Category Archives: Reading habits

Library Checkout: February 2020

By Rebecca Foster on | 14 Comments

The public and university library systems I use came to my aid and supplied lots of books for Paul Auster Reading Week and my Valentine’s-themed reading project. I’m now reading a mixture of brand-new releases and backlist novels and memoirs that caught my eye for one reason or another. I’m eagerly awaiting some high-profile fiction that’s still on order – new work from Sebastian Barry, Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell! Still a fair few DNFs this month, but never mind.

What have you been reading from your local libraries? Library Checkout runs on the last Monday of every month. Feel free to use this image and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part. As usual, I give links to reviews of books I haven’t already featured. I had a couple of very high ratings this month!

 

READ

  • War Bears by Margaret Atwood
  • The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
  • Oracle Night by Paul Auster
  • Winter Journal by Paul Auster
  • Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
  • Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo
  • Bizarre Romance by Audrey Niffenegger
  • Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish: Advice for the Rest of Your Life — Classic Graduation Speeches

SKIMMED

  • Report from the Interior by Paul Auster
  • Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr

CURRENTLY READING

  • Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss by Rachel Clarke
  • Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen
  • This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
  • Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
  • Reading with Patrick: A teacher, a student and the life-changing power of books by Michelle Kuo
  • Meet the Austins by Madeleine L’Engle
  • The Golden Age by Joan London
  • The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde
  • Other People’s Countries by Patrick McGuinness

CURRENTLY SKIMMING

  • Literary Values by John Burroughs
  • Staying Alive in Toxic Times: A Seasonal Guide to Lifelong Health by Dr Jenny Goodman
  • Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

  • Whatever Happened to Margo? by Margaret Durrell
  • The Night Brother by Rosie Garland
  • Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
  • The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan
  • Before Everything by Victoria Redel
  • Conrad & Eleanor by Jane Rogers
  • Nemesis by Philip Roth
  • Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas
  • Our Fathers by Rebecca Wait

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

  • A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry
  • The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
  • Actress by Anne Enright
  • The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
  • The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
  • Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
  • Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
  • What Are We Doing Here?: Essays by Marilynne Robinson
  • Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson [poetry]
  • Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell
  • My Wild, Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story by Clover Stroud
  • Pine by Francine Toon

ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP

  • This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
  • A Short History of Medicine by Steve Parker
  • Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

RETURNED UNFINISHED

  • Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron – I read 25 pages and didn’t feel drawn in to the characters’ story. (It could also be that I’m too familiar with Rwandan history from reading We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch.)
  • When All Is Said by Anne Griffin – I read 60 pages and found it wordy and sentimental.
  • Jazz by Toni Morrison – I dragged my way through nearly 100 pages. In 1920s Harlem, Joe and Violet Trace’s marriage falls apart when he takes up with Dorcas Manfred, who’s just 18. We know pretty much from the first page that Joe ends up shooting Dorcas dead, and that at the girl’s funeral Violet takes her haircutting scissors to her rival’s face. After that it’s just a matter of why. There are some wonderful descriptions of the cityscape, but I wearied of the endless layering of flashbacks.
  • Run by Ann Patchett – I read the first 80 pages. There are a lot of interesting elements here: Catholicism, interracial adoption, grief, politics and fish. But they don’t feel like they fit together in the same book. The circumstances of the accident that sparks the main action feel very contrived. I was also annoyed at the constant use of “fishes” as a plural.

RETURNED UNREAD

  • Love Is Blind by William Boyd – Requested after me; lost interest.
  • You Are Now Entering the Human Heart by Janet Frame [short stories] – Couldn’t get into any of the stories.
  • Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala – Lost interest.

 

What appeals from my stacks?

Posted in: Library Checkout | Tagged: ,

Adventures in Rereading: A. S. Byatt and Abigail Thomas

By Rebecca Foster on | 24 Comments

At the end of last year, I picked out a whole shelf’s worth of books I’ve been meaning to reread. I know that others of you are devoted re-readers, returning to childhood favorites for comfort or poring over admired novels two or three times to figure out how they work. Alas, I’m usually resistant to rereading because I feel like it takes away time that I could be spending reading new or at least new-to-me books. Yet along with the nostalgia there is also a certain relief to returning to a favorite: here’s a book that is guaranteed not to disappoint.

So far this year I’ve finished two rereads, and I’m partway through a third. I’m not managing the one-every-other-week pace I would need to keep up to get through the whole shelf this year, but for me this is still good progress. I’ll report regularly on my experience of rereading.

 

The Matisse Stories by A. S. Byatt (1993)

Byatt is my favorite author. My memory for individual short stories is pitiful, yet I have never forgotten the first of three stories in this volume, so I focus on it here with a close rereading. In “Medusa’s Ankles,” a middle-aged woman goes berserk in a hair salon but it all turns out fine. I remember imagining what that would be like: to let go, to behave badly with no thought for others’ opinions, to act purely on instinct – and for there to be no consequences.

I’d forgotten all the particulars of the event. Susannah, a linguist, is drawn to the salon by the Rosy Nude reproduction she sees through the window. She becomes a reluctant receptacle for her stylist Lucian’s stories, including tales of his wife’s fat ankles and his mistress’ greater appeal. He confides in her his plan to run away. “I don’t want to put the best years of my life into making suburban old dears presentable. I want something more.”

Susannah holds in all her contempt for Lucian and his hip shop redesign until the day he fobs her off on another stylist – even though she’s said she needs an especially careful job this time because she is to appear on TV to accept the Translator’s Medal. When Deirdre is done, Susannah forgets about English politeness and says just what she thinks: “It’s horrible. I look like a middle-aged woman with a hair-do.” (Never mind that that’s exactly what she is.)

In a whirlwind of fury, she trashes the salon. Byatt describes the aftermath, indulging her trademark love of colors: “It was a strange empty battlefield, full of glittering fragments and sweet-smelling rivulets and puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, patches of crimson-streaked foam and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper.”

You can just imagine the atmosphere in the salon: everyone exchanging horrified looks and cautiously approaching Susannah as if she’s a dangerous dog. Lucian steps in to reassure her: “We all feel like that, sometimes. Most of us don’t dare. … The insurance’ll pay. Don’t worry. … You’ve done me a good turn in a way.” Maybe he’ll go off with his girlfriend and start a new business, after all. Predictably, the man has made it all about him.

The ironic kicker to this perfect story about middle age and female rage comes after Susannah goes home to a husband we hadn’t heard about yet. “He saw her. (Usually he did not.) ‘You look different. You’ve had your hair done. I like it. You look lovely. It takes twenty years off you. You should have it done more often.’”

“Art Work” briefly, unnecessarily, uses a Matisse painting as a jumping-off point. A bourgeois couple, a painter and magazine design editor, hire Mrs. Brown, a black woman, to clean their house and are flabbergasted when she turns out to be an artist in her own right. “The Chinese Lobster,” the final story, is the only one explicitly about Matisse. An academic dean invites her colleague out to lunch at a Chinese restaurant to discuss a troubled student he’s supervising. This young woman has eating disorders and is doing a portfolio of artwork plus a dissertation on Matisse’s treatment of female bodies. Her work isn’t up to scratch, and now she’s accused her elderly supervisor of sexual harassment. The racial and sexual politics of these two stories don’t quite hold up, though both are well constructed.

I reread the book in one morning sitting last week.

My original rating (c. 2005):

My rating now:

 

A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas (2006)

In April 2000 Thomas’s husband Rich was hit by a car and incurred a traumatic brain injury when their dog Harry got off the leash and Rich ran out into the road near their New York City home to save him. It was a miracle that Rich lived, but his disability was severe enough that he had to be moved to an upstate nursing home. This is one of the first memoirs I ever remember reading, and it made a big impression. I don’t think I realized at the time that it was written in discrete essays, many of which were first published in magazines and anthologies. It represents an advance on the highly fragmentary nature of her first memoir, Safekeeping.

Thomas maintains a delicate balance of emotions: between guilt every time she bids Rich goodbye in the nursing home and relief that she doesn’t have to care for him 24/7; between missing the life they had and loving the cozy one she’s built on her own with her three dogs. (The title is how Aborigines refer to the coldest nights.) As in One Hundred Names for Love and All Things Consoled, Rich’s aphasia produces moments of unexpectedly poetic insight.

Before rereading I remembered one phrase and one incident (though I’d thought the latter was from Safekeeping): doctors described Rich’s skull as “shattered like an eggshell,” and Thomas remembers a time she was driving and saw the car ahead hit a raccoon; she automatically swerved to avoid the animal, but saw in her rearview mirror that it was still alive and realized the compassionate thing would have been to run it over again. I’ve never forgotten these disturbing images.

Unassuming and heart on sleeve, Thomas wrote one of the most beautiful books out there about loss and memory. I’d recommend this to fans of Anne Lamott and readers of bereavement memoirs in general. This is what I wanted from the rereading experience: to find a book that was even better the second time around.

My original rating (c. 2006):

My rating now:

 

Currently rereading: Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

Considering rereading next: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

 

Done any rereading lately?

