NOOOOOOOvember reading

[lillielangtry]

Webs, I'd never heard of that, but the description on Goodreads sounds excellent and it's got a very high rating there too.

Cynthia McLeod, The Cost of Sugar (translated from the Dutch by Gerald R Mettam)
My reading around the world book for SURINAME. I mean, how many books from Suriname have you read, people? Exactly. I think this is basically the most successful novel the country has so far produced, and it apparently sold well in the Netherlands in the 90s.
It's a very interesting story of life in Suriname in the 1700s and gives a lot of details about plantation life, slavery and the Jewish community (which I had no idea about). THe characters are quite roughly drawn I think... one of the main white female characters is so passive I think it's almost unrealistic even for the time, and another is almost too evil, while many of the slave characters are a bit "too" good. Nevertheless, a good historical novel about a part of the world you don't generally hear much about.

[Webs]

Nov 13, 2020 19:34:51 GMT -5 scrubb said:

Storm Front, by Jack Butcher.

.

I've read many of the books in this series and developed a literary crush on Harry Dresden.

[Oweena]

The Searcher by Tana French

Not normally a reader of mystery/suspense books, but this one had an Irish setting and good reviews so I took a chance.
It didn't make me want to start reading the genre since there are always too many plot points that aren't realistic.
But the characters were well drawn and French definitely can spin a tale.
I sorted out who the bad guys were pretty early in so there wasn't much mystery or suspense.

[weeg]

I'm off work this week. It doesn't seem appropriate to say I'm on holiday. Going to get some reading done. Starting with A Nice Class of Corpse by Simon Brett. I've read/ listened to radio plays of a bunch of his, so I know what I'm in for. Fun, witty murder mystery with a good amateur detective. Mu happy place.

[scrubb]

Birdie, by Tracy Lindberg. A first novel by a First Nations lawyer. It's a familiar story of a young First Nations woman, with abuse, racism, neglect, mental illness, and substance abuse. But it's told in an I interesting way, as Beatrice (Birdie) lies still and quiet, going away in her head and remembering.

And it's a story about women and family relationships among women, painful but so much live.

I liked it. A bookbub special I'm glad I bought.

[ozziegiraffe]

Finished two books so far on my road trip.
61. The Irrational Season, a devotional book by Madeleine L’Engle. Now I know why A Wrinkle in Time meant so much to me. Madeline’s spiritual world makes so much sense to mine. While our lives have been very different, her writing meets me in a numinous plane that she is able to put into words far better than I can.
62. Murder in the Dark, Kerry Greenwood. A fascinating view of life in the twenties, with some quite different characters attending a four day New Year’s Eve party. Nerine the jazz singer is back, but Dot and Mr Butler are only on the fringe of the story. Great company as an audiobook on a road trip, especially as my van was named after the actress in the tv series.

[weeg]

Nov 14, 2020 10:58:35 GMT -5 Webs said:

Nov 13, 2020 19:34:51 GMT -5 scrubb said:

Storm Front, by Jack Butcher.

.

I've read many of the books in this series and developed a literary crush on Harry Dresden.

This is Deal of the Day on uk Amazon today. 99p for the kindle edition. I shall buy it and take myself out to lunch and start it.

[tinier_dragon]

Nov 11, 2020 13:57:33 GMT -5 Webs said:

Did anyone mention "The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue"?

Okay, this pulled me like "The Night Circus".

So complex to explain. Read it. You won't regret it.

Thanks for this. Reading it now and I like it.

[sophie]

The woman before Wallis: a Novel of Windsors, Vanderbilts, and Royal Scandal by Bryn Turnball. The title says it all. Novel based on (mostly) true facts. Not the kind of book I pick up but a friend passed it on to me, and said it was better than she expected. It’s an easy read and quite interesting. Nothing really thought provoking but, what a self centered group of socialites!

[lillielangtry]

Kate Summerscale, The Haunting of Alma Fielding
Some people might remember The Suspicions of Mr Whicher a few years back. Summerscale is an amazing non-fiction writer, her books are carefully researched but entertaining. This one centres on a woman, Alma Fielding, in the 1930s who claims her house is haunted by a poltergeist. She calls in Hungarian Jewish emigrant Nandor Fodor, who attempts to find out the truth of her supernatural experiences.
At first the book is rather slow and describes the various ghostly incidents in detail. But then Summerscale slowly brings everything together - the political turmoil of the 30s, the lingering trauma of the First World War and the growing fear of another one, the development of pyschoanalysis. It should be noted I have basically zero interest in the paranormal, but that honestly doesn't matter. Really excellent.
Oh, the only thing I took a while to get used to was that I listened to this as an audiobook and it was read by a man. I think in the past all the books I've listened to that were not read by the author had a reader the same sex as the author. It really doesn't matter of course, I just kept noticing it to start with.

