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 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!

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

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.

WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 10 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 There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I’m not sure where I heard of this book, but I’m always interested in Russian writers. This book is written backwards, starting at the back of the book, and I’ve barely started it, so we’ll see how it goes. Also, it’s short, and although that usually doesn’t figure in to my reading, right now it’s a plus.

What I just finished reading

Well, that depends on how you count. I took a short plunge into Slowness by Milan Kundera. It is very short, and I hadn’t read any Kundera, was just familiar with the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, it seemed more like a philosophical treatise than a novel. Almost nothing had happened by 20 pages in. I got bored. Yes, that’s right. Slowness was too slow for me. Not usually a problem.

So that leaves the book before, an Agatha Christie I hadn’t read before, Death Comes as the End. Unusually, it is set in Egypt, not in Christie’s Egypt but in 2000 AD or so. Still, it is a mystery.

What I intend to read next

It’s looking like my next book will be another mystery, The Widow of Bath by Margot Bennett. I read one other book by Bennett, and I liked it very much.

A Century of Books! How Am I Doing? FINAL Report

~ whatmeread ~ 14 Comments

I’m done! I finished the last book on April 27th!

In January 2024, 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 was trying to finish by the end of December, but I clearly didn’t make it.

There are no longer any holes in my project. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: complete!
  • 1935-1944: complete!
  • 1945-1954: complete!
  • 1955-1964: complete!
  • 1965-1974: complete!
  • 1975-1984: complete!
  • 1985-1994: complete!
  • 1995–2004: complete!
  • 2005-2014: complete!
  • 2015-2024: complete!

Between March 28 and April 27, I read the following books. The ones for this project are listed in bold:

  • Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts for 1945
  • Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante for 1948
  • Lanark by Alasdair Gray for 1981
  • Luckier Than Most by David Tomlinson for 1990
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson for 2003
  • Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan for 2007
  • Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke for 2017
  • Treacle Walker by Alan Garner for 2021
  • Clear by Carys Davies for 2024
  • Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd for 2025

Yes, beginning in April, I only had three more books to go, and they nearly killed me! Reviews to come.