on reading The Knight in Panther Skin, but it disappeared from my library's stock before I could borrow it!

>59 rachbxl: first I’ve heard of The Eighth Life. Terrific review, you have me really interested.

>59 rachbxl: Added The Eighth Life to my wishlist. Great review. And I am halfway through My Brilliant Friend and have the second on order.

>59 rachbxl: I’ve picked that up in the library a couple of times, then put it back because it’s so thick... I can see it’s going to have to go on the list as well! :-(

>60 AlisonY: It was very early in the year; I was still feeling that I could do anything I set my mind to! I don't think I'd set about them both at the same time now, though I'm glad I did. I did consider adding the next Knausgaard (4?) to the mix and reading that at the same time too, but I drew the line at that.

>61 Dilara86: It is indeed fantastic! And it was a great 'Georgia' book because it really is about Georgia, rather than just happening to be written by a Georgian writer.

>62 dchaikin: Our reading tastes seem to be converging, Dan, though it's entirely because you're coming on to 'my' territory, I'm afraid. I'll be interested to see what you think, if you read it.

>63 labfs39: I've been wondering what you're making of My Brilliant Friend, though if you have the second on order, it can't be that bad. I've got the second out of the library, and just today a colleague has offered to lend me books 3 and 4.

>64 thorold: Oh no, not another book on your list...! The size is quite off-putting, isn't it? But I quickly got so into it that the pages whizzed by 50 at a time.

>65 rachbxl: on my reading into your territory...hoping that’s a good thing. 🙂 But, Ferrante was a huge hit for me. I would like more like that - knowing it’s hard to find. (Knausgaard is on my list too)

>65 rachbxl: I zipped through the first half of My Brilliant Friend, the part dealing with their childhood. I'm into adolescence now, and I have slowed down. Not sure if it is the book, or the fact that I am moving in 6 days! I received the second volume in the mail and definitely plan to continue on to it. I think several people have said the 2nd is their favorite.

I have also ordered the second Knausgaard, and it is being delivered to my new address.

So, I looked up The Eighth Life on the online megabookshop that shall not be named, and the French translation is out of stock, but a second-hand copy can be mine from €147.43! The English hardback version is also out of stock. There's always the ebook or the German version, I suppose...

>66 dchaikin: Definitely a good thing; it’s nice to be able to talk about the same books once in a while, after all!

>67 labfs39: I haven’t been here for over a week, so I missed the chance to wish you all the best for the move, Lisa. Hope it went well, and that you are settling into your new place.

>68 Dilara86: That made me laugh! It’s good, sure, but €147.43-for-a-second-hand-copy good, maybe not... I just bought it for a friend, in English, from the same online megabookshop, and fortunately it was only about €20 (hardback).

>32 rachbxl: I, also, am filled with admiration for this Christmas idea. I have little grandchildren, but how could I afford 24 good books? 24 crummy books would not be worth it. I remember getting beautiful books when my children were little, and I told their father that we had to "feed their eyes" as well as their stomachs. He is an artist, and something of a miser, and that was the only way I could get him to understand. Oh, he came around beautifully, since when I worked late, he did bedtime. I worked late for most of 30 years, so that was a lot of bedtimes for him.

>70 sallypursell: I have only just seen your comment, as I haven’t been here for a while. I quite agree with you that we have to feed their eyes too. Beautiful children’s books are important. I confess that I do spend a lot on children’s books (though not really for the advent calendar, as I’ll explain); apart from the fact that I have the luxury of being able to afford it, for me it’s a big part of how I pass on my mother tongue (English) to my (bilingual) daughter (we live in Belgium). If I ‘just’ wanted to foster a love of reading, I would take her every week to the local (French-language) library. Anyway, on the advent calendar, I had seen the idea maybe a year before, which gave me a year to get it ready, and over that year I picked up many suitable books in second-hand shops - and that’s in a country where English is a foreign language, so English books are relegated to a small corner in your average second-hand bookshop. I also came across a suggestion that library books could be incorporated into the advent calendar, as long as you keep track of them.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore

I really struggled to get into another book after The Eighth Life, and I thought this might do it, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as others by Dunmore that I’ve read. However, I read it about a month ago, and whereas now I just want to escape from covid-19, back then I couldn’t get enough news, so it’s fair to say that the book didn’t get my full attention, and may have suffered as a result.

The female narrator is a district judge, married to a bankrupt architect. They have moved with their two young sons from London to the countryside in search of a life they can afford. Life isn’t easy, but then the narrator starts to get blackmail letters from an old flame from a long-ago summer spent in the USA (he has compromising photos of her). There were certainly things about it that I liked, the descriptions of the sea and the coastal countryside, the gentle portrait of a marriage (still strangers after all these years), Dunmore’s quiet, understated style, but as a whole it didn’t grab me - though, as I said, that may not have been the book’s fault.

Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

I came to this book because of my goal this year to read more by writers whose works I have enjoyed in the past (Plainsong, Eventide and The Tie that Binds in this case, all years ago). It’s one of those quiet books that on the surface isn’t ‘about’ very much: OAP widow asks OAP widower, a neighbour whom she knows only slightly, if he would spend nights with her. Not for sex, she spells out, but just for company. Two people, together, in bed, keeping the lonely night at bay. He accepts, and a strange, beautiful relationship develops, coming to incorporate her young grandson as well when she has to take over his care. This little tale is told in a sparing style, no frills, no superfluous detail, which has left me, several weeks on, with vivid images of the characters and their lives. It reminded me of Anne Tyler, and her ability to tell a captivating story about very normal people, and a story which leaves you thinking about the characters long after you’ve closed the book for the last time.

>72 rachbxl: I know I read that Dunmore, but the fact that I didn't remember what it was about is probably telling.

Glad you had a moment to pop back in.

>73 rachbxl: I enjoyed Our Souls At Night, but it didn't grab me as much as Plainsong did.

I really wanted to continue the trilogy when I read Plainsong a few years ago but my library never had it. I finally came across Eventide a couple of months ago in the second hand store, so I hope to read it soon. Sadly I can't remember much at all about the plot in Plainsong, but I'm hoping it all quickly fits into place anyway once I get into it.

Haruf's writing always feels so gentle - I think it's a good choice in Coronavirus times.

>74 avaland: Lois, I’ve been thinking of you because I’m reading Natacha Appanah’s Waiting for Tomorrow, which I think is the one you read last year after I read Tropique de la violence. Didn’t you say at the time it reminded you of Small Country? As I read, I am constantly reminded of it, not of the story, but of how it made me feel.

>75 AlisonY: I can’t remember a thing about the plot of the earlier works, but I do remember something of the setting. And I know I liked them. Yes, the gentle writing was like a balm, but to such an extent that I wondered afterwards if whilst the Dunmore had suffered by being read in Coronavirus times, maybe the Haruf had come out of it extra well.

>73 rachbxl: I enjoyed this too, my only Haruf, picked only because my library had it available on audio. It simplifies and I think that gives it room to become reflective. Maybe it is a good fit for this time.

>76 rachbxl: I believe I recommended that one to you and you turned around and recommended Tropic of Violence. Have you read Paul Yoon yet? I didn’t read his first but read his collection which prompted me to buy the new one that just came out. He has that secret ingredient that we both respond to.

>72 rachbxl: For weeks I have been trying to track down a quote from a book I read years ago, to the effect that those of us who don't live in a time and a place where Vikings might suddenly appear over the horizon and sack our village, don't know how lucky we are. I was convinced it was from a book by Nicola Griffith and it's been driving me mad trying to think up different ways to google it.

As soon as I saw the title Your Blue-Eyed Boy I knew this was the book I had read it in. And happily, the quote had struck me so much at the time that I'd put it into my review:

These men coming inland, across the cleared ground, moving quickly in spite of their weight. Such things have always been happening. Sometimes they stop for a while, but they start up again before long. If you happen to be born in one of those happy times when nothing's happening, then the change can be a real shock.

I can see it didn't do much for you, but THANK YOU for reading it and listing it in this thread!! It has saved my sanity (and since it's not by Nicola Griffith and doesn't contain the word Viking I would never, ever have found it).

>77 dchaikin: Yes, Dan, that’s a good way of putting it - it simplifies and gives room to become reflective. Which actually is quite a feat, I think; it simplifies, but doesn’t dumb down.

>78 avaland: I hadn’t even heard of Paul Yoon, so thanks for that. If you think he has that secret ingredient, I’m sold. I’ve finished Waiting for Tomorrow, and I’ve gone straight on to her latest, Le Ciel par-dessus le toit (2019). It’s only short, but I’m slowed down by the fact that I have to read it on my iPad, which I don’t like (it’s a library e-book; I’ve only started using them since confinement came in, and they’re not kindle-compatible).

>79 wandering_star: Glad to be of service! That part of it, the way Dunmore describes the landscape and the way its history colours it still, I did like, very much, but the rest of it didn’t do much for me, no.

Un homme, ça ne pleure pas by Faiza Guène
English translation available: Men Don't Cry

I read this because of my resolution this year to read more by writers whose work I have enjoyed in the past. In 2004 Faiza Guène, born in France to Algerian immigrants, caused a literary sensation in France with her first novel, Kiffe kiffe demain (Just Like Tomorrow), published when she was only 21. It was fresh, a little bit irreverent, bursting with life, and it talked openly about immigrant life in the Paris suburbs. I read it in 2008, the year I joined LT, and that same year I saw Guène and her English translator Sarah Ardizzone at a world literature festival in London. Guène was much like her book, fresh, bursting with life, a little bit irreverent, and she talked openly about immigrant life in the Paris suburbs. I really warmed to her, but what struck me most of all was the complicity between writer and translator. I went on to read her second novel Du reve pour les oufs straight away, but I'm not sure I finished it, which may have been the book's fault, may have been mine. It didn't live up to the first novel, and I hadn't been back to Guène's work since.

Un homme, ça ne pleure pas came out in 2014, and whilst it's quite different in tone to Kiffe kiffe demain and Du reve pour les oufs, it's still about Algerian immigrants to France, their integration (or not, depending), and their ties with their home village back in Algeria. The narrator is the son of an immigrant couple, who also have 2 daughters. The elder, Dounia, is integrated into local (they live in Nice) life to such an extent that she rejects her family, whist the younger does exactly as her parents expect and marries a nice Algerian boy from a local family, has children, and stays near her parents. The narrator, meanwhile, tries to tread a line equidistant from them all. The first half, set in the family home in Nice and peppered with flashbacks to the narrator's upbringing, is wonderful, warm and full of life. Guène is so good at portraying this world, and she does so with great affection - the illiterate but proud and hard-working father, the feeder mother, who appears over-the-top in so many ways next to the narrator's friends' mothers, but who at home in the village is quite typical, the rebellious daughter, the conformist daughter, and the studious but confused son; they could easily have been caricatures, but they aren't, and whilst there is much humour (I remember in particular a glorious account of the narrator's teacher from secondary school visiting the family home to try to persuade his parents that their son should really go on the school ski trip - the 'classes de neige' being a rite of passage for French children, and a ridiculous waste of time as far as his parents are concerned...talk about a clash of cultures!), there is no mockery. However, about halfway through the novel, the narrator gets his first teaching post in Paris, and has to move there; he goes to stay with his (Algerian) cousin, who, far from living in the digs the narrator had been led to expect, lives in style as the toyboy of a much older French woman. This part of the novel didn't capture my interest in the same way; I found it barely credible, full of stereotypes, and I spent my time wishing we could go back to the narrator's family in Nice.

Heidi by Johanna Spyri
translated from the German by

For me, at least, there have been a lot of positives about this period of confinement, and one of them is how much time I have to read with my daughter (6). Her own reading has come on in leaps and bounds, thanks, amongst others, to the wonderful Ivy and Bean; we read all 11 books in the series earlier in confinement, me one page, her the next, and so on. We always have something more difficult that I'm reading to her on the go as well, and when else other than this last month would we have managed to read the whole of Heidi in 4 days? This was possibly THE most important book of my childhood, so I was extra pleased that my daughter loved it (she's a sensitive little soul, though, and one evening spent 2 hours sobbing in bed at the thought that poor Heidi was stuck in Frankfurt, far from her beloved grandfather; the next day we had to read and read and read to get Heidi out of Frankfurt and back up the mountain). I'm always in two minds about visiting old favourites - what if they don't stand the test of time? I don't know what I would make of Heidi now if I hadn't read it all those times as a child - I think I would find it a bit preachy. But the thing is that I DID read it all those times, and revisiting it, and revisiting it with my little girl, was a treat, something really very special, adding another layer of experience and memories.

En attendant demain by Natacha Appanah
English translation available: Waiting for Tomorrow

I felt like I held my breath from the moment I started reading until the moment I finished, afraid that the magic would disappear otherwise. When Appanah is on form like this, as she was with The Last Brother and Tropic of Violence, there is something about her writing that almost hurts, so beautiful and so fragile is it. The last time I had this feeling with another writer was with Gael Faye's Petit Pays (Small Country).

>83 rachbxl: Well said re both authors.

>82 rachbxl: That sounds lovely, Rachel. It was a tremendous favorite of mine, too.

