Tag: book lists

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 2 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.

Nonfiction November 2025! Week Five: New to My TBR

~ whatmeread ~ 23 Comments

Welcome to the last week of Nonfiction November 2025. This week the host is Deb at Readerbuzz, and the prompt is New to My TBR:  It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR? Be sure to link back to the original blogger who posted about that book!

In her roundup for the year, Shoe’s Seeds & Stories reminded me of Amy Tan’s Backyard Bird Chronicles. I must have read about that book on her blog last year, but I also listened to an NPR interview with her about the book. I still have that book in my pile, but Shoe also mentioned her memoir, The Opposite of Fate. I think I would like to read that.

In her roundup, Kate of Books Are My Favourite and Best mentioned Hannah Kent’s memoir, Always Home, Always Homesick, about falling in love with Iceland. I’m kind of fascinated by Iceland, and I loved Kent’s book set there, so I’m putting that one on my list.

On Books Please, I read about Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn, about what happens to places when they are abandoned by people. Sounds fascinating!

I noticed that Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden O’Keefe is mentioned by Anne in My Head Is Full of Books. This is another book in my pile that I think I read about last year but have not gotten to yet. So, not new to my TBR but waiting.

A memoir that looked interesting on Fanda Classic Lit was Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä, and it has a map on the cover! I love maps!

This book isn’t nonfiction, but Michelle Paver’s name has been popping up all over the place lately, so when Olivia of Bemused and Bookish paired it with a nonfiction book of exploration, I put Rainforest on my reading list. I didn’t put the nonfiction book on my list because I already read a similar book called The Lost City of Z by David Grann. Also, it has a great cover.

Also from Olivia’s post for book pairings is Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed & Stolen Work by Allison Tyra. As a woman whose work has been overlooked and misattributed, I think this will be interesting.

I think the Franklin Expedition is fascinating, and I have already read several books that are either about it or reference it, so when Aj Sterkel of Read All the Things posted Ice Ghosts by Paul Watson, I had to add it to my list.

Aj Sterkel also brought up Stiff by Mary Roach, which made me remember how much I enjoyed her book about space exploration, Packing for Mars. Learning what people have done with corpses throughout time sounds interesting. So, I put that on my list. And, by the way, Read All the Things also reminded me that I have not yet read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which I put on my list last year.

Joy of Joy’s Book Blog mentions The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, a book I read in 2015. This reminds me that I have not yet read Caste, by the same author, a book that I have had on my list since it came out. And she also reminded me of another book that I’ve had on my list for a while, Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan.

So, I’m cheating a little bit by mentioning some books that are on my TBR, but I have added quite a few this week.

Some Book Serendipity of My Own

~ whatmeread ~ 7 Comments

When Bookish Beck posts her lists of what she calls “Book Serendipity,” that is, coincidences she notices across books, I am always impressed by how many things she lists and the level of detail she notices. So, last summer, I noticed a few things and jotted them down, thinking I would create a book serendipity list of my own. Then I had to flip the page in my notebook for some reason and forgot all about it. So, this is the paltry number of things I wrote down, plus one that is more recent.

  • Frail older woman interferes with a much younger man’s life: The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym and Cecil by Elizabeth Eliot.
  • Women are married to much older men: Cecil by Elizabeth Eliot and The Musgraves by D. E. Stevenson.
  • Feudalism is a good thing: The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie and The Portuguese Escape by Ann Bridge.
  • Empire is a good thing: The Portuguese Escape and The Lighthearted Quest by Ann Bridge

Boy, Ann, you’re not doing too well here.

The other things I noticed were actually cross-media serendipities that happened almost exactly at the same time:

  • Reference to Burgess and Maclean in The Portuguese Escape by Ann Bridge while watching a TV series about Kim Philby, also with references to Burgess and Maclean (A Spy Among Friends, starring Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis)
  • References to or setting in Ancient Syracuse in Indian Jones and the Dial of Destiny, on Jeopardy, and in Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

I guess maybe I’m not so much a details person as a big picture person, because I’m sure there have been more than these.

Nonfiction November 2025! Week Four: Diverse Perspectives

~ whatmeread ~ 17 Comments

This week the host is Rebekah of She Seeks Nonfiction. The prompt is Diverse Perspectives. Nonfiction books are one of the best tools for seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. They allow us to get an idea of the experiences of people of all different ages, races, genders, abilities, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, or even just people with different opinions than ours. Is there a book you read this year from a diverse author, or a book that opened your eyes to a perspective that you hadn’t considered? How did it challenge you to think differently?

I think the book I read that most reflected a perspective that was different from my own was Life Among the Qallunaat by Mini Aodla Freeman, a memoir by an Inuit woman whose life, even in the 1950s, was so different from my own, growing up at the same time. In the memoir, she portrays herself as a very naïve young girl, but at the same time there is lurking in her writing a little bit of humor as she explains the differences between her people’s ways of thinking and behaving and our own.

Another book that reflected a different kind of “modern” life was Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village. What struck me about this book is that the lives of the people were so remote from those of everyday English people in the 1970s even though their village was located only about 30 miles from Cambridge. The fact that for years there was no easy transportation between the village and larger towns and even between the fen dwellers and the village made the villagers’ lives a lot more primitive than others’, and the situation, although it has improved with many people having cars, has only gotten worse for the poor with transportation issues such as the removal of bus routes.

I don’t feel as if this topic works that well for the books that I read this year, though.