Category Archives: Reading habits

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?

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.)