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, rereading | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Library Checkout: January 2020

By Rebecca Foster on | 37 Comments

December into January has been a big library reading month for me. I made it through most of the Costa Awards poetry shortlist plus two from the fiction shortlists and enjoyed some YA and middle-grade fiction (not my usual reading comfort zone) and graphic novels. As we head into February, I’m reading lots of ‘Love’-themed titles for a Valentine’s Day post, and starting the reading for some other projects: Bellwether Prize winners, past Wellcome Book Prize long- and shortlistees, and Annabel’s Paul Auster reading week.

You’ll notice that I also had a lot of unfinished library books this month. Some I’d read 20‒30 pages of; others I dropped after just a few pages (or barely made it past the first page). I need to get better at doing this few-page sampling before I even borrow a book so I don’t bother hauling things I’m not going to read to and fro. Often, though, I show up to the library on a Friday afternoon with a long list of books to borrow and just 10 minutes to get to my bookshop volunteering, so I grab and go without opening them up. Next month I’ll try to do better.

As usual, I give links to reviews of books I haven’t already featured. I had three very high ratings this month!

What have you been reading from your local libraries? Library Checkout runs on the last Monday of every month. Feel free to use this image and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part.

 

READ

SKIMMED

  • The Body Lies by Jo Baker
  • The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels by Adam Nicolson
  • Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
  • The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

 

CURRENTLY READING

  • Winter Journal by Paul Auster
  • Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron
  • Literary Values by John Burroughs
  • Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler
  • Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo
  • When All Is Said by Anne Griffin
  • Meet the Austins by Madeleine L’Engle
  • Jazz by Toni Morrison
  • Bizarre Romance by Audrey Niffenegger

 

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

  • The rest of The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
  • Love Is Blind by William Boyd
  • Whatever Happened to Margo? by Margaret Durrell
  • The Night Brother by Rosie Garland
  • Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala
  • The Golden Age by Joan London
  • The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde
  • Run by Ann Patchett

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

  • Disobedience by Naomi Alderman
  • Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love and Loss by Rachel Clarke
  • Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen
  • This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
  • Miss Austen by Gill Hornby
  • The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
  • The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan
  • Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr
  • A Short History of Medicine by Steve Parker
  • Nemesis by Philip Roth
  • Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas
  • Pine by Francine Toon

 

RETURNED UNFINISHED

  • Surge by Jay Bernard [poetry] – I read the first 20 pages. Protest poems in various voices. I enjoyed one in pidgin – reminiscent of Kei Miller.
  • Short Short Stories by Dave Eggers – I read 22 out of 55 pages. These flash fiction stories appeared in the Guardian in 2004. Of the first 10 stories, a few were amusing (a man’s current earworm spells the demise of his relationship; guessing how water feels to fish; a flight attendant has fun with his routines) but the rest were slight or gratuitously sexual, and the style is repetitive throughout.
  • Under the Camelthorn Tree: Raising a Family among Lions by Kate Nicholls
  • The Botanist’s Daughter by Kayte Nunn
  • Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor
  • The Ice by Laline Paull
  • Bad Mothers, Brilliant Lovers by Wendy Perriam
  • The Paper Lovers by Gerard Woodward
  • My dear, I wanted to tell you by Louisa Young

 

RETURNED UNREAD

  • Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah – Not a fan of the prose style.
  • Consolations by David Whyte – Not what I thought it would be.

 

Anything that appeals in my stacks?

Posted in: Library Checkout | Tagged: ,

2020 Reading Goals and Anticipated Releases

By Rebecca Foster on | 36 Comments

Review copies have started to feel like an obligation I don’t want. Almost as soon as one comes through the door, I regret having asked for or accepted it. (Now I have to read the danged thing, and follow through with a review!) So I’m going to cut back severely this year. The idea is to wait until late in 2020 to figure out which are the really worthwhile releases, and then only read those instead of wading through a lot of mediocre stuff.

“Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be ‘This book is worthless,’ while the truth about the reviewer’s own reaction would probably be ‘This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to’. … The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews … to the few that seem to matter.” (from “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” in Books v. Cigarettes by George Orwell)

These are the January to May 2020 releases I own so far, with perhaps a few more on the way. I acquired a lot of these in September through November, before I made the decision to cut down on review copies.

I’m also looking forward to new books by Sebastian Barry, Susanna Clarke, Stephanie Danler, Anne Enright, Yaa Gyasi, John Irving, Daisy Johnson, Daniel Kehlmann, Sue Monk Kidd, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Helen Macdonald, Hilary Mantel, David Mitchell, Sarah Moss, Mark O’Connell, Maggie O’Farrell, Anne Tyler, Abraham Verghese, Raynor Winn and Molly Wizenberg.

I can still access new/pre-release books via my public library and NetGalley/Edelweiss, especially fiction to review for BookBrowse and nonfiction for Kirkus and the TLS.

