Tag: book lists

WWW Wednesday

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

You might be wondering why I’m not posting as often as I used to. Well, the answer is that I got caught up with myself in reading, and instead of being several months of books ahead of myself, I’m only about two weeks ahead, so I decided first not to post on Wednesdays except for special reasons, and then a little later, when the situation did not improve, not to post on Fridays. This situation will be fluid, like it has been since I started blogging. If I get way ahead of myself again, I’ll start posting on Fridays. I like being ahead on my reading, because it allows me to choose more carefully the order of books instead of having to review the next book I read.

Anyway, the Chocolate Lady is always doing bloggy type activities where she joins with other folks, and I don’t usually have time. Plus some of them take some planning. But she is occasionally doing WWW Wednesdays (I don’t know what WWW stands for, and she doesn’t explain), which seemed like an easy thing to take part in. If you want to take part, you just have to answer three questions: What are you reading now? What did you recently finish reading? What will you read next?

What am I reading now?

Right now, I am reading a Dean Street book from their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint, Family Ties by Celia Buckmaster. This gives me an opportunity to lobby for Dean Street publishing more Furrowed Middlebrow books. I know they are tied up in estate issues now, but I hope they will reconsider closing down this imprint. If you want them to continue with Furrowed Middlebrow maybe send them a message on their Facebook page, and please comment here! I am only a few pages into this book, and so far it seems to be about eccentric family life in a village. I always enjoy relaxing with a Furrowed Middlebrow book!

Technically speaking, I am also reading Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz. I chose this book to read for the 1937 Club (coming up next week), but so far I just haven’t been able to hack it. It is supposed to be his masterpiece, and it is about a grown man who gets turned into an 11-year-old boy and put back in school. If that sounds juvenile, it is. I got into it about 70 pages and put it aside. Every time I finish another book, I look at it and say “Nah!”

What did I recently finish reading?

The last book I read was The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara, which is part of my Pulitzer Prize project. One of my habits, maybe it’s a foible, is just to check the library periodically to see which books in my projects are available and get them without reading what they’re about. And in fact, I do the same thing with all the books in my stack. At some point I have usually read what they are about but I don’t do that right before I begin reading them. Well, for this book, the timing was unfortunate, because it is a dystopian novel, and not only do I not usually read dystopian novels, but it seems like recently everyone is writing them. And, in fact, I had read three just in the past few weeks. Now, don’t get me wrong, one of them was wonderful, as you’ll find out when I review it. I didn’t have as positive of an experience with The Immortal King Rao, although I didn’t dislike it. You’ll have to wait for my review, which should be coming up in a couple of weeks.

What will I read next?

When I troll the libraries for my project books (online, of course), I usually try to get one for each of my projects, although often I cannot find the Walter Scott Historical Fiction project books there and have to buy them. (That means they go into my pile and I get to them a lot later. I should do something about that. The Bee Sting has been there for quite a while.) Last time I trolled, I ended up with The Immortal King Rao for my Pulitzer project and Real Life by Brandon Taylor and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch for my Booker Prize project. (I am still waiting for After Sappho by Shelby Wynn Schwartz to arrive for my James Tait Black Project.) I have read Prophet Song, so after I finish my current book, I’ll read Real Life. As usual, I have no idea what it is about. I hope it’s not dystopian.

Have you read any of these books? What did you think?

A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? March Report

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

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?

I decided this accounting would make more sense if I listed the holes, so here goes. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: entries needed for 1926-31
  • 1935-1944: entries needed for all years except 1936, 1937, 1941, and 1943
  • 1945-1954: entries needed for all years except 1947, 1953, and 1954
  • 1955-1964: entries needed for all years except 1958 and 1959
  • 1965-1974: entries needed for all years except 1965, 1966, 1972, and 1974
  • 1975-1984: entries needed for all years except 1976
  • 1985-1994: entries needed for all years
  • 1995–2004: entries needed for all years except 2004
  • 2005-2014: entries needed for all years except 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014
  • 2015-2024: complete!

Read since February 28th:

  • The Circular Stairway by Mary Roberts Rinehart (unfortunately, it doesn’t fit in this project because it’s from 1908)
  • Firebird by Zuzanna Ginczanka from 1936 and 2023
  • Beginning with a Bash by Alice Tilton from 1937
  • Mrs. Martell by Elizabeth Eliot from 1953
  • Impact of Evidence by Carol Carnac from 1954
  • Silence by Shūsaku Endō from 1966
  • My Death by Lisa Tuttle from 2004
  • An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman from 2014
  • The Green Road by Anne Enright from 2015
  • The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller from 2023
  • The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon from 2023
  • The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters from 2023
  • The Hunter by Tara French from 2024
  • Murder Road by Simone St. James from 2024

What Is It with Cathedral of the Sea?

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments
Cover for Cathedral of the Sea

I occasionally look at my stats, and I find it interesting to note such things as which reviews are most read and when. I decided to look at them last week because I recently noticed that the novel Cathedral of the Sea had been popping up again as one of the reviews that was most read. I remembered it as a mediocre historical novel, so that piqued my curiosity.