>85 sallypursell: Was it you that read it every week as a child, Sally? I was thinking of you (or another CR member, if not you!) as I read it.

>83 rachbxl: Based on your comments, Lois' review, and my love of her novel The Last Brother I just purchased the Kindle edition of Waiting for Tomorrow, which is on sale for $2.99 in the US.

>87 kidzdoc: Good move - I hope you enjoy it. I highly recommend Tropic of Violence too.

>88 rachbxl: Great. I'll plan to pick up Tropic of Violence as well.

>86 rachbxl: Yes, that was me. Fancy you remembering that! I read it 53 times that year.

>88 rachbxl:, >89 kidzdoc: Ditto.

>90 sallypursell: How big was your cache of soft, white bread by the end of that time? :-)

Your daughter is growing up. Glad she’s enjoying reading with you. Enjoyed these last entries. I probably won’t rush out and read Faiza Guène, but i’m very intrigued by all the comments on Appanah. (Also, The Eighth Life arrived yesterday. Whoa, big! )

>93 dchaikin: Dan, how long in Club Read and you still haven't read The Last Brother??? As for The Eighth Life, it's big, but it sort of reads itself. Before I knew it another 50 pages had whizzed by.

Le ciel par-dessus le toit by Nathacha Appanah

As I've said many times before, there is something about Appanah's writing that gets right inside me (and avaland!) when she's at her best. For me, in Le ciel par-dessus le toit, she isn't at her best. It's a nice story, well told, but it's missing that magical something that some of her other books have (I've read others of hers from which it's been missing too).

The novel opens with the teenage Loup being taken to a juvenile detention centre, and from there Appanah reaches back, not so much to Loup's childhood, but to his mother's childhood as a talented singer, whom her mother liked to dress like a miniature beauty queen and parade in front of her friends...until the child (originally Eliette, but she renames herself Phénix) rebelled. Phénix's screwed-up upbringing leaves her unable to get close to people, including Loup and his older sister Paloma.

Avaland was wondering on her thread recently whether this 'secret ingredient' is empathy, and I've been thinking about that. Empathy is certainly part of it, I believe, and that's what makes Appanah's characters so real. Reading En attendant demain I felt compassion for the main characters, Adam and Anita, and when they made mistakes, I could understand, I felt for them. I say 'I felt', but if I felt that, it was Appanah's writing that made it possible. In Le ciel par-dessus le toit, I didn't feel much; I just read. I didn't feel at all invested in the characters and what happened to them (I remember feeling this way about Appanah's La noce d'Anna).

>95 rachbxl: Maybe I'll skip that one when it comes into English. Is it newer or older than the others?

btw, I 'accidentally' picked up Olaf Olafsson's One Station Away yesterday...eight pages in and I think I'm already hooked.

>94 rachbxl: I didn’t recall The Last Brother and was surprised to find it on my LT wishlist. I have this comment there:

See this review on belletrista: http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue4/reviews_1.php

>92 thorold: While nutritionally deficient, white bread is quite a wonderment to those only used to dark brown loaves. As far as your question goes, Why, do you need some? I still have a stock.

>98 sallypursell: I still have a stock
Ah, so you are still saving it up for your grandmother!

We got Heidi read to us a lot when we were small — my sister is called Heidi and felt very proprietorial about the story until she was about ten, then became embarrassed about it and banned all mention of goats, mountains, and related topics...

>96 avaland: 2019. Interestingly, I see that the other one I consider weak, La noce d'Anna (2005) doesn't seem to have been translated into English.

I look forward to seeing what you make of One Station Away. I'm third in line for The Sacrament as a library e-book (I am pleased to see Olafsson has at least 2 fans other than me here in Belgium!)

>97 dchaikin: That's my review!

>99 thorold: I read it to the two older children when theywere small. The other two were not born yet.

Do you have something against my grandmother? She is awesome. Her husband ran around with flappers, and she wouldn't bob her hair, or bleach it, and he left her home. My mother ended up special. She got taken around with the flappers, riding in the open touring car, but he still bought her a mahogany baby grand, a beautiful Chickering case with a Steinway interior. She played it obsessively until she died. Now one of my brothers plays it, and bought a home just to house it (and himself). I have an amazing family, seven sibs each more wonderful than the last. I'm one of the underachievers in the family.

You do know that I was kidding, don't you? the story is real, but "Do you have something against my grandmother?" was not.

>100 rachbxl: of course. 🙂

>100 rachbxl: Finished One Station Away in two days (!) I found some of it mesmerizing with fascinating parallels between the story lines. It's a sad story of sorts (and I'm not sure if I can tell you what was so mesmerizing), written in Olafsson's usual gentle prose, but I thought the ending missed the mark a bit. Will get more distance from it before I write a review.

>102 dchaikin: I'll look forward to reading your review.

Old Yeller by Fred Gipson

Another one I read aloud to my daughter, who says it's 'even better than Heidi'. She wanted me to start right back on page 1 as soon as we finished (I refused).

I hadn't heard of this book, which I now realise is an American classic, until very recently, when I came across it on a Pinterest list of great books to read aloud to children of around my daughter's age, and I still knew nothing about it when I started to read. The dog on the front suggested it would be a soppy animal story that I would have to put up with without really enjoying, so I was quite taken aback when on page 1 the narrator announced that by the time he had to shoot the dog, it broke him, and I questioned whether it was going to be suitable for my 6-year old (particularly given the tears over Heidi). I read on, confident that it was going so far above her head that she would be bored within minutes and ask me to stop...but she didn't, so I carried on. We read it in 2 days, because she kept asking for more (and because I was really enjoying it too), and as we read we stopped off to talk about all sorts of things it threw up: the liberal hitting of animals and children, the division of labour according to gender and the role of women in general, Native Americans. Meanwhile, an American friend expressed horror that I was reading it to my daughter, because she would never cope with the ending. But cope she did. She sat for a while and then said very quietly that Travis had had no choice.

>105 rachbxl: A book is far from the worst place to first encounter the death of an animal.

>105 rachbxl: I saw "Old Yeller" at the Drive-in when I was quite young, but I don't remember reading it. The movie ends the same way.

>106 RidgewayGirl: Agreed! And over the last few days that has led quite naturally to conversations about people we love dying.

Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson
Translated from the Swedish by

Another read-aloud. Glorious! One of the things that I like about these books it's that whilst they are very gentle in many ways, they don't shy away from difficult things, disagreements, big feelings, characters leaving, and they deal with them in a way that isn't patronising.

Le pays des autres by Leila Slimani
no English translation yet (only published this year)

I read Leila Slimani's second novel, Chanson douce (Lullaby in English), a couple of years ago and enjoyed it well enough, though in a squirm-making voyeuristic kind of way. Two years on, I can't remember anything about it, other than the awful thing that the nanny did, but I can't even recall the circumstances of that. On the basis of that, I wouldn't have gone out of my way to read anything else of Slimani's, but Les pays des autres, published earlier this year, fell into my hands as a library e-book, so I gave it a chance.

Les pays des autres is the first part of a planned trilogy called 'La guerre, la guerre, la guerre' ('War, War, War'), and it is set in Slimani's native Morocco (she now lives in France) in the 1940s and 50s. During the Second World War, Mathilde had met Amine, who, serving with the French army, was posted near her village in Alsace, France, and after the war, now married, they returned to his home in Morocco. The novel recounts Mathilde's struggles to find a place for herself in this very foreign land, but Mathilde isn't the only one in someone else's country (the novel's title translates literally as 'the country of the others'): the French in Morocco have literally taken over someone else's country, but equally the Moroccans are in a country which is no longer truly their own. And then there are the women, living in a man's world (or country), and as for Amine's mother's slave...

This is a wonderful family saga (apparently parts 2 and 3 will see members of the family through until almost the present day), with some great characters. Mathilde is particularly credible; some of her reactions to the 'foreign-ness' of living in another country ring uncomfortably true with me. As much as the characters, though, I enjoyed the portrayal of Morocco on the cusp of independence from its colonial power, and I like the way Slimani manages to convey, in a non-didactic way, that nothing was black and white: it wasn't a case of French bad, Moroccans good. As I read, it struck me that it worked well having the main character, French Mathilde, married to a Moroccan man (one who had served France in the war without losing any of his love for his homeland), as the reader discovers this exotic land of others through her eyes, but I wondered why so much emphasis was placed on the fact that Mathilde was from Alsace, and not just French. From an interview with Slimani which I read after finishing the novel, I learned that her grandmother was from Alsace, met and married an Algerian soldier who participated in the liberation of her village, and went back to North Africa with him to live.

As much as the story, I enjoyed the writing. Slimani has a beautiful clear voice which I remember from Chanson douce, and which is perfectly suited to the telling of this story. Her style is simple, unfussy, but elegant, and the words she uses...! Her vocabulary is rich and colourful, but I never had the feeling that she was using a 'clever' word just to show that she could. (She is, after all, President Macron's personal ambassador to the 'Organisation internationale de la francophonie').

>109 rachbxl: I read a couple of these to my son a few years back - he was probably 6 or 7. I do remember that we both loved them, except they were definitely written in a different time because some of the characters smoked cigarettes! My son was appalled. :-)

>111 japaul22: I've not encountered cigarettes in the Moomins yet, but we've read 2 books recently where characters were chewing tobacco and spitting out tobacco juice; my daughter is shocked on so many levels!

Léon and Louise by Alex Capus
translated from the German by John Brownjohn

Another of those lovely quiet books that leave space for reflection, this was a recommendation from avaland a while ago. Seventeen year-old Léon falls in love with Louise the first time he sees her, during the First World War, when she overtakes him on her squeaky bicycle as he nears the end of a several-day cycle ride from his home on the coast of Normandy to the small town where he has been sent to work as a telegraphist at the railway station. They don't meet until several weeks later, when a strange, beautiful, gentle yet inevitable friendship starts to develop. Their first night together, though, is their last, as it is spent on a beach to which they have cycled, and on the way back they are caught in a German air-raid. Léon is badly injured, and Louise disappears, presumed dead.

It's Léon's grandson that tells the story, and he does so because as the family is assembled in Notre Dame cathedral for Léon's funeral, everyone is distracted by the arrival of a mystery woman: is it? Could it be? Is that Louise? The grandson then reaches back in time to tell the story of Léon and Louise, a story about people, relationships, marriage, the passing of time, and many other things. Initially I thought it was going to be a bit light and frothy, full of the (stereotypical) charms of France in the early twentieth century (the baguettes! the bicycles! the cafés!), but once the story settled into itself, and I settled into it, it captivated me. It's certainly an easy read, but there's nothing frothy about it.

>105 rachbxl: I’m pretty sure I cried when I saw Old Yeller on TV. It was kind of thing at that time, in the early 80’s, for kids to watch it and then talk about how we cried at the ending. I never considered a book may be involved. Beware of Where the Red Fern Grows - I definitely cried reading that. 🙂 I bought a copy for my daughter, but she never read it.

>110 rachbxl: Wonder if/when Slimani will get translated to English. Sounds good, anyway, especially considering the real life tie.

>113 rachbxl: noting the title for now. Not frothy is good, at least.

Le dernier amour de Baba Dounia by Alina Bronsky
translated from the German (into French) by Isabelle Liber

Baba Dounia is an old woman who has defied the authorities to go back to her native village, deserted after an accident at the nearby nuclear reactor (presumably Chernobyl, and the timing is right too, though it's only ever referred to as 'the reactor'). She was the first to go back, and others have followed, building up a small self-reliant community of people who have nowhere else to go, or for whom life there is the least bad option (Baba Dounia herself decided to go back to her old house when she couldn't stand living in a rented room in someone else's house, all she could afford outside the exclusion zone). Isolated from the outside world, their only visitors are the odd journalist and the occasional scientist, come to measure the radiation. However, one day, a man and a five-year old girl turn up, and life in the sleepy backwater spirals out of control.

I thought the first half of this novella was wonderful, before the arrival of the newcomers, with a particularly strong sense of place. I have a clear picture in my mind's eye of the half-abandoned village, the decrepit houses, the overgrown bits of land next to them on which the eldery inhabitants strive to produce as much of their food as possible (radioactive it may be, but everything they don't produce has to be brought from the nearest town, which involves a 2-hour walk to the bus stop (before 'the reactor' buses ran to the village, but not now that it's in the exclusion zone)), the odd cockerel and goat. I also liked how Bronsky handles her characters; Baba Dounia, the narrator, has a sharp eye and a sharp tongue, as well as a dark sense of humour, and it's her throw-away comments about her neighbours, and her sometimes combative interactions with them, that make them come all alive.

I won't say it all went wrong in the second half - that's too harsh - but it went shooting off in directions that I didn't find all that credible. I was content with stories about life in the village, and bits about the neighbours' lives pre-reactor, and what happened next jarred with that. Overall, though, a charming little tale, written by a Russian-born writer who has lived in Germany for many years and writes in German.

I found this novella in the 'translated fiction' section of my library's ebook catalogue. As this is a French-speaking area, translated fiction mainly means translated from English, but persistance has thrown up a few interesting-looking things like this, and like Miss Islande (Miss Iceland, which I will be getting on to soon.

