Category Archives: Reading habits

The Rest of the Books I Abandoned in 2018

By Rebecca Foster on December 22, 2018 | 23 Comments

Almost without exception, if I do not finish a book it’s because I WAS BORED AND COULDN’T BE BOTHERED. But that’s obviously not an acceptable review, even if it is the truth, so I always push myself to say a little more. What didn’t work for me? Why couldn’t I connect? I try not to go on too much about the books I don’t finish, since I feel a touch guilty about them and it doesn’t particularly serve anyone to list my failures. However, these occasional posts on abandoned books are very popular, I think because readers want permission to give up on books they’re not enjoying. (You have my express permission!) But also, if you enjoyed some of the below and think I should give them another try, do say. I apologize in advance for not getting on with a book you loved.

These are all the DNFs since late June, not mentioning again any that I described in my monthly Library Checkout posts. No tags, cover images, links or full reviews here – though I might write that little bit more if I got the book from the publisher. In total this year I abandoned about 50 books, equating to roughly 14% of the ones that I started. They are in chronological order of my attempted reads, with the pages or percentages read in brackets.

A Degree of Mastery: A Journey through Book Arts Apprenticeship by Annie Tremmel Wilcox: I bought this from The Open Book (Airbnb) shop in Wigtown. Of course I love books as physical objects, and repairing damaged books was my favorite task when I worked in a university library, so I thought I’d enjoy learning about the traditional bookbinding techniques the author learned from Bill Anthony at the University of Iowa. Yet this was somehow disappointingly tedious with technical detail. [57 pages]

Nevermore by Andrew McNeillie (poetry): I enjoyed the short bird portraits that form “Plato’s Aviary,” and “Elegy,” about the advancing dearth of common songbirds. None of what followed, especially the long ones, drew me in. [61 pages]

Kinship Theory by Hester Kaplan: “Maggie Crown was pregnant with her daughter’s baby,” the first line tells us, acting as a surrogate to fulfill Dale’s overpowering desire to become a mother. It’s a great setup, and I warmed to 48-year-old Maggie with her “burden of maternal guilt” she hopes to ease through this sacrificial act, but not to Dale (the odd, male-sounding name doesn’t help). I think this could have been a good short story, but I don’t have the patience to follow such a slow and quiet plot through nearly 300 pages. [24 pages]

The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher: This sequel to Dear Committee Members was only mildly amusing. Jason Fitger is now Payne’s chair of English, a shabby and underfunded department that always seems to get passed over while Economics receives special treatment. His hapless floundering – wasp stings, dental treatment, accidentally getting high on pills before a party – induced a few cringes but no real laughs. The supporting characters are well drawn, but overall I had zero qualms about setting this aside. [44%]

The Librarian by Salley Vickers: The vintage cover design is adorable, and probably drew me in against my better judgment. An idealistic young woman takes up the post of Children’s Librarian in a small town populated by good-hearted busybodies and urchins. On the twee side of pleasant. Promises to be a predictable love story. An excuse for the author to list off her favorite books from childhood? I’m not sure I’d try anything else by Vickers. [48 pages]

If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim: This feels SO similar to Pachinko that I was unable to evaluate it on its own merit. [11%]

Spectra by Ashley Toliver (poetry): I couldn’t make much literal or metaphorical sense out of these poems at all. I highlighted one passage I kind of liked – a play on the two meanings of ‘bulb’? – on my Kindle: “Away from the glow, a dumb bulb freezes in its wintery malaise, covering the rest of the light.” [37%]

Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper: I should have known from my experience with Etta and Otto that Hooper’s style is too twee for me, but I was lured in by the accordion on the cover! I did like the existence of the library boat and Cora redecorating the rooms of a derelict house to match the latest travel book she’s read. [14%]

When Rap Spoke Straight to God: A Poem by Erica Dawson: Not for me at all; I should have figured that out before even opening my Edelweiss download. [14%]

Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin: I read the first long chapter (almost like a standalone novella) called “Hole.” Mona, a 23-year-old art school dropout turned cleaner, was raised by a cousin after her addict parents’ death. Like Beagin, who cleaned houses for five years to support her art, Mona collects vacuum cleaners and considers vacuuming her primary hobby. She enjoys the repetition and inadvertent intimacy of her job – it gives her glimpses into other people’s inner lives. In her spare time she volunteers for a needle exchange program and thus falls in with “Mr. Disgusting,” the nickname she gives to a thief and Dumpster diver 21 years her senior. It’s all super-quirky and unnecessarily crass. The closest comparison I can make is with Miranda July’s The First Bad Man. Throughout I kept thinking to myself, this should really be written in the first person. This is a strong character who can describe things for herself. The style is readable; I could have forced myself through the last two-thirds. But with so many other books waiting for me, I decided I didn’t want or need to keep going. [65 pages] My apologies and thanks to Oneworld for the review copy.