This resolution is not about denying or punishing myself, as bloggers’ book-buying bans sometimes seem to be, so if an unmissable book (e.g. HAMNET) is offered on Twitter or via my blog, I won’t consider it cheating to say yes. FOMO will likely be a chronic condition for me this year, but ultimately I hope to do myself a favor.

With the reading time I’m saving, I plan to make major inroads into those 440 print books I own and haven’t read yet, and to do a lot of re-reading (I only managed one and a bit rereads in 2019). I might well blog less often and only feature those books that have been exceptional for me. I’ve set aside this shelf of mostly fiction that I think deserves re-reading soon:

“I do not think we go back to the exciting books,—they do not usually leave a good taste in the mouth; neither to the dull books, which leave no taste at all in the mouth; but to the quiet, mildly tonic and stimulating books,—books that have the virtues of sanity and good nature, and that keep faith with us.” (from “On the Re-Reading of Books” in Literary Values by John Burroughs)

I hope (as always) to read more classics, literature in translation and doorstoppers. Travel and biography are consistently neglected categories for me. Though I won’t set specific goals for these genres, I will aim to see measurable progress. I will also take advantage of the Wellcome Book Prize being on hiatus this year to catch up on some of the previous winners and shortlisted books that I’ve never managed to read.

Mostly, I want to avoid any situations that make me feel guilty or mean (so no more books received direct from the author, and any review books that disappoint will be quietly dropped), follow my whims, and enjoy my reading.

 

What are some of your goals (reading-related or otherwise) for 2020?

Posted in: Reading habits | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Holiday Book Haul and Final 2019 Statistics

By Rebecca Foster on | 18 Comments

This is the stack I got for Christmas – along with a £30 Waterstones voucher to buy more books! I haven’t spent it yet, but I’m contemplating some combination of Be My Guest by Priya Basil, Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, The Glovemaker by Ann Weisgarber, a pre-order of the paperback of Benjamin Myers’s The Offing, and a cheap 2020 calendar.

2019 was my most prolific reading year yet! (I’m sure I said the same thing the last two years.) People sometimes joke, “why not aim for a book a day?” but that’s not how I do things. Instead of reading one book from start to finish and then beginning another, I almost always have 10 to 20 books on the go at a time. I tend to start and finish books in batches – I’m addicted to starting new books, but also to finishing them.

Some interesting additional statistics courtesy of Goodreads:

How did 2019 turn out for you reading-wise?

Posted in: Reading habits | Tagged: , , , , ,

Other 2019 Superlatives and Some Statistics

By Rebecca Foster on | 34 Comments

 

My best discoveries of the year: The poetry of Tishani Doshi; Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout (whom I’d read before but not fully appreciated until this year); also, the classic nature writing of Edwin Way Teale.

The authors I read the most by this year: Margaret Atwood and Janet Frame (each: 2 whole books plus parts of 2 more), followed by Doris Lessing (2 whole books plus part of 1 more), followed by Miriam Darlington, Paul Gallico, Penelope Lively, Rachel Mann and Ben Smith (each: 2 books).

 

Debut authors whose next work I’m most looking forward to: John Englehardt, Elizabeth Macneal, Stephen Rutt, Gail Simmons and Lara Williams.

 

My proudest reading achievement: A 613-page novel in verse (Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly) + 2 more books of over 600 pages (East of Eden by John Steinbeck and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese).

Best book club selection: Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay was our first nonfiction book and received our highest score ever.

 

Some best first lines encountered this year:

  • “What can you say about a twenty-five-year old girl who died?” (Love Story by Erich Segal)
  • “The women of this family leaned towards extremes” (Away by Jane Urquhart)
  • “The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.” (from The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff)

 

The downright strangest book I read this year: Lanny by Max Porter

 

The 2019 books everybody else loved (or so it seems), but I didn’t: Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Topeka School by Ben Lerner, Underland by Robert Macfarlane, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse by Charlie Mackesy, Three Women by Lisa Taddeo and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

 

The year’s major disappointments: Cape May by Chip Cheek, We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer, Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis, ed. Anna Hope et al., Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer, The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal, The Knife’s Edge by Stephen Westaby and Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

 

The worst book I read this year: Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

 

 

Some statistics on my 2019 reading:

 

Fiction: 45.4%

Nonfiction: 43.4%

Poetry: 11.2%

(As usual, fiction and nonfiction are neck and neck. I read a bit more poetry this year than last.)

 

Male author: 39.4%

Female author: 58.9%

Nonbinary author (the first time this category has been applicable for me): 0.85%

Multiple genders (anthologies): 0.85%

(I’ve said this the past three years: I find it interesting that female authors significantly outweigh male authors in my reading; I have never consciously set out to read more books by women.)

 

E-books: 10.3%

Print books: 89.7%

(My e-book reading has been declining year on year, partially because I’ve cut back on the reviewing gigs that involve only reading e-books and partially because I’ve done less traveling; also, increasingly, I find that I just prefer to sit down with a big stack of print books.)

 

Work in translation: 7.2%

(Lower than I’d like, but better than last year’s 4.8%.)

 

Where my books came from for the whole year:

 

  • Free print or e-copy from publisher: 36.8%
  • Public library: 21.3%
  • Secondhand purchase: 13.8%
  • Free (giveaways, The Book Thing of Baltimore, the free mall bookshop, etc.): 9.2%
  • Downloaded from NetGalley, Edelweiss or Project Gutenberg: 7.8%
  • Gifts: 4.3%
  • University library: 2.9%
  • New purchase (usually at a bargain price): 2.9%
  • Church theological library: 0.8%
  • Borrowed: 0.2%

(Review copies accounted for over a third of my reading; I’m going to scale way back on this next year. My library reading was similar to last year’s; my e-book reading decreased in general; I read more books that I either bought new or got for free.)

 

Number of unread print books in the house: 440

(Last thing I knew the figure was more like 300, so this is rather alarming. I blame the free mall bookshop, where I volunteer every Friday. Most weeks I end up bringing home at least a few books, but it’s often a whole stack. Surely you understand. Free books! No strings attached!)

Posted in: Reading habits | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Report on My Most Anticipated Reads & The Ones that Got Away

By Rebecca Foster on | 11 Comments

Between my lists in January and June, I highlighted 45 of the 2019 releases I was most looking forward to reading. Here’s how I did:

Read: 28 [Disappointments (rated or ): 12]

Currently reading: 1

Abandoned partway through: 5

Lost interest in reading: 1

Haven’t managed to find yet: 9

Languishing on my Kindle; I still have vague intentions to read: 1

To my dismay, it appears I’m not very good at predicting which books I’ll love; I would have gladly given 43% of the ones I read a miss, and couldn’t finish another 11%. Too often, the blurb is tempting or I loved the author’s previous book(s), yet the book doesn’t live up to my expectations. And I still have 376 books published in 2019 on my TBR, which is well over a year’s reading. For the list to keep growing at that annual rate is simply unsustainable.

Thus, I’m gradually working out a 2020 strategy that involves many fewer review copies. For strings-free access to new releases I’m keen to read, I’ll go via my local library. I can still choose to review new and pre-release fiction for BookBrowse, and nonfiction for Kirkus and the TLS. If I’m desperate to read an intriguing-sounding new book and can’t find it elsewhere, there’s always NetGalley or Edelweiss, too. I predict my FOMO will rage, but I’m trying to do myself a favor by waiting most of the year to find out which are truly the most worthwhile books rather than prematurely grabbing at everything that might be interesting.

 

I regret not having time to finish two 2019 novels I’m currently reading that are so promising they likely would have made at least my runners-up list had I finished them in time. I’m only a couple of chapters into The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins (on the Costa Awards debut shortlist), a Gothic pastiche about a Jamaican maidservant on trial for killing her master and mistress (doubly intended) in Georgian London, but enjoying it very much. I’m halfway through The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall, a quiet character study of co-pastors and their wives and how they came to faith (or not); it is lovely and simply cannot be rushed.

The additional 2019 releases I most wished I’d found time for before the end of this year are:

All This Could Be Yours by Jami Attenberg

Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

&

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado: I’ve heard that this is an amazing memoir of a same-sex abusive relationship, written in an experimental style. It was personally recommended to me by Yara Rodrigues Fowler at the Young Writer of the Year Award ceremony, and also made Carolyn Oliver’s list of nonfiction recommendations.

Luckily, I have another chance at these four since they’re all coming out in the UK in January; I have one as a print proof (Cruz) and the others as NetGalley downloads. I also plan to skim Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez, a very important new release, before it’s due back at the library.

The biggest release of 2019 is another that will have to wait until 2020: I know I made a lot of noise about boycotting The Testaments, but I’ve gradually come round to the idea of reading it, and was offered a free hardback to read as a part of an online book club starting on the 13th, so I’m currently rereading Handmaid’s to be ready to start the sequel in the new year.

 

Here’s the books I’m packing for the roughly 48 hours we’ll spend at my in-laws’ over Christmas. (Excessive, I know, but I’m a dabbler, and like to keep my options open!) A mixture of current reads, including a fair bit of suspense and cozy holiday stuff, with two lengthy autobiographies, an enormous Victorian pastiche, and an atmospheric nature/travel book waiting in the wings. I find that the holidays can be a good time to start some big ol’ books I’ve meant to read for ages.

Left stack: to start and read gradually over the next couple of months; right stack: from the currently reading pile.

I’ll be back on the 26th to start the countdown of my favorite books of the year, starting with fiction.

 

Merry Christmas!

Posted in: Reading habits | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Library Checkout: December 2019

By Rebecca Foster on | 5 Comments

One final chance to get through the rest of the 2019 releases I was most interested in reading. At the last minute, a bunch of my reservations on Costa Awards shortlisted books (one from the Novel category, one from the First Novel category, one from the Biography category, and the entire poetry shortlist) arrived. I’m pushing myself to get through at least the poetry.

I give links to reviews of any books I haven’t already featured, as well as ratings. What have you been reading from your local libraries? Use this image and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part.

READ

SKIMMED

  • Five Ingredient Vegan: 100 Simple, Fast, Modern Recipes by Katy Beskow – I made the banana pecan bars, above, for a quick snack.
  • Afloat: A Memoir by Danie Couchman
  • The School of Life: An Emotional Education by Alain de Botton
  • Happy Ever After: Escaping the Myth of the Perfect Life by Paul Dolan
  • Diary of a Lone Twin by David Loftus
  • The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels by Adam Nicolson
  • The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold
  • The Christmas Chronicles by Nigel Slater

CURRENTLY READING

  • The Body Lies by Jo Baker
  • Surge by Jay Bernard [poetry]
  • Flèche by Mary Jean Chan [poetry]
  • The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins
  • Reckless Paper Birds by John McCullough [poetry]
  • Under the Camelthorn Tree: Raising a Family among Lions by Kate Nicholls
  • Mr Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva
  • A Good Enough Mother by Bev Thomas

CURRENTLY SKIMMING

  • Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

  • The Botanist’s Daughter by Kayte Nunn
  • Frost by Holly Webb
  • Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon [for February book club]

PLUS an exciting new batch of university library books! (I keep hoping no one notices the odd selection of books my husband borrows in addition to his standard bird biology stuff…)

  • The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
  • Literary Values by John Burroughs
  • Short Short Stories by Dave Eggers
  • You Are Now Entering the Human Heart: Stories by Janet Frame
  • The Trick Is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway
  • Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived by Penelope Lively
  • Jazz by Toni Morrison
  • Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
  • My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese

ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP

  • Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah
  • Confession with Blue Horses by Sophie Hardach
  • The Ice by Laline Paull

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

  • The Handmaid’s Tale [graphic novel] by Margaret Atwood; illustrated by Renée Nault
  • Whatever Happened to Margo? by Margaret Durrell
  • This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
  • The Night Brother by Rosie Garland
  • When All Is Said by Anne Griffin
  • Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala
  • The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
  • The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes
  • The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded by Jim Ottaviani [graphic novel]
  • Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith
  • Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce

RETURNED UNFINISHED

RETURNED UNREAD

  • Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann – 1000+ pages. It just wasn’t going to happen. Not even a skim.
  • Early Riser by Jasper Fforde – The blurb appealed to me, but I quickly remembered that I don’t actually like Fforde’s writing (I read The Eyre Affair many a year ago).

What appeals from my stacks?

Posted in: Library Checkout | Tagged: ,

Reading Fail: The Remainder of the 2019 DNFs

By Rebecca Foster on | 16 Comments

Yipes, 97 DNFs this year – that’s roughly 22% of the books I started. Higher than my usual 15% average, suggesting that I’ve had trouble getting on with books that appealed for their subject matter or hype but didn’t live up to my expectations. (In the latter category, I’m thinking of It books of the year like The Man Who Saw Everything, The Starless Sea, Three Women, Trick Mirror and On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous.)

Following on from June’s post on the books I’d abandoned so far in 2019, here’s a list of the other DNFs I haven’t already written about, perhaps in a monthly Library Checkout post. No cover images, tags, links or full reviews here; just a text dump. Titles are in chronological order; the number of pages or percentage I read is generally given in brackets at the end.

Note: I encourage readers to give up on books they are not enjoying – at any time, but as early on as possible. You owe it to yourself to devote your limited, precious time to the books you’ll love and find worthwhile.

 

Stroke: A 5% Chance of Survival by Ricky Monahan Brown: Brown, a Scot in New York City, suffered a hemorrhagic stroke at age 38. I’m pretty oversaturated with medical memoirs; despite the breezy style and accessible details, this one doesn’t stand out. (104 pp.)

 

How to Catch a Mole: And Find Yourself in Nature by Marc Hamer: Hamer is a gardener and former molecatcher. This is a gentle natural history of the mole, as well as a meditation on our connections with a nature and a memoir of a life lived largely outdoors. But is it about atonement or not? (103 pp.)