>115 rachbxl: I'll have to look out for that — Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche was fun too, but also featuring a combative baba, so probably not to be read too close to the other book.

>116 thorold: That's good to know! I liked the character of Baba Dounia, but it could easily be too much of a good thing... I would certainly read more by Alina Bronsky, though.

>115 rachbxl: i saw your note on this in the what are you reading thread and was curious. Such a strange place - this exclusion zone with its own variation of refugees. Intriguing

>115 rachbxl: Agreeing with you about the first half of the novella, where you could see that village in your mind, putting any plants, animals or building into it you wanted. The second half was a definite switch, but I thought it allowed more of Baba's pre disaster personality to surface - the need for action for one.

I like the way you described Baba as narrator. Recently I watched the series on Chernobyl, and for some reason, kept thinking of Baba Dounia the person.

I read this in English, with a terrible cover. The only reason I gave it a try was that it was a Europa edition, and I usually take to their authors.

>119 SassyLassy: Yes, that's a good point about the second half allowing Baba Dounia's pre-disasater personality to emerge. It wasn't so much what happened that I had a problem with, it was the lack of context or explanation that I found odd - as if it all had to happen that way for the characters to delevop in the way the author wanted them to. I watched Chernobyl recently too, though before I read the novella, so I suppose it was inevitable that thoughts of the series crept into my reading. I find the whole idea fascinating, these people living in these abandoned radioactive areas, the 'refugees', as Dan calls them (>118 dchaikin: ); I knew they existed, but this novella has really made them come alive for me.

>115 rachbxl: Thanks for that! I'd heard of a few of her other books, but not this one, and that sounds interesting even if it did go a little south. I've always had a peripheral interest in Chernobyl and what happens to a ghost city like that—kind of out of left field, but the banner image for my late great blog was a watercolor/ink illustration I did of cars from the abandoned ferris wheel at Pripyat. Anyway, my library's got the ebook, so I'll probably give it a look at some point.

>121 lisapeet: Definitely worth a look, I would say. I did like it, despite my reservations about the second half (or the last third, maybe). What was your blog about? And what made you choose that particular image for the banner?

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Narrator Danny and his older sister Maeve grew up in a big, splendid house on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a house known locally as 'the Dutch house' (the original owners were a wealthy couple of Dutch origin). Lost to their family in traumatic circumstances when Danny was still a teenager, the Dutch house is forever present in Danny and Maeve's minds, even decades later.

I knew nothing about this when I started it (library e-book). I've read one other of Ann Patchett's books, Bel Canto, which I remember nothing about, though I know I enjoyed it at the time. So, quite unusually for me, I came to it completely open-minded, hoping to enjoy it, but ready to set it aside quite quickly if I didn't. I knew within pages that I was going to like it, and it turned out to be one of those wonderful books that I couldn't wait to get back to. Quite simply, it's a great story, very well told.

I was particularly struck by how life-like a lot of what's in this book is. First of all, the stepmother, Andrea. She is, if not a dreadful woman full stop (we don't get to know her other than in relation to Danny and Maeve), then a terrible stepmother; her behaviour is the cause of Danny and Maeve's losing the house. And yet...as a stepmother myself, loathe as I am to admit it, I found myself cringing at just how realistic she is. Andrea goes far further than I or any of my stepmum friends would, but she's recognisable; she's coming from a very real place. Similarly, the close sibling relationship between Danny and Maeve, and the problems that causes between Danny and his wife Celetste: very close to home, and not always comfortable reading.

The most interesting example of how true-to-life a lot of this is, though, is the thing that is at the very heart of the novel, and it's not something most people have any experience of, I don't think: the obsession with the lost house, years later. My own experience is probably fairly typical: my family no longer owns the beloved house of my childhood, but my parents disposed of it in a very normal way, my dad selling it and moving away. My sister and I shed a tear or two, and moved on. However, my husband's family lost a (palatial) house because of bankruptcy, and collectively they cannot let it go. It bores me to tears, sitting through family dinner after family dinner and hearing about the damn house, which they last lived in TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO. Suddenly, here in the book there's this other family doing the same thing; they weren't ready to let their house go either, it was taken from them. And, even better, there's Danny's wife, Celeste, who, just like me, is fed up with hearing about the house and says things like:

"'Jesus .... It's like you're Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?'"

Love this post (on The Dutch House). I’m in this world too, and constantly looking forward to my audiobook time. But, part of me thinks it’s not just the story, or the house, it could be any story, it just pulls me in, puts a little detail in to get my attention, and then keeps doing that.

>115 rachbxl: I enjoyed Baba Dunja too. The setting was so unusual and interesting. I have Bronsky's The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, I think, but have not yet read it. 99% of my books are in boxes, or I would be tempted to pull it out now.

When I read your review, I immediately thought of Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill. Not sure if it's because it's description of village life, or simply that I read them fairly close together. Enjoyed it as much as Baba Dunja.

>123 rachbxl: I have read Bel Canto a couple of times, although it is unusual for me to reread. I liked the writing and the character of the translator, Gen. In my review I wrote that "it is about a microcosm of people from different cultures and class, who are forced to interact in ways that would never have happened in the everyday world."

I've also read Run by Patchett, but it made little impression on me.

I loved your review of The Dutch House. Patchett is just so good at making the details ring true. Both of my parents had their own lost house stories, in my Father's case, a cottage on Martha's Vineyard that was sold by my Great-Grandparents for next to nothing, and on my Mother's, the family farm having been willed to a neighbor under shady circumstances (the shadiness of the circumstances being the general consensus of the relatives surprised not to have inherited, in all likelihood my Great-Uncle wanted the farm to go to someone who would farm the land and not just sell up, but who knows.)

>122 rachbxl: It was a literary blog—book, library, and publishing news, reviews, odds and ends. It was called Like Fire and I ended up joining forces with the good folks over at Open Letters Monthly, an online review journal, and it became a member of their blog "family." Those were really fun days—the book blogging community was cool and smart, and I made a lot of good connections that way. The archives, or at least part of them, are up at Open Letters' page, but they're not formatted the way the blog was—it was pretty good-looking, if I do say so myself, and customizing Wordpress is how I taught myself HTML. I should have archived it when it was live, but... I didn't. I gave it up around 2015 or so, when I just couldn't keep up the blog alongside my day job. (Though ironically, or maybe the opposite of ironically, it's what got me the day job in the first place.)

As for why that imagery, good question. I've always liked pictures of abandoned things, especially amusement parks and old house. I saw that old ferris wheel at Pripyat in a photo somewhere online and just took to it. No real significance there, though.

>124 dchaikin: I think I know what you mean, Dan. It's the way the story is told rather than the story itself which makes it so captivating. Strange, then, that I can't remember anything about Bel Canto, other than that I enjoyed it at the time, and similarly that Lisa (>125 labfs39:) says Run made little impression on her. I want to read more by Patchett because story-telling this good can't be a one-off, surely? (I can't imagine forgetting this story in a hurry).

>125 labfs39: I am quite sure it was because of you I read Bel Canto, Lisa.

>126 RidgewayGirl: Thanks, Kay. Interesting that your family has not one but two lost house stories.

>127 lisapeet: Thanks for the link! I'll be interested to have a look.

>127 lisapeet: Aha, found it (doh, the blog had its own FB page for many years):



The lettering comes from images of old torn down signs in Las Vegas.

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

It's been a long time since I had access to a 'proper' English-language library (the 2 I use at work are great for what they are, but they are limited), and one of the good things to come out of the coronavirus crisis is that I am now the proud holder of a completely legit card for Queens Public Library in New York, one of the very few libraries I have been able to find which allows overseas residents with no connection to the area to join (for $50 a year). I originally signed up for my daughter because we were in danger of running out of books to read aloud, as of course we haven't been able to visit the English children's library in Brussels for ages, and online deliveries have been so slow, but now that I've had time to peruse the adult catalogue too, I feel like a child in a sweet shop - all these books! I hadn't heard of this book, or the author, but I thought it looked interesting - and that's the beauty of a library e-book, after all; it can go straight back if it turns out to be a dud, and I go on to the next thing that catches my eye.

The Mountains Sing tells the story of a Vietnamese family in the twentieth century, including of course what we call 'the Vietnam war' (but which in the novel is called 'the second Indochina war', or 'the Resistance War against America'), but also covering other pieces of Vietnamese history with which I was less familiar - the Japanese occupation, the Great Famine of 1944-45, land reform in the 1950s, etc. Narrated by a grandmother and her granddaughter, it flits between various times in the grandmother's life - born into a wealthy land-owning family in central Vietnam, she ended up begging on the streets when her family's land was confiscated in the land reform - and the granddaughter's teenage years in the 1970s, when she lives with her grandmother in Hanoi. Nguyen Phan Que Mai does an excellent job of telling foreign readers about her country's history without it ever being didactic, and she weaves around the bones of that history a really compelling story. I don't read much non-fiction, but I really appreciate fiction which takes me to a time and place I'm not familiar with, and makes me go and look up facts to find out more.

Nguyen Phan Que Mai has previously published several books (poetry, fiction and non-fiction) in Vietnamese, and this is her first book written in English...and that is my little quibble with it. It is a wonderful story, but I found that it was sometimes a bit wooden, a bit stilted. It reads like something I might write in French (not that I could ever write a novel, and certainly not one like this), technically very good, but at times there would be something just a bit...off. It didn't stop me enjoying the story, but I was aware of it (to be fair, though, my job has given me a heightened awareness of this kind of thing, so others might not be bothered by it). I also wondered why mistakes like the occasional wrong preposition and missing article hadn't been edited (I even wondered if it was done intentionally, to give the author her true voice). Something else that bothered me a little was the frequent use of Vietnamese in the text - sure, to give a little local flavour, why not? The characters often react to something with a string of Vietnamese, which is then paraphrased in English, which I didn't really see the point of (even without this, I realise that they wouldn't be speaking English to each other!), but which I could live with. What I found surprising, though, was the use of Vietnamese characters in names; in other words, names aren't transliterated, which wouldn't have mattered that much except for the fact that by the end of the novel, I still couldn't tell you what the granddaughter's name sounds like, because it contains several Vietnamese letters I don't know! (I have tried to find out, to no avail).

>129 lisapeet: Thanks for that - I love it!

>123 rachbxl: whoa, I'm so behind on your thread! Another review that makes me want to order The Dutch House asap. You've had a string of interesting reads as always.

That’s really cool about the Queens public library. Enjoyed your review and curious about the language decisions. Why English? Sales? Topic? Was it maybe a kind of self-translation? Or was the author unable to get a translator for previous books? Interesting, regardless.

>132 AlisonY: Hi Alison! I'm so behind on so many threads... I think you'd like The Dutch House.

>134 rachbxl: Dan, I read an excerpt from an interview with Nguyen Phan Que Mai in which she said that she found her voice in English; she couldn't tell the stories she wanted to in Vietnamese. And she really does have a very distinctive voice...I just think that she deserved to be better served by a ruthless editor. It's also very much a book for a non-Vietnamese audience. I keep thinking about it; it got right under my skin.

The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler

In line with my new year's resolution to read more by authors whose work I have enjoyed in the past, I pick up Anne Tyler books whenever I see them. This was another library e-book.

Widower Aaron, the narrator, works as an editor in his family's small publishing firm, whose trademark publications are a series like the 'Dummy's Guides', only smarter. So far, this had lots of bells ringing; surely this is the story of Macon in Tyler's (much earlier) The Accidental Tourist, all over again? The similarities only go so far, though, and actually I really enjoyed Tyler's second riff on this character (I enjoyed the first one, too, but it was interesting to see her take it in another direction).

Aaron walks us through his life with his wife, Dorothy, from their first meeting, through their awkward courtship, their quiet wedding, their marriage, and then her sudden, untimely death and his struggles to deal with it, and, months later, her reappearances to him (hence 'the beginner's goodbye', because it turned out not to be goodbye for real). As usual, Tyler's characters are lifelike, and likeable for it, and her flair for putting her finger on what makes humans tick is in evidence again. Aaron describes a very believable relationship, one which was at times difficult, frustrating, but also one which gave meaning to his life, and I felt great compassion for him, as well as for Dorothy. There is a happy ending, but a bitter-sweet one, which I felt hit just the right note.

This is another of those quiet little books, and one which I very much enjoyed.

Tyler is an author I want to try, but still haven’t Good reminder.

>136 dchaikin: surely this is the story of...

That's the fear I always have when starting another Tyler novel. But it always seems to come out right in the end somehow. She keeps finding new things in the same old pile of material.

I haven't come across that one yet: must look out for it.

I always enjoy anything I read by Anne Tyler, but also tend to put years between her novels for no good reason.

Enjoy the library access! When I was living in Germany I had access to two libraries, one Canadian and one American. It was a great luxury.

>82 rachbxl: I'm late in posting, but really liked your review on Heidi. I have this book on my ebook, but never attempted to read it.
And I kind of envy you reading your best childhood books with your daughter. My children seem so far from the books I liked when I was their age... But I managed to read Little Women with M'ni Raton during this confinement time. It is not my favourite childhood book, but it was nice to watch her reactions, and to re-read this story.
Maybe I should try Heidi with her?

