The Best Book for this period is Someone from the Past by Margot Bennett!
Best of Ten!
Why I Quit Using Goodreads
Observant readers may have noticed that in the last couple of days, the Goodreads widgets have been missing from my blog. Here’s why.
I got a surprise email from Goodreads on Sunday morning. Apparently, someone had complained about one of my reviews because it only had the link to my review on this blog in it. They said that it violated their review policy, so they removed it. They said if anyone else complained about other of my reviews in the same state, they would remove those.
I found that interesting for a couple reasons. (Actually, I found it infuriating.) One, when I started using Goodreads 12 years ago, I sent them an email asking if it was okay to link to my blog. They said yes, it was encouraged, and they didn’t tell me I had to write anything else. I felt that putting in part of my review and then linking to the review was redundant, so I have simply stuck to a statement referring to my review with the link. And I have done that for more than 2000 reviews over 12 years.
It is also interesting, because the majority of “reviewers” simply pick a number of stars, and at least my review did more than that.
So, first I looked for this policy that I had apparently violated. I couldn’t see a place for it on any of the menus or submenus. I looked for a link to it on a review page for a book. I found nothing. Finally, I clicked on the link to the policy that they emailed me, and as far as I can tell, this is the policy I innocently violated. The only way I can tell this is because the other policies don’t have anything to do with this issue. I haven’t harassed anyone, plagiarized anyone, or abused their rating system.
Full reviews that link to a blog are acceptable, as long as the blog is not selling a competing book and using the review to denigrate the book being reviewed in favor of its own.
The word “full,” I guess, is supposed to convey that you have to write something in addition to a link. Otherwise, this rule is about something else entirely. There is no rule that outright says you have to leave a text review in addition to a link.
I sent them an email explaining all of this, and the response I got just repeated everything they had already said. To my comments about not being able to find their reviews policy on their site, they actually responded this:
For security reasons, we do not share details about our guidelines or moderation processes.
So they’re purposefully hiding their policies? Is that what that means?
In the meantime, I was so angry, especially at the pettiness of someone bothering to complain about my review, that I decided to look for alternatives. I finally decided to switch to The StoryGraph because it allowed me to import my Goodreads data (some of it) and because it was one of two alternatives that allows me to use my computer rather than an app on my phone. I have Goodreads app on my phone, but I never use it.
While I was researching alternatives, I heard for the first time about some of the controversy surrounding Goodreads since it was bought by Amazon. Some of it involves not following up when authors complain about blackmail attempts by people who threaten to load their books up with one-star reviews if they don’t pay up. I found this interesting because Goodreads does allow you to post star reviews with no other content, whereas The StoryGraph does not. You have to at least make some selections about the type of book it is even if you don’t write anything. Apparently, it is okay to Goodreads to leave just stars, even if this can be abused, rather than linking to a full and legitimate review. And it is interesting to me that they would not follow up on blackmail threats by removing the one-star reviews but then remove mine.
I may have cut off my nose to spite my face, because I am having to get used to the new interface, and in some ways I don’t like it. It is a lot harder, maybe impossible, to see all the books you have reviewed. I used the Goodreads spreadsheet feature a lot, and they don’t seem to have anything like that, although I have asked. (I can export all my book information and figure out how to get it to tell me what I need, but I’m too lazy.) As far as traffic is concerned, my blog stats inform me that I got eight referrals from Goodreads in the last year, so that seems insignificant. I do have one follower who came over from Goodreads that I know of and who leaves comments on my blog occasionally, but I don’t think I have lots of them. I don’t know how many users The StoryGraph has, but probably a lot fewer than Goodreads. The only social feature that I used on Goodreads was to see what one of my friends was reading, just one. So, I’m not going to miss that.
Anyway, all I can say is, bye, bye Goodreads.
Review 2310: Jane Austen at Home
Although I read Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen years ago and thought it was very good, I feel that historian Lucy Worsley’s book provides a more personal look at Austen with more detail about her everyday life. Although some references are drawn from Worsley’s knowledge of Georgian society, she doesn’t hesitate to draw inferences from Austen’s novels and letters. Further, I think she has a better sense than some biographers of when in Austen’s letters she is joking
Worsley points out how important a settled home is in Austen’s fiction. Certainly, from the time of her father’s retirement from Steventon, that is something she and her sister and mother did not have that provoked much anxiety.
It was Tomalin’s suggestion that Austen was unable to write when she was unsettled, but Worsley suggests that Austen was working on novels all along but not doing much to market them. She also pointed out some subversive ideas in Austen’s fiction that I never noticed despite how many times I’ve read the novels. In any case, she does a good job of showing how revolutionary Austen’s fiction was for her time.
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Review 2309: The Curate’s Wife
When I reviewed E. H. Young’s Jenny Wren, I remarked that I preferred Jenny’s sister Dahlia to Jenny. So, I was delighted to find that The Curate’s Wife is about Dahlia (although Jenny’s romantic fate is also involved).
