Tag: book lists

Nonfiction November: Week Three

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This week’s host for Nonfiction November is Liz of Adventures in reading, running and working from home. The theme is Book Pairings, and here is its description:

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. You can be as creative as you like!

This is a toughie. I can think of some obvious pairings, like Middlemarch and My Life in Middlemarch, or the biographies of authors whose books I have read, or Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them and one of those Russian books, but I was looking for something more creative.

Here’s what I came up with: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance is the world-renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s nonfiction account of a collection of netsuke that belong to his family and what happened to it during World War II, when the family thought it was stolen by the Nazis. In tracing the collection, de Waal traces his own family history, beginning with Charles Ephrussi, the original owner of the collection, who was the cousin of de Waal’s great-grandfather and also the inspiration for Proust’s Charles Swann.

I’m pairing this with Great House by Nicole Krauss, a collection of linked short stories about the migrations of a desk, which the character Nadia tries to find after giving it away because she cannot write without it. The desk turns out to have a sad history and comes to represent all the objects lost in the Holocaust.

Nonfiction November: Week Two

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Week Two of Nonfiction November is hosted by Volatile Rune. The theme is Choosing Books, and here is its description:

What are you looking for when you pick up a nonfiction book? Do you have a particular topic you’re attracted to? Do you have a particular writing style that works best? When you look at a nonfiction book, does the title or cover influence you? If so, share a title or cover which you find striking. 

Cover for The Wicked Boy

I am not nearly as big a nonfiction reader as I am a fiction reader, so to answer this question, I had to look back at my list of nonfiction books since I started my blog. It’s clear that I like to read books about literary subjects and biographies and memoirs, often by or about literary figures, but although I have read a few, not often celebrity biographies and memoirs. I think in general I just look for nonfiction books that pique my interest in some way, either because of who wrote them or what they are about.

Although the cover generally influences me for fiction books, I haven’t been able to discover that I read any nonfiction books because of their covers. However, I will read books by certain authors: the biographers Doris Kearns Goodwin, Claire Tomalin, and Ron Chernow, for example. I also like true crime novels, but mostly true crime of an older vintage, so I have enjoyed a couple of books by Kate Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, The Wicked Boy) and have another one on my pile.

Cover for Annals of the Former World

There are also periods of history I’m interested in, particularly the Wars of the Roses. I’ll read histories and biographies about that time.

I am not very scientific minded, but occasionally I hear of a book about science that sounds fascinating. I have an upcoming review of The Bathysphere Book that I found really interesting, and it has a great cover illustration.

Ten years ago, I discovered John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, about how our continent was formed geologically, in four big, fat volumes, and I read every one. Fascinating stuff, and McPhee is a great writer.

Nonfiction November

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I thought I might participate in Nonfiction November this year. I haven’t participated before, not being the biggest nonfiction reader, but I thought I’d try to do a post a week, if they are appropriate. I am also planning to review two nonfiction books this month, including one I originally intended for the 1962 Club, but it didn’t fit my schedule.

The host for this week’s Nonfiction November is Based on a True Story, so people’s reviews and comments will be listed there.

So, here is the description for the theme for this week:

Week 1: Your Year in Nonfiction : Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favourite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you’ve been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

I have read eight nonfiction books this year, three of which I haven’t reviewed yet (although two are coming up in a few weeks). They are listed in order of my reviews:

These books don’t easily fall into categories, but:

  • 3 are memoirs and 1 is a biography
  • 4 are related to literature, 3 by authors known in the literary world and the last about Shakespeare’s work
  • 1 is a sort of travelogue or nature book
  • 2 are science-related

The books I enjoyed most were The Other Day, a memoir of Dorothy Whipple’s childhood, which was touching and funny, and The Bathysphere Book, a nonlinear account of the ocean explorations of William Beebe in a bathysphere, leading up to his deepest dive in 1930. This book was really interesting and included vivid descriptions of a bunch of colorful characters. Unfortunately, my reviews of these two books won’t appear until November or December. Silent Spring also made my mind boggle.