>136 dchaikin: Dan, The Beginner's Goodbye reminded me in feel of Our Souls at Night, which I think you said was a book that left space for reflection. So you might like this one too. That said, I've enjoyed pretty much everything of Tyler's that I've read recently (I didn't get on with her when I first tried 20 years ago).

>137 thorold: This is such a short novel that I didn't think Tyler would have time to do anything with it that was significantly different...but she did, and actually seeing her take the same material off in a different direction added to my enjoyment.

>138 RidgewayGirl: I had been aware for a while that there were several writers I'd enjoyed over the last few years, and had wanted to read more, but never did, so a few months ago I looked back at my reading since I joined LT and made a list of writers to re-visit. Like all my reading plans, it was an idea, something I might like to do, rather than something I wanted to hold myself to, but it's working out nicely. So far this year I've read other books by Ann Patchett, Natacha Appanah and Kent Haruf, amongst others.

>139 raton-liseur: Thanks! I feel very lucky that my daughter's tastes are so far similar to my own. Heidi was such an important book to me that I read it aloud to her with a degree of trepidation, and I was delighted when she liked it so much (and even the evening she spent sobbing over poor Heidi's fate was good, in a way, because I could see that she was carried away by the book). Give it a go! I hope you both enjoy it (though, as I said in my review, I'm not sure what an adult who hasn't read it before would make of it).

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

I feel that I need to let my thoughts about this book settle, as I only finished it this morning, but I know that when I do that I often end up not writing anything at all, and in this case I want to leave myself some record, albeit not a very coherent one.

Hard to say what this book is 'about'. Many, many things. Easier to say when and where: Abyssinia, during the second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-37), a war in which, though largely forgotten by history, women fought alongside men. Two of these women, Hirut and Aster, are two of the main characters: Hirut, the servant-girl, and Aster, her cruel mistress, leave those roles behind on the battlefield...and that leads me on to one of the things I loved about this book, namely, the way nothing is permanent, things slip and shift. Things are not always what they seem; a soldier may appear to be obeying orders, but his or her motivation may be different to that of their officer's. Another of the main characters is an Italian soldier, Ettore Navarro, a photographer whose job is to record the Italian war effort - but Navarro is Jewish, at a time when Jews are being rounded up in fascist Italy, and, forced to depend on the whims of his colonel, Fucelli, to avoid being sent back to Italy, he duly photographs gruesome executions and other illustrations of the greatness of the Italian army. For himself, he photographs local people, and descriptions of these photos are inserted every now and then into the narrative. But these are only snapshots; what do they really tell us? Because one of the main messages I took away is how things, everything, slide in and out of focus depending on exactly what is in the frame, and on who is looking. In addition to the photographs, sections entitled 'Chorus' are inserted periodically, with the chorus commenting on the narrative in the first person plural, expressing hopes and wishes for the characters, but unable to intervene. Even before the first 'Chorus' interlude, I had been reminded of Greek tragedy, for it was clear early on that the characters, full of action, move within the limits imposed by fate.

I don't often re-read, but this is a book that would certainly benefit from it. There are so many threads, and Mengiste is so skilful in the way she handles them, that I think I would get much more out of it a second (and a third) time, which is not to say that I didn't get much the first time. This is a wonderful book, and the biggest star among a lot of bright stars (the characters, the storyline, the sense of place) is Mengiste's writing. I read Beneath the Lion's Gaze, which I enjoyed well enough, but The Shadow King is in another league; it is exquisite.

>141 rachbxl: Based on this review I've just borrowed the ebook from my library.

>142 wandering_star: I hope you enjoy it. I look forward to seeing what you make of it.

Ooh...that's a great and very compelling review of The Shadow King. It seems to be eligible for this year's Booker Prize longlist, and, based on your comments about it, I hope that it makes it.

I heard her speak on a panel and she—and the book—sounded fascinating. She talked a bit about how she fell into her research for it, which was a really cool path. Thanks for reminding me about it.

>144 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. I'm glad I got my thoughts down when I did, because I don't think they would be any more ordered now, and at least they were fresh then.

>145 lisapeet: I was curious about how she fell into it, and did a bit of reading - fascinating, as you say.

Police by Jo Nesbo
Translated from the Norwegian by Don Barlett

This had been languishing on my TBR shelves for a while, ever since I picked it up in a second-hand bookshop, waiting for when I needed something gripping but not too challenging. Gripping it certainly was, though I'm not sure about not too challenging; I'm not sure I managed to follow the whole plot, though that didn't stop me enjoying it, and I do like Harry Hole. I like him (I say this to lay the ground for my next review) because he's not black-and-white. He's basically a good man (he's a policeman! Hmm, but there are several policemen here who really aren't good...), but he's not entirely a good man. He's nuanced. So are the other characters.

I have read several Harry Hole books, but not in order, and I must have skipped at least one before this one, but it didn't matter as everything is explained. It had been ages since I last read one, and it will probably be ages before the next, but they are always good, reliable page-turners.

The Snakes by Sadie Jones

Bea and Dan decide to take 3 months out from their working lives in London (she is a badly-paid psychologist, and he, a would-be artist, is an estate agent) to go travelling in Europe. They can't really afford it, but then, they can't afford much on their salaries, not even their everyday life (and holier-than-thou Bea has forced Dan to work for an ethical estate agency, where he gets less commission). The plan is to stop off at Bea's brother's hotel in France before moving on to wherever they fancy...except that they never get any further, because they get drawn into a murky web of money, deceit, lies, violence, addiction and probably a few more things.

My problem with this book is that the characters are all utterly unlikeable. Even the ones who, I think, are supposed to be nice are unlikeable (I found Bea insufferable, and as for Dan, if he called his wife 'babe' one more time, I was going to throw the book across the room), and the ones who are not supposed to be likeable are so one-dimensional that they are like cartoon villains. Not a redeeming feature between them. That being the case, I found it hard to care what happened to any of them, and I only finished the book because it was there.

>148 rachbxl: I've not heard any good reviews about this book, which is a shame as when she's at her best I think Sadie Jones is an excellent writer.

>141 rachbxl: great post on The Shadow King. Noting.

I’ll pass on The Snakes.

>141 rachbxl: I've read too many books about war lately, I think, so this would not be an immediate read, but I'll keep it in mind if/when it's available in France.

>148 rachbxl: Agreed, Alison; I thought The Outcast was superb, and I think I enjoyed Small Wars too. And to be fair, there are flashes of excellence in The Snakes too. Just not in the characters.

The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld

One of those lucky finds. I had heard of neither the book, nor the author, when I stumbled across it as a library e-book. The blurb quoted Margaret Atwood as saying that Denfeld's work in 'astounding' (or some such), so I had to find out for myself.

The Butterfly Girl is actually the second book featuring 'the child finder', Private Investigator Naomi Cottle, but I only found that out as I was nearing the end when I started looking for info about Denfeld, and it really didn't matter that I hadn't read the first. In The Butterfly Girl, Naomi hasn't accepted any cases for the last year, instead spending her time searching for her younger sister, left behind, to Naomi's eternal shame, when Naomi managed to escape from the house in which the two of them had been held for years. The search has brought Naomi and her husband Jerome to Portland, Oregon, where Naomi meets street child Celia; the narration flits between the two characters.

If I say that this book is about child abuse and children sleeping rough, I'll make it sound like a grim book, but it isn't. Denfeld doesn't shy away from recounting exactly how these children live, and yes, it's grim in parts (how could it not be?). I want to say that I found it realistic, but fortunately I'm in no position to say. It SEEMED realistic, though, and that's what sent me off to look for Denfeld's story. Sure enough, she has a background of abuse and lived on the streets for a while as a child. I read an excellent essay of hers on the subject in which she says that life on the streets was as awful as we might imagine, if not worse, but that there is also hope, beauty and kindness on the streets, and that comes across clearly in The Butterfly Girl. The gentleness with which the street children treat each other is striking. Celia's refuge is Portland library (it was Denfeld's refuge too, apparently); she surrounds herself with books about butterflies, and the butterflies in her mind accompany her whenever life gets too tough.

I really enjoyed this. The story is gripping and well told, and the characters, particularly Naomi and Celia, are great creations. I appreciated a look into a world I know little about and wouldn't know where to start looking into on my own, and I appreciated both the grit (no glossing over) and the suggestion, which I wouldn't dare make myself, that there is always hope. I can't wait to get my hands on the first Naomi Cottle (which, presumably, doesn't feature the wonderful Celia, which is a shame).

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet

A large group of old college friends get together decades later, renting out a big house for the summer. The children sleep all together in the attic and do their own thing, distancing themselves from the adults and their drinking and drug-taking. The scene is set for a long, uneventful summer, and just as I was wondering how Millet was going to get a novel out of it, a hurricane hits. It soon becomes clear that this isn't just your average hurricane; this is climate apocalypse. The children know that action is needed, but the parents refuse to leave the rented house, so the children set off alone to find a safer place.

There's lots packed into it this relatively short novel. The style is unusual but I found it effective; it's narrated in the first person plural (we, the children) by one of the older children, Evie (15 at the start of the book). The children all have names, but the parents don't. There is inter-generational conflict, with the children at one point rounding on the parents to ask why they never did anything to prevent this, and with the children taking action while the parents say, 'I thought we had longer'. There are Biblical allusions a-plenty. There is the disintegration of society in a post-apocalyptic world. And there's Millet's great writing, telling a story that kept me interested from start to finish.

>154 rachbxl: Sounds very different - going to note that one.

>154 rachbxl: I’m curious about this one and thought about getting in on audio. (I hesitated last time and went with a different book. )

The Sacrament by Olaf Olafsson

Another of those beautifully quiet novels which leaves a lot of room for reflection and in which silence - what is not said - and inaction are as important as what is said and done.

Sister Johanna Marie, an elderly French nun, is sent by the Cardinal back to Iceland, where she was sent some 20 years earlier to investigate allegations of abuse in a church school. While she was there the first time, the priest who ran the school, the alleged abuser, fell to his death from the church tower, an apparent suicide. This time she is summoned because a man has come forward saying he wants to talk about the incident, but only with her. A child at the time of the incident, he witnessed the fall from the broom cupboard in the school in which he had been locked, and in which Sister Johanna Marie later found him. The journey back to Iceland triggers painful memories of the first trip there, and of Sister Johanna Marie's pre-convent life as a student in Paris, and her intensely close friendship with Halla, an Icelandic student with whom she shared a room, and who taught her Icelandic in return for French lessons (this familiarity with Icelandic is why Sister Johanna Marie was selected to go to Iceland to investigate). The three strands - the present day, the first trip to Iceland, and her time with Halla - are interwoven together so closely that at times it is hard to separate them, which rather than irritating me, which it could have done, struck me as a believable (we don't sit down and think about one thing to its end, and only then move on to something else). I did get a bit mixed up at some points and had to go back and work out which thread it was, but this is an outpouring of memory from an anguished older woman, after all, and if I were sitting opposite her, a real person, while she told me all this, it would be completely natural for me to say at times, 'Hang on, is this the first trip again? Are you back in Paris now?', etc. In other words, rather than bothering me, I found it lifelike.

I'm still thinking about Sister Johanna Marie, whose quiet life at the convent revolves around her rose garden and her dog, George Harrison. This quiet life at first seems to be a contented one, the one she wanted, but as she tells her story we start to question that; we see that it is a life based on things not said and things not done, and we see the pivotal role played by a senior member of the Catholic church, one who acted here where he shouldn't have done, but who at other times, when he should have done so, failed to speak or act at all, like so many of his colleagues.

The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld

The prequel to The Butterfly Girl, which I posted about in >153 rachbxl:, which takes place about a year earlier. Naomi is already well-established as a private investigator specialising in finding children who have disappeared, hence her nickname among parents and the law enforcement community of 'the child finder'. However, it's clear that as much as looking for the children, Naomi is also looking for herself, not in a New Age-y 'trying to find myself' way, but because she has no memories before the age of 10. Her memories start with her running across a strawberry field at night, terrified, escaping from something or someone (but what? Who?), and being rescued by a group of migrant workers who drove for hours to leave her with a safe sheriff (why not take her to the local sheriff where she was found?) Now aged almost 30, Naomi still can't stop running.

With all of this in the background, Naomi investigates her cases, and in this novel that means the disappearance of 5-year old Madison, who went missing from the Oregon forests while on a trip to choose a Christmas tree with her parents. Oregon is Denfeld's home state, and she writes about it with great love, so vividly that I could smell the forest smells and hear the silence, feel the wilderness around me.

I liked this novel for many reasons: Denfeld's writing, fresh, clean, flowing and often breath-takingly beautiful; the sense of place; the connection with nature; the well-developed characters; and something else which I'll mention in a moment. However, there's no getting away from the fact that this is a novel about child abuse. Denfeld comes from a background of abuse herself, and she says in interviews that it is important to her that victims, 'even fictional victims', be left with their dignity, and that their pain be honoured, though she says she makes a point of never writing about it in a way which is graphic or exploitative. As I said in >153 rachbxl:, I read an interview with her in which she talks about hope and beauty, how even when she was living a desperate life on the streets as a teenager, hope and beauty remained, and just as in The Butterfly Girl, that comes across strongly here, and helps to make The Child Finder a beautiful novel about an ugly subject.

