I just made the TBR dare harder…

Thomas24 Comments

  
You may recall I decided to take up CB on his TBR dare from January 1 to April 1. I thought that with over 300 books in my to be read pile I would have no problem just reading from the pile for four months. But it seemed a little too easy. And some may think that my definition of what constitutes a TBR pile might be too broad. Essentially I consider everything in my library that I haven’t already read to be my TBR pile. But, as I said that just seems a little too easy.

So I have decided to limit myself to only the books that are in my nightstand. So until April 1st, this is my limited universe of reading material. It has a bit of everything so I shouldn’t get bored. But I do have the tendency to want what I can’t have so I am sure I will feel some pain. Now we will have to see how many I manage to finish.

click on photo to enlarge

Amis, Kingsley – Lucky Jim
Bennett, Alan – Untold Stories (nonfiction)
Boll, Heinrich – End of a Mission
Bowen, Elizabeth – The Last September
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth – Lady Audley’s Secret
Brookner, Anita – Providence (the last Brookner left for me to read)
Burnett, Frances Hodgson – That Lass O’Lowrie’s
Burkhart, Charles – The Pleasure of Miss Pym (nonfiction)
Carr, J.L. – A Month in the Country
Cartwright, Justin – This Secret Garden
Cather, Willa – The Professor’s House (this would be a re-read)
Cather, Willa – Shadows on the Rock
Coetzee, J.M. – Diary of a Bad Year
Coetzee, J.M. – The Master of Petersburg
Drabble, Margaret – The Pattern in the Carpet (nonfiction)
Eliot, George – Silas Marner
Fitzgerald, Penelope – The Beginning of Spring
Fitzgerald, Penelopoe – Offshore
Hesse, Hermann – Peter Camenzind
Jackson, Shirley – The Haunting
James, Henry – The Spoils of Poynton
Laski, Marghanita – The Village
Le Carre, John – Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Mawer, Simon – The Glass Room
McEwan, Ian – The Child in Time
McEwan, Ian – Saturday
Meyers, Jeffrey – Somerset Maugham, A Life (nonfiction)
Mitford, Nancy – Love in a Cold Climate
Mitford, Nancy – The Pursuit of Love
Mueenuddin, Daniyal – In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Oliphant, Mrs – The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow (the only Persephone!)
Panning, Anne – Super America
Porter, Katherine Anne – Flowering Judas
Rugg, Julie – Buried in Books
Sarton, May – The Magnificant Spinster
Schlink, Berhard – Homecoming
Sitwell, Edith – Selected Letters (ed. Richard Greene)
Stadler, Matthew – Allan Stein
von Arnim, Elizabeth – Love (will work for Virago Reading Week)
West, Rebecca – The Thinking Reed
Wharton, Edith – The Demanding Dead
Wilde, Oscar – The Happy Prince and other stories
   

Book Review: The Hopkins Manuscript by RC Sheriff

Thomas17 Comments
Grr!

I was 80% finished with a pretty good (and lengthy) review of the The Hopkins Manuscript when I lost my data. I did one of those too quick keystroke combos that highlighted all my text and then wrote over everything as I unknowingly went on to type another word. In a second poof, gone. And not a damn “undo” button in site.

Sigh.

I had been intrigued by The Hopkins Manuscript from the moment I looked at my first Persephone catalogue. But for some reason I didn’t order it when I chose my first twelve Persephones. I think I wanted everything in those first books to be jam and Jerusalem, and there didn’t seem like there would be much cozy in a dystopian novel about the end of the world. I realize now that I was wrong on a few counts. Not only is there a certain coziness to much of the book, but the cataclysm of the moon crashing into Earth takes, rather perfectly in many ways, the thematic place of World War II – something common to many other Persephone titles. Indeed the fact that The Hopkins Manuscript was published in 1939 means that Sheriff could have only been aware of the rumblings leading up to WWII. Yet much of this survival tale seems prescient, and the accompanying highs and lows of human nature depicted could just as easily be applied to the WWII experience in Britain.