Sure enough, the novel has the third highest number of views of any other on my site. (I’m not counting views of my home page, which has more than 83,000. That page, after all, is whichever review is up for that day.) The one in first place with 983 views is The Devil All the Time, which I don’t really count because it got linked to from Robert Pattinson’s official site after I mentioned the character he was playing and was only looked at for that year and the next. The second place review is for The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu, but views of it peaked from 2017-2019 and fell off to almost nothing from there. Cathedral of the Sea only had a few views for the first few years after I reviewed it, but starting in 2020, it has had an average of 90 views a year, which is a lot for one of my several thousand reviews, and continues to pop up regularly as one of the most viewed posts of the week.

Cathedral of the Sea was published in 2006, but I didn’t review it until 2013. It was a popular book for a while—you can see that it says “#1 International Bestseller” on the cover—but I found it an uninspired and rather poorly told story. I looked back at my review to remind myself what I thought of it, and I observed that the characters were poorly defined and Falcones had a habit of bringing people and things into the story when he needed them and then forgetting them. His women have no personality at all and have horrible fates. The oddest thing about it was that he has a plot where the main character is trying to discard his mistress for years so that he can have good marriage with his long-suffering wife. He finally does, and then there is an immediate jump of five years and within a page or so from that jump, Falcones kills off the wife. The wife is a cipher the entire time, and it’s like he doesn’t know what to do with her once the mistress is gone.

So, I notice that in 2018 Netflix posted a production of it. Could this be the reason people keep looking it up? It’s true that in 2018 the views of my post jumped from almost none to 33 that year and then almost doubled the next year and again the next year. But it has continued to be viewed at about the same rate every year since then. It’s a mystery.

Maybe the Netflix program is better than the book. I guess I have my answer. (I was looking all this stuff up as I was writing this, so I didn’t even know I had an answer until the end of the post. In fact, my plan was to ask my readers if they had a clue about it.) I was unaware of the Netflix series before now. It’s little research expeditions like this that make looking at the stats interesting.

Have you read Cathedral of the Sea or seen the Netflix show? What did you think of it?

A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? February Report

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

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?

I decided that the method I chose last month to keep track was meaningless to anyone but me, so it makes more sense if I list the years for which I don’t yet have entries. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: entries needed for 1926-31
  • 1935-1944: entries needed for all years except 1941 and 1943
  • 1945-1954: entries needed for all years except 1947
  • 1955-1964: entries needed for all years except 1958 and 1959
  • 1965-1974: entries needed for all years except 1965, 1972, and 1974
  • 1975-1984: entries needed for all years except 1976
  • 1985-1994: entries needed for all years
  • 1995–2004: entries needed for all years
  • 2005-2014: entries needed for all years except 2009, 2010, and 2012
  • 2015-2024: entries needed for 2015 and 2024

Read in February (up to today):

  • Fear Stalks the Village by Ethel Lina White from 1932
  • The Warrielaw Jewel by Winifred Peck from 1933
  • Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom from 1934
  • Tom Tiddler’s Ground by Ursula Orange from 1941
  • Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton from 1943
  • Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette from 1976
  • Murder at the Residence by Stella Blómkvist from 2012
  • Mrs, March by Virginia Feito from 2021
  • Chenneville by Paulette Jiles, The Bookbinder by Pip Williams, and Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo from 2023

A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? January Report

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

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.

12th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

Today I’ve been blogging for twelve years, which means it’s time for my anniversary post, where I list my top 10 books of this year of blogging. This year I found it much more difficult to pick this list than in previous years. Working from my Best of Ten list, I had several cases of more than one book by the same author that I had to choose between. I also didn’t have as many books that I was absolutely sure would end up in my top ten for the year as I usually do. (When I’m sure, I mark them in purple on my list.)

Of the books I’ve chosen, six are historical novels, three are vague as to time, and only one is clearly contemporary, but harks back to the 1970s (which some of us can remember). Eight are by women. This is an international group of novels. I’ve chosen books set in far northern Canada, islands off the coast of Denmark and in the Moluccas, France, Iceland, Michigan, Texas, and Ireland. My choices are by Canadian, Danish, American, Icelandic, Indo-European, French, and Irish authors. Seven of the books were written relatively recently, while three are older books. This year, all are novels.

So, in the order in which they appeared on my blog, here are my top ten books of the year:

  1. The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
  2. The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen
  3. The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer
  4. Miss Iceland by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
  5. The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermoût
  6. News of the World by Paulette Jiles
  7. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  8. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
  9. The Child and the River by Henri Bosco
  10. Foster by Claire Keegan

Classics Club Spin #36!

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

It’s time for another Classics Club Spin. What’s it all about? Members of the Classics Club select 20 books from their Classics Club lists (here’s mine) and list them by number on their blogs before Sunday, January 21. On that day, a spin number is selected by the club, and that number determines which book on the list the member will read by the spin deadline, which is Sunday, March 3. I am always ready to play, so here is my list:

  1. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
  2. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  3. The Prophet’s Mantle by E. Nesbit
  4. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  5. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  6. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini
  7. The Book of Dede Korkut by Anonymous
  8. Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton
  9. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  11. The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos
  12. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  13. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  14. Merkland, A Story of Scottish Life by Margaret Oliphant
  15. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  16. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  17. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  18. Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe
  19. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862)
  20. Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton