O come, all ye readers (December book thread)

[lillielangtry]

2020 is drawing to a close, I don't suppose many of us will be sorry to see the back of it, but there's still some reading time left!

Here's the November thread

[lillielangtry]

Dörte Hansen, Altes Land (available in English as "This House is Mine")
A book set in the German countryside around Hamburg, not an area I know very well. It focuses on two women, Vera and Anne. Vera is the daughter of a woman expelled from East Prussia following Germany's defeat in WW2 and Anne is her niece who moves from the city to her aunt's village. The horrific experiences of that journey had lasting effects on the subsequent generations. This is a beautiful, slow study of rural Germany and the changes it is undergoing, traumatic memory and families. I really liked it. My only reservation is that I seem to be stuck in a bit of a rut of picking this kind of German book.

[Liiisa]

Thank you lillie! That sounds good -- your description reminds me of that other really good book that I'm currently forgetting the name of where the Russians are advancing on East Germany... what was that.

I'm about a third of the way through "The Memory Police" by Yoko Ogawa, which feels a little like Murakami. I wonder if this is just a quality of translation from the Japanese, some quality of sentence construction. Well, it's also a little creepy.

[scrubb]

Thanks, lillie! Yesteerday I finished Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. It was published in 1968 but he wrote most of it in the '50s when he spent a summer as a park ranger in Arches National Monument, in Utah. It was in the days of dirt roads and fairly low numbers of tourists. He enjoyed the solitude and used his days off to hike further into the wilderness.

Some of the chapters are polemics against "civilizing" nature, and he outlines a plan to forbid vehicles from entering parks (while drving his pick up around himself...). It actually sounds pretty good, when I see the horrific congestion in parks these days. He also has a chapter talking about the plight of Indians in the USA. His solutions to their problems are a lot less palatable, including potentially forced birth control, although that is softened by his fairly idealistic and sympathetic viewpoint overall.

He is fairly poetic in his descriptions of the desert. He hikes into some really cool spots and writes about it in ways that made it easy to picture it all.

Unfortunately, the book's introduction, which the author wrote at the time it was published, is pretty obnoxious and made me dislike him before I even started the book. Luckily I was able to mentally set his later incarnation aside and enjoy his younger self, for the most part.

So - worth reading.

[Liiisa]

I've read that and agree that he seems kind of like an asshole but that it's a worthwhile book nonetheless.

[ozziegiraffe]

Thank you Lillie. Bookmarking.

[Oweena]

Thanks lillie.
I'm hoping December is a hole-up-and-read month for me.

[Liiisa]

47) Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

A woman lives on an island where things - not just objects, but the entire existence of a whole class of objects - disappear, and there are police who enforce this and take away people who seem resistant to the idea. A beautiful and very strange novel. I found it haunting and very interesting; will probably have it on my "best" list for this year.

[lillielangtry]

Glad you enjoyed that one Liiisa, I did too, but I've heard mixed things.

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, That Hair (translated from the Portuguese by Eric M B Becker)
My read for Angola. The protagonist of this slim novel, like its author, is of mixed Portuguese/Angolan heritage and grew up between the two countries. It's not quite what I was expecting. I knew it was a first person narrative based around the narrator's experiences with her hair, but it's also very complex linguistically with quite winding sentences. I was glad to see a translator's note explaining that Portuguese often has very long sentences and in the original they were sometimes more than a page long. When we find a translated book challenging stylistically, I think there's a great temptation to say "it's a poor translation", but there's a real risk that translating "smoothly" loses the deliberate choices of the author. ANYWAY I did not love this book although I had had really high hopes for it, but it was an interesting read.

[ozziegiraffe]

65. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Peter Godfrey-Smith. A fascinating account of the parallel development of cephalopod brains, written by a philosopher with an extensive knowledge of biology and scuba diving.
I always did wonder what the purpose of philosophy as a career could be. This goes a little way to support the discipline.

[Liiisa]

That one sounds really interesting, ozzie!

[scrubb]

Dec 4, 2020 21:43:43 GMT -5 ozziegiraffe said:

65. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, Peter Godfrey-Smith. A fascinating account of the parallel development of cephalopod brains, written by a philosopher with an extensive knowledge of biology and scuba diving.
I always did wonder what the purpose of philosophy as a career could be. This goes a little way to support the discipline.

Oh!| I bought that off Book bub and started it a few months ago but stalled after just a few pages. Mostly because I had assumed it was going to be written by a biologist and when he announced he's a philosopher and that was the focus of his book, I was less interested. But I intend to keep going with it sometime, and your review will help provide the impetus!

[ozziegiraffe]

The author is a professor spending half his time in, I think, New York, and the other half in Sydney, where he teaches History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney University, when he is not scuba diving in Octopolis. It is a subject I studied there fifty years ago.

[Liiisa]

48) Per Olov Enquist, The Royal Physician’s Visit

Historical fiction based on solid research (I looked at the wiki afterwards and yep, this all happened), in which we learn about shenanigans and political intrigue in the mid-18th century Danish court. The young King is mentally ill and rather dissociated, and the young Queen is having an affair with the character in the title, the King's physician and counselor.

Good book, which I had a hard time putting down despite knowing how it would end (you know from the beginning). What I really enjoyed about this is that all the characters are complex, with complex motivations. To me the Enlightenment itself is the hero of this novel, though it does get the characters in a bit of trouble. But it's interesting to read about its first flowerings in this time now when it's under attack.

[sophie]

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili. I need to thank Mei for talking about this book months ago. I ordered it (it had to come from the Uk as it wasn’t available in North America then) and it laid in my to read shelf for ages as it is a serious brick of a book. It is a fascinating look at Georgian life during the past 100+ years. Like many Russian novels, it is large in scope with a vast array of characters who are all somehow entwined. Definitely worth reading. And it has just won a major prize for translation work!

[mei]

#28 - Het woeden der gehele wereld by Maarten 't Hart.

A book by a famous Dutch author, although I think this is the first I've read by him. It's very good. A bit of a coming of age novel about a boy in his teens growing up in a small Dutch village, witnessing a murder. That becomes the main thread of the story, with some ww2 history, music, relationships woven into it. A surprisingly good read.

[lillielangtry]

One of my reads of the year, sophie, glad you enjoyed it!

[Liiisa]

That does sound great - will put it on my list. Probably for next year, though... I just started reading a 700-page history book, which will likely last me until February or so.

[sophie]

Lille, maybe it was you who recommended it.. sorry.. I just know it was considered an excellent read by someone on here. It got a great Review in the NYT btw.

[mei]

It wasn't me! But it does sound interesting.

[lillielangtry]

At least 3 people have read it on my recommendation and that makes me happy!

[scrubb]

Clea, by Lawrence Durrell. The last book in the Alexandria Quartet.

It wrapped things up pretty well but somehow felt possibly weaker than the others. The 3rd book felt like the strongest.

This one is narrated by the same person as the first one and while it's interesting seeing how his perspective has changed, he's still somewhat myopic. Certainly whatever aspect of his character is so attractive to the female characters does not come across!

[Oweena]

Fifty Words for Rain by Asha Lemmie

Tale of an 8 year old girl in post WWII Japan who is dumped by her mother to live with her grandmother in Kyoto. The girl is a bastard, the result of her mother falling for a Black American soldier and the child will ruin the families reputation so a series of unfortunate events happen to the girl. I disliked this book and kept asking myself why I was reading a romance novel that some one tried to sell as literary fiction.
I was frustrated by much of the plot with it's continued contrived tragedies.
I was so frustrated I looked at what GoodReads reviewers said. The person who described it as "VC Andrews set in Japan" captured my feelings.

Switching back to non-fiction for my next read, I need a dose of reality.

[lillielangtry]

Nadiya Hussain, Finding my Voice
Brits and other fans of the Great British Bake Off will remember Nadiya, the best winner ever ;-) I'm not one for the celebrity memoir generally, but I just really like her, so I listened to this audiobook read by herself.
She comes across as a very warm and determined woman. I was angry on her behalf sometimes - she vividly describes how her parents refused to let her go to university, for example. But she explains what led them to be that way, too. Anyway if you are into autobiographies and explorations of growing up in an immigrant family (and not the inside story of Bake Off, which is barely mentioned), it's a good one. It's still not really my genre, I felt that writing is not absolutely Hussain's forte and sometimes she fell into cliche at a sentence level, while still coming across as really genuine overall.

Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes (Rivers of London #4) and Foxglove Summer (#5)

Zsuzsa Bank, Weihnachtshaus (don't think this has been translated)
Someone got me this last Christmas but I deliberately didn't read it then because who wants to read a Christmas-themed book right after Christmas? It's only around 100 pages and looks like one of those gift books that bookstores put by the till for last-minute stocking fillers/gifts for people you don't know what to get.
There's not much of a plot. The narrator is a woman who has been widowed with two young children, but she finds that she has people around her who support her. OK for a bit of Advent heart-warming ;-)

[mei]

#29 (!!!! I haven't read this many books in a year in about a decade I think!)
Betraying Big Brother by Leta Hong Fincher

A pretty interesting (and better written than her first book) account of feminism in China. Basically, there's a huge gender equality gap and hardly any space for any type of activism to improve this. Pretty depressing also.

[ozziegiraffe]

66. Identical Strangers: a Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein. Interesting autobiography of twins separated soon after birth and raised in different New York families. They were part of a controversial twin study, involving twins deliberately separated. Interesting to me both as a psychologist and someone adopted as a baby. No, I don’t have a twin, but I have five half siblings.

[Oweena]

Dec 15, 2020 7:50:14 GMT -5 ozziegiraffe said:

66. Identical Strangers: a Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein. Interesting autobiography of twins separated soon after birth and raised in different New York families. They were part of a controversial twin study, involving twins deliberately separated. Interesting to me both as a psychologist and someone adopted as a baby. No, I don’t have a twin, but I have five half siblings.

ozzie, If you can find it, I recommend this documentary. As an adoptee with 5 full biological siblings it hit home for me, here's a link to the trailer:
Three Identical Strangers

[ozziegiraffe]

Thanks, Oweena. I actually saw that on tv here, a few weeks ago. They were part of the same study, adopted through the same Jewish agency in New York. The director claimed to believe separating twins was good for them!

[scrubb]

I've read a couple more of the Harry Dresden (Wizard detective) series. I think the 4th book was a lot better than the previous ones and I think I"m really into it now.

Also read a Graeme Greene - "A Burnt Out Case" about a man escaping his fame and his shallowness by going to the middle of the African jungle. Has lots of his angst about Catholicism, and his usual good writing.

[scrubb]

Finished another Armand Gamache detective novel by Louise Penney - Glass Houses. Pretty good but her style got on my nerves a bit.