As a member of the British Lunar Society, our hero, champion chicken breeder Edgar Hopkins, learns months ahead of the general population that the moon has slipped its moorings and is headed toward Earth with ever increasing speed. What follows in the months that Edgar must keep the secret is an interesting, if somewhat odd, exploration of Edgar coming to terms with his final seven months on Earth. I have been trying to figure out how to describe Edgar. The word ‘prig’ comes to mind. A retired bachelor drawn very much like the stereotypical female spinster. Generally capable and content but with a deep well of loneliness and much too worried about the small stuff in life. Jodie at Book Gazing does an excellent job summing up Edgar:

He is a man obsessed with niggles, who inflates the importance of the smallest insult or honour to incredible proportions. He is rather petty and although he sometimes realises how ridiculous his behaviour is after the fact, he always finds some way to justify his thoughts to himself. He will probably remind readers of the phrase ‘a bit of a stuffed shirt’ and is a harmless character, though sometimes his thoughts tip over into small, spiteful ideas that have a little too much righteous conviction behind them.

Some of the 1930s-era content can seem naive given the rather breathtaking scientific leaps of the past 80 years, but this doesn’t really diminish the novel’s ability to draw the reader in. During the few days I was reading this book, there were times when I noticed something about the sun or the moon and thought of it in the context of the The Hopkins Manuscript before remembering that it was not really true. It is also the case that knowing the general plot (moon crashes into earth) does not diminish the book’s suspense in any way. There is so much to learn about how and when and why and what happens next that it is hard to put the book down until you know all.

The book is also filled with many poignant moments of individuals and society coming to terms with the end of the world. It really made me think a lot what I would do in the same situation. Different than knowing that I might die from a terminal illness, but the possibility that humankind may perish from Earth or the entire planet itself may disappear into a million little pieces. And appropriate for many of us, what does one choose to read with only limited time left? Edgar first finds out the world has seven months left. What do you do with your TBR pile when you put it in those terms? What about your final hours on earth? You are healthy, mind as good as it ever was. What do you choose then?

I went to my bookcase. My hands moved instinctively away from the classics – the heavy books of history and philosophy that have helped me through unhappy times in days gone by. Instinctively I went to an obscure, untidy row of books in the corner of the lowest shelf: the oldest friends in my library – the treasures of my boyhood.

For as much as most of us love to read, we probably have other things we would rather do, people we would want to spend time with. But assume for one minute that you have said your goodbyes and have chosen to be alone when the end came. Are you calm enough to read? Do you obsess over what the end might be like? Do you want to think about happy times? About regrets?  Let’s say you want to read. Do you choose and old favorite? Do you try something new? Will it be Jonathan Franzen or the Booker short list or something like that? Will it be the eternal truths of poetry? A picture book? People magazine?

It kind of boggles the mind doesn’t it? So tell me what you think. As the world comes to an end and you sit in your comfy chair just waiting, what would be the last book you choose to read? [1/7/11 update: After reading the comments on this post I realized that my question is not as grammatically clear as it should be. I makes it sound like “well that is the last book I would ever read…” Let’s try this instead: As the world comes to an end and you sit in your comfy chair just waiting, what would your first choice be for the last book you would ever read? Slightly better.]

(Let’s also pretend like you have made your peace with your god, so please no holy books…okay, you can say “The Bible” or similar, but then please follow it up with something else…you aren’t running for office after all…)

A day late and a dollar short…

Thomas10 Comments

  

Ready When You Are, C.B. dared us all to read from our TBR piles only for a period of our choosing beginning 1/1/11. The deadline for accepting the dare was 12/31/10 at midnight Pacific Time.

As usual, I am late to the game but I am going to participate anyway. The most extreme dare was to go from 1/1/11 to 4/1/11 (translation for you across the Atlantic: that end date is April 1st, not January 4th).

Since I have about 400 books on my TBR pile. And since I really need to focus my disposable income on house projects, I am taking the dare and plan to only read TBR books until April 1st.

And I know I have already broken the main rule of the dare–to accept it by 12/31–but I haven’t checked out, borrowed, been gifted, or purchased any books since before then. Thankfully I finally got my Persephone Secret Santa gift on 12/30 so I have those books already ensconced in my TBR. But more on the later this week.

Off I go to read something from my TBR.

  

The End of the Year Wrap-up that got out of hand…

Thomas39 Comments

    
My annual recap turned into a bit of a mind explosion.

I was going to wait until 2011 to do my year-end recap. But I am pretty certain I am not going to finish any more books in the next three days. Versions of this year end wrap-up have been floating around the book blogosphere of late. Here is my contribution.
 

