Tag: books

Review 2533: The Stone Angel

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

When I was looking for books to fill a hole in my A Century of Books project, I found this one. I thought I had read a book by Laurence before, but apparently not. The Stone Angel is the first in her Manawaka series.

Hagar Shipley is 90 years old. She is a proud, tough woman who has never expressed any of her gentler feelings. Now she finds that her son Marvin and his wife Doris are thinking she needs to move to a senior home. She understands this idea as greed for her home and possessions, although that is not the case. She is fighting the idea as best she can.

Hagar, though, is prone to falling and has memory lapses. In between the scenes from her current life, she returns in her memory to important events and tragedies in her life.

Hagar is not a pleasant person, but Laurence makes us interested in her and manages to make us understand and even sympathize sometimes with this complex character.

Related Posts

The Night Stages

Fifth Business

The Northern Lights

Nonfiction November: Week Five

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Here we are at the last week of Nonfiction November. The prompt for this week is

Week 5 (11/25-11/29) 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! (Deb)

I have added a bunch of books to my TBR this week! Some of them were ones that I intended to put on it but forgot until reminded by a thoughtful blogger! Others are brand new to me. So, let’s go! I thought I’d divide these into books I already knew about and books I learned about this week.

Books I already knew about but forgot

Actually, a friend of mine recommended this book to me quite some time ago, and I forgot about it. So, when I saw it on Readerbuzz this month, I immediately put it on my list. Thanks Deb! It’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.

I’ve had my eye on A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan since it came out. Okay, I am interested in the history of fringe organizations. I’ll never forget reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. Also, I found Egan’s book about the dust bowl to be interesting. Notice how I made no attempt to use this book’s really long and bulky subtitle. C’mon you guys! Some subtitle on a nonfiction book is expected, but you don’t have to tell everything on the cover! The blog that reminded me of this book was Joy’s Book Blog.

I didn’t write down which blog reminded me of Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, because it was mentioned on several. I have been meaning to read this book, especially because I thought Wilkerson’s book about the Great Migration was excellent.

One morning as I was driving to my art class, I heard an interview with Amy Tan. I didn’t know that she had been more or less restricted to her house because of a condition that causes her to faint with no warning. She told how she got interested in looking at the birds in her backyard and how she eventually trained some of them to eat from her hand. The book is also illustrated by herself! I made a resolution to get that book right away, but I forgot all about it until Shoe’s Seeds and Stories wrote about it this week.

Those are the books I knew about before, but look what I picked up this week!

Books that piqued my interest this month

These books appear in the order that I wrote them down.

What could be more exciting than the story of women in 1938 tackling the Colorado River to see what botanical specimens they can collect? They were expected to die! I found out about Brave the Wild River by Melissa L. Sevigny on The Book Stop blog! Another unnecessarily long subtitle, guys.

I can thank Unsolicited Feedback for listing two books that I put on my TBR this year. One of them is Our Moon (long subtitle) by Rebecca Boyle. I’ve always liked the moon, and Boyle hooks it into effects on our intellectual development, science, and other topics.

The other book is Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin, illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. OK, I like birds. In this beautiful book, Unwin picks 80 birds from around the world and tells us all about them.

Thanks so much, Unsolicited Feedback!

This one looks like a page-turner, Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan by Shrabani Basu. It’s about the first woman wireless transmitter in occupied France during World War II. She assumed a dangerous resistance post, was betrayed, and ended up dying in Dachau. I put it on my TBR thanks to Literary Potpourri!

And stepping back to World War I, Margot at War by Anne de Courcy is a biography of Margot Asquith, the wife of Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I and how she affected the office. This is a staid description, but this book with its examinations of the couple’s private lives sounds quite juicy! Thanks to Hopewell’s Library of Life for this suggestion!

Finally, thanks to Helen of She Reads Novels for just yesterday reviewing another true crime novel by Kate Summerscale, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. I have found Summerscale to be reliably good and interesting but didn’t know she had another book out. I like me a good true crime.

