Tag: book lists

Classics Club Spin #43

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. To participate, post a numbered list of 20 books from your Classics Club list (here’s mine) before Sunday, February 8th. Classics Club will announce a number on that day, and that determines the book to read before the 29th of March.

I think I’ve participated in every spin since I became a Classic Club member. At this date, I have just eight books on my list, so I’ll be repeating to get 20:

  1. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  2. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  3. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  4. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  5. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  6. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  7. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  8. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  9. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  10. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  11. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  12. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  13. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  14. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  15. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  16. The Tavern Knight by Raphael Sabatini
  17. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma
  18. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  19. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de la Fayette
  20. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I Am Reading Now

I just started reading the biography Oscar Wilde by Sheridan Morley. This book was kindly sent to me for review by Dean Street Press. I find Wilde a fascinating personality, so I’m hoping to gain some insight from this novel.

What I Just Finished Reading

I read A Fortunate Man by Henrik Pontoppidan for the Pontoppidan Review-Along in March. By the last few days, I felt as if I had been reading it forever (it’s more than 800 pages long), and I’ll have a lot to say about it in my review. It is a vast novel that attempts to bring in most of the important philosophies and currents affecting Danish life in the mid-nineteenth century.

What I Will Read Next

If I don’t read If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery next, I’ll have to send it back to the library unread! It’s one of only two books I need to read to finish the Booker Prize shortlist for 2022. I’m reading it for my Booker Prize project; hence, I have no idea what it’s about.

14th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

~ whatmeread ~ 19 Comments

It’s hard to believe that yesterday was the 14th anniversary of my blog. As has become my habit, this is the time that I list my favorite books of the ones I reviewed during the year. As usual, I make my list from the Best of Ten books during the year.

This year was a tough one to pick, because I had twelve books that were difficult to choose among, along with all the other Best of Tens. I ended up with three or four fairly recent books and five or six classic novels, one comic novel, three novels about the course of the main character’s childhood and life, four historical novels and one partially historical, one nonfiction memoir, one mystery, and one drama with a twist. Three were by men, and seven by women. Two of these books were re-reads for me.

So, here they are, in the order I reviewed them:

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I am reading now

I am reading The Town House by Norah Lofts. It’s the first book in Lofts’ Suffolk Trilogy. It begins in the 14th century with a serf escaping serfdom, much like Cathedral of the Sea. I looked for a book by Lofts after finishing her book Lady Living Alone, which I really enjoyed.

What I just finished reading

I just finished reading Beggar’s Choice by Patricia Wentworth. Although I had difficulty getting started because it was so obvious that someone was trying to frame the oblivious main character, it turned out to be a pretty good read.

What I will read next

I guess I’m on a roll with classic novels, because the book I will probably read next is Death in Ambush by Susan Gilruth. I think I bought this book to read for the Christmas season and apparently forgot to do that!

Wanderlust Bingo: I Guess I Get a C

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I didn’t actually participate in the Wanderlust Bingo Card challenge. In fact, I haven’t really gotten the point of the bingo card challenges. However, FictionFan put her card up last week showing how she had filled it out pretty well without attempting the challenge. Actually, she got all of them. So, I decided to try it myself. Unfortunately, I found that although I had many choices for some of the entries and several for others, as far as I can remember the settings of all the books I read, this year I had none for several locations.

Here’s how my card came out:

Here are my books:

As you can see, the spaces that are missing are

  • Subcontinent
  • Central America
  • Caribbean

Maybe I’ll do better next year.

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I am reading now

I am reading The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, which I’ve had sitting on my nightstand for a few weeks but was avoiding during Nonfiction November and Novellas in November because it is 600+ pages long. However, it is perfect for Doorstoppers in December, so I signed it up for that. I originally chose it because it’s on my Classics Club list, so reading it serves two purposes. So far, the novel may be autobiographical, and it is covering the main character’s childhood. It was published in 1930.

What I just finished reading

I just finished a really entertaining early mystery, Enter Sir John, by two authors I have never heard of, Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson. Well, actually, I think I have heard of Clemence Dane, but not in terms of mystery novels. It turns out both were successful writers, Dane mostly as a screenwriter and Simpson as a novelist. This mystery is from 1928.

What I will probably read next

The next book in my stack is Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, which has shown up here and there a lot this year. I have forgotten what it’s about since I ordered it, but that just makes it more fun to dig in!