Famous Adopted People by Alice Stephens: This felt very college literary magazine. Perfectly competent writing, but with so much thrown in: details, descriptions, profanity and sassy slang in the dialogue. After skimming the first couple of chapters I’d warmed to none of the characters and had no clear idea of where this was going. I wonder if the opposite to the previous book is true: third person would have been a better choice. Each chapter opens with a Korean propaganda image and an epigraph from a famous adopted person. [5 pages]

The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey: Set in the English village of Oakham in 1491, this is narrated by local priest John Reve, who learns more than he might prefer to know about his neighbors through the confession box. The writing and the period detail are strong, but there’s little narrative drive despite Harvey’s unusual strategy of proceeding backwards and this ostensibly being a (murder) mystery. Reve writes of the “endless watermill of days,” and though the action takes place over just four days it still has that repetitive quality: a cycle of confessions, meals, and village rituals that doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere. [60 pages]

Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott: Full of glitzy atmosphere contrasted with washed-up torpor. I have no doubt the author’s picture of Truman Capote is accurate, and there are great glimpses into the private lives of his catty circle. I always enjoy first person plural narration, too. However, I quickly realized that I don’t have sufficient interest in the figures or the time period to sustain me through nearly 500 pages. [18 pages]

Middle England by Jonathan Coe: In 2015 I very much enjoyed Number 11, Coe’s state-of-the-nation novel about wealth, celebrity and suspicion in contemporary England. Middle England uses roughly the same format, of multiple linked characters and story lines, and seems to make many of the same points, too. However, by embedding his book so completely in 2011–18 history, he limits its fictional possibilities. I often wonder how the history books will look back on recent events (Brexit, Trump), but revisiting them in fiction feels depressing and pointless – I was there, I remember all this stuff, I don’t need reminding of how we got here. The book is far too long and there were no characters I immediately latched onto. [22 pages] My apologies and thanks to Viking for the review copy.

The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos: I’m interested in trying more literary/crossover crime novels and liked the synopsis of this one, but didn’t enjoy the hardboiled style. [20 pages]

A Well-Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler: “Alva did not need to love William Vanderbilt; she needed only to marry him.” I was a huge fan of Fowler’s Z and jumped at the chance to read this, but found the first couple of chapters dull. Alva is one of four sisters and has an invalid father. She’s desperate not to become a spinster or a caregiver, so she goes along with her best friend Consuelo’s plan to set her up with W.K. Vanderbilt, even if they share lingering snobbism about his nouveau riche background. There’s always a danger of historical fiction devolving into a biography-lite information dump about social history (manners, fashion, etc.), and unfortunately that felt like the case here. I might have been able to stomach Alva as part of a group biography, but she wasn’t promising as the focus of a novel. [25 pages] My apologies and thanks to Two Roads for the review copy.

Sea of Ink by Richard Weihe: Lots of names and dates of Chinese dynasties; not a lot of story. Started for a potential Novellas in November review. [7 pages]

The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara: I couldn’t get into the sassy Spanglish voice. Doesn’t feel like a book for me, which is a real shame as I won a signed copy in a Oneworld Twitter competition. [5 pages]

Winter by Ali Smith: I’ve read six of her books before, but it’s looking unlikely that I’ll try another at this point (though I might make an exception for How to be both). I knew what to expect style-wise: no speech marks; a fairly repetitive stream-of-consciousness studded with subtle jokes and wordplay. I was enjoying the mock-Dickensian opening and Sophia’s run-in with British bureaucracy (a bank this time, as opposed to the post office in Autumn) on Christmas Eve. But by the time Art came along, I was done. [47 pages]

Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen [translated from the Greenlandic by Anna Halagar]: I was keen to try this because Greenland has been one of my surprise reading themes this year in both travel books and novels, but this was definitely not for me. I didn’t get far enough into the story to comment on it, but what I did read was drenched in sex talk, with f***ing appearing in pretty much every sentence. One line I liked: “Dry kisses stiffening like desiccated fish.” [7%]