[ozziegiraffe]

63. Unnatural Habits, Kerry Greenwood. I saw the tv adaptation. The book is much more complex. It’s fascinating how Phryne can show how much hypocrisy is in the world. In this book, the respectable middle class, nuns and priests are the evil doers, and those generally frowned on by the society of the day, including gays and communists, are the people standing up for the poor and afflicted. Go figure. Great expose of some very evil people, and lots of fun at the same time.

[scrubb]

Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto - another Book bub special. Apparently the author is a bit of a sensation in Japan. I enjoyed it, but the book is really short with a short story included afterwards, and they were very similar. Maybe all her books are virtually the same, and if so, I would get tired of them eventually.

Both focused on a young woman dealing with grief and loss of loved ones. The second one had some mystical elements. I don't know if I thought of Murikami just because there is some element of Japaneseness that is similar, or if she was sort of trying to sound a little bit like him, or if I just associated them because they're both Japanese. But the style seemed familiar.

[mei]

Finally finished my book club book, #26 of the year for me, something I would've never picked up myself (which is why I like bookclubs in general, but not this book in particular!): The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule. Undertitled as "The definitive story of the TED BUNDY case". It's a true crime book going through the murders by Ted Bundy, in a lot of detail. The author is someone who befriended Bundy before any of the women disappearanced and way before Bundy became a suspect.

It's a long book, over 500 pages, and very detailed with lots of names, dates, places which make it quite a drag to read through. The further the book goes the more annoying the author's sympathy for Bundy becomes (which continues until the very end even if at one point she does become convinced of his guilt). The original book ends around p400, when Bundy receives his death sentence in 1980, and then there are a ton of epilogues, updates and more updates which I only scanned through until the story really finishes with his execution in 1989.

Unless you're really interested in this type of crime book I wouldn't recommend it. If not for the book club commitment I wouldn't have finished it.

[ozziegiraffe]

64. Threadbare, Monica Ferris. An interesting mystery,dealing with the lives of homeless women,a demographic that mostly goes unnoticed in the world. While the mystery was cozy, it dealt with a serious issue sensitively

[Oweena]

Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller

Not sure how to describe this book by Miller. She's a science writer and reporter for NPR (she started the podcast Invisibilia). The book tells the story of David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist, the first president of Stanford University, and an unrepentant eugenicist. But it also weaves her own life's path throughout, discussing an older sisters mental health struggles, her relationship with her father, and a years long obsession she had with a former partner after they broke up. There's lots of talk about taxonomy, Darwin, fish, forced sterilization, and a whole slew of seemingly unrelated topics.
I found myself wishing the parts on her upbringing and personal life went on longer, due to the writing style she used in those chapters. Those shorter sections seemed written in a different way from the other parts which I'm sure is unavoidable when you're switching between science writing and a more memoir-like format.

[scrubb]

A Wolf at the Table, by Augusten Burrows. Not 100% sure yet what I think about it. A memoir of the author's childhood with a - possibly - twisted father. It was mostly well written, evocative of childhood, with plenty of tension. But a lot of the time I couldn't tell if his perception of his father as psychotic or evil or twisted or whatever "bad" it was (he didn't seem able to put a name on it) was just the imagination of a neglected child, fed by confusing input from his mentally ill mother.

Reviews called it "brutal" but I honestly didn't find it that brutal. Sad, in parts, and I feel sorry for the child he was, but his mother loved him, he had friends and pets, he wasn't physically or verbally abused (though maybe emotionally, hard to be certain), and I just didn't see the evidence that his first 12 years were utterly bleak and brutal. (From googling, I understand that the years he skipped over in this memoir - after his mother and he left his father - were brutal and terrible and damaging.)

[ozziegiraffe]

Interesting, Scrubb. I’ve read Running with Scissors, and his brother’s book, Look me in the Eye, when I was leaning about Asperger syndrome and high functioning autism. Not sure I’d want to read any more of Burroughs, as I don’t trust his veracity. It might be worth reading their mother’s story, though.

[lillielangtry]

Selva Almada, Dead Girls (translated by Annie Macdermott)
This is that middle genre known as journalistic fiction, or narrative nonfiction, or similar (think "In Cold Blood)
The author is Argentine and the book focuses on the lives and deaths of three young women murdered in rural Argentina. It's very good. Of course the subject matter is difficult and depressing - Almada makes it clear how violence and mysogyny pervade women's lives - but there is not too much visceral description of the crimes themselves so it didn't feel voyeuristic. If you find this kind of thing interesting, I would very much recommend. It's from the excellent Charco Press, one of the best sources for new Latin American writing in English.

Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui, I am Nujood, Aged 10 and Divorced (translated by Linda Coverdale)
Honestly this was the only book by a woman from Yemen that I could find and I would not otherwise have read it. The story, of Nujood's exceptionally brave decision to challenge her forced marriage to a much older man, is interesting but I don't think I found it "uplifting" as I was supposed to, especially after Google tells me that Nujood's father took most of her royalties and she dropped out of her education again, and that's without the war that Yemen has been suffering the past few years. Desperately sad.

[scrubb]

I read the Nujood Ali book a few years ago, lillie. I wouldn't say I found it uplifting, but the ending did provide some hope.. Your googling results kind of squash that, though. And of course the war has likely made life pretty hellish there.

[Oweena]

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Let's start by saying I know nothing of Shakespeare or his plays or his sonnets or his life.

This is the fictional story of his wife and 3 children with the starting point being what little is known about them.
The author doesn't pass the story off as non fiction in any way. It's more a starting point for her to write some great characters.
She writes in a way that sucked me into the story since the time period and the person of Shakespeare are definitely not what I'd normally read.

(This book apparently won the Women's Prize for Fiction this year.)

[mei]

#27 - The girl on the train by Paula Hawkins

I wanted something quick and easy after the string of non-fiction books recently, so found this on my bookshelves. A thriller, very different read for me - but it was easy and quick. Entertaining enough, although I got quite fed up with the characters involved.

[scrubb]

Marion Zimmer Bradley - The Worldwreckers. It's in the Darkover series, but I haven't read any of the others.

It was ok. Some interesting concepts, and she always writes well, but the conclusion was very simplistic.

[Liiisa]

Ohhh those Darkover novels. I had a friend in the 80s who loved them and insisted that I read them, and I probably got through 2 or 3 before deciding that was enough. Agree 100% with your description there; "interesting concepts but simplistic."

[Liiisa]

46) Isabel Wilkerson, Caste

Here's an important book for Americans to read. Wilkerson compares American racism with the Indian caste system and describes the American system as another ingrained system of caste. (She also uses the Nazis as a point of comparison as a system that intentionally created a caste system, and now has been making sincere and deliberate efforts undo it.)

Well thought through and researched; insightful and quite, sadly, true.

(It took me a couple weeks to read, but this was just because it was nonfiction and I've been kind of brain-dead from work lately. It's not a difficult read, just one that some nights I just didn't feel up to.)

[scrubb]

Fool Moon by Jack Butcher. Second in the Dresden files about the wizard private detective. Enjoyable.

[Oweena]

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
Picked it up because it's one of this author's books that I hadn't yet read.

As you can guess from the title, this one is about Lafayette. How at age 19 he worked to get the French monarchy to support the colonies during the Revolutionary War, and followed that up by volunteering to fight, even being shot in an early skirmish.
While the book is history, Vowell always writes with a good chunk of snark which I appreciate.
I always learn from her books and at the same time am entertained by her sensibilities. There's no hero worship here for any of the founding fathers or Lafayette. She points out their shortcomings as well as their contributions to the cause.

[scrubb]

I'm a big fan of Sarah Vowell's history writing. Still haven't read her first 2 (The Partly Cloudy Patriot, and Take the Cannoli), and now this one to catch up on too!

I learned extremely little American history in school. In fact, none. Her books have taught me a lot as well as being very enjoyable reading.

[Webs]

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. New, about 1/8th the size of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

[sophie]

Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye. Set in Portland, 1921, this novel tells the story of a young woman (white) who has to flee NYC and ends up in Portland in a hotel catering to a black clientele. She is smart and cheeky, with an uncanny ability to fade into the woodwork so her nickname is Nobody. She also manages to solve a bit of a mystery while get her own life in some sort of order. An easy read, with some interesting background about racial issues in Oregon.

[Oweena]

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

Short novel told from the point of view of a woman who's asked by an old (though not particularly close) friend to go away with her so the friend can take her euthanasia pills and not be alone. The friend has terminal cancer and wants to go out on on her own terms.
That's the pole the narrative swims around, but it's more background than main plot. The narrator tells several "sad stories". While they're sometimes sad, they're also spot on in telling the story of how we interact with each other and often don't take the opportunity to simply ask someone, what are you going through?

The narrative moves quickly and I'd say it's more about life than death.