I have only recommended The Bathysphere Book to my husband. It will be interesting to see if he reads it.

I didn’t really have in mind gaining anything by participating except maybe that participation will draw me into reading more nonfiction.

Classics Club Spin #35

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It’s time for another Classics Club spin. For the spin, members select 20 titles from their Classics Club lists and post them in a numbered list on their blogs. On Sunday, October 15, the club selects a number, and that determines which book to read for the spin. The goal this time is to read that book by Sunday, December 3, and post your review.

So, with no further ado, here is my list of 20 books:

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

Since I have exactly 20 books left on my list, this will be the last spin that I can participate in for a while that doesn’t require repeating some of my entries. I’m interested to see how it turns out.

If I Gave the Award

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As I just posted my review for the last short-listed book for the 2019 James Tait Black Award for Fiction, it is now time for my feature where I decide whether the judges got it right. This time the choice is difficult for me, because I didn’t really like any of the shortlisted books. Most of them share a strong intellectualism, although that’s not why I felt so-so about them.

It’s kind of a toss-up which of the books I liked least. I remarked in the review of Murmur by Will Eaves how much I dislike books with dreams in them. In this novel about an Alan Turing-like figure, the main character eventually experiences wakened dream states as a side-effect from chemical castration. It’s ironic that the other book I disliked, Crudo by Olivia Laing (the winning entry), is also a fictional character study of a real person, a woman very much like the poet Kathy Acker, with whom I was completely unfamiliar. In this case, I found Kathy really annoying in her neuroticism and use of crude language. Both of these books were extremely well written, but I had difficulties with them.

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires was probably the least intellectually removed of the four books. It’s a collection of short stories linked by common characters that explores black identity in the California middle class. The stories are insightful and original, and some of them are bizarre.

That leaves me not quite knowing what to do with Sight by Jessie Greengrass. It’s about seeing below the surface, narrated by a woman who is conflicted about her own pregnancy. It combines her ruminations with stories about scientists whose discoveries also have to do with seeing below the surface. I found it to be written in meticulous prose but also to be distanced from the reader, and I didn’t like the main character’s neuroticism.

I guess I’m going with Sight, but this one was a tough choice.

If I Gave the Award

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As I have just posted my review of News of the Dead, the last of the shortlisted books for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, it is now time for my feature where I decide whether the judges got it right. The shortlisted books are set in 16th century Scotland; 8th, 19th, and 20th century Scotland; 20th century Trinidad, and 20th century Germany, California, and Switzerland. For this year, most of the entries were strong ones.

The book set in 20th century Trinidad, Fortune by Amanda Smythe, is the fictionalized story of a true one, a love triangle that resulted in a disaster. I felt that the characters in this novel were not very interesting and the setting not vividly described. Also, the writing was rather mundane. However, this book was the weakest entry on the shortlist.

The writing in The Magician by Colm Tóibín was not at all mundane. This novel is more difficult to evaluate in the context of my having to pick the best one, because I said only good things about it in my review, but it didn’t make as much of an impression on me as some of the others. A biographical novel about the writer Thomas Mann, the book was intuitive and meditative in tone and Tóibín’s writing is always excellent.

The winner this year was News of the Dead by James Robertson, and I’m guessing it was picked because of its scope. It tells the story of a remote Scottish glen through manuscripts written about a figure in the 8th century, a family in the 19th century, and an individual in the 20th, and how these people found refuge. It was well written, and I certainly found it involving and was unexpectedly touched by the second and third narratives. However, I wasn’t very interested in the first, about a supposed local saint.

Despite the three really good books in this year’s shortlist, it wasn’t difficult for me to pick my favorite because of the lasting impression it gave me despite being the book I read first, in August 2022. That is Rose Nicolson by Andrew Greig. It is set in the difficult times of 16th century Scotland, when people are still fighting about religion, about a young man’s love for an extraordinary young woman who is in danger of being thought a witch just because of her intelligence. I am a big Greig fan, and this was one of his best (although I might put in a word for his Fair Helen).