>154 rachbxl: It's been a few months since I read A Children's Bible, but I'm still thinking over how Millet did it. To write a novel about our failures to address global climactic change, leaving it to the next generations to deal with, and then to structure the story with Biblical underpinnings and make that whole thing readable, with characters who breathe, is a remarkable achievement.

>158 rachbxl: Another great review. I have just one Olafsson left (perhaps a collection, too?), but something about the pandemic and other current events seem to have put me off anything more than crime novels. Trying to work my way back....

>159 RidgewayGirl: Exactly - and what's more, to do all that in so few pages! It's really not a long novel.

>160 avaland: Thanks, Lois. I have a couple more of Olafsson's books left to read, and he definitely falls into the category of 'writers I've enjoyed and want to read more of this year' that I made part of my new year's reading resolution. What I'm finding at the moment is that books have to be immediately compelling for me to read them; I haven't the energy to put in an effort right now.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Another random e-book pick from the library. I knew nothing about this book or its author, which is perhaps surprising given that it has over 500 reviews on LT and was a US bestseller (neither of which would have encouraged me to read it!) It turns out to be about a flu-like pandemic which sweeps the globe with devastating speed, the ensuing collapse of society, and the aftermath, which takes us 20 years into the future.

Leading on perfectly from what I said to avaland in >161 rachbxl:, this was the perfect book for me now, not so much because it is topical (although that did make it interesting), but because it drew me in right away and kept me reading, without requiring much of me. It's well written and carefully put together, and I liked the way St John Mandel handled things at character-level, their different responses and reactions, the way they change over the years, the way they relate to each other and to outsiders, the way some of them fight to preserve music and culture, whilst others just fight, and whilst there are arguably much more important things to be concerned with (20 years on, society is still in tatters - but maybe music and culture really are the most important things?) On a bigger level, the view of a post-apocalyptic world, I'm not sure there's much new here; this felt like a re-hash of 'The Walking Dead' and every other similar thing I've ever read or seen. Unlikely to make my best-of-the-year list (or even best-of-the-quarter), but a good entertaining read.

>162 rachbxl: I agree with your assessment re entertaining, not super memorable, but the opening scene is one of my favorites of the past few years.

>161 rachbxl: Interesting you should say that about needing books to be immediately compelling. Other than a few short stories, I've not been able to read anything but crime novels for the last month or so. And some of those have put me off...quite possibly because they weren't immediately compelling....yes, that might be it. I have had the Mandel since publication but did not get to it (usually a lot of hype around a book turns me off), perhaps I'll consider it....

>164 avaland: Interesting you should say that about needing books to be immediately compelling.

I see a question for the avid reader in there

>163 lisapeet: Yes, I liked that scene too. With a little distance, I'm coming to appreciate how cinematographic Station Eleven is. Sometimes I read a book and roll my eyes, because I get the feeling that as it was written, the writer was already seeing it on the big screen. That's not what I mean here, though. I mean how well she creates scenes; that first scene, but also others, less striking and less pivotal to the plot, but still, all very vivid in my mind.

>164 avaland: I generally have the same reflex as you, i think - to reach for a crime novel when I can't settle on anything else, but I was aware even before coronavirus that it didn't always work as a strategy. As you say, some of them put me off. Over the last few months I've had more reading time than I've had for years, which is fabulous, but whilst I started out with high hopes ('I'm only going to read in my other languages, this is the moment to read all those Polish novels I've got stacked up at home...and to finish the Neapolitan quartet in Italian', etc etc), they quite soon tailed off. I'm tired! The last few months haven't been easy for most of us (I know I've had it much easier than many, and it's still been tough), and I decided I had to give myself a break, at least on the reading front. I'm reading exclusively for pleasure at the moment, for escapism, and I'm being quite ruthless about putting things aside. The way I choose what I read and when I read it has changed as well, thanks to my new supply of library e-books. There's nothing to lose! I try things, and if they work, great. If not, straight back they go. The holds system adds an element of randomness which I'm enjoying; I've always maintained that there's a time to read every book, but when my hold comes through, it's now or, if not never, then who knows when. Anyway, what I'm getting round to saying in this lengthy comment is that I've noticed that for the most part the books that work for me at the moment are, yes, those that are immediately compelling. Usually I'll put in the extra effort if I'm not grabbed immediately, but right now, I haven't got the energy. Although there are exceptions, of course, like Little Gods by Meng Jin, which I'm reading now, and which didn't draw me in immediately, but which I've stuck with because it's relatively short, and a third of the way through I'm already glad I did.

>165 Nickelini: And my answer is all ready to be copy-pasted!

>165 Nickelini:, >166 rachbxl: Yes, if you don't mind, i may work this into a July question....

>167 avaland: No, of course I don't mind!

In the Woods by Tana French

Hmm, wouldn't you know it? It seems that 'immediately compelling' doesn't work after all. This one was immediately compelling; the first few chapters drew me right in, and I settled down to enjoy it. Having enjoyed a couple of French's later books well enough (this is her first), I though I knew what I was in for - probably not the greatest book I'll ever read, but a good gripping read. However, that wore off quite soon (what is the opposite of compelling?), but I stuck with it because I assumed it was a dip in the middle and that the last third would be enjoyable. I should just have put it down, but hindsight is a great thing. I wouldn't mind, but it was over 500 pages long.

Dublin murder squad detective Rob Ryan, the narrator, and his partner Cassie Maddox take on a new case, the murder of a 12-year old girl in some woods near her home in a small town on the outskirts of Dublin which happens to be where Ryan grew up too. As a 12-year old, he was involved in a major incident in these same woods, when his 2 best friends disappeared for ever, and he was found bloody and terrifed, clinging to a tree. His family moved away and sent him to school in England, and he started to use a different name. Somehow, on joining first the police and later the murder squad, he never thought to reveal his true identity. Nor does he see that his background should preclude him from taking on this new case. I see that if he had done the right thing and refused the case there would be no novel, but he lost my every sympathy right there. Unfortunately, Rob Ryan is a man one needs to feel sympathy for, because he goes on and on about what's going on in his head, and if I had no time for him at the outset, it only got worse. I don't always need to like, or agree with, characters, but I couldn't be doing with his self-absorbed ramblings. I think there is probably a much better novel lurking within this one, with many of Ryan's thoughts cut (we're not taking philosophical discourse here, more like the tedious navel-gazing of an immature bloke).

I did like the setting and the Irish-ness of it. I could hear my Irish colleagues speaking when I read the dialogue. This is something I've enjoyed in the other books I've read by Tana French, and for that alone I would give her another chance...but next time I'll be ruthless and stop right away if I'm not enjoying it.

Little Gods by Meng Jin

Definitely not immediately compelling, this one, but I decided to persist anyway, as it's not a long novel. It never really worked for me and I wasn't sorry to get to the end...but I keep thinking about it. Without my realising, it got under my skin. Told from several different viewpoints, it's the story of a Chinese woman, Su Lan, who overcame her humble beginnings in a mountain village to become the best student in her city high school class, get into Beijing University, and become a brilliant physicist, even going on to achieve her dream of emigrating to the USA to work at a university. After Su Lan's death, her daughter travels to China to try to piece together her mother's life. One of the recurring themes is language; characters from different parts of China can't understand each other because one speaks Mandarin, and the other, a local dialect. Su Lan is a brilliant scientist, but her English is poor. Her daughter speaks English, but her rusty Mandarin comes back bit by bit when she is in China...but she can't read or write more than the basics. Interesting. I think I'll be mulling over this one for a while.

Glad you found something that worked! After abandoning several crime novels, I've gone back to Paul Yoon for that compassion "thing" we share. It worked.

>171 avaland: I haven't read any Paul Yoon yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so before too long.

Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler is a great writer, particularly good at 'normal' people and everyday life. I would really like to read a book in which she tells a different story, though; this is at least the third time I've read a version of this particular story! Main character: a 40-something man, lives alone, good neighbour, rigid housekeeping schedule, often bemused by people's behaviour, not wildly successful with women because struggles to take things other than at face value, close to his family (slightly dominant sisters, no brothers), not terribly successful professionally. Last time I read a Tyler re-hash, I admired the way she used the same material in a slightly different way, but I don't want to read it a third time!

That's not to say that this is a bad novel; it really isn't. But someone who hasn't read both The Accidental Tourist and The Beginner's Goodbye recently (and possibly others in this vein that I haven't read) might enjoy it more.

>169 rachbxl:

I felt exactly the same way about In the Woods. I also remember being disappointed in how the whole murder mystery was resolved.

>174 Nickelini: Yes, I felt that the whole murder mystery just sort of fizzled out - and we never find out what happened to Rob's missing friends, which I thought was odd.

>170 rachbxl: I keep thinking about Little Gods and my reaction to it. I think it is a corona victim, by which I mean that it's probably a book I would really enjoy in normal times. But right now it required a bit more of me that I'm able to give, so I couldn't get into it (this is my point about 'immediately compelling'; I need to be drawn in by the book at the moment, whereas normally I'm not so passive so I'll invest more without the book having to do all the work).

The Royal Abduls by Ramiza Shamoun Koya

Amina, born in the US to Indian parents, is a biologist specialising in hybrid zones (areas where two distinct species come together, merge, mate and produce offspring of mixed ancestry). She walks away from a faltering romance on the West Coast to take up a job in a lab in Washington DC, where her brother Mo lives with his (white) wife and their 11-year old son, Omar. Amina is surprised to find Omar affecting an Indian accent and claiming a royal past for the Abdul family, and as she builds up a relationship with this nephew she never really knew until now, she comes to understand that Omar is trying to find his identity, like everyone else. This is a warm, funny book about family and individuals, about immigrants (living, like Amina's insects, in a hybrid zone) and about love. It's also a serious book about life in the USA for people like the Abduls in the years immediately following 9/11.

This was another random library e-book (I hadn't heard of the book or the writer), and I loved it. It was a joy to read, whilst giving me a lot to think about almost without my noticing. It has some very important messages, serious messages, which Ramiza Shamoun Koya certainly doesn't shy away from, but she has a light touch which means that the story is never held up by the message. This is Ramiza Shamoun Koya's first novel, published earlier this year, and when I looked her up, hoping to discover that she was already working on a second, I was genuinely saddened to learn that she died of cancer shortly after The Royal Abduls came out. She has such a fresh voice; I wish we could have heard more from her.

Nice review of The Royal Abduls, Rachel; I'll be on the lookout for it. That's a shame that Koya died so young.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Another one read aloud to my daughter. As I've said before, I don't record all the read-alouds (though that would certainly be an easy way to boost my reading figures for the year, this lockdown year in particular). I was going to say that I only record the longer ones, but even that's not true. I record some of the longer ones, on a purely subjective basis, then.

My daughter loved this, as I remember loving it. As an adult I didn't love it, but I did enjoy it. I found it interesting that this time all the magic had gone - there is no magic, it's just common sense! Yet for my 6-year old, the magic was there, of course. I was also irritated by the transcription of Yorkshire speech - everything that the locals say is in 'Yorkshire', not the odd word or two to make the point, but the whole thing. I'm able to do something which passes for Yorkshire well enough (though wouldn't be recognisable as such to a Yorkshireman or woman), coming from just the other side of the Pennines myself, but I would think that some readers must find it hard to understand, let alone read out loud. However, I don't remember being bothered by this when I read it myself as a child.

Antéchrista by Amélie Nothomb

I have long had a love-hate relationship with Amélie Nothomb, and I hadn't read anything of hers for years because the hate side was winning by a long way. Antéchrista may just have tipped the scales so far in hate's favour that I'll never try anything by Nothomb again. The narrator, Blanche, is a 16-year old who lives with her parents in a flat in Brussels, and who has just started university there. She has never had a real friend, and is drawn to another 'young' first year student, Christa, who comes in by train every day from her family home in the Eastern Cantons. Blanche's parents are enchanted by Christa and insist that she move into their home to spare her the journey. Christa, superficially friendly, is a nasty piece of work, two-faced and manipulative (hence the novel's title), who has decided to make Blanche suffer, but if Blanche complains to her parents they refuse to believe her because the Christa they see is charming. There is much in this short novel I found unconvincing, and this most of all - Blanche's parents siding so completely with a 16-year old they hardly know, to the point of insisting she move in with them, meaning that their own daughter not only has to share her room with this girl she didn't want to live with them, but has to give up her bed for her and sleep on a camp bed! Perhaps there is something terribly clever here, but if so, I missed it, and the 150 pages felt like a lot more.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Philips

A recommendation from avaland's thread a while ago.

