Tag: book lists

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

Right now, I’m reading the second book in the Department Q series: The Absent One by Jussi Adler-Olsen. It’s pretty grim so far, but that doesn’t usually bother me with crime novels. The second season of Department Q is supposed to be uploaded to Britbox this month, so I’m right on time. FictionFan pointed out to me that the TV series has inexplicably moved the mysteries to Scotland. I didn’t even notice that! Maybe it’s because I saw the TV series first.

What I just finished reading

I have to thank Nonfiction November for this one, because I have seldom enjoyed a nonfiction book as much. It’s the beautiful Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky. If you like maps and stories about remote places, even if you don’t have an affinity for islands like I do, you’ll find this one fascinating.

What I will read next

I think it’s going to be The Darlings of the Asylum by Noel O’Reilly. I have no idea how this book got on my list or what it’s about, but it’s almost time to find out!

How about you? What have you been reading?

If I Gave the Award

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

With my review of Absolutely & Forever, I have finished the shortlisted books for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. That means it’s time for my feature, where I decide whether the judges got it right.

This year was quite an international event, with books set in England, Trinidad, Italy, Malaysia, and Canada making the shortlist. As has become my usual approach, I’ll start with the books I liked least.

It’s almost a toss-up between two books as to which I should start with, but I think that will be Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein, which for this year was the winning novel. Although I was interested in the setting, the brutality in the book made me comment that if I wasn’t reading it for the prize, I wouldn’t read it at all. This was a novel about a young boy growing up in 1940s Trinidad, his feud with town boys and his father’s affair with a rich woman.

The other book I didn’t like as well was The New Life by Tom Crewe. I thought the subject matter was interesting, loosely based on the lives of two collaborators on a book about sexuality, but I don’t really like explicit sex scenes, and this book had lots of them.

In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas is about Canada’s history with slavery and treatment of indigenous peoples. I commented that Thomas’s approach of telling stories to fit in as much information as possible didn’t work very well for me. I thought there were too many characters, and he was trying to fit in so much in that it got confusing.

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is about a real group of people in Rome during World War II who helped Allied soldiers escape from Nazi-occupied Italy. Although the subject matter was interesting and I enjoyed the book, I commented that as the first of a trilogy, I wondered where the material was going to come from for two more books.

Now, I have got to my two favorites, and I am having a hard time deciding which one to pick. Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain is a coming-of-age story, sort of, set in 1960s England. I just loved the voice of its narrator and was captivated by it (although since the 15-year-old heroine was the same age as Tremain in the 1960s, it doesn’t really fit my definition of a historical novel). However, I think I’m going to pick The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng about, among other things, Somerset Maugham’s visit to Malaysia in the 1920s.

Six in Six

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I think I paid attention to the Six in Six post on She Reads Novels for the first time and decided to give it a try. It’s a sort of review of reading for the last six months, in which you pick six categories with six books. I see I have read 80 books, so it’s not going to cover mine very well. You can make up your own categories if you want. I have plagiarized from Helen for most of mine and from Annelies of In Another Era. Oh, I see I have the logo, so I must have done this at least once before.

If the title isn’t linked, I haven’t posted my review yet.

Six Set in a Different Century

Six Originally Written in Another Language

Six about Real People

Six with a Mystery

Six with Elements of Fantasy or Supernatural

Six Favorites

What about you? Have you read any of these books? Which books stand out from your first six months of reading this year?

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 am I reading now?

I am reading English Magic by Uschi Gatward, one of the last books for my James Tait Black Award project, since I’m trying to wrap it up. It’s a collection of short stories. I don’t always get on well with short stories, but so far, I’ve found some of them interesting and some of them frustrating.

What did I just finish reading?

I just finished The Librarian by Salley Vickers. I’m not sure how this book got on my list, but I enjoyed it. It’s about a librarian who moves to a small English town in the 1950s and tries to get more children to use the children’s library. At first, I thought it was going to be a standard romance, but it didn’t turn out that way.

What will I read next?

This can always change, but what’s next in my pile is Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. It’s a historical novel set during the Civil War, and it’s been on my list for some time.

What about you? What are you up to with your reading?

It’s Time for Another Classics Club Spin!

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The Classics Club is beginning its 41st spin event this week. If you are a member and want to participate, just post a choice of 20 books from your Classics Club list in a numbered list before Sunday, June 15. You can duplicate some, especially if you don’t have 20 books left to read, like me.

The Classics Club will announce a number on Sunday, and that’s the number of the book you should read from your list. The idea is to try to read that book before the 24th of August and post a review.

If you are not yet a Classics Club member and would like to participate, all you need to do is post a list of books you want to read, most people post 50-100 books, and a deadline by which you would like to have them read. Submit that list to the Classics Club, and you’re signed up! Then post your list of 20 for the spin.

Here’s my list of 20 for the spin:

  1. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakepeare
  2. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  3. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  4. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  5. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  6. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  7. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini
  8. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
  9. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  10. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  11. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  12. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakepeare
  13. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  14. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  15. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  16. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  17. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  18. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini
  19. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  20. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

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 just finished my previous book, so I haven’t actually started An Episode at Toledo by Ann Bridge. I have liked the couple other books I have read by Bridge, but this one is apparently a part of a mystery series she wrote. I haven’t read any of the others, and I’m afraid I’m getting this one out of order, which I hate to do if I can avoid it. Anyway, I’m looking forward to starting it today.

What I just finished reading

I just read The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden for my Walter Scott Historical Prize project. It is set in the early 1960s in Utrecht, but the vestiges of the war are still in evidence. I don’t want to say too much about it here, because it goes somewhere surprising at the end. You’ll have to wait for my review!

What I am reading next

I sometimes forget what I said I was going to read next and read something else, but this time I think I’ll read the third book in Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy. It’s called Girls in Their Married Bliss, and I can’t help thinking that title might be meant ironically. I’ll find out!

If I Gave the Award

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Having read all of the shortlisted books for the 2022 Booker Prize, I see that it is time for my feature in which I decide whether the judges got it right. For this year the choice is difficult for me because I didn’t like many of the books.

As I sometimes do, I’ll start with the book I liked least. That is Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo. Bulawayo’s intent was to explain events in the recent history of Zimbabwe, but her choice to make the characters animals did nothing for me. In fact, it made the characters flat. I also had little tolerance for all the religious and political speeches, and the book’s repetition. I did not finish this book after reading more than half of it.

There was something strange to me also about the approach Percival Everett takes with The Trees. This novel is about the lynching of Black people that took place for centuries in the American South and in particular, the murder of Emmett Till. However, Everett makes it a mystery about some grotesque murders and creates Southern white characters who are almost caricatures of themselves. On reflection, for such a serious subject it seems to indicate an odd sense of humor.

The winner for this year was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, about a dead man who is trying to reveal photographs he has taken of the Sri Lankan civil war. I was very interested in the history of Sri Lanka, which is not a country I know about, but I didn’t enjoy his depiction of a grotesque afterlife. (The book reminded me a bit of the afterlife depicted in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, although I found that book ultimately more touching.)

Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker is a fantasy novella about a boy left alone in an unusual world. It was interesting and imaginative, a fast read that resembled a fairy tale, but it didn’t do much for me.

I always like a book by Elizabeth Strout because of the writing and the gentleness with which she treats her characters. However, Oh, William!, about Lucy Barton’s ex-husband and his family secrets, seemed slight to me when compared to some of the other books.

The book I enjoyed most for its writing and its theme was Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, about the Magdalen laundries. Keegan is another excellent writer. I guess I’ll pick it for its beautiful, pared-down prose.