How many books read in 2010?
A measly 68. Far fewer than the 110 I read in 2009. I put this down to working more, buying a house, and taking on both War and Peace (1,352 pp) and The Golden Notebook (640 pp). Oh and my misguided attempt to read all the Penguin English Journey series in April really undercut my reading mojo.

Fiction/Non-Fiction?
Ha! When I first saw this one I assumed the number of non-fiction books read this year would be a whopping great zero. But I actually read about 11 non-fiction books this year. Mostly memoir-ish type things. A history of Penguin Books, and of course some of the previously mentioned Penguin English Journey series.
Male/Female authors?
I assume this means the ratio of male to female authors as opposed to male to female transgendered authors. Not surprisingly for me, the ladies edged out the gentlemen. I read 30 books by males and 38 by females. Even more telling is that 8 of my Top 10 for 2010 were by female authors.
Favorite read?
See my Top 10 for 2010. I think if I had to pick just one that provided the most unqualified reading groove it would have to be Dorothy Whipple’s collection of short stories, The Closed Door.
Least favorite read?
Keep in mind that I tend not to finish books I don’t like. I use Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50. So if I don’t like it by page 50 I don’t keep reading. This is why so few clunkers end up on my books read list. As mentioned, I certainly struggled to enjoy the Penguin English Journey Series. I did enjoy many of them and bits and pieces of most of them. But taken as a whole (which was a mistake), it felt more like pain than pleasure. But if I had to choose just one book that I would be least likely to ever want to re-read, it would be Sophie’s Choice.
Most read author?
Both Dorothy Whipple and Maggie O’Farrell provided four titles each. And both were new to me in 2010. Doris Lessing, Anita Brookner, and E.M. Delafield both provided two titles each.
Least read author?
Ha, ha, I just made this category up. Just imagine, I would have to list every author whose work I didn’t read this year.
Author read this year I would most like to meet
I was going to take some time thinking about this, but then I realized I read an E.M. Forster book this year. Not only is his work spectacular, but I would love to chat with him about having to live a closeted life. Plus I would want to sit with him while he watched all the film adaptations of his books.
Favorite reading experience of the year (warm weather)
Reading and dozing by the pool of our private sala in Phuket.
Favorite reading experience of the year (cool weather)
Snuggling on the couch reading Little Boy Lost with Lucy laying across my chest.
Favorite Penelope read this year
Fitzgerald. Other years it could have been Lively, but this year in the Penelope face off, Miss Fitzgerald wins.
New books purchased in hardcover?
Only 3. Cunningham’s By Nightfall, Ferris’ The Unnamed, and Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.
Best blogging related experience?
Meeting two great local bloggers for a fun book shopping get together, and meeting seven more great book bloggers in London.
Author crush?
Joshua Ferris

Biggest disappointment?
That my Barbara Pym fantasy is unlikely to come true.

Blog posts I am most likely to read?

1. Anything to do with a list. Even if I don’t agree with the criteria or the subject, a post about lists will always get my attention.

2. Anything with pictures of books. I prefer the stacks of owned books. For some reason piles from the library fail to inspire me.

3. The more personal and newsy the better. I love hearing about your hobbies, your travel, your cooking and baking, your pets, and even your kids (unless it falls into the “children are our future” camp of over adulation).

Blog posts I am least likely to read?

1. Anything with vampires. I just don’t dig the paranormal and I find this genre tedious.

2. Young adult fiction being read and reviewed endlessly by grown women. I am not dissing YA, and I am not dissing those who have a professional interest, those who review them for a YA audience, or those who review one or two of them in passing. But this year I was a judge for the YA category in a blog beauty pageant and it really soured me on the legions of twenty-something females who appear to be frightened of leaving their tween years behind them. One expects them to have Justin Bieber posters on their walls and fluffy pom-poms on the ends of their purple pens.

3. Reviews of audio books. I read and enjoy reviews of TV shows and films, but I just pass over audio book reviews.

4. The one million Booker Prize recaps. I used to pay attention to these, but there just seem to be too many of them these days.

5. Anything by bloggers who seem to be completely devoid of any sense of humor.

6. ARC reviews. I won’t say that I never read them, but I prefer to see what bloggers read when they get to choose for themselves. (Full disclosure: I have reviewed one ARC. But I would have picked up the Maggie O’Farrell novel anyway.)

Biggest shortcomings as a book blogger?

1. My over the top, intolerant, un-nuanced pronouncements that make me feel temporarily smug (see the answers to the previous question).

2. My inability to recap plots in a way that isn’t boring or overly reductive.

3. I am sure there are more…but I am too lazy to think of them.

4. I get lazy.

One thing I wish every blog included?
Geographic location of the blogger. I don’t need to know the street you live on, but I really like knowing where a blogger lives. And unless you live in Gibraltar it would be nice if you could be a little more specific than just noting thecountry.

Things that puzzle me

1. British bloggers tend to get lots of influenza. What’s up with that? I worry about you all.

2. Mailbox Mondays. Who is sending all of these books? Is there an international directory of mailing addresses that I don’t have access to? I don’t necessarily want to get books, but I sometimes want to send books. But I feel like sending books unsolicited would seem a little creepy. How does one ask for an address without seeming to be a stalker?

3. Feeds.

4. Mincemeat.

5. Why I am using up months’ worth of blog post topics in one out of control stream of consciousness.

 

Contrarian Book Reviews (with parenthetical jibber jabber)

Thomas34 Comments

    
In the vast, wide world of reading, there is room for infinite points of view. (What else could explain James Patterson?) And even within the much smaller world of book-bloggers whose reading tastes align with my own there is room for much diversity.

Sometimes we all sound like we are in an echo chamber, with heaps of praise bouncing around from blog to blog as if we all shared a brain. (I was going to reference the Borg, but I am not sure how many of you would catch the Star Trek reference. I am not a Star Trek geek, but I did have a boyfriend back in the 1990s who, rather enjoyably, inculcated me into the world of ST:TNG. For my part, I turned him into a fan of Upstairs, Downstairs.)
But then there are those times when a chill wind blows through the cozy world of cardigan novels. When the teapot is upset and biscuits fly across the room. When the garden party is rained out. When the ginger beer causes wind. When, well you get the idea, when book-bloggers think to themselves “maybe I don’t know this person as well as I thought I did”.
Well, today is one of those days. One of those days when, like an unruly, ungrateful teenager needlessly rebelling against hearth and home, I risk the warm, welcoming bosom of my bosom-buddy book-blogger friends. Of course I am not the first to risk provocation. There have been some thoughtful blog posts lately about respectful disagreement here and here. (And of course there was that brouhaha some time ago that had the Atlantic seething with raw emotion as the old country attempted to put a former colony in its place. I largely stayed out of that one, but from my point of view it was so poorly reasoned and with only weak anecdotal supporting data that it seems its only purpose was to incite blog traffic. Is that what I am doing now? I doubt it, my readership isn’t as vast, I don’t think that that blogger reads my blog :-(  and I don’t Twitter so it is unlikely I will see much of an uptick in traffic. On the other hand, I do hope it incites lots of comments from regular readers and especially you lurkers who remain so quiet. After all, part of the narcissistic pleasure of blogging is having your own literary brilliance reflected back on you by your adoring fans. Although I shouldn’t joke because I genuinely do like getting comments, especially those that move the conversation forward or in another direction. I usually respond to them all, sometimes posing questions to commenters because I truly like to hear more about you and what you think.)
So which sacred cow will I injure first? I think I will start with the one about which I have less to say–and may God and Simon Thomas forgive me–Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker. I liked the fact that the main character was an organist, we don’t get many of those in fiction. And I liked the premise of the novel quite a bit, it was very creative, and to my experience at least, very original. There was something in the execution of the plot, however, that left me wishing to rewrite it. If any of you saw the dreadful movie Inception you know that I am talking about. Fine, create your whimsical, supernatural world, but you still need to maintain an appropriate logical structure within the parameters of the world you have created. I am not saying Miss Hargreaves was a bad book (but Inception was a bad movie) by any means. It just didn’t keep me as enthralled as I wanted to be. (And as long as I am letting it all hang out, I must say I have been let down by most of my Bloomsbury Group reading experiences. It appears I like the idea of them much more than I like the actual books. (A huge exception would be in their Mrs. Harris reissue, but I read that in an older edition anyway.) And I won’t even mention the poor quality of the paper. No doubt its rough, pulpy quality is the result of being green, but the feel of it on my hands makes my teeth itch.)

The second sacred cow I will poke in the eye, is one of my own making. As a lover of all things Whipple, I was disappointed by her novel Someone at a Distance. My previous experiences with High Wages and The Priory were fantastic. And I liked her short stories in The Closed Door even more. As I mentioned in my review, I think Whipple’s plot arcs are much better in her short fiction. She sometimes has problems with plot in longer fiction. She doesn’t so much as lose the plot in her novels as compress a whole lot of action into too short a period. I liked HW and TP so much that, while I noticed it, it didn’t bother me. Not so with Someone at a Distance.

Whipple spends most of the novel presenting a rather wrenching tragedy, but then with lightning quickness, in the last 30 or so pages makes everything groovy. (Although, if I am being fair it is still somewhat tragically groovy.) I suppose she did the same darn thing in HW and TP, but for some reason in those novels it seemed like a more natural progression. And in SAAD (what an apt acronym) the motivation for most of the characters was more than a little hard to swallow. Louise was selfish and wanted to right a wrong with a whole series of wrongs. And far worse than Avery’s infidelity was his extreme cowardice. One began to wonder if he had a set at all, but he must have or he wouldn’t have gone after Louise in the first place. Plus it seems to me that his little bed and clothes at the office suggest that Louise wasn’t the first piece of tail that Avery went after. And then there is Ellen. Poor, suffering Ellen. Not willing to lift one finger to save her marriage. Accepting everything as it came along. Brilliantly playing the martyr so she can go live out a Marie Antoinette fantasy at an old folks home. And you know what? Anne is 17 freaking years old, if she has to give up her horse, big whoop. Life sucks sometimes Anne. You think losing your horse is bad? Try watching your 20-year marriage disappear in an instant. And then of course there is noble Hugh. Not a cent will he take from his father, giving up Cambridge just to show how much he hates the cheating bastard. And then out of nowhere Miss Daley, who we didn’t even know needed rescuing gets caught up in the happy denouement as well.

As awful a human being as she was, I am far from believing that Louise was the villain of the book. They all played their role in the destruction of their lives.

I probably don’t dislike this book as much as I am making it sound. I would still probably give it a 6 out of 10. But I think what puzzles me is why it is such a favorite Whipple, so much so that it is a Persephone Classic. And fear not, I am still a faithful member of Team Whipple. But as with everything in life, one must realize that even our heroes are fallible.

My Top 10 of 2010

Thomas30 Comments

  
I know, I know, it isn’t the end of the year, how in the world can I choose my top 10 for the year?  Easy, I know the four or five books I hope to finish by midnight on 12/31 and none of them, while being enjoyable, will make it into the top ten. (Sorry Simon, Frank Baker won’t make the cut, but Richmal Crompton will!)

I really liked a lot of the books I read this year, but it was still pretty easy to separate ten from the herd that particularly rocked my reading world in one way or another.

Not surprisingly for me, only one of the ten was published even remotely recently. Besides the Niffenegger, the “newest” title is about 17 years old. This is why I don’t fear the e-book. Plenty of old books for me to read.

So, in no particular order…

Stoner by John Williams
Happily this book has been getting lots of attention in the blogosphere this year. The novel has an academic setting, but you don’t have to like that kind of thing to like this one. Amazing book.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin
A classic that I had never read before. There are some novels where the writing just feels right. This one grabbed me instantly.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
This is NOT normally my cup of tea. And I do NOT think it is a fine, or amazing book. And I will NOT want to read anything else by Niffenegger. But boy did I enjoy reading this one. I picked it up in the resort library last January in Thailand and it was perfect vacation reading.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O’Brien
Such a smart, funny novel about a child of hasbeen movie stars trying to grow up normal.

As We Are Now by May Sarton
A devastatingly tragic novel about being old.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam
The novel I wish had been expanded to Trollopian lengths.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Delightful comfort read. Sigh.

The Closed Door by Dorothy Whipple
I love Dorothy Whipple’s work. I read two novels of hers this year that I loved, and I am reading a third right now. But this collection of short stories are brilliant in a way that her longer fiction is not.

A Closed Eye by Anita Brookner
I love every novel Anita Brookner has ever written, but there was something about this one that I really liked.

Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton
Out of the ten, this is the one that I most wish I could discover again for the first time.

      

Last Weekend

Thomas18 Comments

   
Last weekend we had a holiday open house for friends and neighbors. It was the first chance since we moved in in May that we have been able to share some hospitality. The party got a little too busy for pictures, but we did manage to document some of the prep.

That’s right, I baked all of this.

The chocolate sour cream Bundt cake looks appropriately festive.