 

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux: I read up to when Theroux arrives in northern Italy. He mostly describes his fellow passengers, as well as the details of meals and sleeping arrangements on trains. The writing struck me as old-fashioned. (32 pp.)

 

What Dementia Teaches Us about Love by Nicci Gerard: I’ve read a lot of books about dementia, both clinical and anecdotal, and this doesn’t add anything new. (11%)

 

The Music Room by William Fiennes: Time to accept that I just don’t get on with Fiennes’s writing, even when the subjects seem tailor-made for me. (10 pp.)

 

Tisala by Richard Seward Newton: I guess I read a blurb and thought this was unmissable, but I should have tried to read a sample or some more reviews of it. I couldn’t imagine reading another 560+ pages. (6 pp.)

 

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante: Alas, I do not appreciate Elena Ferrante’s work; this is a third try. I enjoyed the narrator’s voice well enough, and loved the scene in which her errant husband finds broken glass in his dinner, but had no interest in how this seemingly predictable story of the end of a marriage might play out. (25 pp.)

 

Breaking and Mending: A Junior Doctor’s Stories of Compassion and Burnout by Joanna Cannon: I’ve read so many doctors’ memoirs now, and this one doesn’t really cut the mustard: the writing is undistinguished and the tone as sentimental as I’ve come to expect from her fiction. (30 pp.)

 

Dunedin by Shena Mackay: After loving The Orchard on Fire, I thought I’d try another Mackay novel, and I was intrigued by the dual timeline of 1909 New Zealand and 1989 London. I kept thinking we were going to get links back to the historical chapter; I got bored of waiting. (189 pp.)

 

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker: I thought it would be fascinating to read about flying from the perspective of a British Airways pilot. But this is more of an academic and philosophical study of flight and the modern condition of dislocation than a memoir of what it’s like to train to fly planes. (28 pp.)

 

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry: At first these ageing Irish gangsters seem like harmless drunks, but gradually you come to realize just how dangerous they are. I loved the voices and if this was a short story it would have gotten a top rating, but I found I had no interest in the backstory of how these men got involved in heroin smuggling. (76 pp.)

 

The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind by David Guterson: I read “Angels in the Snow” (last Christmas) and “Wood Grouse on a High Promontory Overlooking Canada.” Both were fine but not memorable; a glance at the rest suggests they’ll all be about baseball and hunting. If I want to read stories about dudes hunting I’ll turn to Hemingway or David Vann.

 

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy: There’s a lot of repetition and random details that seem deliberately placed to be clues. I’m sure there’s a clever story in here somewhere, but apart from a few intriguing anachronisms, there is not a lot of plot or character to latch onto. (35 pp.)

 

Inland by Téa Obreht: I made two attempts to get into this Western, but found it excruciatingly slow and couldn’t warm to any of the characters or convince myself of the accuracy of the period speech. This was disappointing as it was one of my most anticipated titles of the second half of the year and I loved The Tiger’s Wife. (37 pp.)

 

Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife before It Is Too Late?, by Mark Cocker: I simply didn’t need this level of detail on the history of nature conservation in Britain. The personal writing about his patch of Norfolk engaged me a bit more. (60 pp.)

 

Better Off Bald: A Life in 147 Days by Andrea Wilson Woods: When Woods’s 13-years-younger sister Adrienne was diagnosed with liver cancer, it hit her hard. This didn’t pull me in, despite strong recreated dialogue and an extraordinary memory for events. I think it’s a combination of it being far too long and detailed, and feeling dated. (12%)

 

The Grassling: A Geological Memoir by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett: Burnett’s roots are in Ide, Devon and in Kenya. She has previously published poetry and is going for extreme lyricism in her nature writing, which at times makes it feel overwritten, especially in the prologue. (55 pp.)

 

The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes: I completely misjudged this: I thought it would be historical fiction, but it’s actually narrative nonfiction about an obscure historical figure. I found it dull and impenetrable. A shame, as Barnes is a favorite author of mine. (9 pp.)

 

Loop by Brenda Lozano: The narrator, waiting for her boyfriend to come back from Spain, is explicitly likened to Penelope. She lets her mind wander at random, which leads to unrelated paragraphs about dwarves, David Bowie songs, her choice of notebooks, tiny things that happened to her, and so on. Not enough narrative to keep me interested. (35 pp.)

 

The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West: I’m not sure I even made it past the second page. It’s even more bizarre and crass than I’m used to from him.

 

Whiskey When We’re Dry by John Larison: Larison has done a good job of approximating the voice of an unlettered young woman in the 1880s, but I found this quite slow and feel like I’ve read too many Westerns in the last few years. (50 pp.)