Don’t Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin: I picked up a free copy at the Faber Spring Party. It’s perfectly serviceably written in a contemporary Western style and I’m convinced by the setting, but I have no sense of the characters, especially the main character, and no desire to accompany him for another 250+ pages. I’ve seen the movie of Lean on Pete, so I know the sort of emotional tenor to expect. Sorry, Willy. Maybe I’ll try The Free instead. [30 pages]

The Madonna of the Mountains by Elise Valmorbida: Also from the Faber Spring Party. Nice writing, nice details. Italian woman fearing spinsterhood: “She must keep the wedding sheet clean and white, like her soul, like her body, immaculate and new. But she is old. Twenty-five years old and untouched by a husband. Her fingers are without thimbles. She has hands that can wring an animal’s neck. Arms to stir a pot of boiling polenta. She’s a good investment for any man, if only he can overlook her age.” I never built up momentum. [20 pages]

House of Glass by Susan Fletcher: I liked the Jane Eyre vibe of this novel about a young woman with osteogenesis imperfecta who travels from London to a rundown Gloucestershire manor house to create a collection of Kew Gardens’ plants. Clara seems feisty and there’s a neat connection between her brittle bones and the glasshouse she’s to set up. But there’s not enough suspense to this slow build, and based on the other Fletcher novel I read the payout won’t be sufficient. [87 pages]

What books disappointed you this year? Were there any you just couldn’t finish?

Posted in: Reading habits | Tagged: abandoned books

A Retrospective of 2018’s Events, Reading Projects and Themes

By Rebecca Foster on December 21, 2018 | 12 Comments

In January I had the tremendous opportunity to have a free personalized bibliotherapy appointment with Ella Berthoud at the School of Life in London. I’ve since read three of her prescriptions plus parts of a few others, but I still have several more awaiting me in the early days of 2019, and will plan to report back at some point on what I got out of all of them.

In March to April I ran a Wellcome Book Prize shadow panel for the second time. This year it was much more successful; I plan to do it again next year, too. (I actually proffered myself as an official judge for next year’s prize and got a very kind but entirely noncommittal e-mail back from the chairwoman, which I will have to take as victory enough.)

Early April saw us visiting Wigtown, Scotland’s book town, for the first time. It was a terrific trip, but thus far I have not been all that successful at reading the 13 books that I bought! (Just two and a quarter so far.)

I reviewed three novels for Liz Dexter’s Iris Murdoch Readalong project: A Severed Head in March, The Italian Girl in June, and The Nice and the Good in September. In February I’ll pop back in with one more paperback that I own, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. November was Margaret Atwood Reading Month, hosted by Marcie of Buried in Print and Naomi of Consumed by Ink, and provided me with a good excuse to read her first two novels.

I did some “buddy reads” for the first time: Andrea Levy’s Small Island with Canadian blogger friends, including Marcie and Naomi; and West With the Night with Laila of Big Reading Life and Late Nights on Air with Naomi as well as Penny of Literary Hoarders during 20 Books of Summer, which I took part in for the first time. In May my mother and I read W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil and shared reading notes via e-mail. (A planned buddy read of The Left Hand of Darkness with Annabel and Laura was, alas, a fail.)

Besides the official Wellcome Book Prize blog tour in April, I participated in another 11 blog tours, averaging out at one a month. I’m going to scale back on these next year because I have too often found, after I accepted, that the book was a dud and I had to just run an extract because I could see I wasn’t going to get through it and write a review.

I joined my neighborhood book club in September and have attended every month since then. Our first four selections were Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler, The Gracekeepers by Kirsty Logan, Noonday by Pat Barker, and Number 11 by Jonathan Coe. I’d already read the Logan and Coe years ago and didn’t fancy rereading them, so wasn’t able to participate as much in those months, but was still glad to go along for the socializing. My husband even read the Coe and came to December’s meeting (was it just for the mince pies and mulled wine?!). We’ve set our first four reads for 2019 – the three below, in order from left to right, plus Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, which I’ll borrow from the university library.

In October I won tickets to see a production of Angela Carter’s Wise Children at the Old Vic in London. Just a few weeks later I won tickets to see Barbara Kingsolver in conversation about Unsheltered at the Southbank Centre. I don’t often make it into London, so it was a treat to have bookish reasons to go and blogging friends to meet up with (Clare of A Little Blog of Books joined me for both, and Laura T. was also at the Kingsolver event).

November was mostly devoted to novellas, for the third year in a row. Although I didn’t officially participate in Nonfiction November, I still enjoyed coming up with some fiction/nonfiction pairings and an “expert’s” list of women’s religious memoirs.

My husband wrote pretty much his entire PhD thesis this year and on Friday the 14th had his graduation ceremony. I was the moral support / proofreader / preparer of simple meals during the months when he was in the throes of writing up, so I will consider myself as sharing in the accomplishment. Congratulations, Dr. Foster!

This month and into January I’ll be reading the last few nominees for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize.

When the list of finalists was released, I was relieved to see I’d already read four out of seven (and three of those were ones I’d nominated); the other three – the Adjei-Brenyah and Brinkley stories and There There – were books I was keen to read but hadn’t managed to get hold of. About 80 of us NBCC members are reading the shortlist and voting for the best first book of the year by January 8th. Plus I’m technically up for an NBCC prize myself, in that I nominated myself (that’s how it works) for the 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and sent in an application with five of my best reviews from the year.

The Ones that Got Away

Two posts I planned but never got around to putting together would have commemorated the 50th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s death (I own several of his books but am most interested in reading The Seven-Storey Mountain, which celebrated its 70th birthday in October) and the 40th anniversary of the publication of The Snow Leopard by the late Peter Matthiessen. Perhaps I’ll try these authors for the first time next year instead.

Final Book Serendipity Incidents

In the second half of the year I started keeping track of all my weird reading coincidences, posting about them on Twitter or Instagram before collecting them into a blog post a couple months ago. Here are a few that popped up since then or recalled earlier reads from the year:

Two protagonists named Willa: Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance and Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered
Two novels featuring bog people: Anne Youngson’s Meet Me at the Museum and Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall
Two dogs named Flash: Ben Crane’s Blood Ties and Andrew Marshall’s The Power of Dog
Multiple sclerosis is an element in Christian Donlan’s The Unmapped Mind: A Memoir of Neurology, Incurable Disease and Learning How to Live, Jennifer Richardson’s Americashire and Michelle Obama’s Becoming (her father had it)
The ideas of Freud are mentioned in a 1910s setting in Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank, Annabel Abbs’s Frieda and Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier
Mermaids (or ‘mermaids’) and/or mermen appear in Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier, and a series of poems in Miriam Darlington’s Windfall
Bohemian writer dies young of tuberculosis (or similar) in novels about their wives: Annabel Abbs’s Frieda (D.H. Lawrence) and Nancy Horan’s Under the Wide and Starry Sky (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Two books that mention the Indonesian practice of keeping dead relatives as mummies and bringing them out on occasion for ritual celebrations: From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty and The Hot Young Widows Club by Nora McInerny
Two books that include a trip to Lourdes for healing: Heal Me by Julia Buckley and Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson
Two books that mention the irony of some of the most well-loved modern Christmas songs being written by Jews: In Mid-Air by Adam Gopnik and Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson

Surprise Themes from My Year’s Reading

A few of these make sense – cults fit with my interest in narratives of religious experience, and it doesn’t take a psychologist to see that my relationship with my father has been an ongoing issue in recent years (I wonder how the numbers would compare for books about mothers?) – but most are completely random.

I decided a theme had to show up at least three times to make the list. Some topics I enjoyed so much I’ll keep reading about them next year. Within a category the books are in rough chronological order of my reading, and I include skims, DNFs and books in progress.

Fathers (absent/difficult) + fatherhood in general: Educated by Tara Westover, And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison, The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman, In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott, Implosion by Elizabeth W. Garber, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott & March by Geraldine Brooks, The Unmapped Mind by Christian Donlan, Never Mind and Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn, The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma, How to Build a Boat by Jonathan Gornall, Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Rosie by Rose Tremain, My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley, Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, Blood Ties by Ben Crane, To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine, Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Addiction: The Leavers by Lisa Ko, Mayhem by Sigrid Rausing, The Only Story by Julian Barnes, The Small Door of Your Death by Sheryl St. Germain, Writing and Madness in a Time of Terror by Afarin Majidi, Marlena by Julie Buntin, Ninety Days by Bill Clegg, Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn, Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin, Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

Greenland: A Wilder Time by William E. Glassley, This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg, On Balance by Sinéad Morrissey (the poem “Whitelessness”), Cold Earth by Sarah Moss, Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen, The Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell

Cults: Educated by Tara Westover, Harmony by Carolyn Parkhurst, In the Days of Rain by Rebecca Stott, The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon, A River Could Be a Tree by Angela Himsel

Trees: Ladders to Heaven by Mike Shanahan, The Overstory by Richard Powers, The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, The Wood and The Secret Life of the Oak by John Lewis-Stempel

Flying: Skybound by Rebecca Loncraine, West With the Night by Beryl Markham, Going Solo by Roald Dahl, Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker

The Anglo experience in Africa: Free Woman: Life, Love and Doris Lessing by Lara Feigel, Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller, West With the Night by Beryl Markham, Going Solo by Roald Dahl

Korean-American women: The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon, If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim, All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung, Famous Adopted People by Alice Stephens, Digging to America by Anne Tyler

New Zealand: The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield, To the Is-Land by Janet Frame, Dunedin by Shena Mackay

Life in the White House: Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton, All the Presidents’ Pastries by Roland Mesnier, Becoming by Michelle Obama

Lighthouses: Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper by Peter Hill, The Bird Artist by Howard Norman, Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan (about Robert Louis Stevenson, whose family built lighthouses)

More lighthouse books ready for next year.

Butterflies: Four Wings and a Prayer by Sue Halpern, Magdalena Mountain by Robert Michael Pyle, Mama Amazonica by Pascale Petit

More butterfly books ready for next year.

What were some of the highlights of your bookish year?

What odd coincidences and recurring themes have you spotted in your year’s reading?

Posted in: Events, Reading habits | Tagged: Adam Gopnik, addiction, Angela Carter, Barbara Kingsolver, Bibliotherapy, blog tour, book clubs, book serendipity, buddy read, butterflies, Caitlin Doughty, cults, fathers, flying, Greenland, Iris Murdoch, Jamel Brinkley, Jeanette Winterson, Julia Buckley, lighthouses, Lourdes, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, National Book Critics Circle, New Zealand, Nora McInerny, novellas, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas Merton, Tommy Orange, trees, Wellcome Book Prize, White House, Wigtown

Season’s Readings: What I’ll Be Reading This Christmas

By Rebecca Foster on December 19, 2018 | 10 Comments

With part of my birthday book token I treated myself to the new paperback edition of Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas Days, which I’ll read off and on over the holidays this year and next, probably. I recently finished Rachel Joyce’s wintry short story collection and started Madeleine L’Engle’s third Crosswicks Journal, An Irrational Season. The first two chapters are set at Advent and Christmas and the rest later in the liturgical year; I’ve set the book aside to come back to in January. L’Engle is a great author to read if you’d like some liberal, non-threatening theology at this time of year. I particularly recommend her Christmas-themed book that I read last year. (Mini-reviews of the Joyce and L’Engle are below.)

I also have a signed copy of Ian Sansom’s December Stories I that I won in a giveaway on Cathy’s blog, so I’ll be dipping into plenty of seasonally appropriate short stories this year. Earlier this year I picked up copies of the G.K. Chesterton collection (signed by the anthology editor) and the Robert Louis Stevenson volume (which contains prayers plus a sermon written during his time in Samoa) free at church from the theological library of a woman who’d died and donated her books to the church family.

A Snow Garden and Other Stories by Rachel Joyce

Two stand-outs were “The Boxing Day Ball,” a prequel to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, describing how Harold and Maureen met, and “A Faraway Smell of Lemon,” in which a woman mourning the end of her relationship wanders into a cleaning supplies store and learns the simple lesson that everybody hurts. (“Life is hard sometimes” – fair enough, but can we say it without a cliché?) “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is about the boy formerly known as Tim, now the mega pop star X. All he wants is a quiet few days back home, but he can’t seem to escape his reputation. Characters and little elements from previous stories reappear in later ones. My favorite was probably the title story, about a father trying to make the holidays perfect for his sons after his breakdown and divorce.

Joyce chooses to write about ordinary and forgotten people, but sometimes her vision of chavvy types doesn’t quite ring true, and when she isn’t being melancholy she’s twee. “Christmas Day at the Airport” was so contrived it made me groan. While I don’t think any of her books are truly great, they’re pleasant, relatable and easy to read.

My rating:

Favorite lines:

“There is much to do, much to prepare, much to mend, but it cannot be done in a day and sometimes it is better to do one small thing.” (from “A Faraway Smell of Lemon”)

“The truth was, there were no instructions when you got married. There was no manual in the birthing suite that explained how to bring up a happy child. No one said, you do this, and then you do this, and after that this will happen. You made it up as you went along.” (from “The Marriage Manual”)

Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation by Madeleine L’Engle

“The story of Jesus’ birth has been oversentimentalized until it no longer has the ring of truth, and once we’d sentimentalized it we could commercialize it and so forget what Christmas is really about.” L’Engle believes in the power of storytelling, and in this short volume of memoir she retells the life story of Jesus and recalls her own experiences with suffering and joy: losing her father young (his lungs damaged by poison gas in WWI) and the death of her husband of 40 years versus the sustaining nature of family love and late-life friendships. Chapters 4 and 5 are particular highlights.

L’Engle was not at all your average American Christian: raised in the Episcopal tradition, she didn’t even encounter Evangelicalism until her mid-forties, and she doesn’t understand the focus on creationism and sexual morality. She also writes about free will and the adoration of Mary and how A Wrinkle in Time (rejected by many a publisher) was her fable of light in the midst of darkness. The title comes from The New Zealand Prayer Book, which also gives helpful alternate names for the persons of the Trinity: Earth Maker, Pain Bearer, Life Giver. This isn’t a particularly Christmas-y book, but it still lends itself to being read a chapter at a time during Advent.

My rating:

Some other favorite lines:

“Christ, in being born as Jesus, broke into time for us, so that time will never be the same again.”

“Family can be a movable feast. It can be a group of friends sitting around the dining table for an evening. It can be one or two people coming to stay with me for a few nights or a few weeks. It should be the church, and I am grateful that my church is a small church.”

Are you reading any particularly wintry or Christmasy books this year?

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Reading habits | Tagged: Christmas, Christmas reads, G.K. Chesterton, Ian Sansom, Jeanette Winterson, Madeleine L’Engle, Rachel Joyce, Robert Louis Stevenson, Samoa, short stories, theology, winter

Library Checkout: November 2018

By Rebecca Foster on November 26, 2018 | 16 Comments

library-checkout-feature-image

This month I focused on novella-length books, though I also managed a doorstopper from the Booker Prize shortlist. I only have another three weeks until I fly to America for Christmas, so I may end up canceling some of the reservations below, or just taking a chance that they won’t come in for me until the new year. (As usual, I’ve added in star ratings and links to Goodreads reviews where I haven’t already featured the books on the blog in some way.)

LIBRARY BOOKS READ

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett
Sincerity by Carol Ann Duffy [poetry]
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
The Glorious Life of the Oak by John Lewis-Stempel
The Secret Life of the Owl by John Lewis-Stempel
Holloway by Robert Macfarlane
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds [graphic novel]

CURRENTLY READING

West by Carys Davies
House of Glass by Susan Fletcher
Becoming by Michelle Obama
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Winter by Ali Smith

CURRENTLY SKIMMING

In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World by Simon Garfield
Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations by Arnold van de Laar

TO SKIM ONLY

Rewild Yourself : 23 Spellbinding Ways To Make Nature More Visible by Simon Barnes
Dare to Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts by Brené Brown
The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth about Healthy Eating by Anthony Warner

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

Selected Poems by Edmund Blunden
Daphne by Will Boast
Louis & Louise by Julie Cohen
The Binding by Bridget Collins
Owl Sense by Miriam Darlington
Dream Sequence by Adam Foulds
A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes
Fox 8 by George Saunders
The Brief Life of Flowers by Fiona Stafford

RETURNED UNFINISHED

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami – I cut my losses at page 120. At that point the story still hadn’t taken off. The setup is fairly similar to that of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and so was not fresh or enticing enough.
The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O’Donnell – I read the first chapter (21 pages) and enjoyed it well enough, but didn’t feel any need to continue.
The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos – I’m interested in trying more literary/crossover crime novels and liked the synopsis of this one, but didn’t enjoy the hardboiled style. I read the first 20 pages.