What about you? What are you reading?

Wrap-Up for My James Tait Black Project

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

Announcement of a Review-Along!

Before I plunge into my topic, FictionFan and I are announcing a Review-Along of the works of Henrik Pontoppidan, the Danish Nobel Prize for Literature winner (1917). We both chose his most famous book to read, A Fortunate Man (also known as Lucky Per), but readers are welcome to choose any of his works that are available. We’re aiming for March, as A Fortunate Man is a real doorstopper! See the details at FictionFan’s announcement post here!

James Tait Black Fiction Prize Wrap-Up

A few years ago, I decided to add the James Tait Black Fiction Prize to my shortlist projects. However, after a while I felt like I was reading too much British fiction as opposed to American or fiction from other countries, since all my prize projects were Brit-based and I also read a lot of reprinted British fiction. So, I dropped the James Tait in 2023 and added the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. For the James Tait, I started my list back a few years, at 2010.

When I was just trying to wrap up this project by finishing the few books I had left to read, some fellow bloggers asked me if I would provide a wrap-up post for my reading. So, here it is, for the shortlisted books from 2010-2023, I know I’m finishing a few years later, but many of the books for this project were never available from my library, so I waited to see if they would become available and at the end, had to buy them. That hasn’t been a problem with my Booker or Pulitzer projects, although it has sometimes affected my Walter Scott Fiction Prize project.

The Data

Thanks to a request by FictionFan, I am providing data about my project. I am not a data person, so bear with me.

I began this project October 6, 2017, and decided to wrap it up in 2023. I finished reading on October 4, 2025, but it’s taken me this long to schedule the final two reviews. I posted my last review last Thursday, November 20, 2025.

Number of books read for project: 57

Ratings in The StoryGraph

Keep in mind that until 2025, I stored this data in Goodreads, which does not allow fractional ratings. There were only two books in the list that had fractional ratings, so I rounded them down. I am not really happy with 1-5 ratings, because to me, a 3.25 rating (a little bit better than 3, which is my meh rating), for example, is a lot different than a 3.75 rating (almost a 4).

Yes, I made some charts! It’s been a long time since I used Excel, so pardon me for any awkwardness. As you can see below, most of the books were rated either 3 (green) or 4 (blue).

Author Information

Number of female authors: 34; Number of male authors: 22

Note that one author made the shortlist twice.

I made a chart for author nationality. This chart is off by one because Sarah Hall is listed twice in my data, and I couldn’t figure out how to exclude one of her from this chart. So, there is one extra count for “English.” I used nationality as listed in Wikipedia, which for some authors listed two. Where are the Canadian authors, guys?

Settings

This answer was difficult, because some settings were unspecified while other books were set in several places, and one was just “Europe.” The chart I generated was unpleasing, so here is the data entered by hand for number of books in a setting:

U. S.: 17
England: 13
Ireland: 2
Scotland: 2
Multiple countries: 9
Unspecified: 5

Only one novel is set in each of the following countries: Kosovo, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Nigeria, Russia, Japan, Uganda, and Vietnam.

Genres

This section is problematic, I know, but I decided to add it at the last moment. The problem is that genres are so fluidly described these days that I could have a different list for each book! I tried for broader categories and used a search when I needed to, but sometimes I got as definitive a genre as “novel.” I also realize that short fiction could also fit into one or more of these genres, but I didn’t go there. I didn’t want to deal with specifying more than one genre per book. So, I did my best. Here is the genre breakdown I came up with. I was surprised by how many of the novels were historical, although I know it has recently become a very popular genre.

How Much I Liked Them

I wasn’t sure how to organize this section, so I decided to break it up into categories by how much I enjoyed the book. So, with no more adieu . . . These books are ordered by year of the prize, with the earliest first. For the most part, you will see that the category I put a book in has no relationship to whether it won that year or not. Winners are marked in red.

Books I Loved

Books I Highly Recommend

Books I Moderately Recommend

So-So or Even Meh or Some Good Stuff

Books I Actively Disliked or That Annoyed Me

Best and Worst

The best book choice is tough, but I pick Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It captured me every second and was minutely researched.

The worst book choice is easy, the only one I didn’t finish, You & Me by Padgett Powell. Who needs to rewrite Waiting for Godot anyway? And so unfunny.