The novel opens with the abduction of two young sisters from the town of Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky, a coastal city on the tip of the Kamchatsky peninsula in Russia's far east. Subsequent chapters are more liked linked short stories, one per month in the year following the girls' disappearance, involving different characters in the community...but in which community? For in Kamchatsky there are Russians (white) and natives, originally reindeer herders up in the northern tundra, with their own languages and cultures, easily distinguished from the Russians by their darker skin and distinctive features. The chapters weave in and out of the different communities, and characters from one chapter make passing appearances, or are mentioned, in others, in a way that ties up loose ends from earlier chapters without those characters having the main focus on them again.

I really enjoyed reading this. It took me to a place I knew nothing about, and turned it into somewhere I feel like I know now, both the city and some of the northen villages. Philips creates a magnificent sense of place, and her characters are lifelike and at home in the environment she creates. After graduating from Barnard, Julia Philips spent a year doing research in Kamchatka on a Fullbright scholarship. Originally researching tourism and investment in Kamchatka, she became interested in everyday harm or hurt against women, not in terms of trauma, but in terms of getting on with everyday life, and this interest became Disappearing Earth, a novel in which all the major characters are women, women who have been left by men, let down by men who have stayed, whose men have left them by dying, women who find their own ways to get on with their lives.

Highly recommended.

Votes for Women! The Pioneers and Heroines of Female Suffrage by Jenni Murray

A short book which tells the story of several of the key figures in female suffrage in the UK - Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst, Constance Markievicz, Nancy Astor. Remarkable stories about remarkable women, told by the inimitable Jenni Murray, whose engaging style draws the reader right in and whose explanations (of the difference between suffragettes and suffragists, for example) are clear but anything but laboured. I no longer have access to the library e-book, which is a shame as there is a brief section at the end on one other woman, who doesn't appear with the other women in the blurb about the book online - the composer who taught the suffragettes to throw stones, a little detail I wanted to include here.

>180 rachbxl: I’ve been vaguely thinking for a while that I ought to catch up a bit with Nothomb. Maybe not then!

>182 rachbxl: ...the composer Dame Ethel Smyth? (I see her father was a senior officer in the Artillery, she might well have known a thing or two about ballistics)

>183 thorold: That's her! Thanks.

Subduction by Kristen Millares Young

Claudia, a Mexican-born anthropologist who has spent years forgetting her roots and making herself American, turns up in Makah territory (the far northwest of the Pacific Northwest) to do research. Running from all sorts of things, most recently a broken marriage and betrayal by her sister, she throws herself into her work with one particular Makah elder, Maggie, who, since Claudia's last visit, has been joined in her trailer by her son Peter, who (also running away) has spent years living off the reservation. And yet, determined as she is that this particular research is going to put her firmy on track for tenure, Claudia starts to do things that are not entirely ethical - she edits transcripts of conversations before presenting them to Maggie, and she sleepwalks into a relationship with Peter. Maggie, a hoarder, is preoccupied with the fact that Peter needs to inherit a particular Makah song which is his due, a song which confers status and leadership and which has been 'stolen' by his cousins. Instead of observing and recording, Claudia becomes closely involved in helping Maggie organise the ceremony which is necessary for the song to pass to Peter.

This was really a glimpse of another world for me, in particular culturally, but also geographically. It's also a a reflection on all sorts of burning issues - identity, the imposing of one culture over another (Claudia being of Mexican origin adds another layer), the manipulation of native people by researchers, amongst others. It could have been a great book, but it didn't work for me. I am carefully not saying 'it isn't a great book' because this could well be another victim of my need for less challenging books at the moment. I want to lose myself in stories, and this required more of me than that. I don't re-read books that I enjoy, so I'm very unlikely to re-read one that I didn't particularly like, but I hope others here will give it a chance.

I want to lose myself in stories... I hear you! Did you see the question (for Avid Readers) about how one's reading or book acquisition has changed during the last 4 or 5 months?

ETA. I picked up Olaf Olafsson's only short story collection yesterday, just thinking I would sample one story and six stories later. The collection, Valentines: Stories are about relationships and is in keeping with his other writing... thus, the spell he has over me still holds.

>186 avaland: I did see it - and yesterday or the day before I finally managed to answer it! I didn't mention book acquisition though; I don't think I've bought any for myself as I've been revelling in my library membership, but my purchases for my daughter have gone through the roof - and she reads them all.

As for Valentines: Stories, I love it when that happens. I haven't read that one... I've found myself a good story to be lost in, Emma Straub's All Adults Here. It's light (which right now is good!), and it has me nodding along in recognition as it's so well-observed.

>187 rachbxl: Are you reading it as part of the NYPL & WNYC virtual bookclub? Or just taking advantage of the no-wait check out?

https://www.wnyc.org/shows/all-of-it/get-lit

>188 ELiz_M: I didn’t even know about that! That probably explains why my hold suddenly came though much more quickly than expected.

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

A read-aloud with my daughter. As this was a re-read of one of my favourite childhood books, I approached it with trepidation, but, as with Heidi earlier this year, I needn't have worried. Again, I'm not sure what I would make of it if I came at it for the first time now, but I really enjoyed re-visiting Avonlea. I was struck as I read by how easily images from the series "Anne with an 'e'" popped into my head, not annoyingly, but fittingly. I'm always wary of watching screen versions of favourite books in case my own impressions are erased by someone else's vision, and that's what happened here; I no longer have my childhood images, which is a shame, but I don't mind too much because what I have from the series (that Anne, that Marilla, that Matthew, that Diana, that Gilbert, but also Green Gables, the countryside) seems to fit. The other thing that struck me on re-reading was how as a child I failed to understand how much Marilla loves Anne; it's so obvious to me now, but it passed me by as a child.

My daughter loved it, and wants more, but I am insisting on a break! We have gone on to Roald Dahl's Matilda instead.

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

The perfect book for now, just what I needed. It's easily readable and, whilst there's not much by way of plot (that's an observation, not a criticism), it's all about the characters, who are up there with Anne Tyler's as extremely perceptively drawn real people and whom I feel I've known all my life. I know I've had some 'corona casualties' in my reading recently, books I'm sure I'd have enjoyed more at another time, but I've also had a few like this one, which I've appreciated more because of my current need for well-written escapism. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel was another.

New York teenager Cecelia is sent to live with her grandmother, Astrid, in a small town upstate after some trouble at school. It's supposed to be a quiet life, and widowed Astrid is assumed to have nothing more to do than look after her granddaughter. And maybe it would have turned out like that, had not Astrid, on her way to pick Cecelia up from the station, not witnessed a road accident in which an old acquaintance was killed by a runaway school bus. This shocks Astrid into the realisation that life is for living now; there's no point waiting, because it might be you under the next bus, and so she decides it's time to tell her family about her long-term lesbian lover. Meanwhile, Astrid's single daughter Porter announces that she is pregnant by a sperm donor, and others have secrets to tell or hide, or at least decide what to do with. How well do we know other people, even our family? Do we really see the people around us, or do we just see what we want to see, and does it matter?

It's funny and warm, and I kept wanting to get back to it, less to see what happened next than to spend some more time in the environment created by Straub. If I have a quibble with it, it's the throwing in of quite so many contemporary social issues - Grandma coming out as a lesbian, young girl meeting an older man who posed as a younger guy online, one character is trans, pregnancy by sperm donor, etc etc. I'm not saying this spoiled the book for me, but it did have me wondering how all this could be happening around these same few characters all at the same time.

>190 rachbxl: It's quite a long book, isn't it (at least to read aloud)? I was reading it to my daughter last year, but then she wanted to get back into reading novels herself so we've still got the last quarter to go. I found Anne's dialogue quite tiring on the voice box to actually read aloud.

>192 AlisonY: Yes! It’s taken us a few weeks, and it would have taken a lot longer were we not at home so much. In the middle of one of Anne’s spiels my daughter stopped me and said, ‘Mummy, there are lots of things I like about Anne, but i could never be bosom friends with someone who talks so much!’ (I sometimes wonder what reading all these old books is doing for her English - as we don’t live in an English-speaking environment she has no way of knowing when things are old-fashioned!)

Cross and Burn by Val McDermid

I like Val McDermid, a lot (she has got me out of many a reading slump), so I pounce on any of her books I see at booksales and in second hand shops, which is how I came to have this one. It’s the 8th book in the Carol Jordan and Tony Hill series, and as i’ve only read one other in the series (the second, Wire in the Blood), the idea was that this one would hang around on my TBR shelves until I’d read my way to it. I’m not entirely without restraint, so it did sit there for quite a few months, but this week I knew McDermid was just what I needed, not because I was in a slump but because of this current need I have for engrossing stories. I don’t think that reading it out of context was a problem, but it’s really made me want to read the ones leading up to it now!

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

Several members of CR have read this recently and enjoyed it, so I didn't hesitate to read it when I got the chance. Just over 30, Casey is at a crisis point in her life. She's been working on a novel which she's no longer sure is going anywhere for over 6 years, still relying on waitressing for income. She lives in a barely-converted potting shed in her brother's friend's garden, paying less rent in exchange for walking the dog. Broken relationships, crippling debt, no prospects of anything improving - this isn't how life was supposed to go...and to top it all, she now has her mother's sudden death to cope with.

Since finishing this a couple of days ago, I've been mulling over why I liked it so much. One reason is Casey's voice; she turns what could easily have been a pity party into something fresh, funny, engaging. She is articulate and intelligent, but in a natural way; King does a brilliant job with her, and it never sounds forced. I also liked the setting - yes, the physical setting (Cambridge MA), but I really mean the social setting, all the writers, some who have made it, many wannabes. We read books where the characters are mainly doctors, or teachers, or anthropologists - why not writers? But I have come to the conclusion that what I most liked was this: I have been noticing more than usual over the last few months that many of the books I read seem to have a 'main' story, and then there are one or more bolt-on bits, in some cases as if the writer felt that the main storyline wasn't enough, in others as if they felt absolutely had to shoe-horn that trans character, that difficult relationship with a mother, that gay friend in at all costs. Here the various different threads all come together seamlessly, making a perfect whole. I felt exhilarated, full of life, when I finished it.

The Margot Affair by Sanae Lemoine

Seventeen-year old Margot is the secret daughter of a French politician, who still lives an outwardly respectable life with his 'first' family, visiting Margot and her actress mother when he can in their Paris flat which he pays for. In this coming-of-age story Margot, for the first time not letting her parents call the tune, does things which set off a chain of wide-reaching events affecting many people.

I really enjoyed the first half of this debut novel, in which Margot describes her life. Sanae Lemoine does little details well, and it's evocative stuff. Throughout the first half the tension mounts until we reach a turning-point, Margot's action. I sympathised with Margot when she took this first, radical, action - that's to say, the adult I am was willing her not to do it because I could imagine the consequences, whilst sympathising with the teenage Margot and her desire to do it. Her action is inevitable after a certain point, and I enjoyed being dragged along to the unavoidable climax. I'm still trying to work out what I think about the second half of the novel. I liked it less, found it less interesting, but the more I think about it, the more it has its place (I didn't think it was credible as I read it, but I'm changing my mind).

This is essentially a French novel written in English, which I found disconcerting, though that's my problem, not the novel's. I don't just mean because it's set in Paris in a purely French context; it's more than that. There's a restraint, an elegance, what's left unsaid, but still, it's more than that, even. For me, it's more that Margot is undefined until she takes action, and that action will define her for ever...pure existentialism.

Sanae Lemoine is apparently working on a second novel, a family saga set in Argentina and Japan. I look forward to seeing what she can do when she moves away from France and things French.

>139 raton-liseur: Oh, I loved Heidi!

So many good books! I wish I didn't have so much help with my TBR mountain.

>198 sallypursell: Tell me about it! My TBR mountain and wishlist grow much more quickly than the list of books I actually manage to read.

>199 rachbxl: (nodding) That's familiar.

The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel

In a high school for the performing arts in the town of Sebastiana in Florida, 4 young jazz musicians make up an extra-curricular quartet to get extra credits - the Lola Quartet. Their last concert is a joyful affair - they play from the back of a pickup truck, and all their classmates are there - but in the darkness someone slips away, in a move that will affect the lives of all four quartet members.

Ten years on, we meet quartet member Gavin in New York, where his life has started to unravel. His fiancée has left him, and, what's more, his sister, Eilo, still in Sebastiana, has given him an unexpected piece of information about the person who disappeared on the night of the concert. Unable to concentrate on his job as a reporter for a decent newspaper (he knew he wouldn't make it as a professional musician and dreamed instead of being a 'newspaperman' or a private detective), he starts making up quotes to back up his stories. Inevitably, he is found out and loses his job. He has no choice but to return to Sebastiana and take the job his estate agent sister offers him (foreclosures), whilst in his own time trying to pursue the lead his sister gave him, which brings him back into contact with the other 3 quartet members, who are not doing well - one is addicted to painkillers, one is a recovering gambling addict, and one is an unhappy twice-divorced police detective. All are still living with the consequences of what happened on the night of their last concert, and Gavin is determined to find out what happened and what those consequences are.

I read this because I enjoyed Station Eleven - not a literary masterpiece, but a good, enjoyable read at this time when I just want great stories. And this is more of the same. A quick, fun read which kept me wanting to know more, though I'm not sure it stands up to much scrutiny. However, one thing which detracted from my enjoyment was that I didn't really feel connected to any of the characters. I kept reading because I wanted to see what happened (St. John Mandel does a good job of keeping the mystery under wraps and doling out tantalising little details), but not because I cared.