Dahlia has married the curate, Cecil Sproat, on the basis of a friendship in which she feels she can say anything. But very soon, she finds that’s not true when it applies to religion, which has not formed part of her upbringing and which she finds silly. For his part, Cecil is rigid and has been unthinking in his religious beliefs. There is also the problem that Cecil is in love with Dahlia, but the reverse is not true.
Another issue is created by Mrs. Doubleday, the wife of Rector Doubleday, Cecil’s boss. She is an unpleasant woman who already dislikes Cecil and takes a strong dislike to Dahlia. She makes it her business to listen to gossip about the girls’ mother’s inferior social standing and her affair during the war. Their mother foolishly married farmer Thomas Grimshaw at the end of Jenny Wren, hoping that would remove a bar to Jenny’s marriage with Cyril Merriman, but that only made the situation more hopeless. Jenny has gone off to live with Mr. Cumming’s sisters and father and learn about the antique business.
Dahlia begins to feel as if she missed out. After school, she was first isolated on the farm and now is living with a dedicated man doing good works. She has never even been to a party or enjoyed other types of amusements. She begins to fancy herself in love with Simon Tothill, a young man she met at a theater rehearsal.
Just as Dahlia and Cecil are beginning to understand each other, Jenny arrives without warning. She has left the Cummings and expects to live with Dahlia and Cecil. Although Dahlia is happy to see Jenny, she begins to realize just how selfish her sister can be. For his part, Cecil is a little jealous of how close the sisters are.
Dahlia’s problems with Cecil have an interesting parallel in the relationship between the Doubledays. Mr. Doubleday is easy going and tries to avoid trouble but is afraid of his ill-natured wife. Their son is returning after three years of service in Africa, and Mrs. Doubleday wants him all to herself. But she soon makes a mistake in a remark that frees Mr. Doubleday from trying to please her.
This novel takes a complex look at new marriage and the lack of preparation people have for its problems. I didn’t like Jenny any better, but I have been impressed by how far below the surface Young’s novels go.
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Review 2308: One Afternoon
One afternoon Anna Goodhart, a widow in her mid-thirties with three daughters, runs into Charlie, a young actor whom she met years ago at some event of her husband’s. He invites her to a party. She agrees to go but almost backs out. However, she goes and they soon begin an affair. Although she doesn’t expect it to last, she is wild with joy and makes no secret of their relationship.
This is the story about a woman who begins to rebuild her own life after her husband’s death, to realize things about her marriage, and to identify what she wants her life to be. Although attitudes had begun to change for women in 1974 when this book was published, it reads like a much more modern novel. I was surprised how the people in Anna’s life, with a couple of exceptions, take her affair and her subsequent decisions.
This is a lovely book filled with mostly kind people. It explores memory and how it tangles with reality as well as the complexities of love.
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Review 2307: The Geometer Lobachevsky
In 1950 Ireland, Soviet citizen Nikolai Lobachevsky has been working in the western bogs, trying to help a team survey the bog lands. He receives a letter from the Soviet government summoning him home to take up a “special assignment.” He knows that probably means execution, so he hides on a remote estuarial island.
Readers who look for a rousing plot aren’t going to find one here. Nothing much happens except for work and exact observations. First, Nikolai is helping with the surveying. Later, he helps farm seaweed. But he is homesick, and once he hears of Stalin’s death, he decides to return to Russia, taking a gamble that Malinkov, for whom he used to work, will pardon him for whatever sins he’s supposed to have committed.
I just felt meh about this novel, which I read for my Walter Scott project. It excels at descriptive passages, but it was hard to know Lobachevsky. Also, I am not that into strictly contemplative novels.
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A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? January Report
In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing?
Well, unlike Simon, who seems to have a huge library of unread books from just about every decade, I have just been reading through my pile, and my worst fears are being justified. Just in the first weeks, I read seven books written in 2023! I had to decide whether, on my page for keeping track, I would list just one book per year or go ahead and list every book I read for that year, and I decided to do the latter, because the former was just too frustrating. I also had to decide, because my first few book reviews for the year were for ones I read in 2023, whether to list those. I decided to do that even though it might seem like cheating, because it’s unlikely that I am going to meet this challenge at the rate I am going. And in any case, by the end of the year, I won’t have posted reviews of the books I read towards the end of the year yet.
I will summarize my progress so far by decade. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.
- 1925-1934: 4 books (however, 3 of them are for 1934—I don’t know how I did that)
- 1935-1944: 1 book
- 1945-1954: 1 book
- 1955-1964: 2 books
- 1965-1974: 2 books
- 1975-1984: 1 book
- 1985-1994: 0 books
- 1995–2004: 0 books
- 2005-2014: 2 books
- 2015-2024: 16 books, but 7 of them are from 2023
So, although Simon said the first half of the year you could just plug in the years and later begin to purposefully look for books for the years you don’t have, I may have to come up with a plan that is more specific sooner, because random reading doesn’t seem to be working well for me.
I’ll post this report each month, so you can see how I’m doing.
Review 2306: The Midnight News
Is The Midnight News a love story? a murder mystery? an espionage tale? a story about a dysfunctional family? an exploration of how the stress of war affects people psychologically? I’m not telling.
Charlotte is the daughter of privilege. Her father is a peer and a member of Parliament with an important war job. But Charlotte has chosen to work as a typist in a government office and live in a respectable but middle class boarding house.
It is the Blitz, and Charlotte’s home is in a dangerous area south of the Thames. She and the other residents of the house have been spending their nights on the lowest level of the house.
The novel starts slowly. Charlotte spends a day with her best friend, El, who has been elusive lately. Then El is killed in the Blitz. Charlotte goes to visit her godmother, Saskia, after she hears that a well-known actress, a schoolmate, has also been killed. Then Saskia dies, too. Charlotte has noticed a square gray man in several different places and comes to believe he is following her and killing people she is close to. This may seem like a wild idea, and since Charlotte has begun hearing the voices of her dead friends and has a history of mental illness, we begin to worry about her.
Then there is Tom, the son of an undertaker whom Charlotte has noticed feeding the birds. He is waiting to hear about a scholarship and a place at King’s College, but notifications are delayed because King’s has been hit in the Blitz. He is in love with Charlotte but thinks she is above him.
Is Charlotte being followed or is she paranoid? Is there something else going on? This novel eventually because a fast-moving, tightly plotted, and satisfying tale.
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Review 2305: The Fawn
The Fawn is an unusual novel, narrated as it is by Eszter, who through the entire novel is speaking to another person. Eventually, we understand this is her lover, whose identity is not confirmed until the last half of the book.
The novel moves among scenes from the present and the past, sometimes with no transition, so that I was briefly confused about the when. Eszter grows up very poor. Her parents are from more prosperous roots, her father’s perhaps aristocratic, but his family has thrown them off. Her father is a lawyer but he takes few cases. He is more interested in horticulture and in fact is ailing for most of her life. So, her mother teaches endless piano lessons to support them, and Eszter earns money by tutoring other students and sometimes by stealing. Her life is made harder by her parents’ sufficiency for each other. She feels that they pay no attention to her.
Although Eszter becomes a famous actress with a good income and a nice flat in Budapest, she never forgets or forgives the slights of her childhood. In particular, she hates Angéla, a schoolmate who is beautiful and kind, but whose way is made easy by everyone because she is rich and beautiful. Her bad grades are corrected by the school after visits from her parents. Eszter is happy to see her family leave town after it is disgraced, but Angéla re-emerges after the war, married to the man who becomes Eszter’s lover.
Eszter is a complex character, not likable but someone who still keeps our sympathy. This novel explores the complexity of human relationships. Eszter laments that no one has ever loved her for herself, but she has turned herself into a chameleon—a famous actress who so submerges herself in her roles that on the street no one recognizes her. The Party members refuse to believe her true story when she submits her CV for approval to work at the theater, so she has to reinvent her life to make herself into a reformed aristocrat. Her lover loves her but doesn’t understand her at all.
I found this novel a little difficult at first because it just seemed to be rambling, but the narrative is compelling. Once I really got going, I just wanted to see how it ended.
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Review 2304: Midwinter Murder
Even though I don’t always get on with mystery short stories, I’ve observed Midwinter Murder going around and thought it sounded like good winter reading. And so it proved to be.
For one thing, with Christie’s stories I didn’t feel that lack of characterization that I often feel with other mystery short stories, since Christie is so deft at depicting characters with just a few strokes. Not all of these stories involved murders, and some are quite benign. Poirot appears in several, Miss Marple in one, Tommy and Tuppence in one, and in two, a Mr. Satterthwaite and his mysterious friend, Mr. Quin.
“The Clergyman’s Daughter,” about a woman who inherits a house only to find odd things happening in it, was unfortunately already included in Partners in Crime, which I read last year. Similarly, the Miss Marple story, “A Christmas Tragedy,” was included in The Tuesday Club Murders.
Just for a change, I believe I preferred some of the more benign stories. For example, in “The Problem at Pollensa Bay,” Mr. Parker Pine receives a plea from an overprotective mother to find a way to get her poor son Basil away from a girl she deems unsuitable. But Mr. Pine doesn’t see anything wrong with the girl.
I also liked “The World’s End,” in which the mysterious Mr. Quin appears in a desolate location in Corsica to right a wrong.
And in “The Manhood of Edward Robinson,” Edward is a clerk who yearns for romance but his too-practical fianceé Maud thinks he’s a spendthrift and chides him when he tries to make a romantic gesture. Edward wins £500 in a contest and decides to spend it all on a sportscar then take it away for a day before Maud ruins his fun. And he has an unexpected adventure.
There are lots of stories with clever puzzles, for example, “Christmas Adventure,” in which Poirot figures out why there is a jewel in the plum pudding. But I thought I’d point out some of the more unusual stories.
What? Me Read? 