RETURNED UNREAD

Varina by Charles Frazier – I tried the first few pages and wasn’t drawn in.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris – I put it down when I found a dangling modifier on page 2! Some people might be willing to look past issues of writing quality and appreciate a story, but I have so many hundreds of books waiting to be read that I am keen not to waste my time on anything even remotely subpar.
The Long Take by Robin Robertson – Getting through 240 pages of a novel in verse was never really going to happen. (I managed about two.)
The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke – No chapters, okay. No heading breaks, maybe alright. But no paragraphs? That’s a step too far!

What have you been reading from your local libraries? Does anything appeal from my stacks?

I don’t have an official link-up system, so please just pop a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part in Library Checkout this month. (Feel free to use the feature image in your post.)

Posted in: Library Checkout | Tagged: library books, Library Checkout

November Reading Plans: Novellas, Margaret Atwood and More

By Rebecca Foster on November 1, 2018 | 34 Comments

This is my third year joining Laura Frey and others in reading novellas in November. Laura has put together a history of the challenge here; it has had various incarnations but has no particular host or rules. Join us if you like! (#NovNov) The definition of a novella seems to be loose – it’s based more on word count than page count – so it’s up to you what you’d like to classify as one. I generally limit myself to books of 150 pages or fewer, though in some cases I’d probably go as high as 180-some. I’ve trawled my shelves and library pile and have four stacks to select from: fiction, classics, novella-length nonfiction, and slightly longer novels (160–190 pages) that I’ll keep around as backups but likely won’t get to.

Between what I have in these stacks, holds I’m waiting on at the library (West by Carys Davies, The Glorious Life of the Oak by John Lewis-Stempel and Holloway by Robert Macfarlane), and some additional choices on my e-readers (Lady into Fox by David Garnett, Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot and Childhood: Two Novellas by Gerard Reve), I easily have enough for a book a day. In a future year maybe I’d be able to clear my schedule such that I could indeed read one novella per day, but I have so many review books on the go that I won’t aim for that. Besides, I’m not the kind of reader who’d sit down and read a 160-page book in one sitting; I’d be more likely to read 20 pages each in eight different books.

This is the pile I’ll be starting later today. (The Evans looks long but is 164 pages of text with various full- and half-page black-and-white illustrations dotted through.)

I got a headstart on Novellas in November with this Canongate volume published today.

Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere by Jeanette Winterson

Last year it was Mary Beard’s Women and Power; in 2018 this is the Christmas gift to slip into every feminist book-lover’s stocking. Adapted from Winterson’s Richard Dimbleby Lecture and supplemented by the text of Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1913 speech “Freedom or Death,” this is a slim, attractive volume that feels timely if insubstantial. Winterson gives a potted history of suffragism and argues that female brains are not wired differently; it’s just social programming that tells us so. Gender imbalances in university admissions and the job market continued into the 1970s, so it’s no surprise, she says, that women are still catching up 40 years later – and she supports measures that could be labeled as positive discrimination.

From the #MeToo movement she makes what seems like an odd swerve into discussing AI because computer science/Silicon Valley is very male-dominated and she wants to be sure women have a respected role in the future. My reaction to this was the same as to Beard’s book and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists: you can’t (and I don’t) dispute what the author has to say; for the most part the points are compelling and well made. Yet I don’t necessarily feel that I learned anything, or saw something familiar in a new way.

Favorite lines:

“When prejudice and bad science are no longer in the way, women always prove themselves as capable as men.”

“that’s how it is with patriarchy – we don’t notice the all-male panels, the movies where women are just the love interest, the number of male presenters on TV and radio […] and we do need parity, because women are one half of the population.”

My rating:

Library Checkout: October 2018

By Rebecca Foster on October 29, 2018 | 12 Comments

It’s been a year since I relaunched the Library Checkout meme. I want to say a big thank you to the handful of bloggers who have joined in since then. It’s such a quick, fun and easy post to put together by the final Monday of each month. Why not take part?!

In the past month I’ve been reading from the Booker Prize longlist. Although I also read within my comfort zones of historical fiction and memoirs, I’ve dabbled in genres I don’t read as often, like graphic novels and middle-grade fiction.

For November’s challenges I’m stockpiling novella-length books, one of them for Margaret Atwood Reading Month. At some point I’ll have to get real about how many more 2018 releases I can read before I fly to America for Christmas, which may mean canceling some reservations. I’m holding out for at least the Murakami and Obama titles to arrive in time!

(As usual, I’ve added in star ratings and links to Goodreads reviews where I haven’t already featured the books on the blog in some way.)