 

Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumburger / Toddler on the Run by Shena Mackay: Argh, another Mackay DNF! She wrote these two novellas when she was SEVENTEEN. I only managed a few pages of Dust, but got 40 pages into Toddler. It has an amusing premise but was only okay.

 

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: I couldn’t even tell you the basics of what happened. Some posh English people on a boat to South America? I could see that there were keen psychological insights, but no plot to speak of. (Did you know Mrs Dalloway is a character?!) Perhaps I’ll try this again someday, but it will require a concerted effort. (110 pp.)

 

Shelf Life by Livia Franchini: Reminiscent of Eleanor Oliphant: readable but blah. (40%)

 

The Complete Stories of Saki by Hector Hugh Munro: This was a follow-up bibliotherapy prescription for reading aloud. My husband and I read “Tobermory,” “Sredni Vashtar,” “The Easter Egg,” “Laura,” and “Tea.” The stories are very short and quite witty, but the language so advanced/old-fashioned that I found them rather like tongue-twisters.

 

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: Like most of the rest of the world, I was enraptured with The Night Circus. This, however, felt like a knockoff of A Discovery of Witches and The Thirteenth Tale, with added geek and queer stylings. Passages from the book within a book failed to draw me in. (44 pp.)

 

The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea: I don’t know if it’s the time period and setting (17th-century Iceland), or the writing style, but I couldn’t get through Sally Magnusson’s The Sealwoman’s Gift either. The challenging names add to a feeling of foreignness that’s more bewildering than entrancing. (8 pp.)

 

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott: The idea of a ghostwriter being almost literally haunted by her subject is appealing, and I did find the writing atmospheric. However, the Isaac Newton and animal rights activism plots didn’t capture my attention. (126 pp.)

 

Three Flames by Alan Lightman: I’d enjoyed several Lightman books before, fiction and non-, but despite his nonprofit work with women in Southeast Asia, he doesn’t seem like the person to write this novel about women’s lives in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. (50 pp.)

 

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken: Quirk for quirk’s sake. Characters are found alive in a cemetery, killed by a flow of molasses, or expire by spontaneous combustion. What is supposed to unite this 19th-century community – a bowling alley – never comes to life. Another disappointment from my most anticipated titles of the year list. (153 pp.)

 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino: I read part of “Ecstasy,” her essay on belonging to a Texas megachurch in her high school years. The other topics, and the writing in general, didn’t interest me enough.

 

Idiot Wind by Peter Kaldheim: I requested this purely on the basis of an enthusiastic NPR review from an acquaintance. While there’s a lot of energy to this memoir of the author’s time as a New York City drug dealer/addict taking off on a cross-country road trip in the late 1980s, I should have known it wouldn’t be for me. (14 pp.)

Posted in: Reading habits | Tagged: ,

Final Book Serendipity Incidents to Close out 2019

By Rebecca Foster on | 12 Comments

Just a short post this time. I call it serendipitous when two or more books that I’m reading at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once – usually between 10 and 20 – I guess I’m more prone to such incidents. I post these occasional reading coincidences on Twitter. What’s the weirdest one you’ve had lately? (The following are in rough chronological order.)

[Previous 2019 Book Serendipity posts covered April, July and October.]

 

  • Characters sit for a portrait in The Confession by Jessie Burton and The Hoarder by Jess Kidd.

 

  • An obsession with saints in Fifth Business by Robertson Davies and The Hoarder by Jess Kidd.
  • A mention of the urban myth regarding why our fingertips prune in water (something about an outdated evolutionary strategy for gripping underwater) in The Body by Bill Bryson and Humiliation: Stories by Paulina Flores.

 

  • Memories of childhood trips to Martha’s Vineyard in Chances Are by Richard Russo and The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall.

 

  • The River Thames is the setting for Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem and Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield.
  • Mentions of pelicans being clubbed to death in God Unbound: Theology in the Wild by Brian McLaren and Autumn Across America by Edwin Way Teale.

 

  • A character who speaks and writes backwards words in The Poisonwood Bible and The Robber Bride.

 

  • Epigraphs containing folk names for the hare, and soon enough a dead hare, in Ring the Hill by Tom Cox and Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley.
  • An unexpected THIRD set of conjoined twins encountered this year (after Cutting for Stone and The Girls) in Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie Macdonald.

 

  • The song “Oh My Darling, Clementine” is quoted in The Robber Bride and Fall on Your Knees.

 

  • Warming an orphaned lamb in a low oven in Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood and The Dig by Cynan Jones.

 

  • A character is presumed incapable of laughter in Agatha by Anne Cathrine Bomann and Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken.
  • Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is mentioned in The River Capture by Mary Costello and Surrender by Joanna Pocock.
Posted in: book serendipity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,