Last year, I listed six or seven nonfiction books in my TBR, but only managed to read three of them (along with nine others). This year, I’ll try to make a point of doing better.

WWW Wednesday

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Well, I guess The Chocolate Lady has got me into something with her WWW Wednesday, which she does once a month. I had some encouragement when I tried it last month, so what the heck. Maybe I’ll make it a habit, although I don’t know if I’ll do it every month.

The idea is to talk about what you’re reading now, what you just read, and what you plan to read.

What Am I Reading Now?

By now, I mean I just literally picked this book up to start it, The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons. I may have read one book by this Southern writer before, but I am not sure. I got it because someone told me it was a good ghost story. I love a good ghost story. I’ll have to let you know about it, because I have literally not even read the first sentence yet.

I just checked the copyright date (1978), and this novel is going to help me fill a hole in my Century of Books project.

What Did I Just Finish Reading?

The last book I read, I enjoyed very much. It was Westwood by Stella Gibbons. It is partially about a naïve and suggestible young schoolteacher’s hero-worship of an older renowned playwright, a pompous and humorless man who thinks he’s god’s gift to literature and likes to philander with beautiful young women, one of which she is not. Some of the scenes with this character and the descriptions of the plots of his plays made me laugh out loud.

With a publication date of 1947, this book also helped me fill a hole in my Century of Books project.

What Will I Read Next?

I just realized today that I needed to get hopping on my next book for Literary Wives. The date to post our reviews is the first Monday in June, and since I write up my reviews ahead of time, I have almost got up to it! So, I have to get reading. It is waiting for me to pick up at the library. I know nothing about it, Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown.

Sadly, its 2019 publication date does not fill a hole in my project.

What about you? Have you read any of these books? What are you reading?

A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? April 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?

Here are the holes in my project with the books listed for April below. 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 1935, 1936, 1937, 1941, and 1943
  • 1945-1954: entries needed for all years except 1947, 1952, 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 1975 and 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 March 27th:

Unfortunately, not qualifying for the project, The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy from 1878

Qualifying:

  • Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge from 1935
  • An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer from 1937
  • Beginning with a Bash by Alice Tilton from 1937
  • Forest Silver by E. M. Ward from 1941
  • Family Ties by Celia Buckmaster from 1952
  • A Stranger Came Ashore by Mollie Hunter from 1975
  • Real Life by Brandon Taylor from 2020
  • The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara from 2022
  • The Other Side of Mrs. Wood by Lucy Barker from 2023
  • Prophet Song by Paul Lynch from 2023
  • The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd Robinson from 2023
  • The Guest Room by Tasha Sylva from 2023

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

Reading Thirkell’s Barsetshire Series in Order: #24 Enter Sir Robert + #23 What Did It Mean? Wrap-Up

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

For the first time in the series, at the beginning of What Did It Mean?, I felt that the novel may not live up to the rest of the series. Eventually, though, it seemed to get back into the groove except for its obsession with a silly prophecy (hence the title), and I enjoyed it almost as much. My thanks to those who are still striving to keep up:

The next book is Enter Sir Robert, which is a reread for me, although so long ago that I can hardly remember it. It’s the last reread, though, so the rest of the series will be new to me. I’ll be reviewing it on Wednesday, May 31. I hope some people will join me!

And here’s out little emblem.

Reading Thirkell’s Barsetshire Series in Order: #21 Happy Returns + #20 The Duke’s Daughter Wrap-Up

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments
Cover for Happy Returns

Since I know that at least one person who had been reading along was no longer able to find reasonably priced copies of the books, I got a lot more comments on the last book than I expected. I hope that happy situation continues. Anyway, my thanks to the following people who participated in discussing The Duke’s Daughter:

  • Liz Dexter
  • Penelope Gough

The next book is Happy Returns, which I read all the way back in 2015 and don’t remember at all (except that someone is running for parliament). It’ll be interesting to me to see whether I view that book differently now that I am more familiar with the characters. I will be reviewing that book on Tuesday, February 28! Hope you will join me.

And here’s our little emblem.