Oh, Rachel, I am immersed (!) in yet another Olaf Olafsson, The Journey Home. Have you read this one? It's not completely unlike his most recent about the older nun being sent back to Iceland, as it is a tale of an older woman making a trip back to Iceland, thus it covers past and present, in her own words (she's been a longtime Innkeeper & chef in the UK). Interestingly, I have had this book on my shelf as a TBR for ages....

>202 avaland: I am almost certain that you sent me that one, years ago. The woman is called Disa, if I remember right? I don't remember much now, but I do remember that I liked it a lot. It must have been the first Olafsson I read. There's just something about the way he writes that grabs me (I don't know how something so restrained and apparently gentle can grab, but it does).

I'm glad you loved Writers & Lovers. I had such a visceral reaction to that book that I'm really not an impartial critic. I fell in love with it.

And, yes, The Margot Affair was very French, and you articulated what made it that way better than I could.

Severance by Ling Ma

I am a sucker for a good bit of post-apocalyptic fiction (and not just since Covid19). I've realised that I've come to use it in the same way I use detective novels (when all else fails, one of these usually works). I hadn't heard a thing about this one; I just 'stumbled' across it among the library e-books, and put a hold on it thinking it would be a good bit of escapism some time. Happily, I got much more than I bargained for.

A pandemic, originating in China, is sweeping the world. Carried in the spores of fungi, the virus affects the victim's memory, making them confused and forgetful before locking them into repeated cycles of ultimately meaningless actions (setting the table, eating the same, rotting, dinner over and over, clearing the table, setting the table again with dirty crockery, etc etc) until they die. Candace, the child of Chinese immigrants to the USA, has somehow managed not to catch it (are some people immune? why?). She hung on in deserted New York as long as she could; her company had asked her to be one of a small, well-paid team left behind to keep the office running when everyone else fled, and she stuck with it as long as she could, going through the motions of doing what an office worker does (is this so different to the way the 'fevered' behave once infected? Is our daily life really meaningful? Why do we cling to routine in the way we do?) She eventually escaped New York and was picked up in unclear circumstances by a small group of survivors, led by the forceful and rather odd Bob, who is taking them to 'the Facility', a place of safety, he says, in Chicago. When the book opens, Candace has been with the group for a couple of weeks, and the story covers the next few weeks, interspersed with lengthy sections looking back, not just at the the start of the pandemic, but at Candace's life in New York over the last few years, at her early years in the USA with her parents, at her even earlier years in China, after her parents had left for their new life, and also at the story of her parents before she was born. It's never stated outright, but memory is part of who and what we are; in hitting the victim's memory, the virus hits everything they are. In my comments on Writers & Lovers I noted that unlike in several other books I'd read recently, Lily King pulls all the strands together to make a perfect whole, and Ling Ma does the same thing here. Every strand of the story contributes to the whole.

I really enjoyed reading this for various reasons. The story is gripping, although there were a couple of points which I felt weren't entirely clear and which I'm still wondering about. Maybe it's me. The writing is clear, lively, sensitive, and Ling Ma gives Candace, the narrator, a distinctive voice. She's articulate, intelligent and self-deprecating. As the virus advances, she revives a blog she started on arrival in New York where she posts her own photos, chronicling life (and decay, now) in the city - but she's also a good chronicler of life using words. I like the way this is a good story, well told, and if you like you can leave it at that, but this story also invites us, if we want, to think about various things, about family, generations, solitude (the 'severance' of the title - being severed from what we know, those we love) and togetherness, the sense in what we do. And I like the gentle humour in this book, which could have been so serious but isn't. I like the way it pokes gentle fun at the ridiculousness, in many ways, of office life, of city life. It doesn't offer any alternatives; it just invites us to stop and reflect before moving on.

>204 RidgewayGirl: I think you said in your comments on Margot that it was 'very French', and I wondered what you meant...until I read it!
Yes, there is something very special about Writers & Lovers. I keep thinking about it.

>203 rachbxl: You are of course right. As I read the book there was a feeling of familiarity with parts, but still I was not sure I had read it before until I saw that I wrote a review in 2008!! Would have been my first Olafsson, also.

>205 rachbxl: Sounds good. I wonder if I am up for post-apocalyptic stuff about a virus....

>207 avaland: I didn't realise quite how close-to-home it was going to be when I started it (I knew it was post-apocalyptic but didn't know it was a virus orginating in China). That might have put me off right now. But ignorance is bliss!

Don't Look Back by Karin Fossum
Translated from the Norwegian by Felicity David

Years ago I read one of Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer novels and enjoyed it, but I'd never read any more. I'm making a conscious effort to read more by authors whose work I've enjoyed, so when I stumbled across this (and a fair few other books too) on my old Kindle, it was the natural choice for the next time I needed a crime novel pick-me-up. I like Inspector Sejer as a character, and I liked the portrayal of the small Norwegian village and surrounding countryside where the crime took place and the body was found. The ending was unsettling; rather than leaving everything nicely tied up, it takes us right back to the beginning...and why not? Life doesn't always come in neat packages.

The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit

Another read-aloud with my daughter. She loves these old-fashioned books (so do I), and it's interesting for me to re-visit them as an adult. Like many of us here, I imagine, I was a precocious reader, and must often have read things that were really meant for older children - things that I could read in terms of the language, but not the ideas (my parents were strict about what I watched on TV, but allowed me to read whatever I liked). So it's quite a revelation to find out what the Railway Children's father was actually accused of, for example; that was all very mysterious to me. There's a lovely symmetry in knowing that my daughter has similarly vague ideas about it, and in seeing that it doesn't seem to bother her because she likes the story anyway. My only fear in re-reading these books that were so special to me as a child is that my adult understanding of them might erase my childhood images of them, but that hasn't happened at all here; I've just added more images to the ones I already had (which come not just from my original reading of the book, but also from the marvellous 1970 film with Jenny Agutter).

>209 rachbxl: You remind me that I also have read a couple of Karin Fossum titles in the past few decades, and liked them well enough, but never chased down the others. Based on your review, I think I'll note that the next time I'm scrounging for a crime novel.

>211 avaland: That's exactly the position I was in with Karin Fossum. Stumbling across this one has put her back on my radar. A couple of weeks on, what has stuck with me is the small Norwegian village setting - very atmospheric.

The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld

I have long been a member of my local library here in Wallonia, but it was only during confinement that I started to borrow e-books (which aren't held by my local library specifically, but by the network of French-language libraries in Wallonia and Brussels). Unsurprisingly, most of the books and e-books are in French. In the physical library, the scant offerings in English tend not to appeal to me (other than a disproportionally large selection of Val McDermids). I am fascinated, though, by the English-language e-books available. There are only a couple of hundred (out of a total catalogue of almost 8,000), but they're quite different to the airport lounge thrillers available as real library books, and there are a lot that I want to read. The last Olaf Olafsson I read came from there (seriously, I want to know who chooses them! Olaf Olafsson is hardly mainstream...), and it was there that I discovered Rene Denfeld a few months ago. I started with her third novel, The Butterfly Girl, then her second, The Child Finder, and now that I've read The Enchanted, her first, I can say that I would read anything Denfeld writes (that's it for now, though she is working on another novel).

Denfeld's books are not easy to read because they deal with difficult subjects that we'd rather not be confronted with (child abuse, homelessness, and, in The Enchanted, death row), and yet they are unputdownable because of the beauty of them and because of the hope that exists even in the darkest of places. She writes from experience (she comes from a background of abuse, spent time on the streets, and more recently has worked for years as a private investigator specialising in death row cases ('I’m the person attorneys call to find out if their client did it or not', she says in an essay linked to on her website)). It sounds strange, but I think her books are some of the most uplifting I have read in recent times, and they contain some of the most memorable characters.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

The story of two very different families, the outwardly perfect Richardsons (mother, father, both pillars of the local community, 4 teenage kids, big house) and single-mother Mia and her teenage daughter Pearl (Mia is a photographer who supplements her income with a range of part-time jobs, and they flit around the country, moving from one small rented flat to another, never staying anywhere long). An interesting look at how families work, and at what is right and what is wrong (and who decides, anyway?) Lots of moral dilemmas, lots of opportunities for the reader to ask themself 'what would I do?'; great book club material, I would say. It's had rave reviews, but I feel quite lukewarm about it because I never really connected with it or with the characters. It was easy to read, and that's why I continued, but for me something was lacking. I certainly didn't hate it, but I was quite glad to finish it and move on.

>214 rachbxl: I wasn't keen on the other Celeste Ng book I read so I've not rushed to this one, but I thought the series with Reese Witherspoon was fantastic.

>215 AlisonY: Yes, I've heard good things about the series, and even though I didn't love the book, I would certainly watch it. It was one of those books that I could see on the screen in my mind's eye as I read.

I'm behind with my reviews!

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

The opening chapter of this recent novel had me sitting on the edge of my chair and raging at the injustice of it - a black babysitter, in a grocery shop late one evening with her young (white) charge at the parents' request, is stopped by security; interfering fellow shoppers have expressed doubts about what they are doing together. The narrative then mainly goes back into the past, into the earlier life both of the babysitter and of her white employer (the mother), looking at what brought them both to where they are now, interspersed with sections from the weeks and months following the evening in the shop.

This book made me think about everyday racism, and it also got me thinking about how some white people, like the mother, and like the babysitter's boyfriend, are sometimes so proud of the fact that they consider themselves to be non-racist that they are blind to the fact that they are racist in other, less obvious but no less pernicious ways (a white man who only ever dates black women to show that he isn't racist, the employer falling over herself to ingratiate herself with the babysitter in a way she knows she wouldn't with a white girl, etc). So thought-provoking, yes, and in that sense probably a necessary book right now...but its impact was lessened for me by the fact that I didn't like any of the characters. I'm not a reader who needs to like characters in order to enjoy a book, but in this case I found them all so unsympathetic that I found it hard to care what happened to them.

>218 rachbxl: sometimes so proud of the fact that they consider themselves to be non-racist that they are blind to the fact that they are racist in other, less obvious but no less pernicious ways

I thought Little Fires Everywhere in the TV serialisation covered that same point very well. The Mum very much fitted into that bracket.

The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson

We first meet Edie as a 20-something who recently married her high school sweetheart...although maybe it's his twin brother that she should have married? We meet her again 20 years later, now married to someone else, with a teenage daughter, and the final section introduces us to Edie the grandmother.

I think one of the effects of the pandemic for me is that I need to be really caught up in stories if I'm to enjoy them at the moment. My attention needs to be grabbed, and I want to be transported to another world...but I'm no pushover. I'm reading more than I have for the last few years, but just when I really want that escapism a good book offers, I'm more resistant to it than ever. I am quite certain that at another time I would have enjoyed The Lives of Edie Pritchard more. It's not that I didn't enjoy it at all - far from it. It's just that as it didn't grab me by the neck, I felt a bit lukewarm about it as I read it, and that's unfair because it's simply not a neck-grabbing kind of book; it's much more understated than that. Looking back on it (it's about 10 days since I finished it), I feel a fondness for Edie I wasn't aware of as I read it, and I keep coming back to the ending; there was an easy 'happy-ever-after' ending which Watson didn't take, and I like that. And I suspect Edie is all the happier ever after because of it.

>218 rachbxl:
Well that's disappointing! Such a Fun Age is my book club book for November. The library hold list is long, and it's not out in soft cover yet. I'm going to Whistler this weekend where I always drop by the wonderful Armchair Books, and I had resigned myself to buying the hard cover, but now I see it is $35. Ouch, especially after reading your comments. I don't like hardbacks, but if it's a fabulous book I will buy one. I'm happy to read this book, but I don't want to pay so much money for a book that's larger than it has to be, and maybe not very good.

LOL - While I was typing this my daughter came in and I told her my dilemma and we were looking at the library website, and although there were huge waits on the audio copies and books, there was a large print edition available. Woo hoo! I'm good with that! Who knows? Maybe I'll only want large print from here on . . .

I read Such a Fun Age recently, and I'm glad you're not paying $35 for it, >221 Nickelini:

I did like it - it's very "of the moment" and has some good themes. But it's one of those books that feels a little too modern to me. I think it will be a good book club book, though.

>221 Nickelini:, >222 japaul22: Although I didn't love it, I agree with Jennifer - I think it will be an excellent book club book; loads to talk about. And it's quite an easy read - particularly in large print ;-)

I'm glad to hear it's a good book club choice. We do like a meaty conversation. I picked up my large print Such a Fun Age today and I have to say I haven't read a book with such a large font since grade 2

I'm behind in my reading log so I'm going to jot down what I've been reading and hope to catch up with my thoughts on them later.

The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson
Queenie by Candace Carty-Williams

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

I don't 'do' science fiction, for no reason other than that I never really have done. The little I have read, I've enjoyed (Solaris springs to mind), but I never seek it out because I have a bit of a prejudice against it. My curiosity has been piqued several times over the years, though, by comments in Club Read about The Sparrow, so I bought a second hand copy when I chanced upon one and stuck it in the furthest reaches of my TBR shelves. It's time came, who knows why, last month. And what do you know? I really enjoyed it. I keep saying that what I need from books right now is escapism, the chance to get lost in stories - so what better than a book that takes me literally (well, as literally as you get in fiction) to another world?

The Sparrow is a 'first contact' novel (I picked up the term from reading reviews by readers who know more about SF than I do) - powerful telescopes at an observatory in Puerto Rico pick up hauting music coming from a distant planet. The Jesuits decide to fund an exploratory mission, which just happens to be made up of a group of friends based around the observatory. We start to get to know these friends even before they hear the music, and we have the opportunity to get to know them well during the preparatory phase. Lots of reviews complain that 'nothing happens', but I was transported into their world even while they were still in Puerto Rico; I loved reading about Anne and her husband hosting dinner parties to which the others are invited, watching the different relationships develop. I could have read about them for even longer, actually. Similarly, the voyage takes a long time (not as long on paper as the years it took the group, but almost), but I enjoyed it. And as for the life they set up on the planet on which they land...pure escapism, just what I needed. But then the ending came and everything happened all at once, and not in a way I was expecting. It's been several weeks and I'm still mulling over why Maria Doria Russell made it end the way it did.

As well as the world-building both in Puerto Rico and on the new planet, I really appreciated the way the characters are built, layer after layer serving to complete the picture. Before long, I felt that these people were my friends - and, like several of the characters, I'm a bit in love with the young Father Emilio Sandoz.

Circe by Madeline Miller

This 2018 novel retells the story of Circe, daugher of the Titan sun god Helios, witch and goddess. I'd been wanting to read it since it came out, but I wouldn't have chosen to read it right now, except that my hold on a library e-book came through. As expected, it took a lot more energy and investment than I think I have available at the moment, and it took me ages to finish - but I perservered because it's glorious. Just as Miller did with Song of Achilles, she resurrects these ancient characters and makes them burst with life. It's been a few weeks since I finished it but it's still very vivid in my mind's eye. Fabulous.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

I discovered Emily St. John Mandel earlier this year at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, and I've read 3 of her novels now. She writes exactly the kind of thing that I want to read at the moment - well-written, well put together, interesting, captivating stories with convincing characters. But they aren't very memorable. I really enjoyed The Glass Hotel - I couldn't put it down, same as Station Eleven - but I have very little recollection of it now, whereas Circe, which I read at the same time, is still vivid. I really don't want to knock The Glass Hotel, though, because it did exactly what I needed, gave me an absorbing story in which to lose myself. Maybe it doesn't matter that the story didn't stick with me.

>226 rachbxl: It's been ages since I read The Sparrow, but I enjoyed the revisit through your review. There's a sequel, you know, not as good but still worthwhile. I've read six of her seven books (didn't read the sequel to Doc). While I wouldn't say that any of others did what the Sparrow did, they are all good, easy reads that transport the reader elsewhere for a while (back into US history, for most of them).

Great reviews, glad you have found some good reading!

>228 rachbxl:

That was my feeling as well. I was super engrossed in The Glass Hotel as I was reading it but I would instantly forget about it when I had to put the book down. It's why I made sure to read it as quickly as possible as I felt that if I slowed down my reading pace I'd put the book down and never pick it up again.

>226 rachbxl: I've enjoyed every single one of Russell's novels and I have this on my tbr. I really should pull it down.

>226 rachbxl: welcome to the world of Science fiction - there is a whole universe out there (but much of it is just empty space)

Catching up - oh my, from June. : ( But I really enjoyed all these reviews and seeing how you’re dealing with Covid-era reading and seeing the reading you’re doing with your daughter. (And...I really should read Circe. It’s sitting by my bedside.) I’m somewhat hesitant on The Sparrow as I understand there is a heavy religious element, but I liked your comments.

>230 lilisin: Not just me, then. I find it really odd - as you say, it was totally engrossing...and then it disappeared from my mind without a trace.

>229 avaland: and >231 RidgewayGirl: Well, if you two think Russell's other books are worth reading, I will look out for them, as you're both nothing if not reliable as far as recommendations go!

>233 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan. I think if I had known more about 'the religious element' in The Sparrow before reading I would have been hesitant, just like you. As it is, on reading it didn't put me off. I won't say any more than that. BTW, I just finished reading Where the Red Fern Grows to my daughter; you put that one on my radar (she loved it, though the ending had us both in tears).

Where the Red Fern Grows - what a childhood memory. Love that you guys read it! (Although, sorry about the tears ☺️)

>226 rachbxl: Glad you enjoyed The sparrow. And that the religious part didn't put you off. While most people seem to agree that the second volume, Children of God, isn't as good, I would say that the tone is different and it wasn't as challenging a read as the first one. But I did enjoy it.

>235 dchaikin: The tears took me by surprise (mine, I mean). I had been finding the book a little tedious for a while - I enjoyed the build-up to him getting the dogs, but once he had them it just seemed to be one account of a night's coon hunting after another, and I didn't think I cared much about it. I had a fairly good idea how it was going to end (the what, but not the how), and I couldn't see how it would affect me at all...but when I got there it turned out that I did care. On top of that, I suspect that the descriptions of the Ozarks will stay with me for a while.

>236 markon: I will definitely give Children of God a chance; apart from anything else, I'm just curious to see what happens next.

Catching up on my thougts on books I've read recently (the ones from the list in >225 rachbxl:):

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

This Nigerian novel didn't particularly appeal to me when it came out, but I've been intrigued by the comments in Club Read so I decided to see for myself. It's a hard-to-pigeonhole book - it has a chicklit-y feel, with the narrator recounting her glamorous sister's string of romances, but with a major twist: the sister has the unfortunate habit of bumping off her suitors, and the narrator, a nurse, helps her dispose of the bodies and clean up the crime scene. I liked the surrealism that came from it all being told as if it were normal. I've never read anything quite like this before - and I've certainly never read anything like this from Nigeria before.

Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson

I think this was a recommendation from wandering star. This is another of those perfect-for-now books, and I romped through it. It starts innocently enough with a meeting of a suburban mums' bookclub, but quickly veers off in unexpected directions when it becomes clear that a new arrival has secret information about the narrator which she intends to use to blackmail her. The story is utterly gripping, full of surprising twists and turns (though a couple of times I saw them coming before the narrator did), but it's more than pure entertainment. It makes the reader think: what is a 'good' person? What is a 'bad' one? Once you've done something awful, can you ever become 'good'? Are some 'bad' actions less bad than others? Are some even justifiable as a least bad course?

Queenie by Candace Carty-Willimams

A random library find, if memory serves. Some of the blurb called it 'a black Bridget Jones' (this wasn't what made me borrow it), but I'd say that does it a big disservice. I found Bridget Jones's Diary very entertaining back in the day, but this is a different book altogether. Queenie is a young black Londoner who at the start of the book is just embarking on what she thinks is a 'break' from her white boyfriend. She moves out of his flat into a room in a flatshare, which she can just about afford with her miserable salary from a lowly job on a magazine. And then she starts to unravel. She drinks too much, has sex with men who treat her badly, and with men she can't remember. She becomes increasingly unreliable at work and ends up losing her job. Unable to pay the rent, she is forced to retreat to her Jamaican grandparents' house in south London. By this point (about halfway) I was almost ready to give up - I couldn't take another half-novel about Queenie's sex life and incompetence at work. I had been getting frustrated with Queenie (and with the novel) on both scores. However, the second half did something different, something which made me see that the first half was necessary because the reader needs to understand that Queenie is utterly broken, not just a woman having a few flings after a break-up. The second half (and therefore the whole novel) is about family, friendship, identity, mental health, family history...and race and racism. (I noted that Queenie is black, her ex white, and her grandparents Jamaican because all these things are relevant).

What is Mine by Anne Holt
Also published as Punishment
translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson

A series of children disappear, and several of them turn up dead. The children are apparently unconnected, but is there actually a link? This is the first book in the Vic and Stubo series, and as what I liked most about this novel was the parts where academic psychologist Johanne Vic and police detective Adam Stubo are together, I will certainly read more.

Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin

A recommendation from avaland, a good while ago.

A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in an Indian community in Toronto. Lovely. It doesn't line up exactly with P&P, but setting it in an immigrant community where arranged marriages are still the norm works well. What else can I say? Reading it was a delight.

>237 rachbxl: awe. Since i read this as a kid and haven’t revisited it - I had forgotten the setting! Ozarks.

>238 rachbxl: glad you liked the Braithwaite and appreciate the difficulty in exactly classifying it.

Looks like several good reads here. Interested in your take in Queenie. I have wondered about it after reading a few reviews here.

>241 rachbxl: Glad you enjoyed Ayesha. Just a nice, light read. You might like Pride and Prometheus which brings Mary Bennett and Frankenstein together.

And the Anne Holt. I really enjoyed both of Holt's series, Vik & Stubo and the Hanne Wilhelmsen series. She's done with those series now. The most recent book was possibly a standalone.

>238 rachbxl: - glad you enjoyed it! Ayesha at Last sounds very good too.

>243 avaland: Mary Bennett and Frankenstein, you say? I am intrigued! Will look out for that one from sheer curiosity.

Luster by Raven Leilani

If Queenie is the black Bridget Jones, then Luster is the American Queenie. Unfortunately, although it's little more than a week since I read it, I can remember absolutely nothing about it other than that it reminded me of Queenie and that I didn't particularly enjoy it (to be fair, I would probably have enjoyed it more had I not read it hard on the heels of Queenie, as it just felt like more of the same).

Back When We Were Grown-Ups by Anne Tyler

This, on the other hand, was glorious. I think I've said before that my first introduction to Anne Tyler, courtesy of my mum, did not go well - in my 20s I couldn't think of anything worse than reading about these boring middle aged people. Ah well, 20 years on I can better appreciate how Tyler takes uneventful lives and turns them into something I desperately want to read about.

50-something Rebecca is many things to many people (widow, mother, stepmother, step/grandmother, sister-in-law, daughter, niece, to name but a few) and it's quickly clear that she is the glue that holds them all together. But she wakes up one morning convinced that she isn't living the life that was meant for her - surely she took a wrong turn along the way? She identifies the wrong turn as being when she met the man she would marry only a few short weeks later, and left her highschool sweetheart. Whilst continuing to go through the motions of her busy life, she becomes consumed with 'what if?', and this parallel world becomes almost as important to her as the real world. There are no major events here, no big dramas; everything is understated and subtle...but so much happens. The characters and the setting were so real for me that I can imagine them going on with their lives even after I closed the book. And speaking of closing the book, I loved the ending - as befits the rest of the book, it wasn't a Hollywood-style happy-ever-after ending, not at all. It was quiet and understated, and utterly satisfying.

The Flatshare by Beth O'Leary

I didn't plan it this way (my library hold happened to come through) but this was the perfect book for a lazy Boxing Day relaxing by the fire. Tiffy and Leon, two strangers, enter into a fairly preposterous (though admittedly pragmatic) flatsharing arrangement whereby they both use the flat (including the same bed) but are never in it at the same time. They get to know each other via the post-it notes they leave for each other.

Tiffy and Leon take turns to narrate alternate chapters with their very different styles and voices. Sometimes I find this kind of thing annoying, but here it worked beautifully. It was light, it was funny, it was the perfect pick-me-up...but it's not fluff. It deals with darker issues too, like abusive relationships, and end-of-life care, and it somehow manages to do so in a way which doesn't drag the book down, but which doesn't trivialize them either.

Reading this book quite simply made me feel good. I want to believe that Tiffy and Leon are out there somewhere.

In the Dream House: a Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado

It's perhaps a good thing I didn't know much about this before I read it; a memoir about an abusive lesbian relationship may not have been top of my list right now (or ever?) However, I found I couldn't put it down. The chapters are very short, usually 2 or 3 pages, and whenever I decided to stop reading I'd end up reading 4 or 5 more chapters before I actually stopped. Machado writes with astouding clarity and honesty to build up a picture of a relationship which starts out just like any other. The first signs come, but at the time they're not signs, of course, just blips, things to turn a blind eye to. And then it's too late. A lot of this is extremely intimate, but whenever it starts to feel like too much Machado takes a step back and veers off into a more academic look at the history of abuse in queer relationships and reserach into it; that might sound like an odd mixture, but it works because of the tone she uses, at all times as though she's telling the reader this over the dinner table.

I read this because of the good things I keep hearing about Machado, and now I plan to read Her Body and Other Parties as soon as possible.

>248 rachbxl:
Oh good to hear! I picked up The Flatshare on my nieces’s recommendation but haven’t read it yet. Good to hear it’s worthwhile

>248 rachbxl: Onto my hold list at the library! Something fun and light, sign me up!

>247 rachbxl: I think that was my first Anne Tyler, a few years ago, it really made me wonder how I’d never heard of her before.

>245 rachbxl: Pride & Prometheus. Let me know if you can't find it ....

Nice to get a catch-up on your reading.

>247 rachbxl: That makes me think I should get back to Anne Tyler, abandoned some years ago and I'm not sure why.